Just playing by feeling
Five fragments for the week of March 17, 2025
Hello from St. Patrick’s Day, just the day to pay a visit to the Emerald City.
Happy to report that I did indeed follow Hilary Gridley’s sage advice and built a personal taste Custom GPT last week, and wow did it work. Highly recommend asking LLMs for recommendations.
Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
I think google searches conditioned users to highlight keywords, reduce context, and keep it brief in order to maximize search results. We have to completely un-teach this behavior
– Isabella Reed on X, March 10, 2025. This has certainly been my experience with LLMs—they love to vibe. I spent some time over the weekend trying to get Claude to output an SVG of a heart and found myself typing “Much better! But the shape is kind of awkward and gangly, can you make it rounder and cuter?”
I’m a very emotionally driven person and for me, it’s more about the moment I feel inspired than discipline. Therefore I was very happy to find out about music production software and having the chance to create sounds without notes and just playing by feeling.
– Christian Löffler interviewed for Stereofox, July 2021. His track “Ronda” has been on repeat for me this past week, so I went looking for more on him and came across this interview marking the release of his album Parallels “reworking” pieces from the canon of classical music. I liked this: “I found a strategy to make my decisions by closing my eyes and listening to all the material randomly over and over again. I took note of moments that really caught my attention and where I had the feeling that I am able to add something that makes sense and lifts it to another level. ”
vibe coding pro-tip - tell your agents they can write tests and add debug UI when you’re still “bulking”, then remove that stuff when you’re feature complete (“cutting”)
– Ryan Maher on X, March 11, 2025. Something I find interesting about LLMs is that language from any field (in this case, bodybuilding) can be applied to any other field—anything can apply to anything, it’s all directional.
I find that if I love something deeply, I end up loving it all the more if I locate its weak points. Often, this helps you find the necessary points of tradeoff that actually made the thing great. If conducted covertly, this particular mental habit allows you to love people more deeply and realistically, by noticing how the annoying thing about them and the great thing are fundamentally intertwined.
– Sasha Chapin, “How to like everything more: on the skill of enjoyment,” December 30, 2024. “Flaws and strengths are two sides of the same coin” is a familiar sentiment, but this take on flaws as the necessary points of tradeoff felt fresh to me.
Photography does not require mechanical contact or pressure; print does. This has many implications; for example, print always happens at actual size while photography does not. Lens-based photography automatically rescales the image as it transfers it to film, but because print involves touch, or contact, between the matrix and the support, the transfer between surfaces must happen at actual size.
– Jennifer L. Roberts, Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, May 14, 2024. Linda Liukas recommended this book in response to last week’s line of thought on Phyllis Seltzer and she was onto something. I especially appreciated this duality: “On the one hand, as a set of processes, printmaking can be so technically intricate as to verge on the arcane…On the other hand, as a class of art objects, prints tend to be devalued as overly common.”
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com