🐝 The Sting
Learn AI in public. Embrace the ridicule. Ship daily. Share experience and results. Measure.
Things built: 14 People watching: 7 Cashflow:-$147
🤖 🧠 Learning
Figuring out the next thing I want to learn with AI and share in Embarrassing AI. A week to freestyle. Day two.
I’ve spent the last couple of years going back to school. In May, 2024 I earned my BA in History, more than 30 years after first stepping onto a college campus in 1993. I’m now about a year away from earning an MA in History, now just working primarily on researching and then writing my thesis.
“That’s fascinating, Bram, but we’re here for AI stories, if we wanted to hear about your academic pursuits we would head over to your blog Newark State of Mind,” I can hear you say.
There’s a point, I promise, and it ties in neatly with the theme of this week.
The Academy, especially in the Arts and Humanities are loosing their minds over AI. My peers in undergrad were using it to write their papers, presentations and often help them take their tests. They were missing the point of going to school by relinquishing the opportunity to develop the skill of deep thinking through writing.
At the same time, my professors wanted to stab themselves in the eyes because of all of the AI slop they were forced to review. They were wrong to insist on throwing the baby out with the bathwater though, and they where not learning themselves how AI can powerup research.
Grad school is not much different, not that AI slop is being created, but that embracing the potential of AI as a research tool is seen as a betrayal of the discipline. There is a deep nostalgia for finding and remembering archival discoveries rather than AI helping with this. This is not just professors, but also librarians and archivists who spend much of their time cataloging and then working on making their collections available for use.
Every time I suggested exploring how AI could make us better historians it was like I was shoving a steaming 💩 in their faces.
While waiting to get my tires changed this morning I listened to an interview with one of the founders of 🚢 Ship30for30🚢 , about writing and using AI. The most interesting point he made was that knowing how to write and think about describing complex ideas is an essential skill for getting good at getting amazing results from AI rather than the slop that generic prompts create.
That’s what colleges should be promoting when selling the benefit of doing a writing intensive major in college. Being able to make a decent living creates the space and peace of mind that allows for the meaningful pursuit of historic research and writing.
My intuition is that learning to get better at AI, will allow me to develop a set of skills that were once walled off by technical hurdles or gatekeepers.
These include building research tools, but also copywriting, sales and advertising, or prototypes of apps and tools.
That podcast helped me think about which project I want to do next.
🍯 🦡 Building
What did I ship today?
Deep thoughts.
🤑 Selling
Here you’ll find either things I’ve made with AI or affiliate links to tools I’m using.
Whispr Flow - smart speech to text - you and I both get a free month when you sign up.
Beehiiv - used to make this - you get a free month and 20% off for three months, I get a nice little kickback
Netlify - free web hosting for your projects - No kickback for me on this one
Emergent - vibe coding platform - you get extra credits and so do I when you sign up
Last Word.
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.
Till next time,