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ismailahmad.com
using this space as my digital gardens, personal wikis, and experimental knowledge systems, so is my :substack 🌐 ismailahmad.com ☁️ substack.com/@ismailahmad
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No, its ia.net/writer I use it for just drafting the ideas, it works just like a note app but it’s distraction free plus it comes with markups and AI assistance. Sometimes, I move the content to craft to refine it before posting it.
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IA writer, craft 3
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I think that will be the engineer, often implement not the way the designer intended
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No. Acclaimed design leadership made designer lazy. It all started decaying the moment tools are glorified. In business or sales, no one made PP or .xcl the center of the industry. We need to change the narrative, Figma or Sketch are just a tools, a mean. It’s not the cause.
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Definitely checking it out.
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Yes. I wonder how we get to this, software used to compete on being useful.
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Some espresso machine. Washing machine. Mobile phone and some software that makes life easy
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Get into the habit of shipping stuff, even if it’s half-baked. You’ll learn. You’ll improve, and in the long run, you’ll have become better at those skills. But that will be hard if you’re doing ten things at the same time.
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Pick a few skills instead and “ship” your ideas to the world — which is what I planned to do myself. If you’re good at many things, lucky you—keep at it. But if the plan is to be better, focus on few things and share them with the world, even when it’s not fully formed. You’ll never be ready.
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No matter the number of information you consume, the feeling never goes away. It will only leave you stuck, unsure, not entirely bad if that’s the goal—to have an idea of that said thing. But the real work is in the output, and it is hard. It’s why a lot of us talk about it instead of doing it.
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It’s good to understand that the goad to learn everything is just an avenue to escape some feelings—a distraction, which is not entirely bad if that’s your intent. You’ll always feel like something is missing. It’s biologically written into us all from Darwinism.
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I have been in situation where I learned blender, photography, and motion graphics prior, but they’re all useless now because I don’t utilize those skill and I can barely find my way around them now if I picked them up again.
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Keep doing simple things without direction. Shipping simple ideas knowing you may not succeed. Not seeing the clear picture and still going for the idea. You should be doing things, I know it’s hard, but try to do it anyway.
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Recent realization have thought me differently, I discovered that working on momentum is better than overly depending on vision, you don’t necessarily have to foresaw an outcome to pursue an idea fully. While you may need vision to know your direction, momentum jolt you forward and it’s better.
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This is hard if you are a visual person, you depend a lot on foreseeing, ie vision. Personally, my life has always been about visual, it’s my compass. It may not necessarily be the best route, but it’s how I have navigated life and I have seen good results.
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TLDR: a personal wiki. They’re notes and ideas linked together by association. Less formal than a blog and embrace the concept of learning in public. M. Appleton’s post on the concept is often cited! Use of gen AI has made so many blogs unreadable for me, so I’m finding gardens refreshing to read.
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The end wasn’t where I thought I’d land, it all makes sense from there
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We are so fixated on data-driven everything (AI) that the human side of it all is being outsourced—the art side of our work, the obsession, that instinctual hunch of it’s not there yet—is nowhere to be found.
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Alas, in just a click, the universe do knows how to put us all in our place. No one has a clue of what’s going on, absolutely no one—ask your professors, absolute nothing they can say but refer to history. I think knowing this should give us some sense of sanity.
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My hypothesis is that we are all exhausted in a way, and just looking for unification or some tranquility, something that bring us all together in a way, but the results of everything we are doing so far is breeding the opposite. The future looks exciting, and yet a little bit frightening.
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AI will kill us all, "it is so over" murmuring filled the street, while all we are just doing is manipulating a wealth of information that’s already accessible to minority and just democratizing it. All still falls under bunch of zeros and one.
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We created the buzz for Crypto to Web3, Metaverse/NFTs, Blockchain etc, and now AI. The doom, gloom, the naysayers all are yearning for one thing, feeling of something outside their control.