Some of My Best Decisions Are Impulsive Ones

We decided last minute to take the boys to a skatepark on Sunday, not really knowing if we could get in or join as the website wasn’t clear.

I Miss Making Things

I think one of the hardest things about being someone who wants to create—and I hesitated just now, calling myself a “creative”—is being honest with yourself. I’ve made a bunch of things, sure. But that label still feels… distant. There’s this low hum of imposter syndrome I haven’t quite shaken. Maybe you know what I mean.

I Need to Sleep Earlier, So I Am Starting a Club

I don’t go to bed early enough.

Why I Could Never Relax

One day, my wife asked our 8-year-old son, “What’s your definition of being relaxed?” He answered, “When I feel like things are under control.”

How I Felt When My Startup Ran Out of Money

Let’s start with how I am feeling. I am not sure. If you ask me in person, I might tell you I feel exhausted, beat, and numb. I am not 100% sure that’s how I am actually feeling. Maybe it’s more than those feelings but a big bowl mixed with all of those and more. I feel angry at times. I feel bitter at times. I feel stressed and anxious financially. I feel the feelings you have when you lose a tennis match you should have won, when you know you could have done better, when you are the last man standing in a dodgeball game. I feel unsupported, paralysed, and I feel, well, defeated.

Build with Local LLM AI Models - Setting Up

I have been prototyping a number of LLM-powered AI digital products in the past couple of weeks to further understand how to work with and integrate AI models into my own projects and ideas, including running AI models locally, using AI to organise and make connections between my personal notes, creating a desktop app that reads my emails and draft replies in batch, AI as a dungeon master in a rogue-lite game, and using AI to continuously create new landing pages for A/B testing for my GMAT book. I’ll write about each in separate blog posts. But first, let’s get some AI running on my device that I can use to test my projects.

Running LLM Models Locally

I want to try running LLM models on my local machine. I have a Mac Studio (Apple M2 Max, 32GB RAM). It’s not the most powerful machine you can build to run AI models, but I wanted to know how capable a typical computer you might find on your desk can be. I have found these local models to be sufficiently capable in most instances for the typical writing related tasks, idea generation, and analysis.

Setting Up

The easiest way I found is to simply use Ollama, which is a desktop platform that allows you to run and interact with AI models locally on your device.

Criteria for Deciding on Ideas

Mike, my co-founder at markd.ltd, and I are both the kind of people that has many random ideas, and often find ourselves diving right in after we’ve come up with something new or novel or just quirky.

A few months ago we decided we should have a process to help us think about our ideas. Building new ideas is all fun and game, but at the end of the day, we’ve got a company to build, one which I hope can continue to be creative, fun, and useful.

So this is the criteria we came up with. This is not meant to be a general purpose criteria for filter ideas, but one that we decide to use because of our skills, experiences, personalities, and resource limitations.

My New Favourite Toys (creative apps, web apps) August 2019

Unfollow tool

Tokimeki Unfollow is a fun web app that helps you trim down your Twitter following. Without showing you the bios of people you are following on Twitter, you have to decide to keep following someone or not based on their recent tweets. I liked the personality of the app (too few social media tools have a personality!)

Olive video editor

TalentSearch.cc bombed on ProductHunt

So TalentSearch.cc bombed on ProductHunt.

It didn’t get nearly as many votes or as much attention as ColdEmailTemplate.cc or Markd.co, both were featured on the front page. I was overly confident in how useful TalentSearch.cc is for people (who wouldn’t want a search bar to find talents on multiple social platforms?!) and how popular it will be for the PH community, which also meant I spent way more time on it than ColdEmailTemplate.cc.

Tidy Up Your Following — The 100-Following Rule

Why We should KonMari Our Social Follows

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A number of years ago I read Kevin Kelly’s essay on 1,000 True Fans. The idea that if you can find and grow an audience of 1,000 true fans that love what you do, you can be financially independent as a creative maker.

I liked this theory, and decided I will put it to practice by reducing the number of people I follow on Twitter.