Family Photo:
Happening

It's all happening.

Last week we had lunch at SLO Ranch Farms, which is something of an upscale, agrarian-themed, outdoor mall. It has a brewery, a pizza place, a biscuit place, and a vintage cheese store. It also has a Persian kabob grill, a Japanese sushi table, and a French bakery. There's a coffee shop, a community garden and a "sauna club". And there's also an ice cream shop that shares a wall with a fitness studio.

We had the kabobs. They were excellent.

It also has these little photographic sites scattered throughout: a tractor surrounded by flowers, a truck bed front of a mural, those wooden painted signs with the holes cutout for your faces, the rope-swing bench affixed to the floor in the picture above.

"It's all happening," reads the neon sign above the rope-swing bench. Somehow that's stuck to me all week.

It's all happening. All of it. Every bit.

Not in the past or future, it's all happening right now. Even on what feels like the most uneventful of days.

The earth has 7 billion people. An 80-year life has 700,000 hours. Do some math and in the 3-hours it takes to watch football game, 30,000 lifetimes-worth of lived experience take place. Every day, roughly a quarter million people are born, and a quarter million people die. Countless joys and tragedies, everyday.

It's all happening. The vastness and richness of all everything happening is beautiful and overwhelming.

John Koenig wrote the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, "a compendium of new words for emotions that we all feel but don't have the language to express." As he says, "It's mission is to shine a light on the fundamental strangeness of being a human being. Defining the world as it is and the world as it could be."

To reflect on "it's all happening," may be to experience what Koenig calls Sonder—the awareness that everyone has a story. Maybe it's a mix of a few of his invented words:

Sonder: The Awareness That Everyone Has a Story

Morii: The Desire to Capture a Fleeting Experience

Dès Vu: The Awareness That This Will Become A Memory

Zenosyne: The Sense That Time Keeps Going Faster

Or maybe it's a Ron Paul meme:

Dad Jokes:
Happening Up There

Getting my drone stuck in the tree isn’t the worst thing that happened to me today,
but it’s definitely up there.

Joke Source: Twitter
Image Source: Dad[AI]Base

Highlights:
Happenings

Generative AI in a Nutshell - Einstein in Your Basement by Henrik Kniberg

In order to use generative AI effectively, you need to get good at Prompt Engineering...

Write a prompt, look at the result, add a follow up prompt to provide more information, or edit the original prompt, and rinse and repeat until you get a good result. In this third approach, I ask it to interview me. So instead of me providing a bunch of context up front, I'm basically saying, what do you need to know in order to help me? And then it will propose a workshop agenda. After I often combine these two, I provide a bit of context and then I tell it to ask me if it needs any more information.
...

A nice side effect is that you will become better at communicating in general, since prompt engineering is really all about clarity and effective communication.
...

How do I do it? Prompt engineering design is a crucial skill. Like all new skills, just accept that. You will kind of suck at it at first, but you'll improve over time with deliberate practice.

So my best tip is experiment. Make this part of your day to day life, and the learning happens automatically.

How Learning Happens by David Perell

Inspiration is the keystone of learning. It’s the engine behind a student’s motivation and the glue that makes ideas stick. But because our school system undervalues the necessity of inspiration, students don’t learn as much as they could.
...

Enjoyable learning begins with inspiration—both to get you started and to help you push through the struggles of knowledge acquisition. The way I see it, the need for inspiration inverts the learning process: instead of starting with the building blocks and moving toward curiosity, students start with curiosity and move towards the building blocks. Guided by the light of inspiration, the benefits of memorization become self-evident, and the motivation to learn comes intrinsically.
...

This kind of inspiration is born out of a kind of enthusiasm where the more you learn, the more you want to learn. As you acquire skills, you realize that perfection isn’t a summit you reach, but an asymptote you continually strive for.

The best chefs, musicians, and filmmakers I know revel in this kind of inspiration. They know that no meal, no song, and no movie will ever be perfect. There is no mountaintop you can reach where you can finally rest on your laurels. Their inspiration is fueled by the dance between ascending the mountain of improvement and marveling at its wondrous, ever-receding peak.
...

[S]chools should embrace entertainment because it lets you scale inspiration. Since entertainment means something different to every person, let’s start with a definition: to engage a person’s attention in a way that makes the time pass pleasantly.

Entertainment is not amusement. Entertainment can be nutritious, but amusement never is. Amusement is defined by distraction. Like candy, it’s appealing in the short-term but has few long-term benefits. Usually, when educators criticize entertainment, they’re actually talking about amusement. Though the distinction is subtle, it’s the difference between an educated citizenry and the dystopia of Huxley’s Brave New World.

Painting the Bullseye: What Happens When We Lose Our Curiosity? by Lawrence Yeo

I like to think of this as painting the bullseye before the search for truth even begins. This is when you already have a preferred target in mind, a conclusion that you want your inquiry to eventually reach. If you are depending on “A” to be your answer, then that bright bullseye will be there to remind you of this every step of the way.

This bullseye prioritizes certainty over curiosity; places the destination over the journey. If the conclusion is drawn before the search begins, it’s only inevitable that each step in the middle is guided toward that end. There will perpetually be an invisible wind sending your arrow toward the bullseye; it may drift off-target every now and then, but you sure as hell want it to land properly when all is said and done.
...

[T]he takeaway here is to realize when you’re being hopeful for a targeted outcome, rather than allowing curiosity to be the driving force of the search. If you paint a bullseye beforehand, you’re likely to be disappointed when you don’t hit it, and that introduces all kinds of biases to come and cloud your vision. But if there’s no bullseye to begin with, then you’ll be more open to seeing what other possibilities may emerge as you broaden your field of awareness.
...

Perhaps life’s greatest paradox is that existence is a single-player game, but meaning is ultimately derived on multiplayer mode. While it’s true that no one will be able to experience your life as viscerally as you can, an inability to share this life with others will largely render these personal experiences meaningless.

The thing we use to construct this meaning is curiosity – a sense of wonderment for the human beings that will become companions in our journeys. When I think of people that exercise curiosity in its purest form, I look to children as the exemplary figures here.

What Happens When Everything Becomes a Meme? by Kyla Scanlon

Products like Cluely advertise: “We built it so you never have to think alone again.” AI isn’t just a productivity tool, it’s attempted cognitive outsourcing. Critical thought, ambiguity, creativity, all the beautiful things that probably define what being a human is, are all replaced by optimized, immediate answers.