Linkblog from zafarali.me@

Reading is important. Having mastery of your attention span.

Letters from people in China (translated to English) who moved from 1st tier to 2nd tier cities and their feelings and emotions, regrets and cope.

(There are also replies inline but I think those were not as moving to me)

In this article I, learned about 'heart energy': what…

neat project for finding non fiction books. Good use of AI.

With no chat window open there was no sidebar of half-finished conversations begging for my attention [...] A morning that used to splinter into a bunch of prompt-and-wait cycles, these past few weeks became a more cohesive single deep flow session.

Maybe there is some value in our lives to forgetting the trivial, to not having an immediate answer to every query that appears in our minds.

In India, the bicycle is shedding its humble image. With a growing middle class, high-end bikes and e-bikes are gaining popularity for fitness and leisure.

I want to actually know what the food looks like, not an artist interpretation pls

Made me laugh so much, peak silicon valley, pay nano banana 1c to create crappy pictures and make food unappealing than food photographers that actually do and will be able to sell your food!!

Lessons learned from Advocacy: Slow streets (e.g. traffic calming, daylighting etc); land use is intertwined with bikes; engage seniors for moral and tactical reasons; patience/repetition.

Less support for scientists means strange questions no one will get to chase. Exploring those questions is how medicine advances.
You cannot schedule the lizard’s gift, and you cannot rush the leukemia campaign.

It's worth asking whether LLMs are actually making us more productive at all—and if so, what we might be sacrificing in return.

A thought experiment: In the age of "Teleportation", what happens to "Wandering"?

Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane?

Read about the hidden divide between self-inflicted irrelevance and real engineering leverage.

Probably the most important health-adjacent article I've read this year.

Trying to steer a conversation.

Using LLMs to turn static figures from data analysis, schematics, and publications into interactive widgets as tools for thought

Reminds me of my own explorations into car free living in bay by brompton.

The Bloor West Village BIA had six decorated bikes installed in the neighbourhood. A picture of one of them was posted to the Cycling in Toronto group on Facebook, and it looked like the bike was white which caused understandable concern from ARC. Having white bikes that are n…