Programming used to be a creative act.
Programming used to be a creative act. Now it just feels like grinding.
Topic: creative act
16 chunks · 12 episodes
4.1x burst in 2024 Q4
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Peak quarter intensity across the topic's active span. Higher values mean attention was concentrated into a shorter stretch rather than spread evenly over time.
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- creative act appears in 16 chunks across 12 episodes, from 2024-02-12 to 2026-07-20.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 1/6/25 (2025-01-06), with 4 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with dead end, Anthropic, and mental model, while by chunk count it sits between become increasingly and excellent piece; its yearly rank moved from #50 in 2024 to #138 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
Creativity in practice is curation of previous output from others and choosing which subset to build on.
...us output from others and choosing which subset to build on. That choice is the creative act. Of all of the things you've been exposed to, what do you find valuable to choose to build on? That accretion of intention is what powers folksonomie...
A second-hand summary of parts of Rick Rubin in The Creative Act:
A second-hand summary of parts of Rick Rubin in The Creative Act: When you don't have the muse don't worry about it or try to get it to show up. When it strikes, push it as hard as you can and be thankful for it. D...
Someone got an LLM to create a pretty good stand-up routine for other LLMs.
...powerful creative duo, much stronger than either would be alone. Irreducibly co-creative acts. The human as supervisor or editor to the LLM.[alv][alw][alx][aly]
The append-only conversation log to interact with LLMs leaves me wanting more.
...cially a chat; it's actually a way to drive an LLM to interesting outputs; a co-creative act that just so happens to manifest as though it's a normal chat. These kinds of open-ended exploratory conversations are just one killer use for LLMs, ...
Interacting with LLMs today is like doing computing before the GUI.
...lent of a GUI for an LLM be[amk]? Creating the equivalent to the first GUI is a creative act wildly unlike building a new product in an existing paradigm. It requires multi-ply thinking.
Someone was telling me about how BMW thinks about their supply chain.
...mplies that they vouch for any of the components used in the car; part of their creative act on the final car is making decisions about what components should exist and what is good enough.
Coordination and collaboration are hard for different reasons.
...ly better than any individual could have done themselves. Coordination is not a creative act. Collaboration is a creative act. When you create together, the creative tension helps build trust. How can you kick a coordination challenge into a ...
Socialization of ideas should not be an afterthought.
...t finish the idea and then socialize it as a static thing. Socialization is the creative act; the place where disconfirming evidence emerges and makes the ideas better than what either party started the conversation with.
When a large organization creates an "innovation team" it is nearly always performative.
...a different kind of creativity. Actual innovation emerges from the bottom up, a creative act. To get innovation, you need to give space for acorns to have the possibility to grow.
You can't force someone to trust you.
You can't force someone to trust you. Trust is like love. It is a creative act that must emerge authentically without being coerced. Trust creates the potential for larger outcomes, because you now are willing to believe.
If you ask a question to a five year old, they just confidently distill an answer on the spot.
...n answer that is plausible within the context of everything else you know, is a creative act.
As you mature sometimes you find that the creative activities you did no longer feel meaningful.
As you mature sometimes you find that the creative activities you did no longer feel meaningful. Normally people go through this when they retire. But now maybe all of humanity is contemplating their mass...
"Yes, and" without the "and" is passive.
...lling part of what they said. Even deciding what subset to build on is itself a creative act, an act of selection.
Push vs pull: same direction of travel, but the difference is which side has the agency.
...ut the difference is which side has the agency. You can't force someone to do a creative act. That can only happen via a pull, intrinsically. An ecosystem growing is a self-catalyzing creative act. An intrinsic energy. An aliveness. You can't...
Something that is "like clockwork" cannot be a creative act.
Something that is "like clockwork" cannot be a creative act. A creative act requires applying your agency without coercion. If it's like clockwork, the agent is delegating their agency to the machine, to the c...