There's something about stumbling down internet rabbit holes that makes me feel alive. This week, I had a few random ideas bouncing around my head for the blog. I also watched a couple of videos Sunday morning that inspired two additional blog posts: Investing: Don't wait to buy the dip and Directionally Correct with Alexis Fink: The Truth About Bullshit Jobs and AI that I decided not to email to my newsletter subscribers.

The Little Prince and Getting Older

42courses recently inspired me to buy "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. If you haven't read it, the book is full of allegorical characters that hit differently at different ages. The Businessman obsessed with owning and counting stars. The Lamplighter who dutifully lights and extinguishes his lamp according to orders. The Geographer who records facts about planets but never explores them himself.

At my age, these characters feel less like children's book figures and more like mirrors.

AI: The Good, The Weird, and The Concerning

I've been following Dylan Curious for interesting AI news. Three random things caught my attention:

Google's Genie 3 can take famous 2D paintings and render the rest of the scene in 3D. You can literally walk around Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" diner. It's mind-bending.

OnLock Learning on Instagram is using deepfakes of celebrities for educational content. TikTok-style videos where Abraham Lincoln teaches you about the Civil War. I don't know how I feel about this yet.

Tilly Norwood, a fictional AI actress with a complete personality and backstory. Hollywood should be nervous about AI taking away jobs. We're all probably nervous.

The AI Slop Problem

I watched the First Million Podcast raving about SORA. It is intuitive, and to me it appears to be a social media platform for making memes. But here's my concern: I didn't want a cameo or clone of myself floating around the internet, so I deleted it.

I'm on iOS and based in the US, so downloading SORA 2 was easy—no invitation needed. If you want to try it and need an invite, I have 4 codes: sebant R5STX7

Sora can certainly create some fantastic and helpful content. My friend Hammel used it to create an advert for Pixaroma channel where we both spend a portion of our free time each day.

What worries me is the ease to produce AI slop and flooding the internet with junk content made quickly.

Yes, a thousand monkeys with typewriters could eventually produce Shakespeare. But what about all the rest of the nonsense those monkeys create in the meantime?

What I'm Actually Learning From

The AI Lab by Brian Sykes on Substack keeps me grounded with thoughtful analysis and articles. I subscribed for $150 a year.

Visual Hooks by Zach Soijo is a quirky collection of Midjourney prompts that spark so many creative ideas. I found it on Gumroad and enjoy it.

Brilliant App ($130 a year) has become my daily 5-10 minute ritual. It's well designed to run on a phone, and the quizzes reinforce learning.

I just learned about Bayes' Theorem, a fundamental formula in probability crucial for scientific discovery, machine learning, and AI. This naturally led me down another rabbit hole to 3Blue1Brown whose lesson on Bayes' Theorem is enlightening.

I like non educational stuff like music too :)

Instagram's algorithm served me a video about railway ballast that somehow might have redeeming educational value?

I was obsessed a couple months ago with the GrayStones—an 11-year-old band covering "The Logical Song." I discovered the video when it had 700k views; now it's approaching 5 million views on YouTube! The production quality is incredible. The lead singer's expressions, the musicianship—it's all remarkably professional.

Fil from Wings of Pegasus, a channel that analyzes auto-tuning and pitch correction in music, revealed that the GrayStones' performance isn't quite the live magic it appears to be. There's serious post-production happening because one of the dads is skilled at sound engineering. Phil deleted that particular video analyzing the Graystones because there were a lot of nasty comments on YouTube that could potentially affect the young kids.

Comments are divided. Some say the parents are exploiting the kids. Others argue they're giving them opportunities few peers ever get. I honestly don't know what to make of it.

Why I Share All This

Here's what I've realized about my "favorite things."

They're not just entertainment or time-wasters. They're breadcrumbs in a larger journey of understanding how creativity, technology, and human nature intersect.

• The Little Prince warns us about becoming like the Businessman or the Geographer—people who count or catalog but never truly experience.
• AI tools like Sora offer incredible creative possibilities but risk flooding our world with meaningless noise.
• Young musicians get opportunities through technology that previous generations never had, but do we lose something authentic in the process?

Every week, I reflect on these random observations, these discoveries, these contradictions. And I share them because I think other creative people are navigating similar tensions.

We're all trying to figure out how to stay human in an increasingly artificial world. How to create meaningfully when AI and technology make it easier to create meaninglessly. How to preserve what's genuine while embracing what's new.

If any of this resonates with you, tell me what rabbit holes you've been exploring lately. Your response and feedback always spark my next post.