Valentine's Weekend Edition - Returning to My First Loves - 3 Ways GenAI and Music Merge I 5 AI and Productivity Apps I Can't Live Without I Some of my favorite books I love to reread
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Happy February y’all! In this post-Valentine’s weekend edition, I share some of my favorites that I constantly refer (whether I’m a paid affiliate or not) that have given me joy or helped me become more creative, productive, and informed.
Music 🎶❤️🤖 AI - 3 of my favorite AI x Music Technologies
As a writer and software engineer and computational hybrid, I like sharing not only my favorite books (as I did in my IG live and post last month and LinkedIn post on some of my initial book recommendations here), but also the music I enjoy. Music is one of my first loves, so as a pianist, alto singing long-time choir girl, spoken word poet, and attempted being a hip hop emcee, I like sharing the intersections of music also with technology.
1/ Soundry (YC W24) - Generative AI x Music: Advances in Audio Production
The space has evolved much since the days of Deep Dream and introduction of Magenta (debuted at early conferences, Google Tensorflow Dev Summit in 2017) I attended in-person, I actually remember Sherol Chen’s Tensorflow Dev Summit 2018 presentation best at Google.
Currently, one of my favorite apps comes from YC (YCombinator) backed company, the Soundry which allows artists to create music with AI. Here it’s like Logic had a baby with genAI and you can edit and compose, without displacing the artist, which is great. As any music producer or sound engineer, this type of AI application is all about optimizing truly capturing the idea of Augmented Intelligence (AI), aiding creativity of humans, not AI displacing human potential.
2/ ViTPose - Advances in Computer Vision
A Hugging Face Machine Learning Engineer dropped this update to release a new model, ViTPose, building upon Google’s prior work on pose-estimation (computer vision motion algorithm), this one focused on human movement (as you can see from the breakdancer above, I added the audio btw).
Technical jargon of what it does: It builds on the vision transformer architecture to be able to do the most accurate prediction (keypoint estimation) using a decoder had and simplifies the architecture, getting SoTA (State of the Art) results on past benchmarks (the MS COCO Keypoint Detection Benchmark). Source: Substack
3/ Spotify’s Hendrix
Machine Learning Platforms - ML Ops Basics - Last year, one of my favorite webinar’s I attended with O’Reilly Media showcased, Hendrix, Spotify’s Machine Learning Stack, they were also at another conference I attended in Santa Clara the year before. Great to see how they’re evolving even the most basic algorithms, recommendation systems (collaborative filtering) and expanding on their machine learning pipeline (evaluating parallelism and throughput, the basics of optimization).
5 AI x Productivity Apps I Can’t Live Without
AI is all the rage.
When I wake up, you have any one of your mobile devices, wearables, clocks, smart home devices be able to wake you, tell you the news, and get your day started—it truly is the Internet Of Things (IoT) of everything where we live in a Jetsons golden era of technology as fact. AI is more ubiquitous more than ever. Whenever I have any initial thought or question, I now ask my favorite foundation/frontier models of choice (OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, Microsoft CoPilot, Pi, Poe, and Meta Llama) if it isn’t Google Search. When I go on a webinar or group meeting, everyone has an video recording hooking into Zoom nowadays (Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai etc.).
Though Netflix films like Subservience (fun fact, Megan Foxx is also part Filipina) and Afraid (John Cho is a lead, who I’ve had the privilege of meeting) portray the AI-as-Terminator narrative, there is still much excitement over the possibility and advances in of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) or General AI despite AI doomers as said by Marc Andreessen in his post in 2023 (AI will save the world). Breakthroughs in reasoning and motion continue will evolve as Nvidia, deepseek, and every foundation model competing with OpenAI makes advances.
Here are some tools that help me stay productive as a software engineer and human being in general.
GenAI Coding Tools
Cursor.ai using Claude (or even GPT) - for general web and AI development’ My favorite example of Anthropic artifacts comes from a creation made by my friend, Meng To who taught his 8 year old how to use Claude, Python and React Fiber to create a genAI game. Below is one of the first evolutions of his web-based video editor, 90% of which was created with Claude.
Anthropic Claude and OpenAI GPT - to develop data visualizations and dashboards (OpenAI Canvas, Anthropic Artifacts). While there are many foundation/frontier models of choice ranging from OpenAI’s GPT (many versions), Anthropic Claude (many verisons), Google Gemini, Facebook/Meta Llama, Pi, Poe and every other “small model,” in between that is hyperspecialized, these two allow indie devs (independent software engineers) to build new experiences on top of their platform we hadn’t seen before, at a speed faster than we had than ever before. We’re able to create tools like the ones Meng (and even a game like his son made) at a pace so rapid (taking days to hours rather than weeks to months) to iterate on the prototyping and deployment of software applications. Software is no longer eating the world only, it’s AI eating software as Marc Andreessen says. Productivity in General
Rewind.ai - Whole screen annotation and general note-taking. This app allows you not only to capture notes from your Zoom meetings, but allows you to trace back your whole screen history so you can go back in time to see what you wrote in command line or what you browsed in any browser or application. This was recommended to me by my friend Alex, and it’s been one of my favorite apps to use in the background. The paid version has more, but even with a free version, it can capture the beginning of your meeting notes pretty well (not word-for-word, but a good summary).
I gave my last 2 IG livestreams the last few days, on self-development, technology, negotiation, personal relationships, feminism, and social media. In the future, I’ll stream more content or related to productivity and the market and especially web3--future streams from YouTube and podcast based on my Substack.
Hope you enjoy this initial list (there’s a lot more I can share). And yes, I average reading about 2 books a month at least, I've been writing in a journal since I was like 4 years old, and have read at least like 224+ books in the last 10 years (according to Kindle and that's just digital books, does not include physical), so probably another 100+.
Too Much: A Guide to Breaking the Cycle of High-Functioning Codependency By Terri Cole. This is a great continuation and follow up to her famous Boundary Boss book and workbook.
The Art Spirit By Henri. This is a must-read that Jack Dorsey (Founder of Twitter) recommended way back in the day. I still read this from time to time and it has a lot of great quotes.
The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life) By John Maeda. I’m so honored that John wrote the forward to my book, Creating AR VR in 2019. He is one of my favorite people ever, and has even advised some of my friends I introduced him to on their early startups in the past (shout-out to my friend, Chris Gallelo who previously founded Purple.li, one of my favorite productivity, project management, and thinking/brainstorming tools for app creation).
The VR Book: Human-Centered Design for Virtual Reality by Jason Jerald Game Development Essentials: Artificial Intelligence By John B. Ahlquist, Jr., and Jeannie Novak
Generative Deep Learning: Teaching Machines to Paint, Write, Compose, and Play By David Foster
How to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of Us By John Maeda
I will announce some podcast episodes in between the other Substacks scheduled to go out in the coming weeks and months.
February
Taro DeepSeek Paper Reading Event - Analysis and Wrap-Up and AI Opportunity
More Web3 and Design Books I Recommend
March
Resource Guide for Women in Tech (highlighting groups from web3, XR, and AI)) and more about AthenaDAO
GameAI
April
How I Stay Productive - Quantified Self and Data Visualization
May
AI Safety Part I (Repost) of UC Berkeley LLM Agent - Fall 2024 Lectures by Professor Dawn Song and Anthropic Co-Founder, Ben Mann). You can find it posted already on my LinkedIn newsletter here. Part II will come at the end of the Spring 2025 Advanced course.
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Rize AI not superintegrated, but the data visualization dashboards are byfar, the best I have seen in the industry for iOS/MacOS natives. Tiimo was a close 2nd with Apple Watch notifications not working perfectly. Top 3 things about this app that make it one of my favorite is the detailed data visualization that I can see everyday. You’re able to categorize all your time (all nicely color coded). What’s also great about this application is that I can go back and track exactly where I could have been overworking (it’ll also give you ‘overworking alerts). One of the most effective things about the app to keep you on track is that it will give you pop-ups to ask if you are working in an application that is a distraction vs. your intended task. And lastly it has a cute music integration built within the app (something you don’t find everyday in most productivity apps). Source: Substack
Sunsama (YC W19) Like Rize, Sunsama has a cool data visualization, though not as dynamic as Rize, it still gives summaries (emails you) daily giving you a progress report whether or not you have completed your shutdown ritual of the day. The founder of Sunsama and their staff is super responsive and approachable over email about all kinds of feature requests. They have an ongoing list here so you can see what’s on the roadmap in the feature. While AI is not super-integrated into the app, it is the ultimate Kanban app that integrates well with Google Calendar and most other project/product management applications. You can Toggle on dark and light mode too. This was a must-have for me and love this app.
