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

1. 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.
2. 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
3. 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).
   

Source: Substack

Some of my favorite books I love to reread

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+.

Books and Workbooks

• The Light We Carry, Becoming, and Overcoming: the Workbook by Michelle Obama
• Principles and Principles Your Guided Journal: Create Your Own Principles to Get the Work and Life You Want by Ray Dalio (book and workbook)

Social Media

• Daytrading Attention: How to Actually Build Brand and Sales in the New Social Media World by Gary Vaynerchuk

Relationships

• It Begins With You: The 9 Hard Truths About Love That Will Change Your Life By Jillian Turecki
• 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.
• It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People By Dr. Ramani Durvasula
• Love Life: How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person, and Live Happily (No Matter What) By Matt Hussey

Philosophy

• Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee By Shannon Lee
• 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.

Negotiations

• Black Belt Negotiating: Become a Master Negotiator Using Powerful Lessons from the Martial Arts By Michael Soon Lee and Sensei Tabuchi

Startups and Business

• Hackers and Painters: Big ideas from the Computer Age By Paul Graham
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days By Jessica Livingston
• Startup Mindsets: A Blueprint to Thrive in an Innovation-Driven and Globally Connected World By Earl Martin Valencia and Dan Gonzales
• High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People By Elad Gil.

Design

• 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).
• Pocket Full of Do By Chris Do. One of the best designed books I have seen.

AI and Spatial Computing Books

Source: Substack

Me, Steve, and Vasanth at Augmented World Expo (AWE)

• Creating Augmented and Virtual Realities: Theory and Practice for Next-Generation Spatial Computing By Erin Pangilinan, Steve 👓 Lukas, and Vasanth Mohan. ←This is my first book I published in 2019
• 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

Feminism

• All About Love By Bell Hooks
• Proposals for the Feminine Economy and The Business Birthing Handbook By Jennifer Armbrust

Next Posts

Source: Substack

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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