Thursday Thoughts on AI

My Weekend Project, Your New Playbook

Happy Monday…

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5 months ago · 2 likes · Jaclyn Konzelmann

Jaclyn took an image subject and applied a variety of style prompts which demonstrates how readily and easily 🍌 was able to generate immediately distinguishable and recognizable art styles.

Oh my GOSH. This is too bonkers to not try even more styles, so here we have some of my faves after I went through a pretty dense list of silly and whimsical ideas that popped in my head.

Thematically, I went from “silly collectibles that people spend too much money on”….

… to East Asian traditional art styles …

… to endearing and whimsical aesthetic …

… to the early era of videogames …

… to early internet and current day computing …

… to “uhhh yikes”.

Happy Monday indeed. 🤯 This shiz is bananas (pro)!

It’s been 3 years (yikes) but I am back… maybe? In case you don’t remember, I started this newsletter years ago to chronicle my silly little creations. Thematically, I will still be sharing my silly little creations, but it will be a bit more technologically focused than before, just because that’s where I am right now.

This is a small group of readers so most of you know me, but for anyone who doesn’t, I’m Andrea! I’m based in Vancouver, Canada, and I love to read, cook, eat, doodle, and learn new things. I’ve been working recently as a product manager but I’m currently still on maternity leave after giving birth to my son last year.

I’m going to try SO DANG HARD to get back on this in a consistent way because I have been desperate to get creative in ways that I just haven’t been able to in the past while. I’ve been reading Unicorn Space by Eve Rodsky and using it as a guide on carving out the time I need to be me, despite everything important that requires my time and attention.

As someone who loves technology and makes a living from it, you’d think I’d have jumped on that AI train a long time ago. But truthfully, no! I am a conservative Luddite when it comes to certain types of tech because honestly, I think I know too much about the potential downsides. I was extremely resistant to voice assistants in the early days but my husband unceremoniously and forcefully opted me in when he purchased too many Alexa devices for our home. I was holding my ground not wanting to do too much in ChatGPT for the longest time because quite frankly, it was getting really good at the things I pride myself on being good at, which bothered me (plus a lot of other things too, but I’ll save that for another day to rant about).

So what am I trying to tell you? Well, I’m now getting into ✨ Vibe Coding ✨ - which if you do not know what that is, this is what ChatGPT says after I poked it a few times:

Here’s my silly little creation from yesterday - I took the first baby step in vibe coding an iOS app I’ve always wanted to build! Literally, it’s been in my notes and my mind for soooo long, I think I started getting this idea sometime maybe 7 or 8 years ago.

So far the output I’ve gotten is a test app that can actually run on my phone in developer mode. It’s SO COOL! I don’t know a single thing about coding in Swift, using xcode, or compiling a real app, but after a bunch of prompting ChatGPT, some back and forth troubleshooting, a barebones app exists. It took me around under 2 hours to get here.

Having a tangible output (albeit very rudimentary, and of course nowhere near my vision) is so mindblowing. I’m sure that as I get deeper down the rabbit hole it’ll get tougher to put together and I am likely to get stuck in spaghetti code, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

Since then, I played around in v0 to prototype some UI and get some ideas of what I actually want it to look like. Without much input from me, it already drew from a lot of really strong UX gold standards:

I’ve joined a peer group of other AI aficionados where next week we’ll workshop together to learn and build with each other. I’m basically doing some homework right now before we meet.

That’s all I’ve got for now, but I can’t wait to keep poking at these tools and see what comes out. I have never felt so old and so young simultaneously; largely because I understand enough about the foundations of these technologies and how truly mind-boggling the scale is, but also just so green and n00b (“newbie”) at all this.

If you want to chat AI stuff, feel free to email me back! I’d love to hear what you’re noodling on.

Until next time, stay neat potatoes 🥔

I had picked up a bag of glutinous rice flour a while ago to keep in the pantry in case of a mochi craving. Paired with a can of coconut milk and some butter at the ready, it’s easy to whip up a cake.

I discovered butter mochi a couple years ago when I was keen on making HK-style mochi balls (糯米糍) but didn’t want to deal with the fussiness of rolling steamy dough by hand and putting stuffing in. That’s the sort of activity better left reserved for a dreary overcast weekend afternoon.

Butter mochi though - it’s genius, and a fabulous dessert for a weeknight. You mix all the ingredients, dump them into a pan and bake it. Using an oven is such a great method because you just let all the ingredients mellow and figure it out for themselves. My favorite type of dessert requires no micromanagement from me; I’m more than happy to delegate the work to time and convection heat.

The worst part is waiting. When it comes out of the oven you do need to let it cool for a while, because it’s no fun to burn your mouth and then not be able to enjoy the taste after! However, the waiting is fully worth it - as the cake cools you get these incredibly flaky, crispy edges because this cake is reeeaally buttery.

I learned a somewhat more advanced version of this technique from attending a hummus-making workshop with a Syrian-Canadian chef over the holidays, where she said that after cooking the chickpeas you should get the chickpeas in a large bowl of cool water, and stick both hands in to agitate and to move them around.

If you do it right with the appropriate soaking and cooking times, what you’ll find is that you can get most of the skins off en masse real quick, and if you’re keen to get all the skins off, you can go in and pop them off one by one like I show in the video.

In most cases, I’m quite happy with starting a hummus when most, but not all, of the skins are off. I don’t always need an ethereally smooth hummus, and sometimes a bit of the extra fiber isn’t bad to have.

I used my stand mixer but I went too long and overmixed the dough - it became a bit too stiff, but the fun part and success came when I got almost all of them to puff up in the pan in the most satisfying way.

They were a bit on the dense and chewy side, but hey - pita pockets you can stuff!

One night I wanted something chocolatey, I decided to make a chocolate mug cake. I googled the first thing that popped up, dumped it all into a mug, and microwaved it.

It was gross. I don’t think I’ll ever attempt another mug cake for a long while.

However, a success! I also googled the first thing for a chocolate pudding recipe, and although it didn’t come out exactly perfectly, it was pretty frickin delicious. Plus, I felt like a wizard just being able to whip up some chocolate pudding out of thin air.

I used this recipe and added about 1/3 cup of chocolate chips:

One thing I had always wanted to try was to make vegan mayonnaise. Regular non-vegan mayo, if you didn’t know, is normally made with eggs. The vegan version uses aquafaba, which has some similar proteiny properties that can allow you to create similar structures (in this case, an emulsion).

Mayonnaise is one of those things that is pretty great and tasty until you decide to make it for yourself, and then realize it’s kinda gross because of the ingredient list. As I was reading this recipe I knew I was going to have to brace myself before I got to the oil portion, but yeah - it’s mostly oil.

This was also a good excuse to use my immersion blender, which doesn’t get a whole lot of action unless I’m blending soups during winter.

The result was decent, although by itself I didn’t find the taste too great (maybe because I didn’t use apple cider vinegar).

I decided to whip it up with some canned salmon and green onions to top toasted ciabatta. Pretty good!

Unfortunately, I couldn’t really figure out a use for the rest of the mayo so I binned it. I think I prefer real eggy mayo, especially to dip fries in!

We love going to Garry Point Park in Steveston because quite honestly, there aren’t a whole lot of other things to do in Richmond if you don’t want to go eating out/shopping (truly Chinese pastimes). Last year we were so surprised to show up early spring to realize that it was actually lined with a bajillion cherry blossoms and it was a major focal point of attraction for anyone who wanted to enjoy the scenery.

A good fun thing to do is to pack some food and drive down to the park and enjoy. I forget exactly what the food was here but I think it was miso stir fried vegetables with some crunchy cucumbers on top.

Those ones are a variety that bloom earlier in spring. Later in the month and in May, we got a load of these pink fluffy ones:

I always match the blossoms because I just own too many pink/purple clothing items 🥹

I’ve been slowly building up my pantry and spice rack, learning a bit more about flavors and tastes I’ve never really had a grasp of before.

On the cutting board I have chopped onions, jalapenos, cilantro, and grated ginger. On the plates I have chili flakes, turmeric, paprika, cumin seeds, curry powder, and garam masala - plus a nice big pat of butter.

Living with a (mostly) vegetarian for so many years now has really forced me to look outside the food I grew up with (mostly meaty). It’s been a bit challenging, but fun to diversify and explore.

After getting all the spices all bubbly and fragrant, stirring it into the lentils gives it this wonderfully mellow look.

Paired up with some homemade pita (I know!) plus some fluffy basmati rice, this was even better than takeout.

The end results, zoomed out, come together very differently than obsessing over the details.

I combined a little bit from each of these two YouTube videos, with some slight modifications.

From JiaBaoMama above, I thought it was a great idea to marinade the green onions ahead of time.

From the video above, I thought the technique looked solid, so I followed the rolling and folding method.

I used bread flour instead of all purpose - I think it turned out quite nice and fluffy, but I brushed oil after rolling out the dough even though the green onions already had sesame oil.

I was initially aiming to make this for lunch but the dough rise failed miserably (kitchen’s always too cold!) so I had to warm up the oven slightly, turn it off, then pop the dough in there to rise. I finished frying this up around mid afternoon and so it was a delicious and filling snack before we went for the last ski of the season.

I don’t think I’ll bother with the fluffy bread type of green onion pancake for another while - it’s just so much more time and fuss to wait for the dough to rise, then assemble and roll, AND pan fry. Oy. I think if I want something bready and green-onion-y next time I’ll attempt milk bread dinner rolls.