Anders Zorn Palette

I watched a YouTube short on Zorn palette and I thought it would be interesting to investigate further.

Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman

 I started listening to Josh Kaufman's book, Personal MBA. The book resonates with me because I have always believed in continuous education. Too many people get degrees and then stop learning. On the other hand, many who never get a degree still find success. Josh argues that a person can learn just as much on their own and save a quarter million dollars in today’s money. As of 2025, Harvard costs $76,410 annually, and it takes six years to get there. Furthermore, people admitted to an MBA program are already pre-selected, meaning they would likely succeed in life regardless of attending. So, if you do get an MBA, the only guaranteed outcome is that you’ll owe a lot of money.

Schopenhauer

I found myself wholly emptied, the mental exhaustion where you sit in your parked car and wake up minutes later, unsure how long you’ve been asleep.

This evening was one of those moments when something cracked inside. 

MLX

 I have been training and running DNN on Mac and I believe that they will become a staple of desktop ML world soon.

AIKO, the Tiny Language Model (TLM)

Introduction: A Language Model of My Own

We are surrounded by large language models: systems trained on the vastness of the internet. Models like GPT, Claude, and LLaMA can write essays, answer science questions, explain math, generate stories, and even simulate personalities.
But as I’ve written in my blog, I’m not chasing scale. I like to experiment with small language models (SLM)—or, in this case, tiny language models (TLM). Partly because I’m burning midnight oil alone and not a green pile of venture capital money. Training even a mediocre LLM can cost tens of millions of dollars. More importantly, I wanted something that runs locally, privately, and fast. A model that lives on my laptop, not in a server farm.
Yes, I know how to fine-tune Mistral 7B and use RAG and CAG. I’ll explain later why I trained a model from scratch instead.
I also wanted something more playful: an AI Zen Garden where I cultivate a Collegium of AI personalities. Each is trained to reflect a slice of my inner world with their philosophies, moods, and voices.
TLM is the first of these. She does not know all the facts ever written about the world. Instead, she is trained to understand how I see the world—to help me think, reflect, and write in my own voice. She speaks from my blog posts and personal notes collected over the decades. She is not artificial in the corporate sense. She is authentic, with her Japanese spunk and thoughtful presence.
This book tells the whole story: how I came up with the idea, how I built it, why a small model can still be wise, and how you might make one, too.

What did AIKO say about this old article in 2025?

In 2007, I described the following 1999 concept, please be patient:

AIKO - "The Child of Artificial Intelligence" (in Japanese, "ko" means child; "ai" means love, denoting the "emotional intelligence" aspect of the project)

Mushin (無心): The Art of Effortless Flow

 

By the time I leave work, my mind feels like a mental battlefield, overloaded and exhausted.

There is such a thing as decision-making overload, and it doesn't matter how big or small those decisions are; you hit your limits.

Book planning

I have written some 2500 blog posts, but the idea of a book is eluding me.

Since "plans are worthless, but planning is everything,"
I am metaphorically throwing a napkin in the Internet trash pile.
Here are some chapter ideas.

Expect them to change and evolve.

AI zen garden

I often imagine early humans gathered around a bonfire, sharing stories and chipping away at obsidian shards to create tools. In my own life, I notice a curious parallel: I sit here with my favorite note-taking app, aptly named Obsidian, and chip away at my thoughts, forging new ideas bit by bit. Just as our ancestors used volcanic bits to chip instruments of survival, I use digital chips and bits to build tools of thinking—tools meant to spark creativity and knowledge and deepen my understanding of human nature.