2026-04-24 00:31:07
pinewind, a blog by kwist, gives us a calm space to enjoy the jots and thoughts of a highly interesting Japan-based hobbyist, enthusiast, and multipotentialite writer.
i can't decide if my favorite post is his thought-log on blogging or his post on personal colour pallets. both posts show the breadth of kwist's interests.
he considers his blog more of a garden. i have certainly appreciated wandering through his garden and have secretly (not anymore) taken some cuttings home with me to graft onto my own projects. please take a patient wander through pinewind, you will experience a lovely visit:
2026-04-23 20:46:47
Today, I managed to get my first Blackcap on camera. He was buried deep in the bush and was hard to even get a clear shot of his face. I didn't even realise he was mid-song until I got home and see the images on a bigger screen.
Also, another couple of Robins. Just because I liked these images.
2026-04-23 18:07:00
I liked school. I was not the most diligent of students for the same reason I liked it: I just liked learning stuff. Not necessarily the stuff I was expected to learn, although I learned that too. I didn't care about the academics of it, the grades. I loved reading about things, I loved understanding things and more than anything I loved not understanding things. I loved talking to my teachers, who wished I was a better student (that I was "más aplicada"), and having them praise my questions and direct me to other things they thought I would like learning and were out of scope for the class.
Some other kids didn't like school so much, for one or many silly or very valid reasons. And if I had to work together with them, on a presentation or some kind of research project, for example, what invariably happened was that they wanted to half-ass it and think about it as little as possible.
I am not against half-assing school projects. I think it's fine, and in fact I was very good at that myself. But I did like to think about them, often a lot, before ultimately deciding to half-ass them. So my disappointment in those team projects wasn't that of someone with an academic disposition, who wanted to work hard and get good grades, but the result of a missed opportunity. Most of the times I thought the tasks either were fun and interesting or had the potential to be made fun an interesting. But making a school task fun and interesting when it isn't out of the box requires an investment. Not "hard work", something far more nebulous. Good faith, maybe, curiosity; a willingness to let yourself be interested, intellectually engaged. You have to want to have fun (not a given) and you have to believe that this particular thing has the potential to be twisted into something that will make you have fun.
My disappointment was epistemological.
And this brings me to the present: I like learning and knowing. I like thinking about learning and knowing and thinking about thinking about learning and knowing. I am not a "result-oriented person" and find the mere existence of the phrase frankly terrifying.
When I ask you a question whose answer I could, with relative ease, find somewhere else, I am not asking it to get the answer, or at least not exclusively, but precisely to ask you the question. I care about my asking of the question, and I care about your answering the question far more than I care about your answer to it.
So when I ask you a question and you reply "let me just ask ch4tGPT" you are stabbing a knife to my heart.
People who hate thinking and their fundamental, sneering disdain for anyone who doesn't have been around ever since someone sat down for the first time and invented thinking. But I don't think it has ever been as ubiquitous and accepted as it is now to laugh at and quickly dismiss anyone who enjoys the distance between a question and its answer, a distance to be trodden deliberately and, yes, sometimes slowly.
I refuse to use "AI" because I refuse to be a part of the unadulterated epistemological disappointment that the world has become. I refuse to use "AI" even to automate away boring and repetitive tasks. If I ever want to automate away a boring and repetitive task I will find a way to automate it myself, maybe learning something in the process. Better yet, I will not automate it away, but think about what exactly it is that makes it boring and repetitive, or the words "repetitive" and "boring" be so often used together. I will look at the thing again, more charitably, and find something about it I can enjoy. And then I will go ahead and enjoy it.
2026-04-23 18:06:00
» science genius girl « 0:58 ─〇───── 3:16 ⇄ ◃◃ ⅠⅠ ▹▹ ↻
2026-04-23 17:45:55
I was reading an article on Music Radar today about Suno Studio AI and the growing use of AI in music creation. Some music maker I've never heard of said that we can't beat AI, so we should either integrate it into music making or just drive Ubers for a living.
I'm pretty tired of dipshit tech bros and opportunists telling everyone that we gotta jump on the ai train now or get left behind! Apparently, in their view, making coin and amassing fame are the only things that matter. Let ai do the work while you do the art - that's another braindead winner I often hear.
So, we have AI, trained on a bunch of copyrighted music, now being sold as an easy and quick way to make the music that is currently overrunning services like Spotify and Deezer so that lazy executives and rent seekers can extract more money without paying royalties to the same music makers they owe a debt to for using their music as an AI training ground? Doesn’t that sound like the biggest scam?
Apparently, putting in the hours to make music, learning, failing, trying - that's just an inconvenience that AI solves. The journey to create art IS part of the art. It's not dispensable. It's not an inconvenience. It's the way we create meaning for ourselves. It's the method by which we grow and understand both ourselves and the world.
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2026-04-23 16:54:00
AI is often framed as the great equaliser.
Better tools. Lower barriers. Wider access. Anyone can now produce what previously required teams, budgets, and time. On paper, that should make competition fairer. In practice, it’s doing the opposite.
What’s emerging isn’t a level playing field. It’s a widening gap.
Two types of companies are starting to emerge:
The first group moves fast. They adopt AI aggressively, integrating it into everything — marketing, operations, communication, even decision-making. Output increases almost immediately. Content flows. Processes accelerate. Internally, it feels like progress.
The second group also uses AI, but with more restraint. They don’t rush to automate everything - instead, they question where it actually adds value and use it to support thinking, not replace it.
At a glance, both groups can look equally capable, but underneath, something very different is happening. The first group is scaling execution. The second group is protecting judgment.
Over time, that difference compounds, because AI doesn’t fix weak thinking. It amplifies it.
If your positioning is unclear, AI will help you produce more unclear messaging faster. In other words, it creates the appearance of capability without necessarily improving it.
When conditions change, the difference becomes visible, because adaptation requires judgment.
AI isn’t leveling the playing field - it’s exposing who was thinking clearly to begin with and who wasn’t.
The gap isn’t closing. It’s widening.
In part 2 ("The More Personal It Gets, The Less It Feels"), I look at how this doesn’t just affect internal strategy, but fundamentally reshapes how customers experience businesses.