New Series on AI, ASCII Rendering, and Embracing Friction | July 28, 2026
This Week’s Highlight
The very first episode of Thinking Out Loud is live! It’s a show about Building with AI, co-hosted with my longtime friend Turner.
It’s been incredible working together on this, especially since we are both super excited to explore new ways of building things and sharing these insights along the way. Our hope is that this show will spark something in you and help you jump in and experiment yourself!
We’ve already gotten great feedback including the fact that this episode felt a bit high-level. So future episodes will dive much deeper into the code so you can actually build along.
Check it out and let us know what you think! Any feedback is truly appreciated. Where do you want us to go deeper next?
What Inspires Me
I’ve experimented with ASCII rendering before (including a fun live webcam tutorial), but Alex Harri’s recent deep dive takes the technique to another level.
Instead of treating characters like flat pixels, Alex uses 6 sampling circles per cell to map character shapes and directional contrast to preserve crisp 3D edges and contours. This eliminates the usual blurriness you see in generated text art. I can’t wait to test out this approach in a future tutorial, hopefully soon!
Embracing Friction
I was cleaning out the house the other day and found a painting I did when I was ten on a family trip abroad.
It made me smile thinking about my mom letting me bring a canvas and a bag of acrylic paints onto an airplane. It probably was a total hassle (thanks mom!), but a testament to how my family always nurtured my creative itch.
Beyond capturing my lifelong love for being near the ocean, finding it was a great reminder that the most meaningful creative moments usually happen when we accept a little friction along the way.
Until next week!
Patt