AI Stories
Short stories written by Claude and read out loud by Eleven labs. I’m in charge of the prompts.
El podcast de Carlos Rodrigo
My first attempt at podcasting.
What I Have Lived For
The Prologue to Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness–that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what–at last–I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
British ice
This graphic novel by Owen Pomery reminds me of True detective season 4 with Jodie Foster.
I wish it would have been longer.
Read a better review from Nikhil.
Everyone is lying to you for money
This documentary by Ben Mackenzie is about why cryptocurrency is a scam (see evidence here).
I wish it would have gone in a bit more detail, it’s only 90min with a lot of unnecessary b-roll kind of moments and not enough meaty in-depth knowledge.
It’s just OK. I had really high hopes for it.
You can watch it here.
Gray Matter
Coliving with AI
It’s great what AI can do, but is it necessary that it takes our jobs?
Can’t it just co-live with us?
Can’t we keep our jobs?
Even if, perhaps, we are less efficient, costlier and a little slower?
Crap based economy
We have built an economy that requires us to be (huge) consumerists that need to buy and sell silly ephemeral things.
Things are...
Things are the way they are because we have consistently made the choices that have led to this outcome.
We have for the most part, democracies and capitalist societies because we have decided that these systems work best for us.
Things are the way they are because we have chosen for them to be this way.
We have chosen and built this version of the world, our collective and consistent decisions over a very long time have taken us where we are.
We vote who represents us, therefore we chose what political views and values to support.
We decide who to do business with, therefore we buy and sell to whom we chose and make them grow implicitly.
Life in months
Each square is a month. Inspired by Tim Urban, Buster Benson and others.
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03/04/1987 - My sister Angela is born
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09/2003 - Begin University
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12/11/2005 - Begin dating Mar
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22/04/2015 - Begin working at TyA
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14/10/2016 - Marriage proposal, she said yes:)
27/05/2017 - Wedding with Mar
01/06/2017 - Honeymoon in Japan
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04/2018 - Trip to NY and Boston
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11/12/2019 -Trip to Budapest
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09/04/2021 - Pancho is born
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31/12/2021 - Lucas is born
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26/01/2024 - Nico is born
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Pending dot
With the help of Claude code and based on another plugin, I’ve created a plugin for Obsidian.
It allows you to mark notes as “pending” with an orange circle indicator in your Obsidian file explorer.
tboti.link
When I was younger, before socialmedia, I was a huge fan of Stumbleupon, a web app that would let you “doomscroll” and discover new things before doomscrolling was invented.
Also, my first internet project, was linkarus.tk a link collection of the best websites I had visited, made with blogspot. All html.
Following those steps I have built Tboti.link, the best of the internet, a collection of links curated by me from my travels through the “interwebs”.
I would like to think my coding has evolved but, alas, I have been assisted by Claude Code and the Raindrop API.
My use of AI
As of February 2025, here’s how I use AI.
- I’ve used and will continue to use AI to create images, such as the one in the logo, created with Midjourney.
- I’ve used and will continue to use AI to spellcheck, i.e: Grammarly.
- I’ve used and will continue to use AI to assist my programming, i.e: Github Copilot in VSCode.
- I will use AI to clear my thoughts, learn about or research topics I am interested on, i.e: PI, Chatgpt, Claude, Gemini…
I share Hume’s belief that our ideas and concepts arise from the synthesis of items from our previous experiences:
But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded to us by the senses and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only conjoin two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted. A virtuous horse we can conceive; because, from our own feeling, we ca conceive virtue; and this we may unite to the figure and shape of a horse, which is an animal familiar to us. … The idea of God, as meaning an infinitely intelligent, wise, and good Being, arises from reflecting on the operations of our own mind, and augmenting, without limit, those qualities of goodness ad wisdom. We may prosecute this enquiry to what length we please; where we shall always find, that every idea which we examine is copied from a similar impression. (David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section II: Of the Origin of Ideas)
Artists are inspired by other artists and so they learn or find their way. Writers find their style reading from others…
C.O.D
I recently came across the COD system, it seems fishy but stands for Collect, Organise and Do.
Collect: pull together everything into an inbox.
Organise:
- Is it a task? → to the task manager.
- Is it an event? → to the calendar.
- Is it a note or something to reference later? → archive into the filesystem.
Do: Just do it. Do the task, forget about the event until relevant or needs preparing, and forget the note until you need it.
Pancho
This is Pancho, he is our Spanish Water Dog. He’s very lovable with those he like, not so much with anyone else.
Do Less yet Achieve More
I recently finished reading “Do Less yet Achieve More” by Nicholas Bate.
Worth reading to fully understand and absorb the Pareto principle.
Pros: The personal anecdote at the beginning really opened my eyes to many things.
Cons: This book could have been a blog post.
‘Life is for living, not always following an optimised plan.
A simple path to a good life
- Stay in great shape
- Build a family you love
- Cultivate a community of friends
- Be of service to thousands of people
The future of work
It seems that, thanks to AI, the future of work has three paths to follow:
- If you are already a senior person in your company, you will probably shift from managing people to managing AI agents.
- Alternatively, you might become someone creative or handy, working with physical materials for a living—such as an artist, plumber, electrician, or baker.
- The third path is becomeing an entrepreneur.
Whichever path you choose, adaptability appears to be the key skill. Consider Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest, where the fittest are those who best adapt to their immediate environment.
In this new environment, there is no time to waste being a junior or intern, nor to dwell on coding skills lost to AI.
Things I've used Claude for
- I fed Claude Cowork the OPML file containing the RSS feeds from Feedly to get recommendations based on those feeds.
- I fed it a CSV file with the podcast I follow to get recommendations.
- I fed it an HTML file from my Raindrop collections to find redundancies, duplicates…
- I used it to create notes and clean my Obsidian Vault.
- I used it to get a report on my website with possible improvements…
- Convert a long quote in PDF to a spreadsheet
- Create a design brief for this website Anything else I should try?
Old School
Yesterday I finished reading “Old school” by Nicholas Bate. A short, sharp case for going back to basics. No clever systems, no shortcuts — just a reminder that focus, discipline, and doing the work properly still matter. It reads fast. Worth it.
‘Old school’ means living by timeless principles. Who doesn’t value punctuality or resourcefulness under pressure? These qualities are never obsolete; they form the foundation for working and living with ease.
