This is James

I’m James Johnson. This is my personal website. Here I write, draw, create, experiment.

Latest posts

Jul 3, 2025	reflecting	Q2 2025 quarterly review
Jun 30, 2025	reflecting	Posting every day in June: mission accomplished
Jun 29, 2025	reflecting	Heat and the limits of the human body
Jun 28, 2025	creating	Uncanny alley me
Jun 27, 2025	reflecting	Procrastination
Jun 26, 2025	reflecting	Adam the jumping spider

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Highlights

Q2 2025 quarterly review

I'm quite happy with what I've achieved this quarter. My new AI Life Operating System is fun to work with.

Tweaking my Tiro note keeping system

I have been using my Tiro note keeping system for about two and a half months and I've made some tweaks to how it works

Fallen and heavenly angel wheel

Wheels of eyes and a snake and angel wings and a neuron and angel names...

What in me is dark, Illumine. How Milton summoned the wrong muse

William Blake thought that John Milton was of the Devil’s Party without knowing it. I've worked out why. Milton was possessed by Satan.

Tiro, a personal note-processing system

I created Tiro, a personal note-processing system designed for fast, structured capture and organization of daily notes.

Q1 2025 quarterly reflection

I've been doing a lot of code creation with AI this quarter, in a sort of structured vibe-coding way. I love it!

Creating animation process toolset with generative AI

I developed a process for creating animations, using Claude 3.7 to code the tools. It worked well, but now I've thought of a better way to do it.

Vibe-coded fractal trees with threejs

My son and I created a little application to generate fractal trees. It was great fun and educational too.

Animation of sparks on the back of my childhood fireplace

I created an animation of sparks on the back of my childhood fireplace

Maintaining websites with Bear App and Quarto

Making this website enjoyable and fun to edit has been the single most important change I ever have made to my productivity processes.

A process to semi-automate research using few-shot classification and GPT-4 summation

I spend several weeks or sometimes months researching new topics. In this post I start to create a method to do this more efficiently, but whilst doing so I realise the process is overly complex and come up with a better process.

Hatching practice

I've been experimenting with hatching. I learn that I should do pencil sketches from references and add shadow-lines before inking.

Update, memory

Musings on note books and a failed experiment using ChatGPT to record stuff

Learning by writing essays

Why writing essays is a great way to study and learn

Thinking about coconuts

Why are coconuts so big? Why do they have water in them? Are they a nut or a fruit? What is the white stuff for? Did dinosaurs eat coconuts?

On misremembering and AI hallucinations

Does generative AI really understand things? I used to think not, now I'm not so sure

Self-prompting — leveraging your mental cockney builder

We use prompting techniques with AI. We can also use them on ourselves

The WEIRD bias in generative AI responses

“The responses from generative AI depend on their training data. That data is biased, so the responses are biased.”

Tree of knowledge image

I created an image of the Tree of Knowledge, based in part on sacred geometry

My seal

King Charles has a seal, and I wanted one for myself. So I set about designing one.

We need to talk about your information diet

In this essay I look at how we have been programmed by evolution to enjoy cute kitten pictures on Instagram and dumb rage-bait videos on Twitter. We are making ourselves dumber, is there anything we can do about it?

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell image

This work is inspired by *The Marriage of Heaven and Hell* by William Blake

William Blake timeline — an information visualization experiment

I created a visual timeline of William Blake's life

Gods of the visual essay

Here I list some of the people that I think write the most inspiring visual essays

AI is coming for your job

How to survive the coming AI job apocalypse

The Moral Machine - Could AI Outshine Us in Ethical Decision-Making?

Philosophers have been debating about ethics since philosophy began, surely they can provide a set of rules for AI to follow? Let's investigate...

How I improved my digital handwriting

Neat handwriting helps memorization and achieving goals. Here's how I improved my digital handwriting when writing on the iPad

Somnium by Johannes Kepler

I illustrated the first few pages of Somnium by Johannes Kepler

Drunk Schrödinger cartoons

I think the points Schrödinger makes in his book _What is life_ could be made much more succinctly by a drunk Schrödinger.

William Blake postcards

These postcard-sized images are inspired by quotes from his work The marriage of _Heaven and Hell_ by William Blake.

Paradise Lost cartoons

I drew illustrations for the first three books of Paradise Lost

The Medici family tree

I created a family tree of the Medici family, to improve on the amount of information given by traditional family trees.