Threshold and organic generative art

Notes for the week of February 16, 2026

Took Penny to the orthodontist and unsurprisingly she will be getting braces. She is sanguine to interested with the prospect. That surely won’t last.
Spent a lot of my time working on the feed reader / article discovery app I started last week.
- This week I came across a new reader app called Current that is addressing a lot of the same things I am. Ultimately it doesn’t work for me because I’m interested in training my system on what kind of articles I find interesting and, more importantly, what kind it should never show me, and this app doesn’t do that. But, it has a great design pattern I immediately stole: The user sorts the feeds into categories based on expected signal-to-noise ration (this is a breaking news feed, this is a personal blog, this is the New Criterion, etc.), and then the system applies different decay functions to each kind of feed. Articles from newsy feeds go away after a couple of hours, journal articles will hang around for a few days, etc.
- Now, when I open the app (which I call Threshold BTW)I see a list of new articles in my feed ranked by an expected interestingness score derived from thumbs up/down I give to articles. There is no unread count. Old newsy articles, even if I would have found them interesting are gone even if I haven’t seen them. I peruse articles from top to bottom as far as I want to go, marking some with a thumbs up (which puts them in my read later system), some with a thumbs down, and most with nothing. Articles from higher signal-to-noise feeds hang around longer and have a greater chance of being seen even if their expected interestingness is middling.
- That’s how discovery works. One the consumption side I use Readwise Reader and I simply sort my articles by time added. I just work my way down my queue whenever I feel like it. Their text-to-speech feature is great, though I wish they would add some of the newer unreal voices available. If there’s an article I come across that I think is worth sharing after I’ve read it, it’s pretty frictionless for me right there to mark it with a star and add a little comment if I want to. Those now show up in a Linklog section of the website I’ve now added.

Also spent a fair bit of time on generative art and had a bit of a breakthrough.
- I’d been coding up and plotting a number of pieces but I was not super happy with any of them.
- First of all, I’m not crazy about using these tools for figurative art. The portraits and such that I’ve seen (and that I’ve plotted myself) are cool, but ultimately a bit gimmicky.
- I imagine most folks feel this way because most of the generative art you see plotted are very geometric and structured. That’s the other kind of drawing I’ve made. I like these much more, but I have yet to really find them satisfying. They look more like craft than art, and I’m not really expressing anything.
- The breakthrough I had was realizing I shouldn’t be looking at other pen plots for inspiration. I should just look at art that I like. And doing that, I came to the conclusion there’s not reason one can’t make more organic shapes using these tools even if I don’t see many people doing so, so that’s the direction I’m exploring and I’m pretty excited with what I’m cooking up. Maybe I’ll have something to show next week.
- I’ve also continued to noodle on a more representation project that maybe veers from art a fair bit into dataviz. Basically I’m taking football statistical data and trying to figure out how to represent individual matches in an aesthetically pleasing form. What I’m coming up with reminds me of NFT drops.

← Back to index