Sharmarke Hujale 🌱

I recently launched jamaah(dot)tools, a website database that makes it easier for Muslims to find meaningful, faith-centered tools and sites, without having to search everywhere else. I built it using Astro, Tailwind, Alphine.js, Baserow, and Vercel.

There's nothing inherently bad about curating, but today it's often strongly linked to performing online. Meaning, you curate for an audience, usually for likes and approval. Even if you don't do it on purpose, it often happens unconsciously. But truly COLLECTING something is a private act first and foremost. You collect for yourself. You gather what fascinates you, what you love and what speaks to you on a personal level. You do it even without any coherence, aesthetic consistency or worrying what it may say about you, because its after all, your personal collection. It's just for yourself, and only you need to understand it. A private collection is the most honest reflection of what you're drawn to and its often the exact opposite to when we curate for an audience. So lets save the thing that does't "fit the grid" but brings us joy. Lets save the thing that would ruin our "aesthetic" if we would curate for others. Lets collect things just for ourselves, for our own soul and mind 🧡

I have a certain love-hate relationship with my writing. I love the initial ideas in my head, and I get excited during the brain dumping, not focusing on structure. But when I start to write the actual draft, I start questioning everything.

Grok, summarize this article. Claude, give me the book in five bullets. YouTube, 5x speed on the podcast. ChatGPT, TL;DR my friend's text. Spotify, skip to the chorus. Netflix, just give me the highlights. I can't wait to die faster.

But the problem is, AI didn't create anything. It just accessed data of existing material across the internet to generate something. I like AI for the concept phase, getting ideas out. But without taste, a point of view, a "Why" behind a choice, it just becomes meaningless hype.

@mohamedragestu It's so bad, which is why I don't post as often in here

@morehujale The algorithm keeps changing

i don’t remember the inspiration but built a small digital tribute to qaraami, cassette culture, and classical somali music as you hover over each tape with an artist name, an oud/kaban sound plays featuring the artists that shaped Somali music forever turn sound on

Name a movie you've seen more than 7 times with just a GIF

@mohamedragestu Thx! Though I have always been here, but not posting stuff. I'm mostly on Substack these days

@morehujale Thanks Sharmarke, and welcome back!

Can't wait for this to come out! Truly a cinematic experience.

@mohammed_hijab I can really recommend reading @talesofkhayaal

what are the most interesting novels you've ever read?

This is what I love the most in the creative process.

You need to write more. Without AI. Without templates. Without knowing what you're writing about. Just you, an idea, and enough time to do the difficult cognitive work necessary to reach true understanding. If you don't, your ability to think will drastically decline.

@fortelabs I can relate to this so much. That led me to write a short essay on why putting effort into something is valuable: open.substack.com/pub/hujale/p/t…

I went all in on AI early. And after a while, something felt off I'd lean on it to handle the hard thinking for me. Draft the strategy. Decide the angle. Structure the argument. It was faster, sure. But when I read the output back, I felt nothing No relationship to the words on the page. My name on something I didn't really write Worse, my curiosity started to disappear. I could get answers so fast that questions stopped forming. I started losing touch with my own point of view on topics I've spent a decade thinking about There's a term for this: cognitive debt You go faster. Sometimes much faster. But there's a hidden cost building up The debt of not having done the thinking to arrive at a conclusion you believe in. The debt of not understanding the decisions behind the plan, and therefore not trusting it. The debt of generating a polished document you don't care enough about to do anything with This is the problem no one's talking about in the rush to adopt AI And it's the reason I built The AI Second Brain differently Instead of handing your work to AI and hoping for the best, you learn Personal Context Management: how to give AI enough of your context that it amplifies your thinking instead of replacing it The founding cohort runs April 15 to May 1

@fortelabs That's interesting. Why is that if you don't mind me asking? In my own personal experience connecting Tana (my PKS) with Claude has been so far a great move

@morehujale I don't trust integrations, nor MCP. They don't work well

After 3 years of going deep on AI, I just taught the kickoff session of The AI Second Brain to over 1,000 people Enrollment for the founding cohort is now open The AI Second Brain is a 3-week live program where I'll teach you how to build a personalized AI system grounded in what I've learned at the frontier of AI April 15 to May 1. Every session taught live by me The core idea: The bottleneck isn't the model. It's what the model knows about you before you ask it anything I call this Personal Context Management. It's the skill of giving AI the right information, in the right format, at the right time Here's what we're building together: → A Master Prompt that gives any AI your context from the start → A PARA structure that feeds AI the right information on demand → An AI Board of Advisors for better decisions on the things that matter most → A complete system that compounds the longer you use it We opened enrollment during the session, and the early bird price of $2,000 (limited to 50 spots) sold out within minutes The response blew me away and made me even more excited to teach this cohort The program is $3,000, with installment options available at checkout

@evielync That's interesting! I'm gonna try it some time. I recently switched to Claude, and I'm loving it!

@morehujale Yep it actually codes it as html and then you can ask it to download as a png.

I'm on the verge of cancelling my Canva subscription and just using Claude Code to design everything. I just built a skill that creates images for my Substack/X articles. I just describe what I want (or leave it up to my AI assistant) and it designs it with my style and brand colours. Finished product (not bad for 30 seconds) ↓

I just can’t resist going into a bookstore and not buying a book. And this time I had to buy the second installment of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in this beautiful hardcover edition.

@taimurabdaal @marcrandolph Gonna bookmark this to look at later

@marcrandolph My openclaw bot surfaces 5 twitter bookmarks to me every morning on WhatsApp

Just curious. Once you bookmark something, how often do you go back and look at it? My retrieval percentage is in the low single digits. Wondering if I’m an outlier - or if bookmarking is simply aspirational for all of us.

@Juventissimo90s I don’t like either of them. At least I can tolerate the one on the right, but the left feels like we’re serving jail time, which reflects how we’ve played over the last couple of years

Which one is worse?