logloglog

Here’s a change log of my consciousness. Starting in December 2021, I’ve been capturing my ideas through the day, and then publishing them to my site the next morning. I’ve written about the benefits, its origins, and a 2-year reflection. Here are the log archives (WIP).

March 10th, 2025

03:32 PM – When I get random Substack push notifications to my phone, it makes me less likely to want to publish a note myself. It’s saying that some half-baked though of mine might get mass delivered without me knowing, in order to bring more people into the app.

03:05 PM – Notes on vibes (a cover of “notes on camp” by Sontag”). I want to write about the dangers of over-indexing on vibes.

Some notes (framework + AI hybrid):

The three binary spectrums—(1) earnest vs. ironic, (2) minimalist vs. maximalist, and (3) logic vs. vibe—combine to yield eight unique possibilities: (1) Earnest-Minimalist-Logic: straightforward, pared-down form, guided by reason (the essentialist); (2) Earnest-Minimalist-Vibe: sincere simplicity attuned to atmosphere (the Buddhist); (3) Earnest-Maximalist-Logic: heartfelt grandiosity anchored by structure (the architect); (4) Earnest-Maximalist-Vibe: passionate extravagance driven by feel (the romantic); (5) Ironic-Minimalist-Logic: wry restraint propelled by intellect (the cynic); (6) Ironic-Minimalist-Vibe: subdued style with a playful detachment (the hipster); (7) Ironic-Maximalist-Logic: over-the-top flair juxtaposed with a tongue-in-cheek rationale (the charlatan); and (8) Ironic-Maximalist-Vibe: a self-aware, flamboyant approach that thrives on sheer atmosphere (the prankster).

March 9th, 2025

03:21 PM – What will your last 15,000 breaths be like?

01:50 PM – The Dark Side of the Moon holds up. It’s one of those things where the meme doesn’t devour the original. I recommend listening to their album before DSOTM. In some ways, the whole album stems from “Careful with the Axe Eugene” (the baseline, the ancient crooning screaming, etc.). Their hit album was an elevated aesthetic from their prior album with added auto-biographical lore (about Syd).

01:50 PM – When people talk about BCI’s, they often assume a Severence-like brain implant. I think the reality is that by 2045, 99% of BCIs will be non-invasive casual headbands. Both will exist, but will have radical differences in functionality. I think even the less intimidating headbands will come with serious implications though.

08:58 AM – 3 tiers of subjectivity:

Quality vs. non-quality (some readers will value work not by how it’s composed, but by a topic, time period, moral, political party, etc. I’d say the less your judgment is based on quality, the more you risk taste blindness.)
Sub-genres of composition (some writers will prefer the patterns that come naturally to them, and resist the ones that are harder or more vulnerable).
Execution within types (within a pattern, writers will vary on how they solve it. I think this is what matters most. From the fundamentals, you get creative/personal in how you break the rules).

March 8th, 2025

08:22 AM – This tweet on agents nails it:

“I’m doing 3261538 actions per second and they’re all wrong”

07:47 AM – Regardless of which side you’re on, I don’t think one-sided pleas will work anymore. You can’t just say “here are 7 solid points on Trump’s insane corruption.” A flurry of comments will come in, “but what about DOGE?” Communication is impossible when bias is baked in, unless you immediately identify how a POV is in a unique position. Such as: “what if corruption exposers are in a position to shield their own corruption?” It frames the question in a way that DOGE is doing good work, and yet also, it’s perpetrating the same thing it’s exposing. Only by immediately identifying with your opponent (both with who they favor & how they critique), will you be able to slide in a nuanced, synthesized point of view that can help them around their bias.

March 7th, 2025

10:59 AM – Saving lobsters vs. killing elephants

09:22 AM – $10,000/month for an OpenAI software agent. 744 hours in a 31 day month, so that’s $13.44 an hour. Does this thing have 24/7 up-time? If so, then it works 6.2x more than a full-time developer. This all depends on the UX. It will be coding faster than you can audit. What if it spirals off in the first hour and then loops for 5 days straight? How in or on the loop does the human have to be?

07:27 AM – Politicians take on the NPC aesthetic to appeal to the youth.

March 6th, 2025

09:55 PM – Talk of pillows, Boca, skiing in Vermont, TV dinners, and William Defoe. Normal, goodhearted chitchat. How does this register to someone in critical condition? Are they unconscious, quietly listening and mildly interested, happy to hear voices, or is each mention rendered into a full-blown immersive scene?

01:19 PM – Infinite Michael (two chatbots named Michael who are in 24/7 conversation with one another).

01:13 PM – I should write an essay that ties my experience getting high at the Salk Institute with different examples of architecture, light, ritual, and superstition colliding (the Aztecs, Corb’s church, and Eleusis). In every case, rituals are built around calculated predictions of the sun’s position.

08:41 AM – When people or pets die, we have the impression that they no longer get to experience our year-to-year reality. The day-to-day seems stable. We feel pain that our dying father-in-law will never meet our unborn kids. Of course this pace of life is experientially real, but in times of pain it helps to remember that life itself is actually the exception. For most of existence you’ll be unborn or dead. At the cosmic scale, it’s as if a whole person’s life is just a day. Your grandparents died yesterday, your parents died today, you die tomorrow, and your great great great grandkids die by the end of the week. This mindshift helps. I am not owed 100 years, I was granted today. It becomes less about you and more about the unbroken chain.

March 5th, 2025

11:42 PM – I was falling asleep while reading one of Henrik’s essays (not because I was bored, but because it was almost midnight), and something weird happened. As I dozed off, I noticed that I stopped processing words and even letters; instead I only registered the black space in-between white words. It was something like prose-paradeolia. I could see accidental faces or objects in each paragraph, composed solely out of spaces. I imagine we’re not far from an AI that can generate paragraphs that have corresponding “shadow art.”

07:44 PM – A bed that adjusts itself. The sound of bubbling water. Outlets labeled A4BEC-14. An LG-TV with loose wires. An analog clock down to the second but the blinds are closed so you can’t tell the passing of days. It’s been 3 and could be another 7, but time stops on the deathbed.

06:46 PM – A novel where fame is dangerous because all celebrities get killed.

06:33 PM – Notes from Ted’s 2025 State of the Culture:

In interest graph shattered context & community. It gives the illusion of optimizing based on your taste, but it actually places you in a pre-determined funnel of algo-fluff.
A consequence of flattening is that the stakes are now so incredibly high. If you share what you really think online, potentially everybody can see it.
Algorithms should be regulated like drugs.
NPC streaming is reflective of how teen culture emerges through technology, and that’s a scary foreshadowing of what might come.

05:53 PM – It’s pouring outside the hospital. I’m looking out a floor-to-ceiling window and the halogen lights near and far show small patches of fast-falling white speckles. I wouldn’t say it’s “torrential,” but it’s hard, and there’s something about a death shelter also serving as shelter from the elements. The living and dying have a shared vulnerability: at least we’re inside.

03:54 PM – Geopolitically, there are no good guys. Falling into the “us vs. them” paradigm is classic/ancient/typical. Both sides are in a power struggle, and you have to imagine your horse is just as vicious.

March 4th, 2025

08:21 AM – How would HTS write about methylene blue?

March 3rd, 2025

03:21 PM – I’ve spent the day in a semi-modern hospital in what seems like my father-in-law’s last days. Communication is barely possible. Some yes’s and no’s come through, but maybe not for long. He left some signed notes from his past self about not wanting to live off feeding tubes. But there are all sorts of decisions (ie: who does he want visiting or not?) that he can’t communicate because he’s too weak to speak. People don’t like writing, let alone writing about the ideal conditions for their death, but considering it must be the most disorienting and climactic of experiences, it could be worth doing a lot of writing to help you and your caretakers in the future.

01:24 PM – Through my childhood, all my waiting rooms experiences have felt like hospitals, but this one is a Starbucks. I imagine 50% of the 20 patrons are thinking about death (ambiently, at least). Of the 2 nurses, maybe one saw it today. Maybe I’ll see it today (we haven’t gone up yet). It’s just odd to me that a very familiar, very commercial Starbucks aesthetic, with Chuck Berry on the radio, is brooding with death in the subtext. This is no doubt better than sterile dropped ceilings, but it’s still uncanny. I don’t think our culture has quite nailed our environments that are adjacent to death. I will be very particular about the ceiling I die under.

12:39 PM – During my 1 hour drive to the hospital today, I had 7 thoughts I wanted to remember, and so I mentally arrayed them as pictograms in a 3x3 dial pad.

1) For my “memory dungeon” project, I want to be granular with scenes. My road trip isn’t one memory, but a constellation of 20-50 memories. But including fragments, you could build tension between parts. Examples: a) photography out of Long Island, b) Scarlet Begonias, etc.

2) Now that coding is easy, I want to create an app that geolocates logs onto a map of Manhattan. Ideally it uses GPS, making it easy for me to locate as I write through the city. It will be like GTA but prose. Someone could even walk around to collect and find notes (not that anyone would).

3) The word “minimum” has a baked-in rhythm. It has two eighth notes and a quarter note: mi-nih mum. Pronouncing them as equal quarter notes create an odd effect on melody.

4/5/6) Photography may have been my first art and I wonder if that shaped my mind/consciousness. At its root, you need to learn how to investigate every environment as if something is hiding. (This thought triggered 2 tasks: to text a friend, and to read Sontag’s essay on photography).

7) Driving is a good way to build your short-term memory.

11:18 AM – Feels like multiple AI writing apps nonchalantly launched a “persona cloning” feature. Just upload a Substack archive URL and you can mimic your voice! (Or, someone else’s?) For now, AI mimicry is pretty hollow for anything serious. But what about when it’s not? I think we’re heading towards a paranoia where more people paywall their writing to prevent scraping.

08:27 AM – All the faces on my refrigerator live so pleasantly in my mind.

March 2nd, 2025

07:45 PM – The Oscars

March 1st, 2025

08:22 AM – More AI-video slop (NSFL), but with a decent script. I wonder how much time went into this.

Essay Architecture