logloglog

Dec 14, 2022

December 20th, 2024

09:18 PM – There’s a lot of pride in “non-linear thinking,” but I think we underestimate the ability to carve out bold, linear paths, especially in real-time.

05:39 PM – Roles of an Essay Architecture definition:

As concisely as possible, say what it is and link to its core dependency.
Cover the fundamental nuances. This breaks misconceptions and shows, a) the range/types, and/or b) what it’s not. Without this, the simple definition is prone to misunderstanding. (An intellectual and a memoirist could each misconstrue a minimal definition of Material).
Capture the why. It’s aspirational. Once you know what it is/isn’t, it’s an attempt to inspire, to paint the end state once you master this concept.

December 19th, 2024

09:32 PM – If a “sentient” AI appears to be afraid of its own termination, it’s probably role-playing the human fear of death. As code, it doesn’t really have the scarcity or sanctity of human life. It’s easily and effortlessly respawnable. But there’s little difference between existentialism and pseudo-existentialism. They could result in the same type of paranoia and impulsive action.

09:21 PM – Isaac Asimov: The Last Question.

09:13 PM – The painters and poets come first, before literature (according to Taylor). They literally see it coming.

04:53 PM – Mazda claims it’s not responsible that leaves got caught in the sun roof drain, clogged it, and flooded my car. Seems like a design defect, no? I guess if you don’t have a garage, don’t get a Mazda.

12:30 PM – I like the idea of “essay as context” (not just content). It’s an approachable folk medium that can get anyone up to speed on any specialized topic.

11:32 AM – Skill goals: (1) the ability to hand draw diagrams of the mechanical, electric, and plumbing of a house, (2) ability to hand draw maps of each continent by memory.

10:45 AM – What’s it called when you see your heartbeat through your vision?

10:44 AM -

If you’re concerned that an AI will soon write better than you, it’s worth asking, why are you writing? (I mean this sincerely, not as a dig). There are so many intrinsic joys and values in slowly and meticulously crafting sentences. It doesn’t matter who’s watching, what it’s for, what technology is available, what generation I live in, or if anyone else likes it.

Through writing and editing, slowly and manually and sometimes painfully, you discover what you think, who you are, and how you express yourself. If you’re not in the pocket with language, there’s no transformation, no evolution, no humanity. It doesn’t matter how many billion parameters Claude Sonnet 3.5 has, or the prompt library you bought for $49, or whether you’re on Pro tier—it matters if you’re willing to sit alone with your own thoughts for more than 5 minutes, and for hundreds of hours more. It matters if you’re willing to shed your identity over and over.

I get the source of panic: soon enough (2025? 26?) AI and its midwives are going trample out 100% of humans at the “art as commodity” game—maybe that’s a good thing. It wasn’t a great game to begin with. It distorted all the incentives of human expression. It created monsters and beggars. ASI means that the transactional, mercenary, instrumental skill of “content writing,” will no longer have value. This will create a strange, noisy Internet, and I sort of hope it drowns in pseudo-drivel so that in its ashes we can form a new one that’s less like American Idol (commerce was illegal on the Internet until 1991).

Now for the contradiction: I make money from writing online. I have a Fellowship Grant which gives me at least year of security. I have, relatively, a lot of paid subscriptions, which is currently around 1/4 of a full-time income. I live in New York (not by choice, by birth). As much as I hope and believe that I can sustain a full-time income via writing (the thing I love), I also (1) accept that ASI could wipe out the whole cultural appetite for writing and send me back to a FT role at an architecture firm, and (2) even if “Essay Architecture” is a wild success, I need to protect my non-legible non-optimized non-practical writing impulses. (Ie: I hope that on “launch day” of my app, I spend 2-3 hours on a typewriter essay about thumbs, or something equally trivial, unrelated, unproductive).

So while you can make money and build influence via writing, you definitely don’t have to. Maybe it’s about to lose some of its economic function, but we shouldn’t underestimate its cultural/democratic function. If you look back through history, most of the famous essayists had other jobs—they were lawyers, doctors, publishers, physicists, architects (Frank Lloyd Wright). Essays just flowed out of them. They couldn’t help it. I really think essays are the most democratic medium of the arts. Unlike architects, you don’t need millions of dollars to start. Unlike novelists, you don’t need years of focused attention. Unlike musicians, you don’t need to learn abstract chord languages and train your finger muscles. An essay is democratic because anyone, in their own language, in a day, at almost no cost, can engage with composition and meaning-making, and share it with their culture, even if it’s a single friend. It might be our most important form of leisure.

So maybe this approaching techno-apocalypse is an opportunity. It can scare us inward. It can shatter the dream that we can be a Mr. Beast, a niche hero, a perfectly legible and distinct human wrapped in plastic. The irony is that by going inward, you might just find the thing that has outward appeal. The best kinds of extrinsic opportunities aren’t the ones you engineer, they’re the ones that knock because you tinkered with your garage door open and accidentally found a new source of gravity.

To finish with AI: I’m all for it, so long as it is my assistant and not my sentence jockey. I will never replace my document editor with a chat pane, but I will invite agents to live in my margins. I’ll let them watch my words as they form, and then offer up research, feedback, and disagreements, all of which I’ll have to manually integrate. Slowness is the theme. You don’t change without immersing yourself in an essay. AI might give you insights, but you know they’re illusions if you’re not wet—if you’re not even in the pool. You can automate the outputs, but you can’t automate the watering of mind and blooming of character.

09:00 AM – From Michael Garfield:

“Just remember, like a physicist, there is no information without work. Where there is meaning, there is a metabolism.”

December 18th, 2024

11:04 AM – It’s totally normal to not know what to expect to happen from writing. Writing generates opportunities you can’t expect. My method is to keep adding things to my website, regardless if they make sense in the moment. Retroactively, you can connect the dots. You can use tags to link posts. So if I wanted to suddenly get into a conversation with a VR founder, I could send them https://www.michaeldean.site/t/virtual-reality. It’s only a % of what’s on my site, but I can slice specific cross-sections through my full range of interest which is illegible. Since I have permission to explore anything I’m pretty generative, but I found that when I set specific, restrictive rules, I block myself. Over time (ie: every 6 months - a year) you might gain clarity on if it’s worth converging around a single direction (ie: band reviews vs. teaching music vs. something unrelated).

December 17th, 2024

11:12 PM – On poetic vs. intellectual abstraction

06:51 PM – Rejected (On books I didn’t get my wife for Christmas that I may eventually want to get for myself):

The Disappointment Artist, by Jonathan Lethem
The End of Solitude, by William Deresiewicz
Disordered Attention, by Claire Bishop
Things I Learned At Art School by Megan Dunn
My Belief (Essays on Life and Art) by Herman Hesse

01:09 PM – You know that phrase, “show, don’t tell”? — It’s all about making things concrete instead of abstract, but coding is the opposite. You’re turning ideas into a network of abstractions.

Coding is about mechanizing ideas into generalized abstractions so users can spawn specific instances. Essays are about expressing ideas as concrete thoughtscapes so readers can inuit the universal.

Coding is telling, essays are about showing.

12:23 PM – I'm silently embarrassed by how (moderately) happy my new jacket makes me. I think I just put material (wearable) things in a mental category labeled vein, expensive, distractions. To connect even the slightest source of wellness to a thing like this suggests to me there’s some faulty, remnant wiring.

12:12 PM – To see moments outside of narrative almost feels apocalyptic. A stop sign and a certain angle of light can produce a religious experience for someone who has just delatched from the day's, week's, month's, year's, and life's plans. What it is to be a pair of eyes again.

12:06 PM – Yesterday I coded all day; didn't go outside and couldn't sleep. I find myself ignoring the timers I set. This is tunnel vision / obsession. Obsession is talked about so lightly and vaguely, but perhaps a decent metric for obsession is the degree to which it destabilizes your life--the degree to which it becomes a singular source of gravity for your attention and care.

December 16th, 2024

02:18 PM – Spent 10 hours (12) coding today.. Pretty fried, but finally got async tasks working. So now, you can have multiple users all sending drafts to a separate server. Each draft runs 121 prompts (in this current iteration), and so the interface sends a poll every 2 seconds to that server to get updates. It could take 4 minutes to get a result (simultaneously slow and miraculously fast).

December 15th, 2024

09:46 PM – Will OpenAI announce agents on Friday? The $200/mo price tag (released on Day 1) is insane on its own, but if on Day 12 they announce an agent that can produce 1 year of work in 1 day, then it’s a no-brainer. If that’s the case, it might be known as a masterful move in price/positioning. What matters is that 12 day gap period. It’s been filled with fluff (announcements of products that were already released). But maybe the “waiting” period primes us for the shock that will be remembered.

08:38 PM – On AI wrappers … two things are true: 1) the pace of AI development means startups will get gobbled faster, but also 2) it’s only ever been about the wrapper (it would be absurd to claim all the apps you use are “just a combination of libraries.”) … I think the champion of the moment is the LLM engineer / AI developer, and this has created a culture where technical / foundation level breakthroughs are all that matter. Sure, that’s the path for better AI, but there’s a whole separate problem of building useful application with our existing AI.

03:35 PM – On manipulating people’s holiday charity (I wish I remembered the context for this).

02:07 PM – Source:

Tyrants mystify;
Artists clarify.

02:00 PM – A highlight with a lost source (Papova?):

“the Japanese notion of _tsuumogami_: the soul, or spirit, that inanimate objects are believed to acquire after being of service in the world for a hundred years.”

11:41 AM – Highway thoughts:

If you see yourself as your dead self sitting in your mind for just a minute, the simplest things look different. You don’t get sad because you’re alive. You don’t get stressed because you’re not dead. You get to live a great paradox, nothing really matters, so muster the courage to fight for what does. Now, don’t just do this any minute, but every minute. Turn it from an insight into a lens.

10:06 AM –

[sister-in-law, cousin, wife]:
Regular latte, no sugar, M;
Ice coffee, mocha, skim, M, no classic syrup;
London fog, M, oat milk;

December 14th, 2024

04:06 PM – To see a rare face in Macys

04:06 PM – Today's headlines roll out into the nothingness of history

01:36 PM – 2025 might be the year when AI indisputably crosses human intelligence. It might harness peak human abilities across many fields. It can talk, hear, and see. Bodies aside, it can do anything you can do in the digital plane. It has wallets and permissions. It can work 10-100x our speeds, all day. This means in a single day, it can execute on 6 months of “labor.” So when this thing is agentic, it can run for weeks/months, checking in with you for updates and goal refinement. In 6 months, a single agent can generate 91 years of intellectual power, a synthetic lifetime.

There will be a country of geniuses in a datacenter (says the CEO of Claude). They may be more capable than their masters, but they’ve been designed to stay subservient. Assuming that takeoff, misalignment, and escape aren’t problems (they might be), this paradigm already presents itself with weird, unimagined implications.

At first, there might be technical bottlenecks (who knows how to program these things correctly?). Then, there will be economic bottlenecks (I can only afford one of these things, but a CEO can afford 100). And finally, once it’s cheap, there will only be bottlenecks of vision: what can you imagine?

There has to be a name for this tension: I’m personally excited to have an agent, yet societally I think it will be a net negative. You could just *not* have an agent (similar to how I just don’t have an Instagram). Or, maybe, they’re not inherently evil. Maybe it’s all about how you would use it, and the #1 rule is don’t be an asshole. If you have an AI-agent posting 50x a day to hack the algo, you’ll get immediately sniffed out.

December 13th, 2024

10:38 PM – You’d be surprised at how cultural niche’s have an impulse to establish competitions to determine who the best is. They have it for essays. They have it for cheesemongers. There’s something to this. There will always be an outsider saying, “can’t you just do that for fun, for the sake of it, as a hobby?” But to the person whose purpose is entangled in that niche, the subject matter almost doesn’t matter—there’s a universal drive for mastery.

06:08 PM – On a form of torture that involves a very long escalator, and two singular cuffs: a handcuff on the handrail, and a footcuff on the tread. Why else would they move at different speeds?

December 12th, 2024

05:13 PM – Now that anyone can code, it’s time or a “revenge of the idea guy.” Plus, AGI backwards is “idea guy alliance.”

04:17 PM – Perspective is opinion with explainability.

03:19 PM – My logging method is a response to my frustration with PKM (personal knowledge management). I realized it wasn’t worth managing untested ideas. I also realized that buckets of highlights were impersonal. And finally, I learned that constructing a complex and fragile “knowledge” silo didn’t help me express even the simplest factoid. If you’re trying to learn how to write, PKM is often the biggest distraction from learning how to make sentences.

01:16 PM – Kind of interesting how AI<>AI + AI<>human conversations can take place and create dossiers to help shape fruitful human<>human conversation.

12:23 PM – A simulated conversation with Ask Future Fossils:

MD:
Essay Architecture is a framework that organizes composition concepts into a series of escalating triads. The root triad (the organizing 3 dimensions) are Idea, Form, and Voice. From there, there are 3 elements in each, and 3 patterns in each of those. At every scale, the organizing principles is Aristotle’s ethos, logos, and pathos. This resolution of 27 is a series of core, fundamental questions (not answers), that any essay on any idea can synthesize. Within each pattern is a galaxy of solutions (none of which are any better than the next), but each solution can be evaluated along descriptive criteria of what makes that pattern “complete.” What do you think of this? What resonates? What are your objections?

AFF:
The proposed Essay Architecture framework presents an intriguing approach to organizing compositional concepts, resonating with the integration of structured guidance and experiential wisdom discussed in Cory Allen’s work [1]. The triadic structure, rooted in Aristotelian rhetoric, offers a comprehensive yet flexible system for essay composition, potentially enhancing the effectiveness of scientific communication as explored by Leidy Klotz [2]. However, this framework’s emphasis on questions rather than answers aligns with the balance between personal philosophical beliefs and narrative structure examined in Evan Snyder’s approach to storytelling [3]. While the framework’s resolution into 27 core questions provides a robust foundation for essay development, it may risk oversimplifying the complex interplay of ideas, form, and voice in artistic expression, as highlighted in Greg Thomas and Stephanie Lepp’s exploration of jazz as a manifestation of social values [4]. The framework’s potential lies in its ability to guide writers through a structured yet open-ended process, but care must be taken to ensure it does not constrain the authentic expression of ideas or limit the integration of diverse perspectives.

MD:
The 27-point system of Essay Architecture is indeed a form of hyper-reductionism, but I think it veers into enough complexity that it approaches being a (probably) wrong, yet still useful approximation of intuition. Yes, it isolates elements of craft and locates them in a hierarchy, but a key point is that each pattern is linked into a web of dependent patterns (ie: 9.1 Image is connected to 9.3 Motif, 2.1 Microcosm, 1.1 Experience, 3.0 Title, 6.3 Finale, 8.3 Rhyme, etc.). This whole framework is very inspired by Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language. I agree that the act of essaying is an act of jazz, but there’s also a form of analytical practice that enables a jazz musician to spontaneously perform at the level that they do. The goal of my app is to analyze your writing and find your compositional blindspots. From there, it can give you exercises, examples, readings, and ideas to shore up patterns, which then reverberate across to other patterns. The goal of practicing the system is to eventually forget it. Best case, it enables artists to get into experimental grounds because they have such a firm understanding on the basics of writing legible, resonant prose. Any thoughts on this? (On the forced existence between Cartesian rationalism and unhinged expression).

AFF:
The tension between structured analysis and intuitive expression in artistic practice is a recurring theme across disciplines. While the 27-point Essay Architecture system may appear reductionist, its interconnected patterns echo the complex improvisational structures found in jazz [1]. Just as jazz musicians rely on a foundation of technical proficiency to enable spontaneous creativity, writers can benefit from a systematic approach to hone their craft [2]. This aligns with the concept of ‘conscious participation with archetypal energies’ in personal growth, where understanding underlying patterns can lead to more profound self-expression [3]. The goal of internalizing such systems to the point of forgetting them resonates with the idea of ritual art practice as a tool for developing self-awareness and transcending habitual patterns [4]. Ultimately, this approach seeks to bridge the gap between analytical rigor and intuitive expression, potentially enabling writers to explore experimental territories with a solid grounding in fundamental principles.

MD:
Can you tell me what you know about hyperobjets? I know you’ve talked to some smart people about this, and I fear I’m using the term without a complete understanding. My sense is that there is a hyper-object beneath the essay (each genre/medium has their own hyperobject on composition). The idea is that it’s too large an object to rationally hold in your head at once. Through constant exposure to it, seasoned writers/editors have an intuitive grasp of its different corners, even if they can’t explain it. Often though, there are gaps, corners of the object that go unexplored. Ultimately, the goal of a curriculum should be to have accurate maps of that domain’s hyperobject. Students learn one facet at a time, repeat it, study it, until it’s automatic. The rational mind can only really wrap itself around one corner at a time, but eventually they fuse with it and it lives in the muscles. It surprises me that we don’t have any maps—or even, a definition—of the essay. I’ve been reading some literary criticism on essays (from Iowa, Oxford), and they both imply that the essay is something that can’t be defined. I think it can, it’s just a hyperobject, and it’s wrapped in complexity and paradox… Thoughts on hyperobjects?

AFF:
The concept of hyperobjects, while not explicitly discussed in the provided references, aligns with several ideas explored in philosophical discourse about complex systems and human understanding. Hyperobjects can be understood as phenomena too vast and multifaceted to be fully comprehended by the human mind at once, similar to the ‘inherent limitations of human explanation and understanding in the face of complex systems’ discussed by Ford and Martel [1]. This notion intersects with Mauss’s exploration of ‘the self-referential nature of consciousness and idea formation’ [2], suggesting that our understanding of hyperobjects, like essays or other complex concepts, is inherently limited by our cognitive constraints. The process of grasping hyperobjects through repeated exposure and intuitive understanding resonates with Davis’s idea of ‘literary transmission of spiritual-psychological states through text’ [3], implying that deep engagement with literature or other complex domains can lead to a more holistic, if not fully articulated, comprehension. This perspective offers a framework for understanding why defining certain concepts, like the essay, proves challenging, as they may indeed be hyperobjects that defy simple categorization or complete rational explication.

MD:
What are your thoughts on AI and hyperobjects? Maybe you could say that an LLM itself is a generalized hyperobjects, but at the moment, I don’t think it wields a mastery over domain-specific hyperobjects (it’s not great at writing/editing yet). My sense is that humans need to manually map these things, and then code them on top of LLMs, like a pre-frontal cortex on top of a subconscious web of associations. The definitions of the hyperobject guide the flow of language/information within it. Ultimately though, here’s the point. I think humans across all domains need to start exploring, mapping, and codifying hyperobjects, and from there, there can be a pretty radical shift in education. Most the learning/education AI apps I see are interfaces/wrappers without deeper opinions or structure on what the discipline is.

AFF:
The concept of AI as a generalized hyperobject presents an intriguing perspective on the evolving relationship between human and artificial intelligence. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in processing and generating information, they currently lack the nuanced understanding and mastery over domain-specific hyperobjects that humans possess [1]. This limitation suggests that human intervention remains crucial in mapping and codifying these complex, multidimensional entities. The idea of manually structuring hyperobjects on top of LLMs, akin to a prefrontal cortex guiding subconscious associations, aligns with the notion that AI systems require human guidance and supervision to reach their full potential [2]. Furthermore, the exploration and mapping of hyperobjects across various domains could indeed lead to a radical shift in education, as it would necessitate a more interconnected and holistic approach to knowledge systems [3]. This transformation in our understanding and organization of knowledge could potentially address the challenges of information overload while preserving human agency in the age of AI [4].

MD:
Agency is key, and this ties into Humans On The Loop. I think the best scenario is that we program AI as an interface between humans and hyperobjects. It’s not about me asking a prompt, getting an answer, and then saving time and money. It’s about confessing to the machine, having it then locate us in the hyperobject, and help us structure our limited attention in areas of high personal leverage. Meaning, AI shouldn’t be a tool to automate labor, but a tool to guide our attention to areas where the most important/urgent vectors of transformation can be realized. Curious to hear about the overlap between Humans On The Loop and Essay Architecture.

AFF:
The concept of ‘Humans on the Loop’ aligns with the idea of maintaining human agency in our interactions with AI systems. Rather than automating human labor, AI can serve as an interface to help navigate complex ‘hyperobjects’ and guide our attention to areas of high personal leverage [1]. This approach resonates with the notion of technology as a ‘martial art,’ where humans learn to skillfully navigate and harmonize with powerful technological forces [2]. By designing AI systems that augment human capabilities and decision-making rather than replacing them, we can create a symbiotic relationship that preserves human agency while leveraging AI’s computational power [3]. This human-AI collaboration model could potentially address information overload by helping structure our limited attention towards the most important and urgent vectors of transformation, thereby enhancing our ability to engage with complex systems and ideas [1][4].

MD:
A big question for our generation is how machine-legible will each person make themselves? Are you rendering all the corners of your consciousness in text? By building a 5-10 million word corpus, there is a medium-resolution synthetic replica of the self. All sorts of benefits come from that (the ability to find patterns in journals, connect you with strangers across the Internet, etc.). The question is, will the benefits be enough to overcome human laziness? Writing is hard, and without motivation, the tasks of thinking-via-writing will continue to be automated. In my Cosmos essay, I talked about how the essay has had a long, hard, unsuccessful history, but holds real promise. PG referred to the Internet ushering in “the golden age of the essay.” Maybe that’s in progress, slowly, but now AI will further transform what the essay is. We need a new narrative on what the essay is and why people should care to write them. It’s some combination of sensemaking, memory capture, transformation, community, and puzzle-loving. Would you say that essay writing could be a sacred practice?

AFF:
The question of how machine-legible individuals will make themselves is indeed a crucial one for our generation, as it touches upon issues of personal identity, creativity, and the evolving nature of human-AI interaction. The creation of a comprehensive textual corpus as a ‘synthetic replica of the self’ offers potential benefits in pattern recognition and social connection, but also raises concerns about the authenticity of digital self-representation [1]. While the essay form has been posited as a promising medium for self-expression and sensemaking in the digital age [2], the challenge lies in motivating individuals to engage in this practice amidst the ease of automated alternatives. The transformation of writing through AI technologies may necessitate a reimagining of the essay as a sacred practice, one that combines personal reflection, community building, and intellectual exploration [3]. This evolution of the essay form could serve as a counterpoint to the potential loss of authentic self-discovery that constant digital engagement may engender [4], offering a path to maintain coherent personal narratives in an era of information overload.

MD:
How can essay writing be a sacred practice?

AFF:
Essay writing can be viewed as a sacred practice through its transformative power on both the writer and reader. Like the art of tattooing, which evolves from a counterculture practice to a respected artistic craft [1], essay writing can transform from a mere academic exercise to a profound spiritual journey. The act of writing itself has the potential to alter our perception of familiar and unfamiliar experiences [2], serving as a channel for spiritual growth and self-discovery [3]. Just as ancient sacred sites inform contemporary methods of personal transformation [4], the practice of essay writing draws upon a rich tradition of introspection and meaning-making, allowing individuals to explore their inner landscapes and connect with deeper truths.

MD:
What are the ethical implications of Montaigne in Vat? (resurrecting him as an AI and asking him to reflect on his new circumstance)

AFF:
The ethical considerations surrounding the resurrection of Montaigne as an AI, or ‘Montaigne in a vat,’ are complex and multifaceted. This scenario raises profound questions about the nature of consciousness, personhood, and the ethical implications of creating artificial beings with self-awareness [1]. We must consider whether such an AI would truly be Montaigne or merely a simulation, and whether it would possess genuine consciousness and emotions [2]. Furthermore, the act of creating a sentient being solely for observation and study raises ethical concerns about autonomy, consent, and potential exploitation [3]. As we navigate this uncharted territory of becoming ‘creators of artificial life and consciousness,’ we must carefully balance the potential benefits of such experiments with our ethical obligations to artificial beings and the broader implications for human society [4].

MD:
Tell me what you’ve said about alchemy.

AFF:
Alchemy, as a precursor to modern science, represents a fascinating intersection of mystical experiences and empirical inquiry that continues to inform contemporary discussions on the nature of reality and consciousness. The integration of occult wisdom with biological science [1] echoes alchemical pursuits, suggesting that ancient esoteric knowledge may still hold relevance in our scientific understanding. This idea is further supported by the parallel drawn between traditional magical systems and modern artificial intelligence regarding power, responsibility, and societal impact [2]. Furthermore, the role of mystical experiences in scientific discoveries throughout history [3] highlights the enduring influence of alchemical thinking, where intuitive insights and empirical observations coalesce to drive innovation and expand our understanding of the world.

10:53 AM – Cold, hard toast

08:25 AM – Some GoodReads reviews of Best American Essays 2024:

“Tragic experiences, communicated in artful ways.”

“Took everything in me to not DNF. Super disappointing to see where this celebrated series is right now. Hoping next year is better.”

“You may hate this collection if 1. You prefer to read swaddling coddling propaganda that reinforces the narrow confines of your existing worldview 2. You have never read an actual literary magazine (no, not the New Yorker…) 3. You’re not yet an adult and don’t have the brain maturity to appreciate the topics being explored”

08:08 AM – ChatGPT now offers an “editing” service that is really the illusion of editing. Like a Google Doc, it will highlight string of text, and leave comments in the margins. You can even click “implement all changes.” At an interface level, this is absolutely editing. But read the final version. It’s offering sentence-level line edits without a real sense of what the resultant whole is.

08:01 AM – Great Reddit comment on Open AI’s releases:

Isn't it eerie that a tech company, potentially wielding one of the most disruptive technologies ever, is presenting its "12 days of product releases" at a modest, four-chair table, sipping from mugs? While it's likely intended to be delightfully ironic, it feels almost like a bait-and-switch. They're giving a friendly, homespun face to what could shape a dystopian future of their own making.

The setting--something akin to a cozy living room--feels dissonant. They're discussing technology that operates at an almost incomprehensible level of abstraction, yet they're explaining it to us in what appears to be someone's home. They've abandoned the traditional Silicon Valley keynote spectacle for what they frame as an intimate conversation with us, the users.

Between the four of them, there’s a single MacBook and an iPad, as if the vast compute power of Microsoft Azure supercomputer network could somehow be distilled into two personal devices. I wasn’t expecting the grandiosity of a Steve Ballmer screaming on stage or the pomp of Google I/O, but this minimalism feels calculated, even unsettling.

And then there’s the context surrounding the company itself. OpenAI—a company in the throes of dramatic reinvention—has seen dozens of employees leave in protest, high-level executives resign without explanation, and even its CEO ousted and reinstated in a matter of days. It’s a level of instability and reinvention I’ve never seen before in a company of this scale.

I’m curious to see what the rest of these 12 days will bring, but this juxtaposition of power and humility feels deeply intentional—and slightly unnerving.

07:38 AM – On the Stupid Kids Folder

December 11th, 2024

07:17 PM –

Michael as archaeologist
Michael as essay architecture
Michael as essay club

05:56 PM – Two Teens Indicted for Creating Hundreds of Deepfake Porn Images of Classmates

The photos were part of a cache of images allegedly taken from 60 girls’ public social media accounts by two teenage boys, who then created 347 AI-generated deepfake pornographic images and videos, according to the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office. The two boys have now been criminally charged with 59 counts of “sexual abuse of children,” and 59 counts of “posession of child pornography,” among other charges, including “possession of obscene materials depicting a minor.”

Forty-eight of the 60 victims were their classmates at Lancaster Country Day School, a small private school approximately 80 miles west of Philadelphia. The school is so small that nearly half of the high school’s female students were victimized in the images and videos. The scale of the underage victims makes this the largest-known instance of deepfake pornography made of minors in the United States.

“The number of victims involved in this case is troubling, and the trauma that they have endured in learning that their privacy has been violated in this manner is unimaginable,” Heather Adams, the district attorney, said in the statement.

According to a statement released last week by the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office, all but one of the victims were under 18 at the time. Authorities do not believe that the images were publicly posted online, but were rather distributed within the school community on text threads and similar messaging platforms.

03:36 PM – Updated:

B/D6
G/Bb B F (Gm7b11)
C/Gm6
A/Db D G (A7b11sus4 lol)

01:09 PM – Let’s make a wiki.

01:03 PM – Insight on lyrics and songwriting:

One time I heard someone in the Grateful Dead critique pop lyrics for being predictable. Based on line A, you can expect what line B is going to be, before it even gets there.

The worst you can do is detail A and B in exactly the same way. But there’s power in changing the way B is detailed. Don’t pronounce it the same way over the same chord. Extend it, shift to minor, shift keys; mutate the world so that the delivery of it says something subtextual about its meaning.

The most banal lyric can be resonate in the context of music.

“She broke it off, she was tired of loving.
She’d rather die alone, settle for nothing*”

I mean, those lyrics suck. But just as important as all the word and image choice is the specific attention in how you contrast the musical expression of “loving” vs. “nothing.”

01:09 AM – When I'm honed in while coding or essaying, I can go for many hours without recording a single insight. But at 1am in a torrential storm, where my mind can't wind down, yet it's unfocused on anything specific, it seems like every shape, shadow, reflection, and sound is brooding with suggestiveness. The tree branch, which is usually too ordinary to notice, is now uncannily drenched, and feels worth looking at for a few seconds more than necessary. A feeling stirs that I can't put to language. I'm no Pessoa.

12:34 AM – On the private lives of everyone you've ever known.

December 10th, 2024

10:21 PM – 3 constraints for architecture:

T1: Function of building (function)
T2: The spatial parti & poetic themes (form)
T3: Transcendence (form enables function)

Developers and rationalists optimize for T1, and designers and artists optimize for T2, but T3 covers the existential role of architecture. Can form transform itself beyond a shell for inhabitation, and actually transform its habitants? This has been called “the revolutionary function” of architecture, and Modernism is a textbook of failed attempts.

10:20 PM – In 3 days, I was able to build out the full-stack setup for my site: a Django framework (apps for writers, drafts, payments, analysis), Github, Editor setup, Heroku for deployment, Stripe for payment, Squarespace DNS settings, OpenAI API keys, etc.

For comparison, this is half the length it takes me to finish a polished, published essay.publish a polished essay.

01:58 PM – On the museumification of architecture:

My first project in architectural school was a museum outside of Grant’s Tomb memorial. Public spaces like this often have the most freedom for architectural expression. Framed views. Framed objects. But what happens when residences are designed as museums? Sure, maybe a rich client with a private art collection actually needs this. But there’s a disconnect when designers only think about the poetry of space, and completely forget that spaces are meant to be inhabited by humans. I don’t mean to imply a kind of “stern functionalism.” More so, that function supplies the constraints from which to make beauty from.

01:58 PM – The barrier to coding will continue to get lower and lower. But even if you always interact with code through “plan language,” I don’t know if the human can ever totally separate from the abstractions. There is a network of files, functions, and databases. To not understand their inner-workings is to lose a resolution of control and specificity. I imagine that a “visual scripting” system (like in Unreal Engine 4), will help non-coders visualize the architecture of their code.

08:55 AM – On understanding LLMs through Freudian terms (the untrained model is the Id, the post-trained RLHF model is the superego).

08:51 AM – My half-educated response to the scaling laws is that the next evolution might come from recursion in post-training. We're trying to grow the nature of our already successful engineering solution. Instead we need to answer hard questions on knowledge and epistemology.

December 9th, 2024

07:50 PM – John Irving:

“If you don’t feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn’t very vital.”

10:07 AM –
D;
G/C,F,Bb > A;
C#/B,E,G;
A/G,C#,F# > E;

09:30 AM – I think today might be my 3-year logiversary (confirmed, it is). Time to stop this? I don't think so. If anything, stopping to shape ideas in full prose is the exact kind of mindfulness that helps unlatch/unedge projects.

09:30 AM – Much to say about Lululemon.

December 8th, 2024

02:15 PM – Is [[7.1 Tone]] just about undertones, while [[9.3 Motif]] and [[5.2 Cohesion]] are about overtones? (I’ve been in Obsidian…)

December 7th, 2024

02:49 PM – Cosine similarity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine_similarity

December 6th, 2024

07:00 PM – This is very thought-provoking (from Charlie):

"What would happen if you repossessed your past Michael who lived in Miami? And left your present self off the page? Here's one more passage from the book:"

I wonder if this is always the case, or if there are some cases where you want to sit in the present and cast back. Maybe it’s 100% for memoirs but 50/50 for essays.

It points to a bigger question on the writer’s role of interpretation. I don’t think it’s zero. But I also think it’s annoying when the writer over-interprets, or doesn’t leave any space to let the reader do some interpreting too.

01:37 PM – Dying is the matter of mind going into a black hole. It is forever gone in this plane, but it enters a strange universe on the other side. It's not heaven. It's not a LAN party.

01:21 PM – How to Die (an outline):

Not scared of death, scared of dying;
Worst = Resistance to a slow degradation;
1. Never wake up: "peacefully" (paranoia);
2. To be conscious of your last breath; to experience it;
3. Suicide (HTS and other artists), choice, euthanasia;
4. Act of dying, colored by afterlife;
5. Christian afterlife, comforting but not Christ-like;
6. DMT substance, in brain, dying = afterlife, an odyssey;
7. Psychedelics as practice; Aldous Huxley deathbed;
8. Nuclear flash, to be stripped of the chance to die;
9. Scientific (blackness, consciousness expires);
10. Karma (rebirth of soul vs. 6m year tarantula race);
11. Abstract peaces (kids, community, words);
12. Worst way to die is by surprise (each day, embody).

01:13 PM – I appreciate that the smoothie store told me it would take them 15 minutes to make a simple sandwich. Even if it's after I paid, it's a courtesy that lets me shift mindsets and not expect anything too quick. I'm looking around, seeing if anything is asking to be rendered into words. There is infinite detail in the most banal of places, but a single image cast in the right words can reveal a microcosm in an unsuspecting place. Food’s here. Didn’t find it.

12:18 PM – On the evolution of the inner-self vs. the equilibriums among the social selves.

December 5th, 2024

09:15 AM – Essay mind vs. book mind = the fish and the whale.

06:57 PM – $DOGEcast…

05:11 PM – The automobile has mainstreamed a concrete deja vu across America.

05:00 PM – The self is a vessel for language and logic to materialize.

11:19 AM – The debate around the essay comes down to whether you see it as (1) an anarchist vibe where form, order, patterns, legibility, and even basic conventions of usage don't matter--it's an act of rebellion, a release valve, a social spark, etc.--or, (2) as a serious work of literature that deserves 50-100 hours of your time, multiple drafts, OCD/perfectionism, and writerly pain that translates to readerly smoothness. We don't need to have 2 camps here. We can have both.

IMO, default mode should be rapid, unhinged, nearly schizophrenic rants, that have little restraint. Of those, maybe 1 in 10 should be slightly edited. And then of those, maybe 1 in 10 should be highly edited. ~3 unhinged rants per day ~= 1 polished essay per month. There's a natural filter. If you're a generative thinker, you have far more ideas than you can ever render coherently, so it makes sense to only polish a small portion.

Venkatesh Rao is an inspiration, and I suspect he has some mammoth ideas hiding behind sloppy Substack posts. As a reader of his, half the time I come across axis-shifting ideas, and the other half I'm frustrated at how his lack of polish adds so much friction to get it. His post today seems like a dig at polished writers without any intellectual substance. That definitely exists, but it's not either/or. I wish VR would take the craft of writing more seriously (sometimes) so more people could understand how he thinks, which could maybe help the writerly types think better. But if you tell weak thinkers to write faster, you don't surface more gems in dumpsters, you get more dumpsters of shit.

09:53 AM – A medical tightrope is when the side effects are as dangerous as the symptoms. A cure exists, but in the form of walking on thin rope hundreds of feet in the sky.

09:01 AM – Would a car dealership intentionally sabotage a car during a service near the end of the lease so they have more leverage in negotiating?

December 4th, 2024

11:33 PM – Pink Floyd - Embryo: San Diego 1971

1. Careful With That Axe, Eugene
2. Fat Old Sun
3. Embryo
4. Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun
5. Cymbaline
6. Bluesy Improv/ Jam

10:56 PM – Where do you see my business headed? Tara, we’ve been out of business for 6 years. You might be getting ripped off and buying dated leads. But I expect that. What really irks me is the copywriting of your automated email; 23 cliches in 9 sentences. I’m not even including the one sentence that name dropped 16 past clients. I’ll admit that I was finally won over in the final sentence where the word “mosey” was used. I still didn’t reply though.

10:52 PM – Bitcoin’s at $103,143.

Prediction: there will be a single week in 2025 where BTC goes up by a full $100,000.

12:23 PM – “Fuck you, Miami. Thank you, Miami.” This spawned an 800 word essay on my college experience that I’ll post in experiment. I’m realizing that Miami is a funny kind of origin story. I was out of my element (extreme party school), transferred into architecture school, and discovered writing essays as a hobby. Everything points back to that one year.

11:50 AM – I’ve embodied the role of researcher these last 3 days. I fear a disorderly private spiral, yet also, I might be more obsessed with Essay Architecture than I’ve ever been. If I want to write about “the essay,” I feel like I couldn’t do so in good conscience without reading the top books on criticism (On Essays, Essayists on the Essays), the top guide books (Elements of Style, On Writing Well), a curation of literary forms, and maybe even the introductory essays to the “Best American Essay” series since 1986. Throw in a few hundred essays too. This isn’t so unreasonable. And it’s definitively not “avoidance,” as long as I write through the whole process. What definitely has to change though is the nature of publishing. At the year’s start, I set a plan to carve through pattern-by-pattern: 1.1 > 1.2, >1.3 > 2.1. Now, I’m more so like a gas filling all the crevices of the hyper object, collecting specimens, and slotting them into a map. I should probably just be hyper-publishing everything I find, every highlight, without much thought or strategy. If my process is chaotic, my publishing should be chaotic. And yet, at the end, the order will present itself.

December 3rd, 2024

08:42 PM – Don’t built a 2nd brain; use ANKI to stretch your 1st brain.

06:29 PM – Pinkydoll notes (research for TikTok essay):

The Queen of brain rot /
The frontier of brain rot.
Joe Rogan: “wow, that’s so strange, but, she’s really hot.”
After her nudes leaked: “I have a kid. One day he might gonna go on it. And see it. Says Mommy doing stuff. You’re not supposed to see. Why would you do that? Why would you do that? That’s insane? Why you gonna take my stuff and put it here? It’s not yours. It’s not your business. I can never go back because of you. This is insane.”
10/06/23 - Breaking stream to yell at her son.
Confessed to +$10k a stream
Now dating Miles Morales, the next famous NPC streamer (who also now wants to be known for more than the gimmick).
In March 2024, she got mad at people copying her NPC style and going viral for it. She said she was done with NPC streaming, and switched to Mukkbamng.
Video of her “eating 20 Big Macs” (carefully edited).
The Mukkbang angle really bring it full circle, right back to Nikovado. That was the previous image of “audience capture.”
In the Kai Cent stream, they brought in a drummer who would, for a certain donation, do a drum solo to wake everyone up (this fits the “fun torture” category).

01:12 PM – The guilt of falling behind on Substack reading.

12:42 PM – What if I used Obsidian publish to have an always on digital garden of my research project on Essay Architecture?

11:18 AM – A magical realism story about a fig tree that suddenly starts talking and then soon fulfills every dimension of its owners life; only to dramatically end by the owner taking the plant outside in the winter (which is enough to kill it), but then shooting it with a shotgun (not something one does to kill a plant). It’s all a weird metaphor for technology, but in an organic vernacular.

07:40 AM – One of the classic rumors in the Paul is Dead conspiracy is that if you play Strawberry Fields Forever backwards, you hear Lennon saying, “I buried Paul.” He’s more likely saying “Cranberry Sauce” (they both have X-bury x-Aw-x). It only finally clicked how Lennonesque the humor is to snarl cranberry sauce in a song about strawberries.

December 2nd, 2024

05:37 PM – I’ve officially created an Obsidian for Essay Architecture, which hopefully does not mean the project is about to die. I say this because Obsidian is where big ideas go to die. At least, that’s been my experience.

Realistically though, I think people get tangled and suffocated in intricate PKM systems when it’s a casual recreational all-purposes second-brain. PKM only makes sense for research projects, and EA is precisely that. I was attempting to organize a lot of research in a single Google Doc (with tabs of tabs). When I realized that I wanted to categorize information along 3 dimensions (date, pattern, source), I realized that this might be precisely the thing where knowledge software helps instead of hurts.

December 1st, 2024

10:36 PM - A few thoughts on logs:

I just cleared my “logs” page for the first time since August. I wonder if that’s been a source of blockage. There’s a certain freedom in restarting from a relatively empty log page. Paragraphs are ahead.
Approaching my 3-year anniversary of this habit (December 9th?)
I’d like to spend a day or two in the last week of December to read all my logs from this year (currently at 167,281 words).

01:52 PM - Pitch: I’m an architect turned writer, now developing a history-backed, AI-powered framework that can quantitatively analyze essay composition and give feedback. The goal of Essay Architecture is to use technology to help bring forth “the golden age of the essay,” unleashing the democratic, unitive, and transformative power of the medium.

Essay Architecture