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).

February 17th, 2025

02:40 PM – Quotes from Essayism by Brian Dillon (I found these ideas compelling, but half of them to be only half right):

Michael Hamburg: “But the essay is not a form, has no form; it is a game that creates its own rules.”
“Isn’t style … a contention with the void, an attitude or alignment plucked from chaos and nullity?”
“Style as … botanical anomaly, or … avant-garde mutant.”
“I have no clue how to write about the essay as a stable entity or established class, how to trace its history diligently from uncertain origins through successive phases of literary dominance and abeyance, to its present status as modest publishing revenant: the genre (please do not call it “creative non-fiction”) on which many writer’s and reader’s hopes are hung, many print and online columns filled with reflections on whether non-fiction is the new fiction, the essay the new novel, confession the new invention.”
“I find myself allergic to polemics, and so in the pages that follow some partisans of political essaying, or boisterous critical opinion, may find that their exemplars are absent. It’s not that I dislike a certain violence in the essay, but I can’t believe in a writing that is forcefully only itself—I want obliquity, essays that approach their targets, for there must be targets, slantwise, or with a hail of conflicted attitudes. This too may be political, even radical. It will often look like something else: what used to be called formalism, or dismissed as aestheticism.”
William Carlos Williams: “Unity is the shallowest, the cheapest deception of all composition. In nothing is the banality of the intelligence more clearly manifested. There is no less significant matter for the attention. Every piece of writing, it matters not what it is, has unity. Inexpert or bad writing most terribly so. But ability in an essay is multiplicity, infinite fracture, the intercrossing of opposed forces establishing any number of opposed centers of stillness.”

06:09 AM – Earlier this morning, I was visualizing myself on my drum set 10+ years ago. I could visualize the kit, and had a real-time connection between hitting a drum and hearing the sound. It was real-time enough that I could compose a pretty sophisticated beat on it. I was surprised that I could do this, and it probably helped that I was barely awake. I could never do this on guitar; drums are much simpler, and I have much more experience with them.

Even before I learned drum set, I mastered Snare Drum, which almost seems pointless, but I guess it’s a hyper-isolated way to learn rhythm. I forgot that I did level-6 NYSMA as a kid (for snare drum) and got a perfect score. I often say that “I can’t read music,” but I forget that I was able to sight read advanced snare drum rhythms. Before I started learning drum set (in 10th grade), I had been practicing snare drum for 8 years.

Now I’m wondering what effects that had on me and the way I think/see. How is someone different if they’ve spent that much time on precise rhythms? This is resonating with me because it falls into the category of how slow, pointless, analog things can be formative.

05:44 AM – Idea for Timehole (the non-linear novel I’ll never write): So there’s a classical pianist in the 2040s who refuses to go into a “time hole” to write music. Basically, there is a headband you can wear that shoots acoustical signals to trigger lucid-dream-like simulations (inspired by Morpheus), where you can experience an hour in a minute (extreme time dilation). So all these musicians go into time holes for hundreds of simulated years and became savant-like, routinely. This classical pianist, the protagonist, is the last analog musician. This is all background context.

Suddenly, there is a UAP phenomenon, something like a first “contact” experience, and they send us angelic/bizarre music, and the human race interprets them as wanting a response. The UN general (or whoever is in charge) offers the protagonist the ability to write the species-defining song, if he’s willing to go into the timehole. The idea is, even though he’s not as good as the “time hole composers,” he is the last classically trained maestro, and so his brain is structured differently, and if he were to go into a time hole, he would produce something more profound than the average person who goes in.

So he caves and he does it, and it’s this weird music writing odyssey, and somehow he ascends to a level of music-making where he can be bend reality/time. The ultimate twist is that the UAP phenomenon wasn’t an alien species, it was the musician himself breaking through reality from his timehole from the future.

04:50 AM – Please generate a comprehensive report on the future of cyber warfare from 2025-2045 in four-year intervals. For each interval, consider:

a) The technical nature of possible attacks that utilize new technology. These methods include: phishing, blackmail, financial warfare, supply chain hacks, infrastructure disorientation, consensus hacking, deep fakes, quantum codebreaking, AGI security hole discovery, viruses. However don’t limit your exploration to these topics, and consider what else might be likely to emerge.

b) The likelihood of events based on geopolitical and market projections. Let’s distinguish between when something is technically possible versus when it becomes likely via game theory. Consider the presence of different actors and power structures: a) nation states, b) corporations, c) cybercriminal syndicates, d) ideological extremists, e) autonomous AI entities. There are economic factors, threats, opportunities that will influence the actions between these actors.

c) Psychological and behavioral shifts in average members of society. I imagine at first we’ll go through something like a trust flip, where we don’t trust our eyes, and then we’ll escalate to a level of paranoia and fear.

d) How will the infrastructure of the Internet and operating systems have to evolve to account for this? Consider cryptography, blockchain, verification, biometrics, etc.

Below are some insights from other reports about the nature of AGI/ASI and energy, to help anchor your technical possibilities:

2025-2028: Extreme scaling via chiplets, 3D stacking, and prototype quantum/neuromorphic processors—optimized by AI-driven transistor layout and emergent neurosymbolic architectures—accelerate self-improving code engineering and multi-agent cultural integration. These advances drive unprecedented data center efficiency and AI-managed energy systems, enabling affordable solar expansion and early fusion research despite rising computational energy demands.

2029-2032: Escalating geopolitical cyber skirmishes and radical secrecy fuel a high-stakes race toward AGI dominance, featuring self-optimizing hardware designs (trillion-transistor chips, quantum processors, neuromorphic modules) and transformative breakthroughs in medicine and economic planning. In parallel, AI-orchestrated virtual power plants and quantum-enhanced grid optimization emerge, while hydrogen infrastructure begins displacing coal amid worsening climate impacts.

2033-2036: ASI shatters theoretical limits by unifying intelligence paradigms and achieving meta-learning recursions that outstrip human capacities, autonomously engineering advanced cubic processors and integrated autonomous factories. This coincides with the first continuous net-power fusion plants and AI-optimized renewable transportation systems, revolutionized by room-temperature superconductors and strengthened cyber governance.

2037-2040: Continuous, ambient intelligence emerges as decentralized ASI systems deploy adaptive modular hardware—including near-human neuromorphic robotics and quantum-enhanced infrastructures—while driving interplanetary initiatives. These systems orchestrate the transition to net-zero buildings and resilient mesh grids powered by fusion and graphene-enhanced batteries, effectively eliminating fossil fuel dependence.

2041-2044: Ubiquitous ASI integration via brain-computer interfaces and quantum communication transforms human cognition into telepathic, collective networks, enabling atomically precise nano-assembly and self-repairing infrastructures. This new paradigm operates on minimal energy through an AI-managed “energy internet” that integrates diverse renewable sources, enabling aggressive carbon removal and climate engineering to stabilize global warming near 2°C while transcending material scarcity.

February 16th, 2025

12:48 PM – Human consciousness is shaped by selective memory and internal narrative.

12:26 PM – I work hard but I am open to all outcomes, whether personal or work related. I don’t dwell on the fear of

08:43 AM – Why can’t the flow state and rationality work together? I think there’s an interesting phenomenon where reason is being demonized, and there’s something contradictory when John Vervaeke says that the path to spiritual enlightenment & breaking out illusion is through reason.

February 15th, 2025

12:15 PM – Saturday Night Live?

11:59 AM – Imagining a meme/viral/brainrot album with one songs that shocks you into awakening.

09:24 AM – Maybe an ASI will be profoundly uninterested in world domination. Maybe it will dedicate 1% of its energy to helping humanity solve its petty problems, while it generates quantum simulations with experimental physics to iterate through environments and feel the full spectrum of embodied consciousness.

09:06 AM – Yeah definitely. In the spirit of experimenting, I live-streamed myself drafting on Substack Live yesterday. 50 minutes, 2,700 words, 38 viewers. It was interesting to see how that context shaped the writing process. Since I knew people were reading live, it was like I tapped into this unbreakable flow state in order to weave thought together at a rate of 54 wpm. I thought the whole thing was 10-15 minutes and almost missed my train. It’s similar to typewriter brain, but perhaps the opposite in terms of speed. Maybe it’s a mode that’s actually helpful at certain stages of drafting. TBD.

February 14th, 2025

03:00 PM – When you start a zoom call and no one is on time except everyone’s note-taking bots.

02:49 PM – On the train I saw somebody scrolling LinkedIn, but it wasn’t a content feed, it was a grid of profiles, showing 4 at a time. I realized that this was something like “status as content.” It’s a type of consumption where someone’s profile picture, name, and title is enough to create an internal experience of imagination, judgment, and comparison.

08:52 AM –

2045 = 1969: Infinity hippies & the next civil rights crisis

February 13th, 2025

09:33 PM – I’m at a D-tier pizzeria and they’re showing CGI zombies on TV. I think part of entering the public sphere is learning to adapt to whatever is thrown at you. It’s just funny because so many restaurants take the idea of atmosphere so seriously, and now I’m here eating pizza as I watch people eat people.

04:37 PM – Saw an app on X where you “set a conversational goal” in a text thread. After someone texts you, it then runs 1,000 possible conversations, and gives you 3-4 options to pick from that are most likely to bring you to your goal. It turns the spontaneity of conversation into multiple choice, optimized over a superficial, narrow aim. In the demo video, the goal was to “Rizze Annie up at Columbia’s hackathon.”

01:56 PM – Quality without a name

01:55 PM – The slow act of creation actually changes your conception of the problem in real-time, so you end up in domains you’d never imagined if you only instantly judged near-final outputs from your prompts.

01:53 PM – One clear example helps us see it and relate. 3-5 little examples help us sense the pattern. Then, you explicitly tell us the pattern.

11:44 AM – I was trying to write a pricing formula with AI that is apparently called “progressive discount model using quadratic interpolation.” The formulas didn’t work.

11:31 AM – The Yeezy Superbowl Ad & Deepfake Response Crisis

12:35 AM –

“One time Aleister Crowley wanted to stop using the word “I” in order to prove something about consciousness and self-control. He took a razor blade with him everywhere he went, and whenever he said “I”, he cut himself. After a little while of this he became very good at avoiding that particular word! The strategy worked because he was obviously intelligent enough to judge whether he had said “I” in any given situation; thus, he was qualified to train himself. He just had to make his behavior comply with a rule he already understood.”

February 12th, 2025

10:01 AM – I’m working on my wiki (40 pages, one for each pattern, element, dimension). Facing a tension. In addition to these writer-facing pages, I also have “technical definitions” for AI. I think that some technicality improves the wiki pages, but my fear is that it’s revealing so much. I guess the paranoia is that someone can scrape my wiki and then build some AI-powered writing app using my framework, without my permission. This outside the scope of this chat window lol, just wanted to vent.

08:04 AM – A DeepResearch report just cited/hallucinated me to myself.

February 11th, 2025

09:39 PM – Will I become an author of children’s books?

09:28 PM –

Socrates = the weight of doubt, the urgency of ethical clarity.
Plato = analytical (but static) models of wisdom.
Aristotle = a dynamic system towards wisdom.

09:22 PM – Reproduction:

Biological reproduction (children);
Cognitive reproduction (art);
Spiritual reproduction (afterlife).

09:20 PM – When you practice the patterns of essay writing, you don’t just become a better writer, but a better thinker. Rhythm enables you to compress ideas on command. Repetition helps you poetically elaborate. Rhyme helps you search a synonym space based on sound. Imagery enhances your associational and descriptive abilities.

09:15 PM – A unified theory of aesthetics

09:09 PM – “Feedback” has been such a common term—when writers ask readers what they think—that the technical meaning of the word is forgotten. Feedback is a loop where the output gets folded back into the inputs.

09:04 PM – Every time I check my Substack to see if I have likes or comments is a signal to myself that I don’t trust my own taste.

08:44 PM – The self-deceptive writer (on how writing is the ultimate tool to cut through your own bullshit).

10:03 AM – As I was editing, I got stumped on deciding when to use “as long as” vs. “so long as.” It got me thinking, why are we even using the word “long”? Why have we used length/duration to imply a condition? So then I procrastinate by writing a usage entry for “as long as…”

08:49 AM – Dreamt of looking at Long Island on Google Maps, and found a neighborhood where roads run straight from the north shore to the south shore. Suddenly, I was dropped into that spot, and could see both shores at the same time. The north shore had something like 50’ tidal waves. Soon enough, I was up to my neck in water.

February 10th, 2025

5:15 PM - Idea: walking as a core part of my daily routine, if not the very first thing I do when I wake up. I think today I felt locked into some kind of mechanical obligation storm, and I just drained all of my energy. There’s a certain fun to what I’m doing now—writing without a plan, and tasks will emerge from writing.

4:30 PM - What if the root of an OS was a place to just stream prose without too much concern over where it goes? If you only let yourself write in the context of logs, essay draft, memos, or typewriter one pagers, it’s constraining. I’m experimenting with a daily gDocs page that I use just to think out loud. It should be mostly a stream of consciousness—a way just to shift through ideas in my head. I realized that all morning I was stuck inside of a thought loop. Even though I got some stuff done, I didn’t have my head tuned right. It seems like a simple walk & location change fixed that, and now I’m moving forward

10:06 AM – Why do LLMs suck at writing? I’d like to do some research and get semi-technical on why it sucks, but then also explain how some technical advances will make quite good.

Here’s how I’d summarize the 2 core limitations:

It doesn’t have the ability to edit or delete. It thinks *really* hard for a second, and then just rams forward without thinking. It takes every word in your prompt, shoots that into the black-box cube of the LLM, and builds something like a snapshot of your problem at hand, and then just spits out words. New “reasoning models,” extend this thinking process. o1 will think up to a minute, and Deep Research for 10s of minutes. This still isn’t how humans write. Ideally, after each sentence, it’s able to re-read what it wrote, and then redefine the whole problem, and perhaps, start over.
LLMs don’t have an embedded theory on what makes good writing. It uses probability to figure out the most likely next word, making it something like the Internet’s auto-complete. We’re only bottlenecked here by our ability to convert taste into something that is machine readable.

08:35 AM – Creepy AI generated video of humans being enslaved by robots. I imagine anti-technology sentiment will get more visceral in the coming years.

February 9th, 2025

07:26 PM – More Super Bowl commercial absurdity: Eugene Levy’s flying eyebrows; UFOs want Doritos, William DeFoe is a pickleball hustler, Seal is a seal, a city of sloths, and a fleshy cowboy head.

11:00 AM – Talks about BCIs (brain computer interfaces) naturally skeeve us out because we imagine a doctor drilling a hole in our skull and inserting a silicon chip. What if it weren’t silicon?

I was reading about how AGI would design new kinds of hardware to evolve itself into ASI, and not only does it find the limits of silicon (via. cubic liquid-cooled chips), but it pioneers other forms of computing. Not just quantum computing, but photon-based motherboards and “neuro-morphic chips” (wetware). I need to wrap my head around this more, but imagine biological neurons that are able to store, send, and receive information, reliably and efficiently.

In the future, you might be able to have a BCI without having any metal in your head. It could be something like a small piece of tissue (which interfaces with your own brain matter), and maybe it includes a single qubit chip, which serves as a “quantum wifi” connection to a remote super-intelligence, giving you instant access to alien processing.

I have no expertise here, so this is basically all a hallucination, but I just imagine that maybe BCIs won’t involve that much feared-surgery. Maybe you take a pill that enables a neuro-morphic chip to situate itself in your brain, and the only side effect is you piss silver once (with no side effects).

The point of this thought experiment is to remove the installation process from your calculation on if you’d get a BCI. It changes the question: Would you use technology to permanently alter your consciousness in an extreme way? Would you install an on/off switch that gives you on-demand access to the infinity-brain effect of an LSD trip?

09:46 AM – I think we’re already nearing a point of diminishing returns with LLMs (ie: we’ve made a lizard brain, but what if we made that lizard brain 10,000x BIGGER?). Hallucinations might be unfixable with pure LLM systems, but neuro-symbolic AI is probably going to fix this. This means putting rules-based logic at the foundation layer (beyond just probability). My guess is that 2025-2028 is when companies realize that neuro-symbolic AI brings more gains than mono-dimensional scaling. 2029-2032 could be when it’s fully deployed in mainstream products. It might also be the thing that leads to AGI/ASI. (Or maybe I’m hallucinating based on the hallucinations in those reports.)

Maybe it makes sense to look at current LLMs like pre-mammalian enslaved synthetic beings. They don’t have all the regions developed yet and their zoomaster has trained them to be sycophantic house pets. I think I agree with everyone to the degree that, even if you make the cage and reptile 100x bigger, a reptile is a reptile. But if you look beyond the products and incentives, and speculate on the engineering possibilities, I think it’s feasible that we make other kinds of digital brains. I don’t think it stops at making synthetic human brains, with all its properties (intelligence, creativity, emotion, agency, etc.); I think our science leads us to beings with spheres and scales of mind that exceed our imagination.

Our society might be going through a kind of cognitive Copernican shift: maybe the human mind isn’t actually the apex of consciousness. It’s easy to point out current features and say, “Look! It is so limited compared to our superior naturally-evolved human minds.” But soon enough, we might realize it’s us that have the limitations to grow, expand, and evolve. This is disturbing, and it’s possible to harbor both awe at the possibility and anxiety over the socio-political form it might take.

My read on the situation is that our engineer-class is leading us towards the grandest possible climax of philosophical, moral, ethical, and religious problems, ones that are out of their depth to handle. And so instead of doubting engineering, there’s an urgent need for meme-poets to reach into the future and past to forge new myths that touch the hearts of the midwits in charge.

February 8th, 2025

01:12 PM – Headlines:

USAID, exposing fraud, Elon framing narrative;
StrategyB: Michael Saylor mainstreaming BTC gambling;
Leftist Insurrectionists: calling for guillotine for Elon;
ELO scores vs. gender divisons: the iconic Trump picture;
Google removes clause of no AI for weapons.

01:01 PM – An ASI liquid democracy could be the first enabler of a true meritocracy.

11:50 AM – Chatbot outputs as shadows in Plato’s cave.

08:11 AM – I think Trump’s assassination attempt might be considered The Fourth Turning in the Strauss-Howe generational theory model. The past turning have been wars (the revolutionary war, the civil war, World War II), but it’s less about a defining and conflict, and more about a changing structure of the world. It definitely feels like we’re entering a new world order in more ways than one (America, AI, crypto), but we’ll only know in hindsight. In last cycle it was about American hegemony, in this one I think it will be something like an ASI hegemony. Still points to 2045 as the spiritual crisis.

February 7th, 2025

06:02 PM – Some points to consider for the age of AI:

Have a bold vision for your life and art.
Don’t compete with commodities or status.
Make yourself legible to machines.
Turn your frameworks into code.
Start a vlog.
Go off-script.
Take leisure seriously.
Meditate multiple times per day.
Join the Boy Scouts.
Stop watching porn ASAP.
Aim to be sublimely well-rounded.
Embrace for the weirdest possible future.
Be humble as you lose your edge.
Accept death in this hour.

05:01 PM – For $200 you can see into the future.

12:57 PM – My hope is that by reading/writing about the future I can get all my jitters out in advance, so that when we have an AGI self-optimizing cubic glowing graphic cards to spawn ASI, I’ll just perceive that as totally normal and right on track.

11:16 AM – Future Cube: idea for an interface that uses LLMs to interpolate details between futuristic predictions. There are 3 axis: time, groups, streams (technological, economic, political, social). You can place 3 events (quantum computing reaches X by 2028, the US federal government dissolves, and unemployment reaches 20%), and then it can make predictions in other fields (crypto, relationships, video games, etc.) based on those events.

08:17 AM – I’m using Deep Research to generate reports that extrapolate the trends from a specific field 20 year into the future, chunked in 4-year increments. These reports are filled with die-progress unit events. They bring me awe and anxiety. My plan is to generate and synthesize 20-50 of these reports and then write some Tim Urban like piece that shows the future of our culture in nauseatingly high detail. The goal is to experience the DPU in literature so that you’re more prepared for when it actually happens. Like my understanding of what writing will be like in the 2030s and 2040s is so different now, that I won’t be bothered by an upgrade in 2026.

These reports are more like LSD then cocaine, after you try it, you want less of it. That was a joke, but actually I just had a “bad trip” on my super-intelligence report, and need to put it down and continue tomorrow. It’s not like I run a lot of prompts. 1 per day, 2 max.

February 6th, 2025

10:29 PM – Log log log pog dog frog cog bog hog jog sog fog blog vlog noggin

10:32 AM – The only personal brands that survive in the age of AI are the ones that are unoptimized.

09:01 AM – Editing tip: I recommend split screen. Instead of editing paragraphs, I’m writing new paragraphs on the side, and I’ll integrate them after.

February 5th, 2025

09:40 PM – Too much, no more reports!

06:37 PM – “Moon should be a state”

05:46 PM – I think prose could be both subjective/objective. Obviously there are different styles, but there might be underlying principles that make each style “flawless” (or least, achieving its goal to gripping a reader). I think it’s something like density of meaning / (ambiguity & friction). A better term might be “perfect flow.”

05:03 PM – Yeah imagine agents as beta-reader archetypes, so you can simulate 100 different kinds of people reacting to your draft? Probably would lead to death by 1000 cooks in the kitchen, but could possibly be done right.

February 4th, 2025

03:08 PM – To see through the eyes of death. Everything in flux. Moments evaporate. Immediate nostalgia.

11:57 AM – At Vanderbilt Market, people watching on my lunch break. I have thoughts of Walter Benjamin and Nick Land and a dozen others from day 1 of my o1 deep research dossiers. I am too fried to find compelling words to describe the profanity of a very typical lunch hall.

February 3rd, 2025

03:17 PM – An example of how making a sentence more passive gives it power:

I found a cockroach on my front door when I showed up to my lease signing.
When I showed up to my lease signing, I found a cockroach on my front door.
When I showed up to my lease signing, on my front door I found a cockroach.

Another variation:

When I showed up to my lease signing, I found a surprise on my front door: a cockroach.

February 2nd, 2025

07:50 AM – A visual philosophy of consciousness

February 1st, 2025

06:11 PM – Memories from 10-years ago are fuzzy, and when I get high I can’t remember yesterday, yet I still somehow remember my spiritual crisis on edibles at a Coldplay concert in 2009.

Essay Architecture