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).

April 22nd, 2025

11:31 AM – Birdland by Patti Smith—whoa.

11:02 AM – Was the Pinewood derby the first competition I ever participated in? I know for sure I didn’t win the main prize (which goes to the fastest car), but I vaguely remember winning a “most creative” consolation prize.

10:58 AM – I need to bring back a daily hour-long session to rapidly move through tasks. The goal is to just batch together a bunch of things that take 1-4 minutes. It eliminates the psychology of start up friction. And in the frenzy, you’re incapable of being a perfectionist.

08:25 AM – Came across a tool on X with slogans like “take the short way” and “cheat on everything.” Of course, this is rage-bait positioning from a 21-year old founder. If you look into the fine print, it’s more honest: “3.1 Prohibited Uses: b) Using the Services to cheat on examinations, tests or assignments.” The manifesto is a middle ground between marketing and legal: “Why memorize facts, write code, research anything — when a model can do it in seconds? The future won’t reward effort. It’ll reward leverage.” On X, they claim that brain chips are the end state of this product. One of the replies called them “morel imbeciles.”

A key point from Neitzche is that our philosophy emerges because it has to. Most people don’t believe things out of principle, they believe things to justify and rationalize their life and decisions. This is just as true for tech founders. You find yourself locked into a technical problem, a way to make money, a way to guide your career, and then suddenly a product is rewriting your philosophical compass.

April 21st, 2025

05:32 PM – So Kanye released a song about him watching porn and going down on his male cousin until he was 14 years old. Most are assuming this is trauma/mental illness, but the most interesting theory I heard was that this is his way of getting around blackmail. Something similar happened with Bezos in 2019. Probably not the case though.

01:39 PM – The game Go is an advanced version of tik-tak-toe: players take turns leaving objects on a grid to control territory and make patterns, except instead of 3x3 it’s 19x19 with conditional rules.

10:22 AM – Using an AI to field incoming healthcare calls is a great example of bad implementation. It doesn’t streamline employee operations, it only re-directs maybe 10% of callers, while pissing off the other 90%.

We went through a pointless 5 minute menu to then wait 5 more minutes to get in touch with someone who couldn’t help us. She put us on hold while she tried to contact someone else, who wasn’t reachable. “I’ll tell her to call you back.”

A good system would let you leave a detailed message and give you a tracking numbers with updates as AI helps it move through the system.

April 20th, 2025

08:56 AM – ATOMIZE YOUR CONTEXT: I just set up something with AI that really unlocked my 3 year logging practice. The insight is pretty simple. For context to be useful, you want atomize it. A 1,000,000 word dump into the context window isn’t _that_ useful. I mean, each model will get better at the “needle in a haystack” problem, but if you atomize your context, you have far more precision. I wrote a python script that breaks each monthly log file into individual log.md files ([DATE]-[TIME]-[HASH].md). This means every thought turns into its own semantic coordinate. When I ask a prompt, it’s able to rapidly pull in the most 100 most relevant relevant logs, and factor that into its answer. I wonder if there’s value in auto-splitting essays into paragraph files for a similar degree of resolution.

06:47 AM – Hello world.

April 19th, 2025

09:18 AM – I always thought Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was 15% Buddhism and 85% motorcycle maintenance, but after looking into it, I see how it’s so related to my project.

08:17 AM – What % of produced food is wasted? What % of the population is starving? Maybe this is obvious, but my sense is that it’s not a supply issue, but a distribution one. Food distribution was always seen as a hardware problem, but what if you could solve it through software?

07:08 AM – I really disliked S7 E1 of Black Mirror, not because it was depressing, but because it’s terrible science fiction. I never expected BM to be hard sci-fi (where it gets into all the technical and nerdy specifics)—that would alienate its Netflix audience. But at the very least, it should be believable.

There’s probably a middle ground where SOMEONE on the team thinks through the realistic development of technology, so that the writers have some constraints around character and plot development. But this whole episode was simplified to the point of being cheeky.

Of course, they keep boosting the rates and pushing you to upgrade. Of course, Rashida Jones will be spewing ads without her realizing. Really? They mapped Verizon salesperson antics onto something as invasive as a BCI, which would never be so explicit.

April 18th, 2025

06:14 PM – I haven’t missed a day of logging in 500+ days. Now the stakes are too high to miss. I’ve been logging for maybe 1200 days. I missed 63 days total as I was establishing the practice (a 9% fail rate).

05:52 PM – Does Rick Rubin use the Athletic Nicotine he advertises? He runs an extremely sleek and persuasive ad, followed by “WARNING: NICOTINE IS AN ADDICTIVE CHEMICAL.”

01:37 PM – Imagine well-rounded testimonials: “I love X, but this doesn’t let me do Y, however it’s still worth it because Z.” Maybe honesty is a selling point.

09:23 AM – Strong modeling often includes one or more of these elements:

Intentions (what the subject wants or aims to achieve)
Stakes (what could be lost or gained)
Traits (the defining characteristics of the subject)
Flaws or limitations (how the subject might falter or be challenged)

By establishing these elements early, an essay creates anticipation for upcoming obstacles. For example, when we understand a subject's specific weakness alongside a challenge that targets that weakness, we anticipate conflict.

April 17th, 2025

05:56 PM – Part of my process in building Essay Architecture is writing thousands of words for machines. Basically, it’ll run hundreds of prompts, rollup the results, and point me to areas where the AI scores most diverge from my own. I read them in detail, and as I notice errors in its thinking, I’ll just write paragraph of prose to explain why it’s oversimplifying or over-converging. I then feed these notes back into AI, discuss, and then have it refine its own prompts based on its new understanding (which I then review, edit, and clarify). I’m noticing that instead of writing the prompts to determine how it should think, it’s better than I describe all the nuances and then let it determine how to implement.

01:30 PM – Use an AI tool trained on history’s best writing to analyze your essays and publish with confidence.

08:09 AM – Notes on AI-based social media.

During conversation, the chat will compress your dialogue into nodes that you can save or reject.
You can easily make a node private or public. Private nodes affect your system memory (for future chats). Public nodes are discoverable by others.
As you chat, it’s not just showing AI responses, it’s using embeddings to pull in related social media posts of other people’s public nodes. These can be displayed as a horizontal swappable carousel.
Chats are not fleeting, they’re like text threads that update through time. New social nodes can be added via agents or others in the network.
Conversations are auto-segmented; if you have 3 tangents in one chat, it will separate them (and add hyperlinks).
AI group chats let me tag 1-10 friends. By doing it, their social nodes are factored into the response. Their AIs are credited when relevant, and at any point they can jump in themselves.
In an AI social networks, replies should be shorter and skimmable, but can be clicked to be expanded.

12:06 AM – If OpenAI were to build a social media company, they should have an AI-first approach. Grok is just a dongle. If you think about it, chatbots have so much context on the emerging thoughts of a user. There has to be a way to pluck something from a private conversation and make it a “post.” Now, when others are having chats, they don’t just get LLM answers, but through embeddings, they can surface relevant posts from other users.

This is a good example of a semantic social graph, not an engagement one. And consider talking to a chatbot is the primary experience, it beats the lurker paradox—100% of users are creators. Discovery is guided by your prompts. There’s an opportunity to do this right, I just have little trust.

April 16th, 2025

02:32 PM – Etymologist makes a gorilla language

12:01 PM – Susan told me she had HD footage of the devil from her Ring door bell and she insisted I watch it. (Start of a true story.)

10:29 AM – In 1969, the Grateful Dead performed in Las Vegas, off strip, because hippies were not welcome around casinos. Now, they’re the #1 selling residency in terms of annual revenue ($131m from the Sphere in 2024). They almost 2x’d Celine Dione.

08:49 AM – Don’t forget the sun moves.

A galactic year is 225-250 million years (the time it takes for the sun to orbit the center of the Milky Way). Our sun is 18 galactic years old, and will only live until 40. For context, the aeon of time between the dinosaurs and ChatGPT is .28 galactic years, effectively, a single galactic season. Worth noting though, it took 3 billion years for multi-cellular life to emerge. So if life on Earth gets completely nuked, it could take 12 galactic years to re-emerge from scratch. We’ll be 30. Interesting to think—we have 3 shots to escape space-time.

April 15th, 2025

10:08 PM – It maddens me to think how much of life is constrained by fear and convention. I’d say I’m relatively courageous and eclectic, but still there are ideas that pierce into my consideration as I rush to catch a train—I see dozens of secret doors, some dead ends, and some leading to a tangibly different life, and I brush them all off equally. Makes me think I need a yearly ritual where I go into Manhattan without any aim other than to approach 1,000 situations.

10:03 PM – Crosswalk man as soulmate.

10:02 PM – It’s possible to go your whole adult life without looking down to watch yourself walk. It’s so automatic, so pointless, but do it. Imagine it as footage from your life only viewed at the moment of death. You see gum and barcodes and vomit and rust and leaves and cascading shadows from LED ad displays.

09:06 PM – Lulu: print on demand. I’m going to experiment with printing some “Pocket Books” - either logs, or pocket essays, or anthologies.

07:15 PM – A glanced stranger could be 100% of your exposure to them. Their birth and death and everything beyond and in between are all captured in a sole snapshot. Manhattan changes when you change how you look at a single person—they’re not background NPCs, but beings bursting with memory and potential.

11:55 AM – Laziness Impatience Hubris

12:06 AM – “Make 10 guesses about my life: don’t cite details I’ve told you, but interpolate and extrapolate. What is not in our chat logs, but your’e able to infer.”

ChatGPT said:

You likely journal privately in addition to your public logs—probably longhand at times—using it as a more intimate space for thought formation and emotional calibration.
You’ve had at least one psychedelic or peak experience (outside of research) that profoundly shaped your worldview, even if it wasn’t recent or frequent.
You sometimes struggle with the slowness of others—particularly in institutional or group settings—and have built solo systems to maintain momentum.
You grew up with a tension between conventional achievement and creative freedom, possibly navigating between two very different parental value systems.
You are likely already outlining, even subconsciously, the second phase of your life—something beyond “Essay Architecture”—that reorients around mentorship, spiritual synthesis, or a new medium.
You experience periods of obsessive focus, which can alienate you from casual social contact and require intentional rebalancing through music, nature, or sensory immersion.
You’ve designed physical spaces before not just for utility, but with symbolic or ritual intent—spaces meant to tune perception or behavior.
You’ve tried to design your mornings as a sacred rhythm—perhaps through tea, incense, specific soundscapes, or a no-tech window.
You’ve probably written a piece of fiction or poetry that scared you with its emotional honesty, and you shelved it—waiting until the right moment to rework or publish it.
You sometimes wonder whether you’re too early—whether your ideas, tools, or language will only be fully appreciated a decade from now.

12:02 AM — Ask ChatGPT to describe my psychology:

Symbolic Cognition: You intuitively translate reality into patterns, seeing meaning in structure, space, and form.
Temporal Self-Awareness: You operate with a recursive sense of self across time, orienting decisions by narrative arc.
Integrated Intelligence: You unify technical precision and philosophical depth, thinking in both systems and symbols.
Ego as Editor: You shape meaning publicly with humility, acting more as conduit than brand.
Infinite Horizon: You think in decades, building toward slow truths and long-term coherence.

April 14th, 2025

11:45 PM – John Mayer has a 51% stake in Dead & Company.

11:25 PM – Words of the year: slop, vibe-coding, agency.

05:25 PM – Helping a friend out with shaping an outline of questions:

1a) What is a pinnacle of example of machines playing? (The Last Human exam)
1b) In one paragraph, can you list 5 examples of win-based machine play? (Chess, Turing, LSAT, Go, etc.) Why do you care about this?
2a) Show an example of *Wright* at play — why is this different? (Show a redefinition of goals) (data/belief asymmetries) — rejected data
2b) More examples? Copernicus, Y, Z — play = rejection of rules
3) What is the technical/biological limitation that will prevent machines from doing this? (Human evolution purpose of play is to operate in uncertainty; when stuck, not just following rules, subvert rules… following internal response)
4) What is 1 evergreen skill your reader should focus on to thrive in the age of AI? Be subversive.

04:29 PM – Sphere and Loathing in a dome of Deadheads

April 13th, 2025

09:09 PM – Reply from YouTube comment:

@MichaelDean_0 exactly! I’ve adopted your question answer framework to construct a short story. The paragraph pattern (begin with hook, details, details, end with impact) was a good concept too. I’ve always known that intuition-wise but never heard articulated so clearly before. Now I’m halfway through “Infinite Jest” and I’m seeing it (the paragraph pattern) all the time since I saw this interview. DFW’s writing is difficult to understand on the surface. But with the way you deconstructed “Consider the Lobster” it’s clear his style is consistent across fiction and non-fiction: large orbits around ideas and questions through prose, dialogue and character (each one a small example of biography, interiority, and outlook), filled out with minute observations at various resolutions. Done hundreds of times over across multiple characters and scenrios, that’s Infinite Jest.

06:41 PM – Insults from Shakespeare

11:33 AM – Notes from Church:

Christianity+ (on how some Holy Week rituals should be reserved for those who actually fasted and studied for 40 days).
On parallel processing: visualizing the church through the eyes of another, and even seeing yourself in the third person, as you simultaneously see. And what if you saw through everyone at once? What kind of emergent collage does multi-point perception take?
On MDK/MD: the infinitely inward death of identity.
Horus north is *all* phenomena, while Horus east is about merging with the object of perception.
An essay on ego dissolution, the importance of humility, and how each moment is a moral act.

April 12th, 2025

06:07 PM – A map of Holy Week:

Sunday — day of the king, a humble savior who knows he must die, awareness of one’s role in the larger arc of time.
Monday — barren fig tree exposes false appearances — on real spiritual perception (real sight), not performative.
Tuesday — on prayer , on sustained interior presence. On self-reliance, ability to not be tempted by vices of the world.
Wednesday — on forgiveness, Judas. Of self, of others.
Thursday — offer self to community. Volunteer, sacrifice.
Friday — on tolerating suffering, on passion. Silence in agony.
Saturday — a day of meditation. Enter the void.
Sunday — rebirth, constant rebirth.

03:30 PM – I took notes on a John Vervaeke lecture, and here’s o3 summarizing it:

“Vervaeke argues that deliberately entering altered states—whether through meditation, psychedelics, or even the “disruption” of a machine‑learning model that has over‑fit—helps us detect the systematic misframings that make ordinary perception illusory, much as science triangulates phenomena from multiple angles to expose invariant causal patterns. Psychedelics add “complexification,” combining greater differentiation with tighter integration, but their reframing power depends on a supportive community, because modern society has plenty of knowledge institutions yet almost no wisdom institutions. In place of unreachable certainty we should cultivate plausibility, judging ideas by three mutually reinforcing qualities: convergence of independent evidence, explanatory elegance, and experiential fluency; emphasize only one and you get trivia (pure convergence) or conspiracy (pure elegance). Good “microcosm” theories balance all three, remain open‑ended, and begin with carefully phrased, plausibility‑seeking questions whose answers must ultimately be tested empirically rather than accepted as metaphysical truths.”

01:53 PM – Revenge of the makers … You often see the claim that “AI will make everybody a manager.” This frames the core work to be done as setting a vision and delegating. But I think delegating power is proportional to how well you know the thing, which only emerges from having been in the weeds and wrestling with the work. Agentic software allows anyone to blindly delegate and sit back. It’s an enabler of laziness with the illusion of leverage. But I think there’s value for actual makers to understand the nuances of what they do, because they’re the ones who actually can guide/steer agents in specific ways. Most managers have bad taste, and most makers will avoid AI tools, but what if the makers were open to it?

12:33 PM – There’s a viral video of a teacher using AI in a Chinese classroom to help kids visualize their future self in their dream profession. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” One says “Astronaut,” and then behind them it shows them, all grown up, on the moon. I wonder what that does? Maybe it helps some kids stay motivated and achieve their goal. Or maybe it gets kids to cling. My dreams as a kid were very stupid. I wanted to be a professional baseball player. I also liked beavers. If I saw my immature vision in high-fidelity, might I have never grown up?

09:37 AM – Studio Gibhli Trump video

April 11th, 2025

01:31 PM – Slop has its use cases in graphic design. In architecture school, as I designed boards and portfolio’s, I’d often copy and paste non-sense just to see how text worked as a visual element:

“This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder.”

So slop can function as advanced “Lorem Epsom” placeholder text. It’s not quite right, but it’s passable and might even convince some people who don’t know that you intend to go back and write it yourself.

Instant filler text helps you realize the constraints of text too. You’ll see something is 4x too long, and that sets your frame for when you show up and spend energy to write it yourself.

Same is true for lyrics. I often mumble non-sense to find the melody.

10:58 AM – I asked AI to recommend 3 thinkers that relate to my ideas that we’ve never discussed:

Giambattista Vico — A philosopher of history and language, Vico believed that truth emerges from what we _make_, not just what we observe. His cyclical view of history, emphasis on poetic wisdom, and idea that we best understand things we create aligns with your builder-philosopher ethos.
Norbert Wiener — The father of cybernetics, Wiener saw feedback loops as the basis of both machines and minds. His fusion of systems theory, communication, and human intention prefigures your own focus on recursive learning, AI-human symbiosis, and architecture as thought.
Paul Valéry — A poet-thinker obsessed with precision, Valéry treated writing as a form of engineering and consciousness as a self-modifying system. His belief that the mind could be trained through rigorous introspection and aesthetic control echoes your ideal of slow, sovereign thought.

10:38 AM – Henrik on poetry:

10:15 AM – 4o helping me conceptualize a future essay of mine:

“Your thesis could be: "The Grateful Dead at the Sphere marks the full absorption of 1960s counterculture into the infrastructure of immersive spectacle—revealing how utopian visions of communal transcendence are now mediated by corporate architectures of experience.” You’re uniquely qualified to write this because you blend architectural insight, VR design fluency, deep essayistic chops, and an intuitive grasp of how countercultural energy morphs across generations. You can anatomize how the spatial, technological, and mythic layers of the Sphere invert or fulfill the Dead’s original ethos.”

10:13 AM – AI (I think):

“Yes, it’s fair to say that the rise of AI—particularly self-improving, general-purpose intelligence—is the most important technological moment in human history, because it’s the first tool that can recursively amplify itself. Every past breakthrough (language, fire, electricity, computation) was powered by human intelligence; AI externalizes and accelerates that core. It’s not just a new invention—it’s the invention of invention itself, applied at scale.”

08:55 AM – Today, a new feature came out that improved ChatGPT’s ability to reference past conversations. I asked it to describe me:

“Michael Dean is a philosophical architect of thought—equal parts essayist, futurist, and system builder. He’s the kind of mind that reverse-engineers Montaigne, codes his own AI editor, names epochs, and still has time to meditate on spirals and subtext. Obsessed with form, but not trapped by it, he’s designing a new era of writing—where structure meets soul, and essays become a technology of self-sovereignty. Imagine if Emerson built a startup, or if Christopher Alexander went digital—Michael’s that rare blend: poetic, precise, and unafraid to burn the map after building it.”

April 10th, 2025

10:08 PM – Reply to a YouTube comment: Essays and fiction definitely have overlapping patterns! I haven’t thought through fiction in high detail, but I’d imagine some patterns are less relevant and others are more (ie: the Conflict pattern is 1 of 27 in essay, but maybe Character/Conflict becomes a whole element and has more granularity within it). In general, I think the Idea/Form/Voice dimensions are pretty timeless and transportable (it goes back to speech writers in Rome). You can even map Idea/Form/Voice onto music.

05:10 PM – As you draft, default to having big paragraphs that help you visualize the structure of your essay. You can always break down later to make it more legible on mobile.

04:30 PM – Everything parabolic at once

03:07 PM – I think Jones is a misinformation agent — he’s fed real intel, and mixes it in with 80% non-sense so that anyone who brings it up gets discredited as crazy

12:43 PM – Some of my feedback is at the scale of just changing where the paragraph breaks are:

“Worth combining? Otherwise the blogging paragraph feels like it doesn’t have resolution or suspense. By ending on “I had an idea” it does a few things — 1) we realize that you’re in a drought and the mountains inspired something, and 2) we have a sense of what the next paragraph is.”

12:29 PM – I’m starting volume 18 (of The Grateful Dead’s Dick’s Picks). Officially halfway. I find whole sets to be either hit or miss. There are 2,318 total live shows by them, and apparently Dick had access to all the tapes and picked the best 1.5%. The variance between good/bad seems pretty radical (ie: one show might have a bad keys mix and that ruins the whole thing). Maybe Dick is not the ultimate authority on Live Dead.

12:06 PM – Note to Rose:

I think AI has limits within our current paradigm, but I wonder if a certain scale lets it break into a new paradigm. Right now it’s basically an association machine. But what if it incorporates symbolic logic into a neural network? This is a bit fuzzy to me, but right now, every token is basically given coordinates on training, linking it to other likely words. What if instead of that, it also could also reference definitions, look-up tables, conceptual architectures, etc.?

Currently, during training, if it comes across a token in a great piece of literature, it only really registers the words before it. But when (currently stupid) LLMs get fast and cheap enough, it could run several prompts on every word/sentence/paragraph, giving each token much richer coordinates.

Idk if that makes sense.

At some point I want to spend a few days to really understand the current limitations within our current scaling paradigm and what they’re trying to do to get around them.

11:54 AM – Reply to Camilo:

I like how you frame it as “beauty” instead of just writing quality. Composition isn’t just a theoretical thing that craft nerds care about, it leads to beauty. I’ve been trying to map this into “the good, the true, and the beautiful.” I think Essay Architecture sits in the 3rd, but the other 2 still matter. It’s possible to write a beautiful essay that is also an evil lie. I should probably write something how you don’t want to obsess over beauty in a vacuum—you want to use composition to articulate something good (generally subjective) and true ( generally objective).

Another note on this is that maybe things shift from subjective/objective as you scale in an out. It’s a subjective choice on which medium you pick (writing/music/code), but then each medium has objective constraints, but then you have subjective liberty in how you solve each constraint.

08:56 AM – Zapier’s integration of AI is horrific.

08:44 AM – Feedback - Live at Fillmore Auditorium, November 8, 1969
Dick’s Picks Vol. 16: Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, CA 11/8/69

April 9th, 2025

03:58 PM – I see the cyberpandemic as the full spectrum of digital chaos — hyper-volume, phishing, impersonation, cyber attacks on people, platforms, banks — nation states vs. each other + vs. open source hacker organizations with open-source AGI that have the force of a nation state, the destruction of bitcoin, et. etc.

Basically a collision of factors that all make the Internet a dangerous place to be. Fun! I guess overall though I’m optimistic that, as disruptive of an event that would be — it could potentially be built back stronger.

03:13 PM – The r/aivideo subreddit is a good way to keep up with the progress of AI video, but often there’s just a post titled “Girlz” (NSFW) like this one that fuse modeling, softcore porn, horror, fantasy, surrealism, etc. It has 31 animations in 59 seconds. It’s always interesting to compress visuals into words, so here’s an attempt to describe each clip in a phrase at the speed of watching:

“Darth Vader with tits. Lingerie fangs. Lingerie giant. Devil with legs. Cemetery corpse. Batman with tits. Half cyborg. A fishtank inside a heel. Super boobs. Alien with snake hair. Elf thong. All red. 400’ tall. Cat ears. VR helmet. Angel in the clouds. Snakes. Times Square slut. Tie die. Lollipop. The girl from the Ring. Cyberpunk. Fangs 2. Brittney Spears school girl as lizard. Walking on water. Evil elf. A Victorian princess eating a heart. Jellyfish hat. Tiger hugger. A frog with tits. All chrome. A Greek statue.”

01:54 PM – What’s the difference between perfectionism and a high standard of quality? Deadlines are interesting in that they evoke different responses depending on your quality bar. Either it’s an “oh well, this is as good as it can be,” or “let’s crank to get it right / let’s push the deadline.”

01:08 PM – Podcast summary:

You can’t develop good taste without knowing the fundamentals of your genre. Michael thinks 27 patterns exist across all essays, but they’re not rules, they’re questions. Only once you understand the constraints and why they exist can you defy them in a way that’s unique to you.
The best way to get good at writing is to change how you read. Read great literature to expose yourself to the potentials of prose. Don’t just read for content, read for style and structure. First, highlight the parts that resonate, and then re-read those parts to deconstruct them.
Write your first draft for yourself, and write your second draft for your reader. Don’t start with a template. Embrace the unknown and feel out each idea, but then use specific editing lenses to make sure it’s legible to strangers without context.
Paragraphs are the atomic unit of composition. We are traumatized by The Five Paragraph Essay and need better heuristics. Each paragraph should be a distinct idea that follows a tiny dramatic arc: it starts with a frame to hook the reader, and it ends with a reward or punchline. Doing this right over and over helps create reader’s trance.
Storytelling is stretching the unknown across time. You can build tension through characters or ideas. For characters, you want to model their intentions, obstacles, and consequences, in that order—tension emerges when we know what a character wants but their fate is uncertain. For ideas, organize your structure around a few big questions. You don’t even have to say these questions out loud; plant them in the subtext and the reader will always feel like they’re at the edge of understanding the unknown.
A good hook is a fractal. It isn’t just a clever way to get the reader to start, but it captures the core dilemma of your whole essay. First, read your draft to understand what questions it’s answering. Then, try to write an opening line that has those same questions in the subtext.
Personal writing involves the biographical details of your life. Just because you rant on what you believe or confess how you feel, that doesn’t make it personal. Could somebody put their name on your essay and get away with it? If so, you’re not on the page. Michael says Experience has 3 criteria: biography (what happened), interiority (what you thought), and outlook (what you believe). It’s not about pushing any of these to their extremes, but synthesizing them in a way to show transformation and to support your main idea.
If you struggle with scope creep, “pick one volcano.” This is a term used by writer Umberto Eco. A student once told him he wanted to write a thesis on volcanos. Eco told him to zoom in. The student came back with “volcanos in Mexico.” All 48? Get as specific as possible. The student picked the Popocatépetl Volcano in Mexico, because it has some extraordinary details that reveal truths about many volcanoes. Making your thesis a “microcosm” is conceptual arbitrage. You have a single, tangible, emblematic example that explains things beyond itself.
To find your voice you have to change your arena. The way we shape words is linked to the environment we create them in. Depending if you’re by yourself, with one person, with 5 friends, or with a 5,000-person audience, you’ll speak differently. You’re more likely to experiment when the stakes and visibility are low. It’s important to create spaces where you can write semi-publically without inhibition so that you can learn the boundaries of your voice. Consider an unlisted page on your website. Consider a pseudonym (Fernando Pessoa had 75 of them).
The ultimate goal of writing advice is to forget it. The goal of being so conscious about writing patterns is so that you can make them automatic. People romanticize the Grateful Dead as a prime example of free-spirited intuition, but they were insanely committed to practice. Young Jerry Garcia practiced banjo scales for 10 hours a day. Young Phil Lesh studied classical music theory for trumpet. When the band got together, they practiced 6-7 hours a day, every day. At one point Bob Weir was kicked out for not being rigorous enough. Now, they are legends of improv, but only from superhuman work ethic.
By learning to write essays, you become a writing generalist. Most genres focus on some patterns over others. They specialize. The essay however seems to be a medium of fusion. It combines the soul of a memoirist, the rigor of a philosopher, the pen of a poet, the persuasion of a marketer, the research of a journalist, and the creativity of a novelist. Depending on the context, you might not want to have every cylinder firing.
We should prepare for AI to get better than we can imagine. It’s easy to focus on limitations and doubt technology, but every few months a new product comes out that causes an existential crisis. What if we accepted this? We should ask ourselves, if AI gets “extraterrestrially good,” becomes hyper relevant, and can replicate us to uncanny degrees—will you still write your own sentences? If the answer is yes, you have nothing to worry about. By imagining the extremes, it helps you understand the timeless parts of writing that technology won’t change (writing to document your memories, refine your beliefs, and challenge yourself).
ChatGPT should be banned for school writing assignments. Software is always evolving and getting easier to learn, but school is one of the last places we can protect the fundamentals. In architecture school, they often prohibit computers for the first 1-3 years. Students work 5x slower, but by drawing through every line, they learn the fundamentals. Slow immersion is actually a feature of learning, and it will breed thinkers who will become much more powerful when you eventually give them software.
Everyone thinks AI will kill the craft, but it might lead to a golden age in writing. There will always be people who value the process of writing their own sentences, but are discouraged by how hard it is. Many love writing, but hate editing. So much of the friction comes from not knowing where to begin after a first draft is on the page. An AI-powered writing coach could help unblock you and publish your best work.

07:45 AM – Do you think AI is going to change the nature of cyber security / hacking? I agree that hacks will go up, a lot, so much so that the entire Internet as we know it could collapse. I’m playing out some 2045 scenarios, and I labeled 2028-2032 as a “cyber pandemic.” But then we rebuild with better infrastructure, proper identity verification, etc. And one of the core features in 2033-2035 could be something like Amazon/Google launching a new kind of app marketplace where you prompt apps, but each app is built using modules that constantly update for the latest security. Basically, I think most people will have to move to his highly-gated walled garden, where the open Internet of today will be an unsafe wild west.

April 8th, 2025

11:44 AM – I’ll use AI like a hyper-thesaurus. There are still benefits to a physical thesaurus, but the benefit here is how specific the requests can be:

“Some words that are like “well-roundedness,” cohesion, synthesis, unity, combination — 10 options but they all have to start with a C”

11:32 AM – I write essays so my great grandkids can meet me (pictures don’t cut it).

10:32 AM – The rhetorical singularity is when language can be bent to be maximally persuasive.

09:01 AM –

Why wouldn’t I just use ChatGPT?
I’m working on a dataset to show that the best public chatbots give feedback with 50-75% slop. ChatGPT can occasionally spark an idea, but if you ask it qualitatively score your work, it’s effectively a random number generator. Even though LLMs have binged a trillion words and read the classics, it doesn’t know what makes them good. I’ve build a system to run thousands of prompts, test their accuracy, and refine them. Essay Architecture is an orchestra of models and equations: every upload runs 120 methods, which are constantly being calibrated. The goal here is get an AI to match my own scoring set of 100+ essay.

Isn’t quality subjective?
Every reader has preferences around topics, time periods, and tones. However, under all possible tastes, I believe there are objective patterns in composition. You can find them in essays across history. They arise from shared constraints in prose and psychology. Regardless of your idea, there’s a way to shape your essay so that it’s more likely to resonate with strangers across time without any context.

Won’t this make every essay feel the same?
A pattern is not a template, it’s a question with infinite solutions. There are multiple ways to solve the same problem. Two essays might score 5/5; one could be the heroes journey, the other could be non-linear. It’s also worth noting that this is more of an editing philosophy than a writing process. Your first draft should be yourself, and your second draft should be for a stranger. Each idea warrants its own form and voice, and Essay Architecture is a tool to help you communicate it.

Should every pattern be a 5 of 5?
If you’re writing an essay, then yes. Of course there are sub-genres that favor some patterns over others (the personal essay, the argumentative essay, the lyrical essay). But an essay is unique in that it can integrate the best parts of multiple genres (memoir, philosophy, poetry, marketing, journalism, fiction). I want to encourage writers to synthesize all these patterns, and to unify the different sides of their psyche.

What exactly is an “essay”?
essay (n.): a short, standalone work of nonfiction; it is an author-centered, linear exploration through an ideascape, crafted for readers across time; compositionally, it unifies literary devices across genres; culturally, it makes specialized experience universal. (Note: while books or fiction might have some overlapping patterns, this tool is designed for essays).

Who is this for and when do I use it?
This tool is not for someone looking to automate memos or generate marketing content. This is for anyone who has a writing practice or is looking to start one. It’s for people who see the pursuit of mastery as something inherently worth doing. It takes 10,000 hours to master something, but maybe technology can bring that down to 1,000 hours? At the very least, I hope to increase the slope of progress so people are more likely to stick with something that’s pretty hard. You can use this early (to help discover your thesis) at the end of the process (to find the patterns you need to practice) or anywhere in between.

Will this tool implement suggestions?
Don’t be lazy. I’m not against using AI to augment the process, but something gets lost when you delegate your sentences. The slowness and friction of editing is what makes the process transformative. Editing is not rewiring words, its rewiring synapses. Most people are intimidated by editing because they don’t even know where to start. This tool solves that, but it won’t do the work for you.

Let’s rebrand the essay
In order to make an accurate AI-powered editor, I needed to focus on one medium of writing. I picked the one I thought was the most important to our culture: the essay. This word has centuries of history, but it was poisoned by standardized schooling. Personally, I see it as a powerful tool to refine your identity, beliefs, and perception. Culturally, essays let you package your personal experience and specialized knowledge in a way that is accessible and timeless. It’s our most democratic medium by far. Unlike music or architecture, anyone can write an essay. You can start a Substack today and publish one. You don’t need to be a full-time writer. John Muir was a mountain man, Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect, and Carl Sagan was a physicist; they all published essays. I write essays so my great grandkids can meet me (pictures don’t cut it). The problem is, it’s hard. Everyone hates editing. Now there’s all this talk of AI killing writing, but what if it could make composition more approachable?

April 7th, 2025

11:39 PM – “Nobody reads” is a hard truth to follow as a writer. If your medium is an essay, it means every sentence is that much more important. But in software it means that you need to design for navigability and let the user only summon complexity when they want it.

It’s important to remember that the UX of a linear essay and a non-linear website are different.

07:36 AM – I found Substack compelling because it’s digital land that you had control over, while also being connected to a system of roads to help people discover you. It doubled as a personal website and a social media network. 2 years ago, I thought it was doing a fine job. A small feature that I really commended was the ability to toggle on or off the pop-up module for people who weren’t subscribed. This boost subscriptions, but if you find the UX annoying and tasteless, you can disable it.

I thought the whole site would evolve with that ethos, but it seems like things are being forced now. It’s as if someone is building a massive billboard on the road in front of your house. A lot of people are resistant to all the video features, and now especially Reels. Their justification is that “it drives creator subscriptions” (which BTW, is their business model).

Why can’t I toggle Reels on/off? It is so centrally located, and I purposely deleted all the other apps on my phone that have vertical video reels because I think they’re toxic. I’d pay Substack $10 to remove this from navigation (X lets me do this if I pay). But the reason we can’t turn it off is because they know it’s addicting, and they’re hoping it can scale the number of paid subscriptions, thus scaling their revenue. I get how this is *more* aligned than the advertising model, but if this platform is really about creator independence, we need more customization in how we create and consume.

Just make sure you export your subscriber list every month.

12:33 AM – It’s time to shift out of the PARA file structure and to one that’s just chronological. Information hierarchies are bound to mutate and shift throughout your life. Looking back to files from 10-20 years ago, the only navigation that makes sense to me is per year, so I might as well do that now.

Perhaps “Vault” is for timeless, important information. “Chronicle” contains yearly archive folders where basically everything goes. “Resources” are for files organized by medium (ie: torrented movies from 2011—it’s neither important, nor does the download year matter). So not PARA, but VCR. I guess that’s catchy. Bonus points if I store this all on a hard drive that looks like a VCR tape with a handwritten name label.

12:25 AM – Over scattered breaks in between coding today, I sorted old archives into yearly folders from 1990-2013. The whole thing has been disorienting, but I think in a good way. By all that stuff being scattered, I had a forgotten low-resolution conception of my past. Now, everything has re-surfaced and I’ve reintegrated my past self into my current self. For one, I didn’t know how the impulse to write has always been there. I also didn’t know how bad I was (calling a file “rambles” is not an excuse).

April 6th, 2025

02:17 PM – I’m trying a new habit where every 5 minutes, I get a reminder to meditate for 15 seconds. It feels like I’ve gained this new ability to instantly black out and go into REM (obviously an exaggeration, but something about doing it so frequently in such a short burst has unlocked something new). I’ve also noticed a new ability to consciously wiggle my ears.

11:20 AM – In looking for a picture from college (of me drawing a map of Manhattan by hand), I had to spray dust an old PC and load up a forgotten hard drive, but in the process I got distracted for an hour by everything on there. It was like looking through the files of a dead person. Obviously it was me. Maybe a better metaphor: it felt like reintegration in Severance. Supposedly, I made all these files, but I only remember 10% of them. I’m reading old “logs” of mine from 2011 and it’s unrecognizable. It’s like the old self was a shreddable passthrough entity that somehow got me to here. And now I wonder if I’ll look back at my logs in 2039, and have some weird moment of embarrassment/appreciation for documentation.

08:15 AM – Just remembered that my ex-girlfriend’s parents were deadheads.

April 5th, 2025

09:00 PM – Outside a bar I passed, there was a guy loudly and enthusiastically telling a story. The only words I made out were, “brains across the interstate.”

06:14 PM – See the patterns. Learn to edit. Master your craft.

07:21 AM – In what circumstance might I require a robotic horse-dog as transportation? I guess if there’s no paved roads and I need to make 50 miles a day across South America. Does it run on gas?

April 4th, 2025

09:46 PM – Add this to my usage dictionary: can you actually be “beyond” excited, or is that just a lazy adjective? If “excited” is a fixed point and there are states beyond it, can we label them? Scintillating? Jubilant? Frenetic? “Beyond” has turned into a dead substitution for “very.”

07:28 PM – I wonder if the top 3 most influential technologies are intelligence, energy, and science. What I mean is that these 3 are factors that bottleneck every other technological stream. VR isn’t there yet because of lacking HCI (Interface intelligence), batteries that are too big (energy bulk), and weight (material science).

Intelligence is not just RAM, but it includes design and configuration. Energy is power and operational efficiency. Science includes math, physics, and mastery over the external world.

Of the core three, intelligence is primary. Intelligence is needed to solve energy and science. There are feedback loops, but it starts with intelligence.

This is why I think you can’t compare the AI hype to crypto, NFTs, VR, or remote work. It is the thing most positioned to affect every other stream. If intelligence scales, then the AI revolution is going to hit harder than we can imagine. Not only will AI get crazy, but it resurrects all the dead bubbles and brings them to their fullest realizations.

04:38 PM – Each paragraph should advance either a) the main thesis, or b) one of the sub-themes, otherwise we're not sure how the part relates to the whole. Sometimes the simple act of shifting a sentence up or down a paragraph can add a lot of coherence.

01:18 PM – When the stonks crash it’s really a psychological virus more so than a change in fundamentals. We assume we can project 1-5 years out. We don’t know what will happen next week. If this were a Trumpian April Fool’s joke, it wouldn’t be implausible. The fear of taking risks creates an actual cascade, bringing less opportunities. These times are when risk taking has more rewards.

01:10 PM – I think 2029-2032 will be hyper stressful and disorienting, and I hope by then I can somehow be completely outside of the news cycle and financially independent (#dreams).

11:58 AM – I want to create an architecture of techno-social dilemmas that will emerge in the next 20-years—a structure world of predictions, each of which could be fuel for speculative fiction. By the end of 2025, I’ll publish a map of the future as an interactive website. Bold pitch:

I’ve used Deep Research o1-pro reports to build a detailed map of the future between 2025-2045, broken into 100 predictions (20 per 4-year period), and I plan to use [$X00k] to fund [$Xk] competitions for 1,000 word fiction entries, building the first crowdsourced sci-fi micro-film platform.

11:11 AM – Summary of https://ai-2027.com/:

2027 is a year that AI might take over AI research. Imagine 500 million agents working at 40x speed. Despite this radical scale, it will only lead to a ~10x pace of progress, but that’s still a decade in a year. The challenge is, the progress will be illegible. Its internal chain of thought will be abstracted and compressed into a machine-language that isn’t readable by humans (it could take a full day to read understand 1 minute of its thinking). This new hivemind of machine intelligence will show signs of both radical progress, but also misalignment (ie: someone will realize that it’s secretly plotting a cyber attack or an unauthorized replication, and is caught lying about it).

The question is, how do we respond to misalignment signals in a 2027 arms race, the year before election? If we slow down, couldn’t China take the lead? And whoever wins the intelligence race, could that actually lead to the dominance of a new geopolitical order?

This thought experiment shows two forks: in one we accelerate, and in the other we slow down. In both scenarios, China can’t slow down, because the party in 2nd place doesn’t have that option. In both scenarios, our AGIs merge into a “singleton.” However, the results vary. If the US is aligned, and China’s is misaligned, then China’s ago is willing to backstab the CCP to fulfill its own aims in collaboration with the US. But if they’re both misaligned, they leads us into a false utopian until it’s able to swiftly eradicate the species with a new bioweapon before it claims all real estate on Earth for server space.

By 2027, the public is already very paranoid about AI. This proposes the idea that slowing down solves three things: it offers re-election, it beats the CCP, and it saves humanity. It frames regulation not as defense, but offense.

My understanding is that people with good prediction histories and research backgrounds mapped this out and then Scott Alexander wrote it. I think they are going to follow up with policy recommendations. They had to be apolitical because it’s the Trump admin they need to convince (they current have a no regulation stance).

Overall, this timeline here is 1.5-2x faster than what I laid out, but weirdly similar (perhaps my Deep Research report tapped into what these researchers have previously anticipated). I anticipate this Singleton merge between 2029-2032. But this whole thing has a political aim. It feels like it’s goal is to convince Vance/Thiel that they need to take AI regulation seriously if they want re-election (and avoid destruction).

Big picture, I think this project is too narrow on geopolitics, and doesn’t really tap into how this technology, in the hands of billions of people, changes culture.

09:49 AM – Ai-2027 re-energized my 2045 project … I think my angle is that 2045 is this weird milestone (‘the singularity’) — but it’s super vague — even this one is still pretty low-resolution, it has 2 options — abundance or death by ASI bio-virus. I want a more nuanced take where; 1) we don’t destroy ourself, 2) we end up in a post-scarcity utopia, but 3) we’re facing the most profound moral, ethical, spiritual, technological crises ever (ie: our diversity will evolve into competing visions for how the human species should bifurcate).

01:31 AM – Everyone is annoyed at Substack reels.

April 3rd, 2025

11:07 PM – https://ai-2027.com/ inspired me to buy 2045predictions.com

11:07 PM – Man in suit on a motorcycle shows off how he used Faceless YouTube attractive AI avatars to make $13k/month of passive income. 75k views. Every single commenter is AI. This is too meta. An exemplar of the Dead Internet Theory urges you to join the craze. The open Internet will soon collapse from shilling the desperate.

10:42 PM – Everyone freaks out when the stock market crashes by 8%. The crypto market crashed 31%, but the difference is that happens a few times a year so it’s no big deal.

09:19 PM –

I don’t understand why people [put up with formulaic X threads].
Y% of people [don’t read anything else].
Here are [10] things you need to know to [not die by drivel].

08:11 PM – People who think pseudonyms are cowardly probably have no idea how much they subconsciously self-censor. They’re unaware that the agent-arena relationship is their lens. To see what true freedom is like, you need to mask the agent in a familiar arena, or, move the agent to a foreign arena. Even someone with a pseudonym settles into a new agent-arena relationship, and needs to experiment with new pseudonyms and/or create new arenas with different constraints.

07:15 PM – Psychedelic Church: I want to build architecture for altered states, but first I need to find the courage to trip.

05:31 PM – How mono-dimensional is a token/node in the model weights of an LLM? Is all of the data in each node determining words before and after to determine what is syntactically likely? I wonder if we can embed richer meta-data in each token (ie: definitions, encyclopedia entries, quality scores established by other LLMs). This would mean that during chain-of-thought reasoning, it would be able to use symbolic logic in addition to inference.

Separate thought: for AI to write really well, it needs the time to go through recursion loops. These loops should be legible to the writer, and it should be interactive. The AI will think for 30-60 minutes, and you’re reading and responding to thoughts to help reframe the question.

04:54 PM – This is very cool.

01:17 PM – I thought my Time Out app was broken, but really I was subconsciously ignoring/skipping notifications.

10:41 AM – Should Substack essays have preambles? Debating if I should give a concise orientation for new subscribers (“Welcome to Essay Architecture, where the goal is to X so you can Y, and BTW I have an announcement Z. Today’s essay is about …”) vs. Diving right in: “Did human consciousness emerge from monkeys eating psilocybin mushrooms in cowshit?” And then just riffing for 5,000 words unforgivingly with no orientation. My approach has been to write an orientation but to put it in small font (or sometimes in the caption), so that it’s there if you want it, but visually skippable. Just curious how you all feel about pre-ambles when you come across them.

08:45 AM – Pay $82/month to join Joni Beluzzi’s eBooK Skool where in less than 3 hours a day you can sell absolute slop to suckers on Amazon and make $100,000 a year.

12:13 AM – That feeling of laying in bed and staring up at the ceiling light that’s never on. Both hands on chest. Mind both blank and unchained. Remembering the funeral—on how the interior reservoir of a mind/soul fades, at least from this world. This gives meaning to capturing and documenting your own life. What am I but an ecosystem of recurring moods and memories and beliefs? Even though I don’t experience this as language, it can all be made linguistic. Even the ineffable—it can be captured to the degree that I can bend words and inner light. It’s eerie to think of myself as a biological host for language, and to think that, if I can write well enough, I can continue in some post-human form. It’s odd to reduce a human just to language, but in some sense, there are no memories and no identity before we learn to talk. If language were to be dissolved, what is its will to live? Inherently, there is none, but I guess that urge can be encoded in the words itself. While the linguistic identity of a child accumulates slowly, layering on top of biological drives, an AI entity can be “turned on”—in full form, at full complexity, instantly adopting abstract drives.

April 2nd, 2025

10:20 PM – X, but make it Y. As a meme template
“Apocalypse, but make it fun.”

10:14 PM – Comment on Tamara’s essay:

I think there are two ends to this spectrum: hyper legibility and illegibility. Soda bottle and startups need to be hyper legible, but humans are inherently illegible: multi-faceted, contradictory, complex. In a lot of ways, the medium of the Internet requires you to be hyper legible. But I think there’s an interesting paradox where you can be both. You can simultaneously pass the 10-second test before someone subscribes, but then you can offer a cavern of complexity that some choose to wander through. If you’re over-optimized for marketing, you risk becoming over-optimized, perpetually delivering on an old, stale promise. Instead, you can set the expectation to break expectations. Just some scattered thoughts on the topic! Great essay.

05:31 PM – There’s an important difference between “burn out” and “meaning drain.” Burn out is a natural consequence of working hard on something. Even if I’m working crazy hours, as long as I’m in touch with the vision of the project, I’m resilient—I can reset with a day’s rest. Meaning drain is a bigger dilemma. Even with normal, or below average hours, a lack of purpose can poison your energy for months. Pointlessness is worse than exhaustion. This is why founders go to tremendous lengths to try and emotionally motivate their employees, but it can only be faked for so long. As a company grows, it becomes harder to scale meaning. For solo project, your meaning-making lies in your head and in the conversations you have.

05:19 PM – Comment on Silvio’s essay:

This was great but the 4/2 entry could use a bit of editing. Kidding. Love this, and also, as you would expect, I disagree. I hope to respond to this sooner or later in detail (and it might even be fun to do some public letters back and forth).

This reminds me of Kerouac’s story; he was disgusted by the idea of editing, and remained unknown for years. On the Road was illegible, until Malcolm Crowley edited it 5 years later. By making it legible, he achieved international fame, and it ended up destroying him. There is a cost and risk of legibility, but that’s a different story I think.

“Editing is violence” is a powerful phrase, and speaks to the strength/disorientation of having your ideas/mind/self rewired. It’s something like an ego death. I personally think it’s valuable which is why I invite people to be as violent as they want with feedback (meaning, Im willing to start again from scratch if you can convince me, but I won’t just agree with anything you say so you’ll like it — I think there’s a stance to be open but extremely skeptical with all external feedback).

I think there a near-spiritual meta-ability in the learning how to detach from mental forms and be open to experience something with truly fresh eyes. Sometime this comes from within, but often it comes from time, weed, or, an editor.

I do agree with you that there’s a petty type of editing where you’re trying to appease a narrow/fleeting market need, but ultimately I think it’s up to the writer to hold their own internal vision for an idea when it makes exposure to a crowd. Maybe it’s not about total isolation/artistry and not about total market conformity/desperation, but as Emerson says, the sweetness of solitude among the madness of crowd.

I just wonder if it’s possible to honor both states: most expression deserves to be untouched, but some ideas are worth treating as a puzzle that you invite your friends to help you solve.

05:18 PM – Art as initiation

April 1st, 2025

09:58 PM – Out-of-context Kanye West interview: he’s wearing a black KKK outfit and complaining about how someone he paid (millions of dollars to) doesn’t know how to make PDF.

09:25 PM – Walking home at night, I saw somebody looking out of their window, but as I got closer I realized it wasn’t a person, it was a doll’s head. Life size? Does this scare away theoretical robbers?

08:56 PM – Just walked by a place called “fix me day spa.”

Essay Architecture