michael-dean-k/

Toying with this idea of "the geometry of the meaning crisis." Maybe this abstract society-scale idea will make more sense through (8) visuals and patterns. Before I unpack each, here’s a sentence on what’s going on and how to fix it: Society used to provide rigid/objective packages of meaning; we found value in shedding them, but now we’re in a world where meaning is completely subjective, and we’re lost; so instead we need to understand the structures we dissolved, synthesize opposites, and not discard them, but transcend them. (What triggered this)

OLD WORLD OBJECTIVITY WAS BAD:

• Oppressive kings
• Male dominance & slavery
• No individuality at all
• Sexual repression
• No ability to build wealth
• Single world view
• Crammed in cities
• No autonomy of thought

BUT SUBJECTIVITY LED TO EXCESS & SCRAMBLING:

• Hierarchy flattening (decline in excellence)
• Duality dissolution (gender dysphoria)
• Downsampling (identity politics, psychographics)
• Hyper-salience (sexualization of everything)
• Hyper-commodification (influencer culture)
• Rationalization (death of religion)
• Disaggregation (isolation in the suburbs)
• Complete relativity of thought (conspiracy theories)

AND SO TO SOLVE THE MEANING CRISIS, WE NEED TO NOT ABANDON FORM, BUT TO RECONFIGURE AND TRANSCEND IT:

• Create your own journey in context of death
• Honor opposites & resolve paradoxes
• Defy labels & become 1 of 1
• Build attentional discipline & immunity to triggers
• Act with agency, honest income
• Pursue mystical experiences & altered states of consciousness
• Take responsibility to forge community
• Intentional evolution of your consciousness every week

It's an obligation to take risks so your life becomes an adventure, epic, a quest with an unknown end. There will be a thousand appeals to practicality. To this end, I wonder if ever an essay has been written to justify gambling. I don’t gamble much, but when I do, I do it extremely. I try to get it over with as quickly as possible. What I mean is that I don’t spend $10-20 per hand and try to enjoy gambling all night. I want the experience of a single intense moment where way too much money is at stake. Nothing devastating, but enough to feel like an idiot if you lose it. I know gambling addictions are very real, but I do not relish to relive the sting of losing $500 in a second. It's mostly a test. If the sting is strong, I'm weak. Myopic. Perhaps the occasional stupid risk is not immoral, but formative. For the vast majority, their ultimate sin is to have never risked enough. They sit on enormous potential and play everything safe and predictably. If you can’t take pointless risks, how will you take important ones?

Sometimes an innocent insight or daydream can mutate into something insanely twisted. It’s shocking at first, but I have the self-awareness to not believe in anything that crosses my mind. I imagine some people don’t have this ability. They might get scared by their own thoughts, thinking they’re a monster. I wonder if an evil person is simply someone who comes to blindly trust all their thoughts.

LLMs are now scanning physical books to get more training data. There’s something eerie about this video: A book lies face up, defenseless, as a black machine thrusts up and down. At the bottom, it uses suction to grab the page, and as it moves up it flashes light to capture the text in high resolution.

Studio Ghibli—that's the meme, the vibe of the day.

Interesting how the thing that can go viral suddenly captures and permanently shapes everyone’s imagination. Out of all the possibilities, most people’s experimentation are now influenced in this one odd direction. What else is possible? It’s a weird moment, a race/competition for creative usage. There is stuff capable in 4o image generation that’s undiscovered by anyone.

4o can render a glass of wine to the brim. Another go-to example of the doubter has been eradicated.

• On data sovereignty: I think the age of AI will show us that we want to unlock our data from apps and own it ourselves. We want the ability to organize it and feed it into applications. Only when our data becomes tremendously valuable will we demand ownership.

• Precision embedding: one of the reasons I assume AI apps are bad at embedding is because they’re working on massive datasets and have no granularity or algorithm on how to properly chunk data. For example, my logs won’t have useful embeddings unless they are chopped. If the embedding is scoped to span 3 logs in some, and 10 logs in another, then it’s creating chunks that span a wide array of things—random noise.

• If you generally copy + paste a lot for AI writing or code, you should immediately stop and use Cursor as your main tool. Even though it’s a developer tool, it’s the best way I’ve seen to connect your personal data to an array of models. It’s far from an identity clone, but it’s remarkably easier to load context and personalize outputs. My notes so far:

  1. Easier prompt storage: In ChatGPT, I either, a) lose my prompts, or b) store them in a separate doc. In Cursor, all my prompts live as named files in my directory.
  2. All your data in one environment: In ChatGPT I’ll sometimes copy in 10k words of context and it looks ridiculous. In Cursor, you can have all your data organized in a file structure (principles, essays, notes, highlights, etc.), and simply reference the file in your prompt.
  3. Rapidly load context: When you’re writing a prompt in Cursor, you can use key commands to load in all your context. Opt+Cmd+P > then type the prompt_name & context_name you want to attach. Not only do I not copy and paste anymore, I barely use a mouse.
  4. Auto-scan for the right context: In some cases, you might not know the context you need, so Cursor lets you “Search codebase.” Anything in your workspace is given an “embedding” (LLM coordinates). If you search your codebase, it then turns your prompt into a coordinate too, and will pull semantically related things you forgot about. This means it can quickly scan 10 years of Evernote, and pull in the relevant bits as context.
  5. Patch edits: If you set your files as markdown (.md), it works as a document editor. You can selectively highlight and run prompts just on your selections (ie: edit this one paragraph).
  6. Redo bad prompts: The conversation chain matters, and in ChatGPT, if you put in a bad prompt, you’re sort of stuck with it. Cursor lets you click into a prompt, edit it, and re-process the result.
  7. All the models in one place: OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok.

A misconception in altered states is to assume the new state is right and the old is wrong. Yes, perhaps your old thinking was illusory, but that doesn’t mean wherever you end up post-trip is true. It’s poor thinking. Just because you zoom in, zoom out, see interconnectedness, etc., doesn’t mean it’s true.

In the other direction, it's a trope for someone stoned to think something mediocre is amazing; this might lead them to believe that no serious insights can emerge from an altered state, which is equally far from the truth!

Our mind is designed to shift in and out scales; we can’t cling to our first break out; nor can we deny all breakouts because the first one was wrong. We need to oscillate back and forth, to see each insight fresh—with possibility and skepticism—to understand the true nature of something.

Pretentious > pre-tense > context (I realize this is a stretch, but...). Artists are pretentious when they’re frustrated that others don’t have the context to understand what they’ve made. They’re upstream of culture, and so others don’t have the framing to pick up on it yet. There are two reactions, 1) not caring if they get it, and 2) making work for mass contexts (meeting the culture where the OS currently is)—and maybe both are wrong.

Instead, progressive ideas come with the responsibility to make sure anyone is equipped to download the context to get it. The trick is doing this implicitly without being too on the nose. The bootloader has to be secretly encoded. Deconstructing your own lyrics feels too desperate. Maybe it’s something about building an on-ramp for those who care to try to pierce into something.

It's possible that Dead & Co. will make more from their two Sphere residencies (2024 & 2025) than their entire touring career (1965-1995). They made $130m in 2024 (covers ’65-’88), and if they match that this year, they’ll have made equal revenue to ’65-’92). Some say ’92 was the symbolic end of the Grateful Dead anyway—Jerry collapsed on stage and cancelled the tour, and the last 3 years weren’t the same.

Tickets were $3 in 1969 ($25.97 in today’s value). That’s a 60x difference to Sphere tickets.

I think this instance is unique from Paul McCartney, Elton John, and The Rolling Stones: Jerry is dead, and it all happens from one city.

I imagine there will be two kinds of agent companies: 1) for modular services (ie: generic SaaS coderbots for $1k/month), but also, 2) for replicating identity. In a world where everyone gets access to swarms of modular agents that move at unimaginable speeds, I think those with a “replica” will have the edge. A replica is like a centralized manager entity—one that has your corpus of principles, lessons, memories, ideas, taste, libraries, etc.)—to coordinate between all the agents.

If this comes true, it brings new leverage to writing out your thoughts in detail. Maybe for every 10k words I write, my agent swarm is 2x more aligned to my specific goals. However, it also inverts the norms of data privacy. There’s a trade-off: the more you use writing for distribution and audience-building, the more clonable you become. It’s causing me to think harder about when a piece of content is public/gated/private.

So if models, apps, and infrastructure become too cheap to matter, then the only thing left that’s scarce is personal data / personal perspective. You’d think Notion/Google are positioned to solve this, but it’s interesting to watch people use Cursor as their PKM system because it’s so easy to connect personal context with an array of models.

During a maid-of-honor speech, I arranged fallen sesame seeds from my bread into an outline of the talk, and when she was done I cited the whole thing back to my wife. She couldn’t believe that subtle arrangements (ie: seeds in a triangle, a line, a circle, etc.) could be mapped to ideas. It was like a highly compressed seed language of crumbs.

My excitement to dance at a wedding/party is directly correlated to my appreciation of the music. Obvious, but I didn’t know that as a kid because every occasion had trashy pop/rap. It’s not that I won’t dance to Lil Jon, it’s just that it requires me to pretend to enjoy it. There was one wedding where I remember dancing in circles around my wife because my friend had a live band with excellent song choice.

I think the "data is all you need" paradigm will be proven wrong in the next 4 years.

My example is, even if you give a 5-year-old the Bible and let them read it cover to cover, they will have read it, but unable to speak about it or understand the full implications. It’s not about more data, it’s enabling deeper understanding of existing data.

And so scaling laws have a limit. Even if you give LLM more time to think, it is still limited by associative connections (it’s effectively just casting and combining more vectors). I’m intuiting that the breakthrough will come from enabling LLMs to inherently make recursive abstractions in chains of thought. After it generates a sentence to itself, it needs the ability to ask: “What is this?” "Is this good?" "Is this (any category within an ontology)?"

What I'm reaching it as it's not about more data, but better labeled data. Early AI was very much about manual labeling and tree construction. It's too vast for humans to do it. We need specialized LLMs to do this abstraction process—to reason over tokens, and then bake back those insights into the token itself, to draw upon during reasoning traces... I think.

This is all pretty fuzzy right now, and limited by my technical understanding, but it could be fun to do some research and properly anchor my "beyond LLMs" ideas. In terms of analyzing essay quality, I could see Essay Architecture evaluations feed directly into model training, but, to what end? I'm all for analysis, but less interested in generation.

To be clear, I’m (somewhat) a fan of the show. The premise is original/timely (and lends to some memorable scenes/situations), the acting is good, and the set/cinematography should maybe win something. But towards the end of S2 I noticed myself thinking several times, “this feels written by AI.”

Slop doesn’t mean “low quality.” Severance is extremely high-quality in some dimensions, so we need to get specific. Slop, literally, is the food farmers feed pigs; it’s a random assembly of leftovers. So slop is work that is arbitrarily assembled in a context where quality doesn’t really matter. If you’re invested in the premise, and are already paying $9.99 per month for Apple TV, then whether the writing is great, good, or bad, it doesn’t really matter, you still watch. I did. Vibes and star power only earn so much goodwill and patience though; if the form is hollow, the viewers will eventually buckle in frustration.

A few different qualities emerge from AI slop—amnesia, hallucinations, disorientation—all of which are hallmark features of the show. (Minor spoilers ahead).

Severance is a mystery that opens loops with no regards for ever closing them. Every episode opens 3-5 loops, but then they’re quickly forgotten, as if it’s written by a transformer with limited bandwidth. The show violates the principle of “Chekov’s Gun” (if you plant a gun on stage, someone has to get shot). Over two seasons they’ve placed dozens of “guns” and have barely used any. It’s as if an LLM was prompted, “add suspenseful cliffhangers aligned with the high concept,” and now it’s carelessly barreling into the unknown at 400 WPM.

A good mystery will resolve minor loops to help open major ones. In Severance, both major and minor loops are ignored. Mark’s “integration” (the fusion of his innie and outie) is critical to the premise; it was a key theme all season, but it played zero role in the finale. Instead, the plot is steered by cinematic porn and the bizarre. One episode we stumble into a room with baby goats. One episode we wake up in a forrest without ever learning why. In S2E10 recap, the show’s creator said, effectively, “We needed another Lumon-sanctioned celebration, and we didn’t want to do the waffle party again, and somebody suggested, ‘what if we bring in a marching band?’” It’s like they’re prompting an endless cascade of irrelevant hallucinations. “No, crazier!”

The result is 60 minute episodes of slow-paced hi-fi disorientation. I guess it’s properly meta: the viewers are as confused as the characters. But for 20 hours? Right idea, wrong execution.Once the vibe wears off, you realize a Severance episode is 50-90% bloat. There is sometimes only 5 minutes of meaningful development per episode, surrounded by spooky moments, stunning imagery, dream sequences, and staring contests. I’m not saying the show should be fast-paced or linear. It should be slow and surreal, but it should also be strategically fusing together the different elements within the premise. Instead, it maxes out on art vibes. Each episode’s plot feels like it’s constructed by an LLM that can’t quite distinguish content from style, and so it just randomly arranges material that fits the aesthetic.

Could be pushing it here, but Severance might be the peak example of high-production streaming slop, and a preview of the future of AI entertainment: a user prompts a clever premise, they’re augmented with stunning visuals/vibes, but nothing is coherently composed. Maybe I’m just angry from the finale, but I think the writing is unforgivable, especially given the potential, and especially since it costs $20 million to produce an episode that is mostly shot in all-white rooms.

Just read several hundred Kanye tweets. I wonder if you take all his tweets since Feb 6 / the Super Bowl, and take the time to meticulously arrange them like a developmental editor would, might it make sense? If you cut 25%, removed the ALL CAPS, and made a prose essay out of re-arranged Kanye tweets, might there be a semi-coherent perspective that’s not completely insane?

One of the key places you find slop is in product demos for emerging AI apps. These things shill writing features without having even the slightest grasp or care about writing. It’s like they’re assuming viewers won’t even read the examples:

Check out this example what was used for an “Improve writing” button. The original said:

“Through collaborative efforts, we aim to create an exceptional work of conversation."

It changed it to:

“Collaboratively, our intention is to craft an outstanding conversation, where I bring forth notable viewpoints.”

One thumbnail said “no editing skills or experience needed,” as if skills and experience were just nuisances, not worthwhile things to pursue.

Now, a Summarize button changed “new branding must focus on our core values and mission” to “new branding should reflect our core values and mission.”

This thread has 20k likes.

9 of the 12 comments: “Great,” “Love this,” “Good list,” “Great,” “Awesome share,” “Great list,” “Great share,” “This is great.” Two more promoted a product, another started with “Most don’t know that…” There was one at the bottom marked as “Probable spam” that says “That’s Awesome.”

You can’t know if the commenters are real. Who even knows if the poster is real? Are these his own bots commenting to boost the algorithm? Are the demo videos AI-generated?

So I call Garden City Mazda because I have an "engine malfunction" warning in my dashboard. Seems like extreme language. Anyway, I call them, give them my phone number (even though I’m calling from that same phone) and get a sense of “oh it’s no big deal—it’s just like a check engine light—but you need to drop it off immediately.”

Will I get a loaner at least? I have a wedding out east this weekend. Carla’s not sure. She connects me to someone else with far worse communication skills. They need my phone number again. She asks what’s the problem. I say it’s about an engine malfunction, but before I can ask about loaner cars, she says “one moment.”

It’s been 9 minutes and 50 seconds. I’ve been listening to royalty-free music, shifting between lo-fi funk and marimba synth. How many minutes are in a moment? Are they aware their song choices dilate time?

This is my punishment for leasing and knowing nothing about vehicle maintenance. 12 minutes in, she’s back. “We have an appointment next Monday.” “But Carla said you have one tomorrow at 10 am?” “We have no loaners until next week.”

Tempted to just drive to the wedding and back and hope the engine warnings are an end-of-lease bluff tactic.

From Bostrom's Deep Utopia:

• Learning over production
• Relationship over things
• Capital over labor

I think the leisure revolution will require people to come to their own decision about pleasure, experience, learning/skill development, goals, and community. Typically, external constraints decide and limit these factors. But in post-work material abundance, we might be forced into freedom, and that will make a lot of people uncomfortable.

David and I got into this talk on how technology will bring us to a point of serious disorientation, and how a Christian (or religious/moral) framework can help ground all the turbulence. At some point I made the point that I think it’s important to die. I believe that some kind of soul-flight is the main climax of consciousness. I don’t believe in the Christian eternal afterlife, but in a 3-minute moment of time dilation that is, in essence, an eternity—1,000 lifetimes. As so while I never want to be literally immortal, I want literary immorality. All the text of my life establishes a moral foundation for a text-based replica to outlive me and interact with and hopefully guide future generations, whether it’s 10 or 10 million people. Books already fill this function, except now books are agentic and interactive.

My logs need to become much more unhinged. I should hold back nothing and write from the perspective of death, as if every moment is fragile and fleeting and if you don’t speak honestly, in full force, with damning truth and judgement and acceptance, revealing all, then I'm betraying my own soul. The dead don’t check their metrics. The dead don’t hold grudges. If your main imperative is anything other than rendering your own consciousness, then you don’t see through the illusion of time. If you write for what you think the Substack Notes crowd wants to hear, then you are polluting your post-death corpus with drivelous digital small talk.

It is weird when you feel normal sights to brood with an unnameable terror. A smirk, or a construction barricade, or a passing flash of the Chinese language, for some unknown reason, are soaked with some unknown significance. The meaning is in the subtext, and you can’t crack it, and you know the mood will pass, but if you sit in it and bear it you might crack open some truth. It’s probably the collision of disparate things: the age of virality, an afternoon with a YouTuber now likely napping, the unimaginable leverage of AI, being 34, guilt over disappearing from Notes, the chaos of Manhattan, the week of grieving, the sushi order—they all come together into an unnameable roar. And now you don’t have a dollar to spare to two consecutive homeless people because you’ve actually lost your wallet, but you also didn’t even look up because you see some abstract benefit of logging this moment in case your unborn grandchildren see the value in your passing shapeless thoughts.

The Jitters. How will this go? I think I’m imagining a storm of 100,000 haters. Or, at least, will the required process of editing and memeification invert what I believe?

Essay Architecture is all about complexity. In a way, it doesn’t require me to translate ideas or make them digestible and catchy; it’s about training machines with infinite patience to create a piece of software that is—to the user—simple and profoundly useful.

I guess this is a test to see how well the idea can be meme’d. Is this something you can enjoy listening to while you wash the dishes? It’s a hard constraint. A fun problem.

To tie this in with David’s tweet on how managers prompt people, an interview is something like a host promoting their guest to package their ideas according to the taste of the host. So in some ways this will be like my ideas through David’s vision for his channel.

All mythologies erode. A hope to be Helen of Troy is a hope that doesn’t see the nature of time. A second is a life, a life is a millennium, a millennium an aeon. Antiquity blinked and here we are. In the next blink, all of our greats will be flattened too, with only a misunderstood bust who wishes to be forgotten.

To yearn to be a historical icon worshipped by your grandchildren’s acquaintances is to inflate your ego with puss. It is a corruption of intent, a romantic taste-blindness, like designing your own ocean home on the ground floor of a beach. Beauty is not in the body, but in a soul that aligns with the creative engine from which it emerged. Beauty need not be tangled with admiration. That is vanity, a devil that fills you with confidence for one night before it strips from you everything that you thought mattered. Pair this was fame, and it’s hard to recover. This is why Virginia Woolf walked into a lake with cinderblock shoes. ¹

I write this to remind myself that I can chase beauty in obscurity. I can see nature in the dark with my eyes closed. I can hide in the suburbs and appear painfully ordinary and even pitied by those who live lives of high literature, and that would all be great. It doesn’t matter if my face becomes known or if my words are spread out over untraceable pseudonyms or if a super-intelligence eclipses all future generations of writers, what matters is that I personally pierce through the veils of heaven. It’s an extremely private experience. It’s enough to know that I’ve navigated my life in a way so that, through my own hands, I can produce things of escalating beauty. It is a privilege. I won’t hoard what I make, nor will I parade it.

Attention makes me uneasy, not because I’m weak, but because fame is an abominable condition. I write not to become more known each day, but to see deeper into our circumstance. If it’s legacy you seek, don’t hand down éclat, hand down linguistic viruses that bloom fresh lenses.

When AI leaders (Altman, Amodei) talk about the potentials and dangers, they always bring up curing cancer. Last night I heard Amodei say that curing cancer, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, and mental illness would make everything worth it, even 100% job loss. This feels like blatant pathos, an appeal to emotion. I feel like they haven’t been pushed hard on the obvious—what do curing these diseases have to do with public chatbots and agents? Surely, someone isn’t going to use a public chatbot to cure cancer; there would be a specialized internal model with 100x the compute and medical experts. It’s a dishonest use case.

Curing diseases might be a side effect, but they’re obviously more focused on (1) the technical excitement of the problem, and (2) infinite leverage (a datacenter of 24/7 geniuses). There’s no compelling public answer for “why are you doing this?” The average fearful person can’t grasp the answer.

When Amodei was asked, “won’t we all be useless?” his answer was weak (along the lines of, “we’ll have to think about work differently”). How? Here’s my attempt at an explanation: there will be no jobs anymore because any single person will be able to launch and scale a business. Do you have an idea you want to bring into reality? Maybe you’ve had 100s of ideas you’d like to see in the world, but they stay trapped in your head because of the incredible challenge of starting even the most basic idea. What if they could all come to life?

I think the rise of AI will bring Silicon Valley culture as the default mode of work. No more jobs, but everyone becomes a startup. Maybe this sounds exciting to some, but only 1% of startups make it, at least in the current paradigm. I imagine there is a small % of people who want to be in “founder mode,” but maybe AGI will be solid enough that you won’t have to grind and sacrifice your life to spawn a company. You can effectively launch a bad idea from your couch, hope it goes well, forget about it, and earn passive income if it does.

We’re so used to the maxim of “idea are useless, it’s all execution,” but if execution becomes automated, then we’re in for the revenge of the idea guy.

Note to David on podcast scope:

"Then we can bridge this into writing by comparing 'Consider the Lobster' & 'Shooting an Elephant' (a popular essay by Orwell). In many ways they’re opposite (saving vs. shooting an animal, digressions vs. plot, maximalist vs. minimalist), yet they both score 9/10. Each has a high-concept title (like “snakes on a plane”) which makes the context load light. I’m thinking the majority of X-ray examples can come from these two essays. And since “essay” is part of the framing for my project, it makes sense to deconstruct a DFW essay in high detail (probably the most famous essay since 2000)."

After spending a week or two watching a decaying human body, it’s weird to investigate the life of your own hands. Death is the norm, and so you take for granted the miraculous and automatic coordination it takes to make a fist. A death is not just the end of a 78 year life, but a 60 million year chain of evolution. To go back into the ground is to return not to the origin, not to the womb, but to a place your genes have never been, the place where another 10 million year cycle begins. I get the reason for pine caskets.

Most people probably don't put much thought into their own funeral, because why plan an event you won’t experience? This might be a writerly perspective, but a funeral might be the moment in your life where everyone in your life is most curious about what your consciousness was like.

From now, I want to start writing, 1) letters to specific people, 2) my values/virtues, and 3) essays on the nature of dying, death, the afterlife, and legacy.

I also want to design a kill switch. Perhaps my wife or future kids will have access to a page to declare “Mike’s dead” and if I don’t answer within 24 hours, then I’m confirmed dead and a series of processes are automatically triggered (ie: emails, letters posts, music, videos, an invitation, etc.).

It will update a /death slug on my personal website (which will hopefully have 300 year hosting), and my gravestone will have a QR code that points to it.

There's a foolishness in embracing slop-poetry over real poetry. Yeah, you can ask 100 casual Americans who haven’t put any time into reading or understanding poetry, and they’ll all prefer LLM outputs because they have a tendency for explicit clarity, but maybe it’s worth having some opaque mediums. When it comes to essays, I think accessibility is important. But poetry is supposed to be cryptic and mysterious. It’s a feature that it haunts you and reveals itself to you over decades. For every thousand who balk at it, it finds one person to completely infiltrate. I’d be curious to see this same study among poetry readers.

2025 might be the best time to be a writer. We’re at the edge of a new time, a writer’s apocalypse, a golden age of the essay, or who knows. It’s a collective paranoia, a mass uncertainty, and it’s that kind of restlessness that requires writers to make sense of.

**AI Metafiction on Grief:**

• Idea: 1.77 of 5
• Form: 2.00 of 5
• Voice: 3.56 of 5

Overall = 2.44 out of 5

There are mixed reviews on this, so I thought I’d grade it with my framework. It’s great on some dimensions, good on others, but poor on most of them. Overall, it’s barely good. I think this shows that 1) casual readers are often impressed by a single pattern, like if it can do repetition it’s a big deal, 2) skeptics will take the absence of a single pattern to completely discredit it, and 3) even though it’s not “good” yet (an overall 3/5) it’s generally a big deal that we’re close to anyone being able to get good writing for free on-demand. Most people can’t write a 2.44.

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

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

My favoriate live recording of theirs:

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

This tweet on agents nails it:

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

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

Regardless of which side you're on, I don’t think one-sided pleas will work anymore. You can’t just say “here are 7 solid points on Trump’s insane corruption.” A flurry of comments will come in, “but what about DOGE?”

Communication is impossible when bias is baked in, unless you immediately identify how a POV is in a unique position. Such as: “what if corruption exposers are in a position to shield their own corruption?” It frames the question in a way that DOGE is doing good work, and yet also, perpetrating the same thing it’s exposing.

Only by immediately identifying with your opponent (both with who they favor & how they critique), will you be able to slide in a nuanced, synthesized point of view that can help them around their bias.

Relatedly, I think there’s a lot of spin/distortion around RFK/republicans. Of course, Elon/Trump are doing the same (or worse) media distortions. That’s just the environment we're in. Both extremes are wrong (American golden age vs. devastating coup). I’d say overall though, there are more good than bad things happening, and RFK is (potentially) one of the good things.

Reality is more like a paradox than a simple narrative.

For example: Elon can simultaneously be a hero for American democracy (on par with George Washington) and the worst dictator ever. I have to assume both can be true. The second you cling to either/or, your vision gets clouded to make sense of all future information.

By clinging to either, I get a false optimism or a false doomerism — both of which are definitely wrong. The reality is somewhere in the middle, and so by stretching across the spectrum, I have a worldview that’s likely more attuned to reality than either side.

• 05:53 PM – It’s pouring outside the hospital. I’m looking out a floor-to-ceiling window and the halogen lights near and far show small patches of fast-falling white speckles. I wouldn’t say it’s “torrential,” but it’s hard, and there’s something about a death shelter also serving as shelter from the elements. The living and dying have a shared vulnerability: at least we’re inside.
• 07:44 PM – A bed that adjusts itself. The sound of bubbling water. Outlets labeled A4BEC-14. An LG-TV with loose wires. An analog clock down to the second but the blinds are closed so you can’t tell the passing of days. It’s been 3 and could be another 7, but time stops on the deathbed. Consider what you're last 15,000 breaths might be like.
• 09:55 PM – Talk of pillows, Boca, skiing in Vermont, TV dinners, and William Defoe. Normal, goodhearted chitchat. How does this register to someone in critical condition? Are they unconscious, quietly listening and mildly interested, happy to hear voices, or is each mention rendered into a full-blown immersive scene?

When people or pets die, we feel the sadness that they no longer get to experience our year-to-year reality. Our day-to-day seems totally stable. We feel pain that our dying father-in-law will never meet our unborn kids.

Of course this pace of life is experientially real, but in times of pain it helps to remember that life itself is actually the exception. For most of existence you’ll be unborn or dead. At the cosmic scale, it’s as if a whole person’s life is just a day. Have you had a good one?

Your grandparents died yesterday, your parents died today, you die tomorrow, and your thrice great grandkids die by the end of the week. This mindshift helps. I am not owed 100 years, I was granted today. It becomes less about you and more about the unbroken chain.

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

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

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

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