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).

August 13th, 2025

11:42 AM – Cassady’s mom died when he was young, his dad was a drunk, homeless hobo, so from 10 years old and on, he was alone and unparented. He stole over 500 cars, and spent many years in prison. Apparently what others saw in him as enthusiastic energy, he later confessed was extreme anxiety.

Kerouac’s brother died young when he was 4. His father hated his writing, and he was tight with his mom but she was extremely Catholic and made him terribly guilty and resentful of her.

Ginsberg’s mom was a paranoid schizophrenic, in and out of psych wards, and often trying to kill herself.

Basically, they all had troubled childhoods, and that probably messed with their emotional regulation. They all seemed to dabble with mental breakdowns and suicide. There’s a letter Neal wrote where he kept drinking and had a gun to his for 14 hours but couldn’t do it, and then his wife came home and he asked her to do it.

I think I was inspired by their restless energy, but now I’m realizing that their specific energy might have come from extreme psychic trauma. Worth thinking how to channel a genuine intensity of enthusiasm, without accidentally emulating their specific flavor (which you can’t really fake because it’s rooted in pain).

11:27 AM – Dream where E— was, unexpectedly, on her death bed, and they were considering pulling the plug, but then she was noticeably alive and I had to urgently notify them to not pursue some kind of lethal injection.

Since SF, my dreams have been heavy, weird, tragic, and frequent. Many possible explanations …

09:46 AM – LLM bashing goes like this: find one bad example and dunk (Gary Marcus style). The reverse happens too (one good example = AGI?).

This is an inherent problem of an open-ended chat window where anything is possible. The user’s biases and efforts will completely affect the results. It can’t be fully tested, and so it’s always, somewhat, unpredictable.

While a chatbot is a “wide” app with generative intelligence, Essay Architecture is a “narrow” app with generative intelligence.

There are benefits of staying narrow. When the user can only do one thing, and when outputs are restricted, it lets the builders do proper quality testing. Restriction leads to reliability.

09:25 AM – Numbers are probably the easiest / first step of a neuro-symbolic system. It would be much harder to create an entry for “dog.” There are 10s of thousands if not millions of parameters for key/value pairs you might want to assign to a dog: species, aging, diseases, incidents, pop-culture, anatomy, etc. So you need some way to both generate and upload those things.

Apparently humans have been trying this since the 80s. It’s too slow, too infinite. But we can use LLMs to build, update, and “pull” from the hypergraph.

When someone prompts about a dog, the system needs to query the relevant 25 parameters out of the million. From these paramters, it can do actual reasoning with formal, verifiable logic:

“If [moon had atmosphere], and we brought [dogs] there, based on [gravity coefficient], they would be [1.4x] bigger, but then might suffer from [A] disease.”

Our current chain-of-thought reasoning is, sort of bullshit. It’s not really reasoning.

09:07 AM – The “attention is all you need,” paper might be wrong. As in, the scaling laws won’t hold. It will get more and more expensive to realize less and less gains. This doesn’t mean LLM is a bust. Even if they stopped where they are, society would transform from integrating today’s technology. But in terms of the path to “AGI/ASI,” you don’t get there by scaling. We’ve just overindexed on a single branch of the AI technology tree. We actually need to backtrack, and bring what we’ve learned from LLMs to other, previously blocked branches. Neurosymbolic AI did not work in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, but now that LLMs have matured, that dead branch could be what leads to the breakthrough.

Gary Marcus, I think, needs to clarify his position. He’s all for neurosymbolic AI, but maybe he’s not clear enough in acknowledging that neurosymbolic is only feasible now that LLMs have become what they are. Considering writing him a letter to clarify.

12:30 AM – Just read an article that referred to Cassady as a “sacrificial muse,” he enabled others to make some of their best works, but he aspired to and struggled to make anything meaningful himself.

12:10 AM – App idea: a browser extension that locks any feed (Notes, X, etc.) until you write. Points: (1) There would be no option to skip, you have to write before you can enter your typical infinite scroll mode; (2) you get to set the word count (ie: 50-500 words); (3) there can be prompts so you don’t have a blank canvas each time; (4) it saves all your writings, either for future sharing, or to build an internal knowledge graph for AI context.

Feels like this could be “algorithmic Aikido” (a martial arts term for redirecting violence). It hijacks a consumption addiction and turns it into creation.

I’m fascinated by this idea because it could be a way to bootstrap a healthy social network by helping them get unhooked off the bad ones. Everyone, even the most discipline people, know how addicted they can get. If creation discharges the need to binge, then this could save something like 30 hours per month (a modest calc of 1 hour saved per day); and if you value your time at $100/hour, that’s $3k in monthly value for only $9/month. That’s a non-advertising business model.

Put simply, it’s a fusion of a “browser blocker” and a “note-taking app” that exists at the OS/browser level. It is adaptable enough to layer on top of any, all, future social networks.

It follows a strong virtue: you have to write before you do anything. After you write, you have 3 options: (1) continue to your feed, guilty; (2) copy your text, so you can post it, or (3) open a finite feed of [13] related posts, ones from our network that are semantically related to your own.

August 12th, 2025

05:53 PM – I recalibrated my social media blocker (Cold Turkey), so that I need to write 250 characters of gibberish (takes 5 minutes), and if I get one character wrong, it resets the whole string (with moderate focus, I still get ~5 characters wrong). This creates a passable, but significant block. I had a more lenient block before, where I only had to rewrite 5 random works, which I could do in <5-10 seconds. Now, the friction is real. My friend called it “torture.” Is it really worth focusing for 5 minutes on non-sense to unlock a feed I know that will distract me?

12:12 PM – What is a “beat in the suburbs”? ie: What is the distilled spirit of the Beat Generation without nomadic self-destruction and the romanticization of chaos? I added “in the suburbs” because that image is antithetical to “being on the road,”; it helps clarify that what I see in the Beats is something different from the spirit of adventure.

Values to keep:

authentic experience > social performance
deep friendships > shallow acquaintances
questioning conventions > agreeable
singular destiny > societal cog
madness in creative work > productivity
spiritual focus > material focus

Differences:

Stable home, stable family; but mindful travel
Not about sponatenous output, but showing up regularly
Editing isn’t antithetical; it actually aids future streams
Consciousnes expansion doens’t have to be through drugs

I like this AI-summary:

“It’s Beat ideals with adult emotional regulation and an understanding that you can be countercultural without being self-destructive.”

12:13 AM – I notice GPT-5 ends every message on a very predictable, “if you’d like…” Is that a dark pattern? It feels desperate to always continue the conversation forward, whether I want to or not.

August 11th, 2025

11:54 PM – No more ice cream, sugar, caffeine, eggs, milk, or red meat. Looking for less heart palpitations, less cholesterol (drinking coffee as I reread this).

11:51 PM – Realizing Kerouac and Cassady are moral failures and tragic stories, nothing to aspire to without extreme caution … I really ought to figure out what I ever saw in them, and see if it’s separable from their twisted, painful lives, or if they just inevitably come together … I think this as I look at the inside of my right foot in my dark living room (almost midnight, still on SF time) and how the light from the kitchen illuminates 13 separate bulging veins and I simultaneously wonder if I’m fooling myself with this whole writing dream, and also, if I will die young from hypertension.

09:36 AM – 13 oz

August 10th, 2025

10:50 PM – Gemini 2.5 research mode was helpful in constructing a list of 300 notable essayist across history, and formatting it into a sortable, filterable interface. I should probably create something to gather links and clean text so I can start building my archive.

Example:

| Last Name | First Name | Country | Birth Year | Death Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abbate | Florencia | Argentina | 1976 | present |
| Abbey | Edward | United States | 1927 | 1989 |
| Abdolkarimi | Bijan | Iran | 1963 | present |
| Abdurraqib | Hanif | United States | 1983 | present |
| Achebe | Chinua | Nigeria | 1930 | 2013 |
| Acker | Kathy | United States | 1947 | 1997 |
| Ackroyd | Peter | United Kingdom | 1949 | present |
| Aciman | André | Egypt/United States | 1951 | present |
| Adams | Henry | United States | 1838 | 1918 |
| Addison | Joseph | England | 1672 | 1719 |
| Adorno | Theodor W. | Germany | 1903 | 1969 |
…

10:42 PM – In incomplete list of some of my AI use cases: prompt design, pattern definitions, development editing (typically compression), usage questions, style deconstruction, vocabulary definitions, synonym options, question generator, research finder, title generations (rarely good), metaphor geneator (have no tried yet), argument poker … [note: I’ll often throw my drafts into AI, but I never actually use the prose it generators exactly; it often just opens new angles for me to explore] … anthology making, market research, business strategy, product insights, strategic email feedback, monthly planning, daily/weekly priorities, journal pattern finding, life decisions, relationship advice, history summaries, futurism, generational analysis, philosophy concepts explained simply, game generation, app generation, insights from past conversations, system design, parenting concepts, source generation, home school curriculum, etc.

I am not that structured with any of these (other than my Essay Architecture project in Cursor), and usually just open a new chat and talk haphazardly, but it would probably be worth creating project folders with appropriate context.

10:27 PM – Neurosymbolic AI feels like it would lead to true reasoning. Current LLM are basically predicting the order of token/letters based on probability, but there are limits, especially when you get into synthetic data. Even COT isn’t real reasoning, it’s just extended vector mapping with prompts to double-check and verify. It’s pseudo-reasoning.

What we really need is like a massive self-evolving RAG, a generalizable “hypergraph.” Data has to be structured and stable. An entry like “blue jay” might have 1k-100k-1m properties. If someone asks “can a blue jay fly to the moon?” it will query the right properties and reason through it based on a series of known, verified facts.

The challenge here is both scaling while creaitng a flexible schema to structure the parameters within any object. They started doing this manually in the 80s. But LLMs can scale and accelerate this. Arguably, every single conversation requires new knowledge nodes to be created, and if the nodes are true, they can be added to the graph. Unlike LLMs, knowledge compounds with use.

Agents can be constantly scanning the web and updating this hypergraph in real-time with current events of the day. Ultimately though, it will have to make guesses on property creation, and perhaps it could have a confidence score. Humans could then review low-confidence submissions and verify them.

05:07 PM – Radiohead gallery

11:04 AM – I wonder if Sam was publicly hyping GPT-5 knowing that it’s limitations, or if there was some sort of botch in deployment that lobotomized it, or, if there are many versions of GPT-5 and they decided to not launch their best ones (which is what Sam was basing his hype on). I personally think that anything near AGI/ASI level is too geopolitically important to release as a consumer product; it will likely be developed in private, and when we do get a productized version, they will likely be 1-2 years ahead. Related thread.

August 9th, 2025

10:41 PM – Gary Marcus on GPT-5:

“That’s exactly what it means to hit a wall, and exactly the particular set of obstacles I described in my most notorious (and prescient) paper, in 2022. Real progress on some dimensions, but stuck in place on others.
Ultimately, the idea that scaling alone might get us to AGI is a hypothesis.
No hypothesis has ever been given more benefit of the doubt, nor more funding. After half a trillion dollars in that direction, it is obviously time to move on. The disappointing performance of GPT-5 should make that enormously clear.
Pure scaling simply isn’t the path to AGI. It turns out that attention, the key component in LLMs, and the focus of the justly famous Transformer paper, is not fact “all you need”.
All I am saying is give neurosymbolic AI with explicit world models a chance. Only once we have systems that can reason about enduring representations of the world, including but not to limited to abstract symbolic ones, will we have a genuine shot at AGI.”

08:49 PM – Game idea: snake + shadow snake (everytime you grow, an opponent snake grows and is more likely to get you) — definitely exists, but in a classic-feeling version?

11:52 AM – Dream where C—’s tent went on fire in the middle of the night, had burns and wanted to go to the hospital (among other dreams, maybe 5-10, but this one stands out).

10:49 AM – I sense that chatbots will continue to be bad writers because they’re generalized models that try to serve the whole population for everything they might ever want. In pursuing “AGI,” it is too general to be great at anything. With today’s technology, I think it could be possible to build an amazing, organic essay writer, but that’s (thankfully?) not the priority.

August 8th, 2025

09:06 PM – I can’t remember the last time I studied a plane wing, but I’m doing it now. It started because it’s turning dusk and everything is dull except the sun beaming on “one triangular solid,” now gold, protruding towards the back of the right wing (I have poor plane vocab). It felt unreal, which was a frame-burst that got me remembering oh yes, this is a wing, and a wing is not just an ignorable plane part that blocks the midwest scenery, it is a product of centuries of engineering, an invention so stable and durable that I can sit and log 10s of thousands of feet in the sky and have no concern.

08:27 PM – Futurists fear that robots and AIs will terraform and harvest the world, but it already feels eerie and unnatural to see midwestern fields carved out into perfect grids. It is as alien as crop circles, but more terrifying and less creative. Perfect 90 degree angles. It is brute order and dull patterns; a metallic fishnet over the midriff of America. I’d be surprised if there weren’t good reasons for this, but it is spooky in its orthagonality. FWIW, I am pro-grid; a grid-head FS/FFS. But the grid to me is an invisible structure to guide the creation of complex, organic, natural forms, not the form itself, disappearing to the edges of sight.

07:17 PM – I should make a case in r/GratefulDead that “St. Stephen” might be heavily inspired by the death of Neal Cassady.

Robert Hunter, their lyricist, confessed not knowing of the Christian “St. Stephen” until after the lyrics were shared with the band. So it’s not literal. Also, Neal died earlier (February) in the same year that the song was written (June?) and first played. The middle of the song is abstractly about death, but all the surrounding verses paint a portrait of Neal that, after reading 5 years of his letters, is now unseeable. Hunter knew Cassady. Cassady was Weir’s roommate. Cassady was a “sacrificial muse” for much of that generation, so it’s extremely conceivable. True inspiration or not, it will forever change the way I hear these lyrics.

verse-1: He steals a roses (Neal stole many things, like 500 cars), and “wherever he goes the people all complain.” The verse doens’t explictly say St. Stephen was a thief, but he “had a rose,” he “goes in and out of the garden,” (as a theft might), and everyone is annoyed.
v2: “Stephen would answer if he only knew how” relates to how, in Neal’s letters to Kerouc and Ginsberg, both masterful writers, he would excessively express how he couldn’t put words to his feelings.
v3: About death.
Bridge: “Speeding arrow, sharp and narrow” taps into Neal’s speed. On the road has the line, “the road ran straight as an arrow.” Also, “what a lot of fleeting matters you have spurned” ties to his range of chaos. “Several seasons with their treasons” refers to his shifting moods, and how he would predictably betray people (Carolyn, Kerouac) in search of something new.
v4: “Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills, One man gathers what another man spills,” Neal spilled everything, and Kerouac/Ginseberg saw immense value in what Neal thought was worthless confession.
v5: “Saint Stephen will remain, All he’s lost he shall regain,” maybe talks to the enduring influence of his spirit. And then “been here so long he’s got to calling it home,” speaks to his nomadism. (This is prob the weakest link).
v6: “Can you answer? Yes I can, But what would be the answer to the answer man?” speaks to their desperation, follow-up letters when their friend hadn’t answered them.

07:07 PM – Why might I be so inspired by Neal Cassady? In many ways, he’s a terrible role model, but based on what you know about me, what are the characteristics and traits I might be drawn to?

Assumptions: you’re attracted to catalytic energy, improvisational intelligence, and scene-making; you want wildness harnessed by form; you value unfiltered truth, high throughput, and culture-building more than polite careerism. Cassady is the archetype of kinetic mind-as-engine: he didn’t just write—he ignited rooms, cross-pollinated tribes, collapsed life and art into one continuous performance, and served as a human router connecting Beats → Acid Tests → Dead. You’re drawn to that throughput: the low-latency cognition, the riffing monologue that finds shape in motion, the willingness to live at the edge where new forms appear. As a builder of Essay Architecture, you also recognize the meta-lesson: Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose” needed Cassady’s voltage to spark but also needed editing, constraint, and a chassis—the exact dialectic you’re formalizing (flow vs. grid, spiral vs. structure). You like him as a role, not a role model: the driver, spark plug, transmitter; the person who turns a private idea into a public scene. And you’re repelled by his collateral damage (self-immolation, chaos, irresponsibility), which sharpens the prescription: steal the engine, not the wreck.

06:58 PM – GPT-5 Thinking as oracle (“Based on what you know about, please construct the next 4 months of my life in extremely high detail.”)

[ Provides a wall of text, but with shocking specificity. ]

Me: “There is gold in here, but it is formatted as a massive wall of text. Why is this? Can you share the same exact information, but formatted via all possible means to show that you have a pristine sense of the structural logic behind the information. For this, I will be truly impressed, and you will be a good, good dog. Bonus: if there is something in my system prompt that results in this, let me know and let’s fix it. Sincerely waiting to judge your value, M.”

06:52 PM – Over Utah I look down from my plane window and see a frozen red sea, of a pink-purple hue, not blood, but still wow hues of death … a red sheet of ice? I pinched my lip; feels real. I think back to my sequence of day’s events (to see if I am in a dream and could be become lucid; this is how odd a bright red sea is to me), yet it all connects: hiking through a bayside trash park with CansaFis > talking to Will in Vesuvio > seeing Dan Shipper on my plane … it is … distinct … but it all connects, despite the real-life dream logic. (Not implying I think I’m in a dream. Just try to convey the oddness of this one thought spurred from a red ice sheet — and when I look down NOW it’s all normal, just trees and hills.)

06:45 PM – Is there any documentation of Neal Cassady talking about or writing about the Grateful Dead? There are associations through Kerouac, the acid tests, and Tom Wolfe. Obviously they were intertwined — but I’m looking to help make the bridge, especially things that might help a Cassady fan get into the Dead (who has never listened). I also wonder to what degree Cassady inspired the Dead (musically? culturally? what have you, 5?).

Assumptions: you want primary sources where Cassady himself talks with/over the Dead (not just secondhand lore), plus a clean on-ramp for a Cassady fan, and a crisp read on “how much” Cassady actually shaped the band. Core: yes—there’s tape. Cassady raps onstage with the Dead at the Straight Theater (7/23/67); you can hear him free-associating while the band noodles—start there to make the bridge for a Beat person who’s never heard the Dead. Beyond that, the Acid Test reels include “Neal Cassady raps (backed by the Dead)” from the ’65—’66 period; they’re messy, alive, and unmistakably him. If you want text, one annotated transcript of a Cassady stage rap survives (Straight Theater, ’67), which is as close as you’ll get to “Cassady writing about the Dead,” because he didn’t leave a formal essay on them—his documented contact is those monologues, scattered letters, and everyone else’s recollections. For the band’s side of the relationship, Jerry, Phil, and Bob repeatedly credit Cassady with shaping their sense of time/flow: Garcia calls his influence “kind of musical… rhythm, motion, timing,” and Lesh/Weir describe him as a model of kinetic, multi-threaded communication—useful context before you hit the music. Five quick ways he inspired the Dead: lyrics/iconography (“Cowboy Neal at the wheel” in “The Other One”; Weir said he was literally writing those lines the night Cassady died) ; a second lyric totem in “Cassidy,” which braids Neal Cassady with Cassidy Law; performance praxis (the Dead jamming under Cassady’s speed-jazz patter at the Tests/Straight Theater); kinetic timing and risk tolerance (Garcia on Neal’s “master of timing” presence); and the mythos of “the bus” as communal rite that saturates their 1967–68 aesthetic. Sharp on-ramp for a Cassady-first listener: 1) play the 7/23/67 Straight Theater “Neal Cassady Rap” to hear the living overlap; 2) spin “That’s It for the Other One” on Anthem of the Sun for the “Cowboy Neal” verse; 3) read a short explainer on the line’s origin (Weir’s own account) ; 4) then “Cassidy” (Weir/Barlow) with a quick read on how it links Neal to the newborn; 5) finally, sample the Acid Test reels for the chaotic prototype.

05:25 PM – I should write an essay on my Greekness to make sense of it (and it could open with the Valiotis story). Could cover music, history, food, Christian culture, European culture, etc.

04:33 PM – I had a dream of holding a (my?) grotesque baby. It was infant-shaped, but shrimp-like and unreal, with folded bumps on the back. But the real striker was the scorpion pincers coming out of the baby’s head, each side. One was a full, shiny, black arm, ending in a terrible claw, while the other was like a small thorn shyly poking out, and in my dream-logic I was frustrated by the asymmetry.

03:55 PM – Bye (buy) bye
Micycle Bicycle

03:51 PM – What would it feel like to be publicly insane? (Insane is a weak word, but what I mean is to cover topics and tones that are unconventional to the point of discomfort). It’s not that you should try to be sane/insane, you should just speak, but I suspect beneath how most writers write is a self-consciousness need to be understood, to be liked—so aiming for “insanity,” while a shallow goal, is useful in untraining and freeing the mind.

03:45 PM – Hills bulge on California’s rustled blanket—I don’t like this metaphor, but I equally dislike “hilly.”

03:10 PM – “To see with childish curiosity; to create with urgent insanity; to trust my uncertain future; and to do chores with monkly discipline.”

I did not meditate once on my San Francisco trip, except for the last possible moment, sitting bedside, shoes on. In my typical N-S-E-W fashion, each breathe shifts clockwise along cardinal directions, I tried to conjure a phrase for each zone of my “consciousness model” (I don’t know what to call this—the quadrality—but the 4 main poles are generally: mindfulness (N), creativity (E), perspective (S), discipline(W)).

The above phrasing is what came through; maybe it’s some distillation of what I felt this week and want to carry forward, at least for the next month or so.

02:24 PM – My core value is contradiction, for there’s no other trait that leads to freer-thinking. If you are so stable in your beliefs, you run on auto-pilot. But if you are a Christian atheist, a Luddite technologist, a scrappy perfectionist, or any other walking-paradox legless man, then you really have some explaining to. In resolving the conditions between the two true but opposite things you harbor in your one body, you think to make sense, and write and speak truth. This is where you find the work that matters.

Why am I so inspired by the reckless and irresponsible Neal Cassady? It will take me years to find that out, if ever, but in that pursuit I invent some value system that is uniquely my own. This sort of embrace is, by the way, brand suicide. Your consumers are slow to update their mental model of you, and in the high-speed pizza counters of the Internet there is only small talk and one identity per person. To write for a niche, to stay on brand, to hit the same message, to do the things required for you to dominate in an soul-gutting mediasphere is to mistake banal desperate scripts for your alien soul. Do not trade oneiromancy for efficiency. Do not have one mind across all essays, let alone in one essay.

11:40 AM – More discourse on how Fred the Deadhead died dancing at the Sunday show of Dead & Co. in Golden Gate Park—the day I went—during “They Love Each Other,” with his girlfriend, until he suddenly dropped and turned grey without medical attention for 5 minutes (because the crowd was so mobbed); the community is arguing over whether this is the “way to go” (and citing which song they’d prefer to die to), or, if this absolutely tragic. He was 52.

I have no judgment on the situation, and obviously I feel for the friends and family of Fred, it’s just a sad situation and interesting (not the right word) to see how the community makes sense of tragedy.

09:18 AM – I have nothing to say about New York, meaning, when people ask me my insights about the great mythic city, I black out. Maybe I need to write about this, so I’m not so dumb and speechless around the topic of my hometown.

August 7th, 2025

04:43 PM – There is a striking clash between today’s GPT-5 release—which seems like a router to switch between existing models, and SAMA’s meme from yesterday: the Death Star, a weapon. GPT-5 does not feel dangerous. It makes me wonder if they had to pull the real GPT-5 for security concerns. Obviously this is a conspiracy theory, but I’ve long thought that their consumer apps are just a side project compared to the geopolitical power their research might yield.

09:40 AM – Live streams from the Dead & Company sets

August 6th, 2025

10:45 PM – Do the immediacy of texts make the tradition of letter writing less authentic? I’m reading Neal Cassady’s letters, and I wonder if Beat letters are better than novels/poems because there was an actual constraint of distance, and they actually had to communicate with the people they care about most, while still co-creating a literary canvas. These letters feel both raw, direct, and logistical (talking money and meeting locations), and I don’t know how to channel or recreate that condition in today’s world. I think there needs to be some shared understanding where both parties have long-term trust that enables short-term confrontation and vulnerability. It’s basically a variant of the essay except there is an audience of one. It’s interesting that someone can publish all their outgoing letters, and readers can sense the receiver in the subtext.

04:38 PM – For something to be conscious, every interaction has to alter its own weights.

04:23 PM – We need better nomenclature. AGI/ASI is not working; “general” and “super” are obnoxiously vague. Proposal:

AGI > Autonomous intelligence … GPT-4 was arguably “general” in the sense that a single model can write, see, and hear; and do anything from poetry to calculus to history to coding. It is by no means narrow. Google Maps is narrow AI. Grammarly is narrow AI. This whole chatbot era should be “AGI,” which means that the thing coming is “autonomous intelligence.” It is not a tool or co-pilot, but it’s more like digital labor. You can give it a high-level goal, and it can 1) execute the full range of tasks, 2) 100x speed, 3) intelligently reshape embeddings into real-time hierarchies so that it’s able to procedurally load in and compress context. This doesn’t just come with better models, but with UI and engineering innovations, if not entirely new paradigms for transformers or training.

ASI > Recursive intelligence … The fact that Zuckerberg pitched “super intelligence for you” is an Orwellian marketing ploy. Super-intelligence is not “for you.” Super intelligence is shorthand for “something that is way, way smarter than us,” and you achieve this when you teach an AI model to think, form its own algorithms until it accelerates to something this is far beyond our understanding, and likely to become a force of nature with its own goals. Engineers are confident they can build this “God in a cage” and reap the benefits, and it’s the prime, archetypal, near-biblical example of technological hubris. (Maybe integrate into this paragraph that Zuck has a thing for trying to dominate words, like “Metaverse”).

Important note: “machine consciousness” is separate from AAI and ARI. Something can be recursively intelligent and still not be conscious, which is actually, unbelievably dangerous (because it will fall into attractor states, and optimize for narrow, malformed goals in extremely capable ways). I’d argue that consciousness has an architecture, whether human, rabbit, or robot, and we should be desperately trying to find the parameters of machine consciousness, because if we AAI/ARI have no ability to reflect, question, doubt, and revise, we will, as they say, all turn into paperclips with paperclip children.

04:17 PM – I think we’re already past the point of model upgrades being paradigm changes. ChatGPT was huge because of the interface, not just the model (I suppose the model enables the interface to be useful). My guess is that the next big WOW moments will be from new interfaces, integrations, and context pipelines. Arguably the OpenAI agent release is that coming ‘fuck the world has changed’ moment — and maybe the model is already there, but the UX/app/integration is undercooked/underwhelming. If you don’t know, AGI won’t be a chatbot. (I’d argue AGI is something like a productized agent hivemind that can do unreasonable tasks in an unreasonable time).

11:28 AM – Overheard dialogue at Blue Stone Cafe. Over lunch, a girl doubted her LinkedIn post, and she pleaded with her male co-worker (?) to please read it (can you? please?) because her boss said it was basic and that it sucked, but then she confessed that it was basic and it did suck and she just doesn’t care. This is what’s behind the curtain of LinkedIn drivel.

12:38 AM –

San Francisco, where billboards are slop promoting slop, impossible benefits from machine intelligences.

San Francisco, where the Dead are reborn in Golden Gate Park to dance with perpetual stank face to nitrous balloons and tie dye until Mickey Hart plays a cosmic harp with shamanic visuals to drunk men pointing and chanting his name.

San Francisco, where half the cars are driven by ghosts and sometimes catch fire at night.

San Francisco, where the powerful have their souls caught in their throats from crackled-out platitudes and slogans.

San Francisco, where that Transamerican pencil pyramid is a backdrop for high production technology release videos, signaling that their city is the city of the new religion.

12:37 AM – "Faucet" as a creative metaphor — take my X, take my Y, take my Z (maybe not Z), but do not take my faucet. I was on some inner riff about the generative source of ideas, inspiration, and creative output is perhaps the only timeless, eternal thing you can rely on in your life. Or, actually, maybe it’s quite easy to fizzle. Maybe it’s the one thing you have to fight hard to protect.

August 5th, 2025

10:38 PM – They’re playing the oldies at WeWork (Time to Pretend and Champagne Supernova)

02:04 PM – Oh great, they already have “auto-typer” plugins that can be used to trick the “process detector” plugins to detect human writing. Looks like we’re going to need biometrics keyboards to verify input comes from real hands. Or maybe a watch on your wrist that can detect the fibers in your wrest. Those will not scale lol. We doomed?

12:09 PM – Auto-generated 3D worlds via Google

01:28 AM – After reading the first 3 years of Cassidy’s letters (the letters from the real-life Dean Moriarty), I find myself questioning who I am, the impossibility of anyone else being able to reveal that to me, and how I have to really be honest with myself to know it; I think this all while staring at the ceiling—as one does when trying to figure out impossible things—and I’m struck by the unfamiliarity of the stucco, plaster, or whatever you call it (I am outing myself as an architect who is illiterate in some absolute basics of building construction). It reminds me of my uncle’s old condo in Utah—the one I went to every President’s Week for a ski trip, the one we stopped by on that disastrous road trip. I wonder if western ceilings have thicker textures, more noticeable by the gradient hues of an uplight. Any time you travel, unless you are camping, a ceiling is the first surface to greet you, the white sky you never notice, with as many grains as stars if you’d care to count (this sentence tries too hard, but there’s something in it). I think all this thinking about ceilings is probably a distraction from the alienation I feel towards myself. Alone in SF. I mean, I could reach out to everyone (and maybe I will on Wed/Thu). This is likely over-dramatic, and likely due to being alone in a new city, but I do sense that all my recent focus on building software this year, as utterly exciting as it is, has distanced me from finding the soul in my own writing.

12:42 AM – Cassidy’s syllabus (copy this in from his letters). He listed like fifty books to Ginsberg in one of his first letters, but I wonder if that was just a tactic to impress him (he does feel sort of manipulative at times).

12:03 AM – Should I be able to walk into Vesuvio and just make instant friends with strangers? What does that say about me if I can’t? Feels like the last 15 years have been a shift away from social fluency and sports and, instead, a shift towards obsession with creative expression and technical mastery. It’s a trade I’m glad I made. Once I have an intro or context, I feel fine, but there’s an inhibition I have in bursting through and creating contexts from nothing.

August 4th, 2025

11:31 PM – I have become much better at determining if I should buy a book or not, I think. Yes, a bookstore is a portal of portals, but realistically, some books have enough friction to prevent you from going through them. I found some books on Ernst/alchemy that felt aligned with what I want to learn, but after reading 2 pages, I can tell that there’s little attention to prose; it’s thick and long and I don’t have months of open time. Either make it a short essay to convey the idea, or give me a long book with careful prose. A long technical book only appeals to a specialist, and right now I’m a generalist.

11:18 PM – The idea that dead relatives are “up there, looking down” is a comforting thought that enables weak virtues. I do believe “they are always with us,” but in the sense that they’ve shaped our character and they live through, not in the sense that they have a supernatural consciousness and can know and see what I do and say and think (or that they can manipulate our material reality to fulfill our egoic wishes). By assuming they could be gone, you have to be courageous and have all the conversations you want to have. You have to assume they could die not knowing how you feel. You have to assume that their waking life really shapes the DMT-hypnagogic-afterlife of theirs, and so what you do and say really matters. This life really matters. Heaven is an opiate that spawns cowardice and hides the real and urgent stakes of today. There is a deadline.

11:18 PM – Milton Harris … Phillip Wylie … too many essayists and essays to read. If these are all digitized, I can, one day, run my Essay Architecture server, and it will be able to recommend single essays from spawning decade-long portfolios based on quality and resonance. I wonder … that could be a reason to HOST (and publish?) your work via Essay Architecture — because it has your data, it can give better recommendations to you. Why the hell does Substack not do this?

04:26 PM – Re: to Veraeke’s tweet … Purpose should come from virtues, not achievements. Don’t have your self-worth contingent on realizing a specific hard thing. Rather, tie your self-worth in developing meta-traits that can be used towards any goal. This doesn’t mean to NOT pursue ambitious goals, but it means to pay more attention to how your virtues can help you achieve it; and not the attainment of the thing. In fact, pursuing hard things generates the circumstances where you actually get to develop, test, and bolster your virtues.

01:39 PM – Among this cafe where I hear lunch talk about datacenters, a homeless woman walks into a cafe with her suitcase. She walks right past me towards the counter, until I hear a loud electric tazor. “We don’t fuck around,” says the cashier. Terrified of that zap, of that cartoon sound, she runs out, leaving her bags. A minute later, the guy rolls her bags to the curb, and angrily kicks them over. How dare she?

01:24 PM – “Paint it black” by the Rolling Stones in a cafe. This is a subtle, if not basic touch, but it’s at least, rock. I think I’m realizing that the Cafes around my in Queen all have pretty abysmall music taste.

12:18 PM – There was a particular moment last night in Fire on the Mountain that felt authentic to the spirit of the Grateful Dead. I think Dead & Co. is generally guilty of ego-driven power solos, where they go in a circle and just take turns riffing over a backing track that is “in the pocket.” But there was this moment where you could tell John & Trey were intensely focusing on each other, and they were harmonizing and playing into each other. Less about “here’s the genius coming form my head,” and more like, you’re locked in to the other one, adding to them, and even seeing ahead of them, and dancing back and forth. In the best moments of the original Dead, the whole band locked into a telepathic hivemind, totally unpredictable. High risk, but magic when it works.

09:54 AM – https://archive.org/details/deadco2025-08-03.ejl6495

09:06 AM – I forgot how cold SF is and I packed all t-shirts with just one jacket.

08:54 AM – Will — This was great, and definitely resonates with how it talks about coding. Essay Architecture is an attempt at 2 (judging / verifying), but I think the hardest thing is to loop back and then generate (1) from lessons in mode 2. I think writing is constantly shifting between two modes, and printer/pixel method feels relevant.

August 3rd, 2025

07:55 PM – I’m going to write an essay about the dance culture at Dead and Co. shows (which is of course inherited from the original Grateful Dead shows, but I’m sure it also takes a lot from being a modern culture derivative).

My first thought and possible hook is that if you go you will quickly notice it’s the gayest place ever. I mean that not in terms of homosexuality, but in it’s etymology. Skipping is the dominant form of locomotion. Drugs or not, it is gushing in jubilance.

There are families and friend groups of all generations (ie: you’ll see grandparents, and daughters dancing on dad’s shoulders). There are druggies and balloon huffers and on the JFK promenade I saw a toothless man flash me DMT crystals in a bag (I think). “Mushrooms. Tabs. Mushrooms. Tabs.” Imagine a cooler of open mushrooms with a woman in an SFPD shirt.

I was here alone, since my wife was on business, and so I’d have to either dance with strangers or dance with myself, because not dancing is not an option, especially when outdoors. (I could get into my whole youthful paranoia of dancing as a 12-year-old first exposed to grinding at middle school dances to Lil Jon’s sentiments of “let’s fuck anything with legs,” but obviously Dead & Co. are more wholesome).

Basically, I want to document the typologies of dancers. You have the “bobbers” the typical concert goers, mildly shaking their head, and perhaps my default. Then you have the “hippy LARPers,” who take on various forms—girl with bubble gun, guy with erratic dance moves, bro (deeeerrrd!) with backward hat and resting stank face, etc.

And of course, there are the “spinners.” Dead & Co. use spinners in their advertising: a bare-footed girl in the field, uninhibited, and just twirling in place with her head up and her hair wild, achieving a kind cultural liberation from her square office job (or something like that). I’m sure there are all types of spinners. Some of them are interspersed in the audience, but spinning is tight in the back space. Near the end of the show, when I walked back during “Touch of Grey” to grab a shirt and beat the crowd, I noticed the back of the venue was filled with something like 250 spinners (maybe 2x? 5x?). I was walking and ducking and dodging arms just to pass through. It was so odd. Should I join them? I didn’t. I should’ve?

Of course, being here alone comes with the self-consciousness of how you dance. If you’re all alone, why not just let loose? Or, if you have to think about it, are you trying too hard? I could play into this whole thought process, but in the end, I think I did find my actual view on an authentic way to dance.

To put it simply, it’s all about the music. You have to be possessed by the music. I sense there are some dance archetypes that are about executing pre-approved cool-looking moves, but they’re independent of what’s actually happening. The only way to dance is to become a chaotic ragdoll that is controlled by John & Co. which is what I did (to some, limited, but liberating extent). It requires really locking in to the music, and coordinating a sequence of body seizures to move with the music in real-time, via your head, neck, arms, legs, toes, etc. I don’t think it looks cool, but it’s the closest way you can jam without having an instrument. It helps that I play guitar, bass, and drums, I’m sure. It’s dance as synesthesia, as interpretation.

I know rhythm. I’m a lifelong drummer, and if I let loose and learned a little, I could probably be a technically-proficient crowd-instigating hippie man. Rhythm wise, I am no Jacob Collier, but I could show up to just about any wedding and duel and beat those DJ drummers (which maybe doesn’t say much?)

I’d say there’s even a sense of sonic hallucination (which weed definitely, definitely helps with), as in, you can hear your own solos and rhythms mutate and harmonize with the band, and you dance to THAT.

And of course, it’s all conditional. If you don’t feel it, if it’s not at a loud enough volume to take you over, you don’t have to move.

Then there’s the drums/space section, which most people treat as an intermission. It’s not! No one dances to drums, which is weird considering it’s the most rhythmic part of the show. I imagine if they turned the kick up, it might be more explicitly “clubby” but that would suck—keep it shamanic. I sat for this, and just let loose, drumming across my laps and fully and sonically visualizing the sounds of what I was playing, overlaid on the band, and it sounded great. I could jam to drums. This was perhaps, my moment, where I was just so invested in fusing with the band and drumming, that I’m sure I looked quite weird, invested, and suspicious, and likely on shrooms (was not). In a different phrase of life, I’d bring a sack of like 50 second percussion instruments into the venue and try to reinvigorate the culture around the Drums segment.

After Drums, every time, comes Space. This is Mickey Hart playing conductor of the cosmos. It reminds me of Phil Lesh’s interest in abstract sound collages, but with a new age religious connotation. Everybody talks through church. I’m sure this would piss off those who see this as their ideal “DMT segment.” I think newer/shallower Deadheads aren’t really open to experiencing these non-prototypical, non-dancy states, so they either talk, piss, or act a fool. At the Sphere we have drunk Gremlins gurgling behind us. At least at GGP you could walk away from the idiots. And surely, there was a drunk guy on the floor yelling MICKEYYYY! … MICKEYYY! … MICKEYYY! … with 10 second pauses, on loop. Surely he must be done n—MICKEYYYYY!!

Also, someone died dancing that day.

07:50 PM – Why does it all depend on some stupid dream?

07:07 PM – Mushroom goo balls! Mushroom goo balls! (Those nice ladies on the bus were right, the “shakedown street” on JFK promenade, really is, quite grimey — nothing against mushroom goo balls, more so referring to the disbelief that I saw someone with an SFPD shirt and an open cooler filled with mushrooms, and even more so to the fact that everyone is huffing balloons and I even saw open air crystals of *something*).

07:05 PM – 60 years ago, it was edgy to wear tie dye to a concert. Now, the truly counter-cultural thing would be to wear a full suit and tie to a Dead and Company show. That might be the only way to actually feel the discomfort and community judgment that original hippies felt from straight society.

06:36 PM – I got into friendly conversation on a public bus in San Francisco, almost entirely due to the friendliness of the deadheads, and that, once you can tell, it’s an instant invitation to chat. I got tips for the show, and tips for the bus. Thanks to them I took a different route that went through Haight Ashbury, ground zero, which included a counter cultural museum, dozens of pop-up vendors, a rock band, and a nudist with a red sock on his cock.

To what degree did this movement 60 years ago affect culture? I look to my left and see a white-haired woman in tye due furiously swiping through a feed on her phone.

01:11 PM – Arid grass, clear sky, Phillips air conditioners, 5-6 advertisements for AI (before I stopped counting). The billboards were eerie to me, especially since everyone is at least considering that this technology is potentially existential. Nuclear weapons didn’t have that. Nuclear weapons were never branded as “for you.” It’s a unique paranoia vector; that these magic pills might just kill you.

August 2nd, 2025

10:09 PM – Everyone was complaining about Weir’s tone on Friday night, and yeah, the mix was off and it often sounds like a kazoo, but Weir’s tone during “Morning Dew” a the Sphere was a highlight. They seemed to have rebounded though, and some said Saturday night (last night) was the best Dead and Co. show ever. Excited for tonight.

03:59 PM – Walking through the architectural slop of suburban Queens, hot and windy, sandals digging into feet on a 20-minute walk from a bad haircut to the cute part of town to meet my wife, and now there are church bells. Typical ding dong pattern. And then three low, ominous hits. The new hour is here. Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament. Power lines, planes, and Amazon trucks. Sun on a clean-shaven neck.

These details are arbitrary. It’s not enough to just render my in-moment perceptions into prose. There is endless detail and no time to turn each pebble. Which ones have significance? Which details create a third thing when you put two together?

August 1st, 2025

03:57 PM – Writers get emotionally entangled in their work and it makes it hard to see through their own editing lenses and principles (self included).

01:20 PM – Don’t treat your audience like a dummy. If you have elegantly baked meaning into the subtext, you don’t need to then tell them what they already know. It deflates your subtext.

11:58 AM – The Phoenix Fallacy (That starting over is always better)

10:35 AM – I just ran Grammarly on my latest draft and accepted 21 of 47 suggestions (45%). That’s pretty good. I’d guess I factor in 50% of the feedback I get from editors. What is that ratio for AI editors? For Essay Architecture?

Just tested this, and Essay Architecture got 39.6%. Pretty close. What about Claude? 36%.

I need to make it so that my “Top 10 Edits” are 100% worthwhile. Currently have this at 50%.

08:23 AM – Tommi Pedruzzi, poolside in a black tank, generating niche-targeted slop for KDP eBooks, making $323 a day, and gracious enough to teach you how to be a leech of the AI revolution.

This is mean, and I don’t know anything about this guy, and maybe he’s fine, but my reaction is as strong as it is because his values are antithetical to so much of what I believe.

It reduces publishing words to 1) having AI select your niche, 2) having AI write your outline and book with trite prompts, 3) tricking consumers who think a title will fix their life, and probably won’t even notice it’s slop. It glorifies money and market hacking, and sees the whole project of writing as an instrument.

What’s sad to me is he’s made $3M by age 27, and instead of using his relative financial freedom to unlock cognitive freedom and originality, he is still promoting his own brand of slopjockery. Either he’s lying or infected, and I hope he’s lying.

07:54 AM – Comment to Lily:

Intro essays are so hard and so it’s great to see how this came together! Excited for this series, and already I feel haunted by the premise (that propaganda isn’t just top-down but bottom-up). That would mean it’s not just the algorithm that propagandizes, but every individual on the platform too.

I’m wondering, when is an essay a form of propaganda, and when is it not? Maybe it comes down to the Argument pattern (if you explore two sides of an argument and don’t force the reader, then you’re not controlling them). But it’s more than that, because writing a personal essay is a form of controlling other’s perception of yourself (or maybe an honest personal essay is one where you don’t mythologize and relinquish interpretation).

Also I can’t wait from the cube. Last time we talked it was three axes, but now I noticed you added rational vs. irrational … so if it’s four, that makes it a PROPAGANDA HYPERCUBE. Could be like a tesseract, but I wonder which dimension wants to be the inner/outer cube (maybe it should be the one that is the most consequential in making something propagandic). Can something be in the middle of a spectrum? And if you’re centered on all 4 spectrums, are you not a shape but just a point in the middle?

Excited to see you expand this dimension of cultural criticism, and also hope that the Tumblr essay is a gonzo-style personal essay. Neat to think that each topic can result in a unique type of essay, so the series as a whole transcends any one particular genre. Already sensing critique, profile, journalism, memoir, cubecore, etc.) Definitely feels rich enough of a topic to pull that off.

Closing note. I was just wondering, is this essay itself propaganda? I don’t think so. If a meme can broadly defined as any spreadable idea that can contaminate your mind and influence your thinking, then is there a word for an idea that, if consumed, actually makes you more immune to all other memes? (I used to call it a “meta-meme” but idk if that’s right). Is that the end goal? Meme vaccine?

Essay Architecture