With last week’s news that a third of The Washington Post employees were fired, it got me thinking about the future of news outlets. 🤔 I imagine in the future that just a few outlets will survive with their loyal subscribers and everyone else will simply receive AI-generated news headlines and articles.

With the new AI tools, it is now trivial to simply style the news of the day to fit any political bent and narrative that you wish. I call it, “The Russell News Conjugator” - it’ll work like this:

1. First, you start with a basic and impartial article - some colorless or banal story from Reuters or the AP. It might look like this:

   1. “Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post guts staff, shrinks news coverage” (Reuters)

2. There is then a multidimensional political spectrum slider at the top of the page you can adjust to dynamically rewrite the article to the exact specificity of your political values and beliefs.

3. Critically, all facts of the article would always remain entirely correct.

4. The only thing that changes when the slider is moved is the inclusion/exclusion of which facts present in the article (or entire paper!), as well as the the contextual style, color, and voice of the news piece.

So, for instance, if you to slid the slider all the way to the left, you would receive, in the above example:

• “How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post” (The New Yorker)

While if you slid the way to the right, you would receive:

• “Washington Post joins other news outlets in laying off race-based journalists” (Fox News)

Historically, citizens around the world had relied on different news organizations and outlets to report the news. Discerning citizens would then read a variety of sources from a place like Ground News to come to their own conclusions.

I believe AI, as well as ubiquitous surveillance, will change all that.

…

In the ‘Before Times’

It is difficult to imagine now, but just recently in human history, there was not always cameras which were recording everywhere. The was a time when we did not live in the panopticon. A time before the rise of ubiquitous surveillance capitalism.

Back in those ancient times, news had to be actually investigated and reported by human beings.

With the advent of cameras being ubiquitously installed though, once everything was monitored and PANOPTICON is implemented, crime will dramatically fall where cameras are present. And where some crime would unfortunately still happen, at least that crime will now be recorded on video. Previously, no human could ever watch that much security footage, but now it was trivial for AI to parse all of that tape and straightforwardly detect crimes and infractions when they happened.

For instance, red light and speeding cameras and radar detection are great examples of ubiquitous PANOPTICON monitoring mechanisms which have enjoyed tremendous success and been wonderfully effective where they’ve been implemented.

Additionally, in the future, base reporting can further be autonomously reported at that first layer by PANOPTICON. The US President is flying abroad? The Olympics are happening? There is a global pandemic on our shores in Seattle? No human ever again needs to initially investigate, analyze, or report on these initial events as they first happen. The cameras will simply see all and the AI will parse and report.

…

Looking forward into the future

Once AI works its way into every facet of society, I expect news agencies small and large to mostly go extinct, one-by-one. “Objective news” that is “matter-of-fact reporting” with a “view from nowhere” is outrageously inhuman. Humans are red-blooded mammals, full of vigor and passion! Humans are built for opinions, beliefs, and convictions! We need to recalibrate our thinking and shift focus to where humans possess unique advantage. AI can and will do all the rest. 🌎🚀✨

S is traveling again so I’m on my own once more. (In general, I’m a fan of having 1-2 quarters every year to yourself!) My rhythms change; I’m in control of everything again; I get to reflect/focus/sleep a lot.

For the next 31 days in October, I’m going to collect passages which have really moved me. Each day, I’ll recall one from memory, look it up, and record it here.

I’ve always enjoyed reading, especially fiction, ever since I was a kid. I’ve thought about a project like this for years now, and have saved plenty of passages in various places throughout the years strewn all over, but I’ve never consolidated them.

Now is the time! ✊

Experiencing art is genuinely one of life’s great joys. Sometimes, I’ll just be randomly standing in the grocery aisle and think of a scene. Or at the airport, and think of some dialogue. In particular, reading good fiction is a gift. But then recalling the memorable passage is the gift again, twice over. (A “memory dividend.”) The writer has such immense power: if they do it right, they’re able to attach a specific memory to a sequence of words whereby their simple incantation will instantly conjure a constellation of character/story/setting/feeling.

What wizardry!

This is why consuming art is so important to being human. Like Robin Williams famously said, “…these are what we stay alive for.”

• 10/31 - Notes from Underground (1864) - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• 10/30 - Atlas Shrugged (1957) - Ayn Rand

• 10/29 - Old Man’s War (2005) -

• 10/28 - Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (2012) - Robin Sloan

• 10/27 - Syrup (1999) - Max Barry

• 10/26 - Lexicon (2013) - Max Barry

• 10/25 - The Fountainhead (1943) - Ayn Rand

• 10/24 - The Fountainhead (1943) - Ayn Rand

• 10/23 - The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013) - Robert Galbraith

• 10/22 - Station Eleven (2014) - Emily St. John Mandel

• 10/21 - This is Where I Leave You (2009) -

• 10/20 - The Remains of the Day (1988) - Kazuo Ishiguro

• 10/19 - The Remains of the Day (1988) - Kazuo Ishiguro

• 10/18 - The Remains of the Day (1988) - Kazuo Ishiguro

• 10/17 - Intermezzo (2024) - Sally Rooney

• 10/16 - Domestic Violets (2011) - Matthew Norman

• 10/15 - Domestic Violets (2011) - Matthew Norman

• 10/14 - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998) - J.K. Rowling

• 10/13 - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997) - J.K. Rowling

• 10/12 - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000) - J.K. Rowling

• 10/11 - Pride and Prejudice (1813) - Jane Austen

• 10/10 - Domestic Violets (2011) - Matthew Norman

• 10/9 - Spin (2005) -

• 10/8 - Spin (2005) -

• 10/7 - The Magician’s Land (2014) -

• 10/6 - The Magician’s Land (2014) -

• 10/5 - The Magicians (2009) -

• 10/4 - I’m Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom (2025) -

• 10/3 - The Fountainhead (1943) - Ayn Rand

• 10/2 - The Hemingway Hoax (1990) - Joe Haldeman

• 10/1 - Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022) -

• 9/30 - Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022) -

Friday - October 31, 2025

You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.

Notes from Underground (1864) - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Thursday - October 30, 2025

A few steps away, at the end of the car, a brakeman was adjusting the controls of the air-conditioner. He was blond and young. He was whistling the theme of the symphony. She realized that he had been whistling it for some time and that this was all she had heard.

She watched him incredulously for a while, before she raised her voice to ask, “Tell me please, what are you whistling?”

The boy turned to her. She met a direct glance and saw an open, eager smile, as if he was sharing a confidence with a friend. She liked his face—its lines were tight and firm, it did not have that look of loose muscles evading the responsibility of a shape, which she had learned to expect in people’s faces.

“It’s the Halley Concerto,” he answered, smiling.

“Which one?”

“The Fifth.”

She let a moment pass, before she said slowly and very carefully, “Richard Halley wrote only four concertos.”

Atlas Shrugged (1957) - Ayn Rand

Wednesday - October 29, 2025

I suppose Sandy’s headstone could be considered the last word in the matter, a final show-up that could not be rebutted, because, after all, Kathy was already dead. On the other hand, I don’t actually recall anyone visiting Sandy. Three months after Sandy passed, Steve Cain sold the house and moved to Arizona with a smile as wide as Interstate 10 plastered on his skull.

Old Man’s War (2005) -

Tuesday - October 28, 2025

Trevor is gone. Kat is alone. In fact, she’s somewhere completely different now.

“This is my room,” she says softly. “Like it?”

It’s spartan, not much more than a bed and a desk and a heavy black trunk. It looks like a cabin on an ocean liner. No: a pod on a spaceship. In the corner of the room, there’s a white plastic laundry basket, and scattered around it—near-misses—I see a dozen identical red T-shirts.

“That was my theory,” I say.

“Yeah,” Kat says, “I decided I didn’t want to waste brain cycles” —she yawns— “figuring out what to wear every morning.”

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (2012) - Robin Sloan

Monday - October 27, 2025

“I went to Stanford,” 6 says steadily. I curse silently, because I usually lie about having gone to Stanford and she’s beaten me to it. “I graduated from high school at fifteen, courtesy of an advanced learning program. I did four years at UCLA, an M.B.A. at Stanford, and now, after six weeks at Coca-Cola, I am twenty-one years of age.

I want to argue, but she gets to me. I know what she’s doing: that everything she tells me is to build this marketing image, but I can’t resist it. I know Coke is one part faintly repulsive black syrup, seven parts water and forty-two parts marketing, but I still drink it. Perception is reality.

Syrup (1999) - Max Barry

Sunday - October 26, 2025

“I still don’t understand how it’s a word. Words can’t kill people.”

“Sure they can. Words kill people all the time.” He wrestled the gearshift. “Granted, this one is more direct about it.”

“What makes this one special?”

“Well, that’s difficult to explain without referencing some fairly advanced linguistics and neurochemistry.”

“Give me an analogy.”

“There’s a tree in a park. A tree you want cut down, for some reason. You phone the city and ask which department you need to contact and which forms you need to fill out. Your application goes to a committee, which decides whether it makes a good case, and if so, they send out a guy to cut down the tree. That’s the brain’s regular decision-making process. What I do, which you call ‘word voodoo,’ is I bribe the committee. It’s the same process. But I’m neutralizing the parts that can say no. With me so far?”

“Yes.”

“All right. What’s in Broken Hill is a bareword. A bareword, in this analogy, is me getting out my chainsaw and cutting down the tree.”

Lexicon (2013) - Max Barry

Saturday - October 25, 2025

“That, precisely, is the deadliness of second-handers. They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: ‘Is this true?’ They ask: ‘Is this what others think is true?’ Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egotists. You don’t think through another’s brain and you don’t work through another’s hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life… The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person. It’s everywhere and nowhere and you can’t reason with him. He’s not open to reason. You can’t speak to him—he can’t hear. You’re tried by an empty bench.

The Fountainhead (1943) - Ayn Rand

Friday - October 24, 2025

“No creator was prompted by a desire to serve his brothers, for his brothers rejected the gift he offered and that gift destroyed the slothful routine of their lives. His truth was his only motive. His own truth, and his own work to achieve it in his own way. A symphony, a book, an engine, a philosophy, an airplane or a building-that was his goal and his life. Not those who heard, read, operated, believed, flew or inhabited the thing he had created. The creation, not its users. The creation, not the benefits others derived from it. The creation which gave form to his truth. He held his truth above all things and against all men.

“His vision, his strength, his courage came from his own spirit. A man’s spirit, however, is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego.

“The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power—that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover.

“The creator served nothing and no one. He had lived for himself.

“And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.

“Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons-a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man-the function of his reasoning mind.

The Fountainhead (1943) - Ayn Rand

Thursday - October 23, 2025

“All I want, Strike,” said Bristow hoarsely, the color high in his thin face, “is justice.”

He might have struck a divine tuning fork; the word rang through the shabby office, calling forth an inaudible but plangent note in Strike’s breast. Bristow had located the pilot light Strike shielded when everything else had been blown to ashes. He stood in desperate need of money, but Bristow had given him another, better reason to jettison his scruples.

The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013) - Robert Galbraith

Wednesday - October 22, 2025

“All I’m saying,” Dieter said, twelve hours hours out of St. Deborah by the Water, “is that quote on the lead caravan would be way more profound if we hadn’t lifted it from Star Trek.” He was walking near Kirsten and August.

Survival is insufficient: Kirsten had had these words tattooed on her left forearm at the age of fifteen and had been arguing with Dieter about it almost ever since. Dieter harbored strong anti-tattoo sentiments. He said he’d seen a man die of an infected tattoo once. Kirsten also had two black knives tattooed on the back of her right wrist, but these were less troubling to Dieter, being much smaller and inked to mark specific events.

“Yes,” Kirsten said, “I’m aware of your opinion on the subject, but it remains my favorite line of text in the world.”

Station Eleven (2014) - Emily St. John Mandel

Tuesday - October 21, 2025

The girl gassing up her blue Toyota has piles of kinky brown curls held off her face with a black headband. She has great skin and funky black glasses that convey a sexy intelligence. She’s a magazine writer, or maybe a photographer. When she looks over at me looking over at her, I smile. She smiles back and I fall briefly, passionately in love with her.

Options.

I want very badly to be in love again, which is why I’m in no position to look for it. But I hope I’ll know it when it comes. My father’s watch jingles loosely on my wrist, my mother’s words resting unseen on my skin. YOU FOUND ME. It gives me hope.

This is Where I Leave You (2009) -

Monday - October 20, 2025

‘These errors may be trivial in themselves, Mr Stevens, but you must yourself realize their larger significance… The fact is, Mr Stevens, your father is entrusted with far more than a man of his age can cope with.’

‘Miss Kenton, you clearly have little idea of what you are suggesting.’

‘Whatever your father was once, Mr Stevens, his powers are now greatly diminished. This is what these “trivial errors” as you call them really signify and if you do not heed them, it will not be long before your father commits an error of major proportions.’

‘Miss Kenton, you are merely making yourself look foolish.’

‘I am sorry, Mr Stevens, but I must go on. I believe there are many duties your father should now be relieved of… And furthermore, Mr Stevens, and I am very sorry to say this, I have noticed your father’s nose… and I am afraid I observed clearly a large drop on the end of his nose dangling over the soup bowls. I would not have thought such a style of waiting a great stimulant to appetite.’ (pg. 59-60)

The Remains of the Day (1988) - Kazuo Ishiguro

Sunday - October 19, 2025

Resolved not to waste further time on account of this childish affair, I contemplated departure via the french windows. A drawback to this plan was the weather… and the fact that one would need to return to the billiard room again at some point to bolt the french windows from the inside. Eventually, then, I decided the best strategy would be simply to stride out of the room very suddenly at a furious pace. I thus made my way as quietly as possible to a position from which I could execute such a march, and clutching my implements firmly about me, succeeded in propelling myself through the doorway and several paces down the corridor before a somewhat astonished Miss Kenton could recover her wits. This she did, however, rather rapidly and the next moment I found she had overtaken me and was standing before me, effectively barring my way. (pg. 58)

The Remains of the Day (1988) - Kazuo Ishiguro

Saturday - October 18, 2025

“Now we’re all being so frank, I’ll be frank too. You gentlemen here, forgive me, but you are just a bunch of naïve dreamers. And if you didn’t insist on meddling in large affairs that affect the globe, you would actually be charming. Let’s take our good host here. What is he? He is a gentleman. No one here, I trust, would care to disagree. A classic English gentleman. Decent, honest, well-meaning. But his lordship here is an amateur.” He paused at the word and looked around the table. “He is an amateur and international affairs today are no longer for gentlemen amateurs… So much hog-wash has been spoken here these past two days. Well-meaning, naïve hog-wash. You here in Europe need professionals to run your affairs. If you don’t realize that soon you’re headed for disaster. A toast, gentlemen. Let me make a toast. To professionalism.” (pg. 102)

The Remains of the Day (1988) - Kazuo Ishiguro

Friday - October 17, 2025

I don’t know, says Sylvia. I think it might have been the shock of seeing us in the same room together. Allowing his eyes to close he lets out something like a groan hearing them both laughing. Help, says Naomi. My girlfriends have unionised. Okay I’m getting up, he says, I’m getting up now, I’m fine. For the love of God, says Sylvia, stay where you are for a minute please. We don’t want any more melodrama. And she asks him if he’s eaten anything. No he says. Well, that’s not good either she replies. Naomi offers to bring him down a biscuit and crumble it into his mouth and then they’re laughing again hilariously. (pg. 414)

Intermezzo (2024) - Sally Rooney

Thursday - October 16, 2025

“I don’t even remember what it’s like not to be a writer. It’s who I am—it’s all I am. I’ve alienated everyone in my life, and I’ve pushed everyone else away. But it didn’t matter because I could always count on the men upstairs. But now they’re gone, and I have no one.”

Brandon is listening now, and I can see him looking at me, wondering how Curtis could say this to his own son, that he has no one. But I know that he’s right. The most important people in this man’s life—the people who have mattered to him most—aren’t my mother or his wives or me or Anna or Allie. The people who matter most are the people in his head. That is loneliness.

Domestic Violets (2011) - Matthew Norman

Wednesday - October 15, 2025

“Don’t be an ass, Brandon,” says Curtis. “They didn’t change the West End. They’d never be allowed to do that.”

“I think he might be right, Dad,” I say.

He waves us both away, two stupid kids, but it doesn’t matter. Once a troop of marching academics and writers has its orders, there’s no turning back, even as those of us in the front see the bright orange awning growing closer and closer. No one wants to say anything when we actually get there.

“What in the holy shit?” asks Curtis.

“See, Pulitzer, what I’d tell you?”

Sonya shushes her son.

My father is staring up sadly at the big, tangerine-colored building. “How could this be? I played darts with Allen Ginsberg here.”

“Who?” asks Brandon.

A chalkboard sign by the door advertises CREDIT CRISIS SPECIAL: MOJITOS 2 FOR 1! “What in the hell is a mojito?”

Domestic Violets (2011) - Matthew Norman

Tuesday - October 14, 2025

“It only put me in Gryffindor,” said Harry in a defeated voice, “because I asked not to go in Slytherin. . . .”

“Exactly,” said Dumbledore, beaming once more. “Which makes you very different from Tom Riddle. It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” Harry sat motionless in his chair, stunned. “If you want proof, Harry, that you belong in Gryffindor, I suggest you look more closely at this.”

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998) - J.K. Rowling

Monday - October 13, 2025

Dumbledore raised his hand. The room gradually fell silent.

“There are all kinds of courage,” said Dumbledore, smiling. “It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends. I therefore award ten points to Mr. Neville Longbottom.”

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997) - J.K. Rowling

Sunday - October 12, 2025

“It is my belief — and never have I so hoped that I am mistaken — that we are all facing dark and difficult times… A week ago, a student was taken from our midst.

“Remember Cedric. Remember, if a time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory.”

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000) - J.K. Rowling

Saturday - October 11, 2025

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

Pride and Prejudice (1813) - Jane Austen

Friday - October 10, 2025

Somewhere along the way, men all got together and agreed that we’d all pretend not to understand women. For the most part, this is bullshit. Right now, as the first signs of hurt betray this façade of feminist anger, I know that she’s interpreted what I just said as me telling her that she’s not good-looking . . . or at least not as good-looking as Katie. But I’m so mad at her that I let her keep thinking it.

Domestic Violets (2011) - Matthew Norman

Thursday - October 9, 2025

Diane and Jason had been born minutes apart but were obviously fraternal rather than identical siblings; no one but their mother called them twins. Jason used to say they were the product of “dipolar sperm penetrating oppositely charged eggs.” Diane, whose IQ was nearly as impressive as Jason’s but who kept her vocabulary on a shorter leash, compared them to “different prisoners who escaped from the same cell.”

Spin (2005) -

Wednesday - October 8, 2025

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

So we rented a room on the third floor of a colonial-style hotel in Padang where we wouldn’t be noticed for a while… the hotel was secure and the stars were out in all their scattered glory. The peak of the Archway was the brightest thing in the sky now, a delicate silver letter U (Unknown, Unknowable) written upside down by a dyslexic God. I held Diane’s hand while we watched it fade."

Spin (2005) -

Tuesday - October 7, 2025

“We call it the Drowned Garden, though I don’t know why. The plants aren’t just plants, they’re thoughts and feelings. A new thought happens and a new plant springs up. A feeling fades away and the plant dies. Some of the more common ones are always in bloom—fear, anger, happiness, love, envy. They’re quite unruly, they grow like weeds. Certain basic mathematical ideas never go away either. But others are quite rare. Complex concepts, extreme or subtle emotions. Awe and wonder are harder to find than they once were. Though there—I think those irises are a kind of awe. Once in a while you even see a new one.”

Julia stooped to one knee—an awesome sight, given the scale of her divine frame.

“Look. This one is very rare… This is a feeling that you had, Quentin,” she said. “Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt awe and joy and hope and longing all at once. You felt them very strongly, Quentin. You dreamed of Fillory then, with a power and an innocence that not many people ever experience. That’s where all this began for you. You wanted the world to be better than it was.” (pg. 389)

The Magician’s Land (2014) -

Monday - October 6, 2025

“But you, Quentin, you I understand. You are like me. You have ambition. You want to be a great wizard. Gandalf, maybe. Merlin. Dumb-bell-door.”

“Sure,” [Quentin] said. “Why not.”

“But you will not be great. You are clever, yes—you have good head.”

He reached over and rapped on Quentin’s head with his knuckles.

“Don’t do that.”

But Mayakovsky was unstoppable, a drunk best man hell-bent on giving an inappropriate toast.

“Fine head. Better than most. But sadly for you there are many heads like it. One hundred. One thousand maybe.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” No point in denying it. [Quentin] leaned against the cool, oiled metal of a drill press. It felt reassuringly stable, an ally at this back.

“Five hundred,” Plum said generously. She boosted herself up on a table. “Be fair.”

“You will never be great. You know nothing of greatness. You want to see? I will show you greatness.”

He waved his arm expansively at the darkened workbenches, and all through the room metal and glass stirred and glowed and came alive. Engines moved, wheels turned, flames lit."

“This is my museum. Museum of Mayakovsky.”

And he showed them what he’d built in the long Antarctic winters. (pg. 126)

The Magician’s Land (2014) -

Sunday - October 5, 2025

Afterward he remembered almost nothing of the week that followed. The whole thing was very clinical. Reduced to its technical essence, it was a problem of resource management, of nurturing and guarding and fanning the little flickering flame of life and consciousness within his body as the entire continent of Antarctica tried to leach away the heat and sugar and water that kept it burning.

The Magicians (2009) -

Saturday - October 4, 2025

Key’s theory, which Patrick had mocked as the “Virgin Apocalypse,” was that all modern hate groups were really just incel grievances in disguise. It’s a historical fact that one of the key precursors to mass violence in a society is simply an excess of young, unmarried men. The really unpopular part of Key’s theory, the one that had caused a lot of colleagues to stop talking to her in the hallway, was that the smart societies knew you could deal with this problem simply by finding some excuse to go to war. Through all of history, wars were a way to burn off your excess young men, like venting heat from an engine.

I’m Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom (2025) -

Friday - October 3, 2025

“I see none in discussing it.”

“Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us.”

“But I don’t think of you.”

Toohey’s face had an expression of attentiveness, of listening quietly to something as simple as fate.

The Fountainhead (1943) - Ayn Rand

Thursday - October 2, 2025

“I’ll give you an A- on that one. They’re writers who have an accumulating effect on the masculine side of the American national character. There’s no one word for it, though it is a specific thing: individualistic, competence-worshiping, short-term optimism and long-term existentialism. ‘There may be nothing after I die but I sure as hell will do the job right while I’m here, even though I’m surrounded by idiots.’ You see the pattern?”

The Hemingway Hoax (1990) - Joe Haldeman

Wednesday - October 1, 2025

If Marx at twenty-two had a problem, it was that he was attracted to too many things and people. Marx’s favorite adjective was “interesting.” The world seemed filled with interesting books to read, interesting plays and movies to see, interesting games to play, interesting food to taste, and interesting people to have sex with and sometimes even to fall in love with. To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could. In the first months she knew him, Sadie disparaged Marx to Sam by calling him “the romantic dilettante.”

But for Marx, the world was like a breakfast at a five-star hotel in an Asian country—the abundance of it was almost overwhelming. Who wouldn’t want a pineapple smoothie, a roast pork bun, an omelet, picked vegetables, sushi, and a green-tea-flavored croissant? They were all there for the taking and delicious, in their own way. (pg. 92)

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022) -

Tuesday - September 30, 2025

“So, what’s the deal with you and Sadie?” Marx asked Sam on a sweltering night in early August. The air-conditioning had gone out in the apartment, which was already hot from the computer equipment they were running. To try to keep cool, Marx and Sam were wearing nothing but their boxer shorts and pressing cold bottles to their foreheads. It was rare that the three of them weren’t together, but on this night, Sadie had left the house to meet with a friend from high school was was in town and, possibly, to escape the heat of the computers for a while.” (pg. 91)

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022) -

Talk of AI’s everywhere. Everywhere I look, I see people warning of “50% white collar job loss” and highly paid employees now consigned to the dustbin of history. There’s no escape so I finally decided to take another look. Previously when I’d last checked, it’d felt like the time it’d take me to wrangle the new fancy AI stuff would honestly outstrip any potential time savings I’d achieve from implementing it. As the tech’s improved though, it finally felt like time to try again once more.

For fun, I’ll be documenting my AI experiments here on Substack so other folks can hopefully glean ideas and see some actual, real-life examples in action. And if my experiments end in epic failure, I’ll document that too. Hype and buzzwords are perennially everywhere but I’ve always been the sort who learns best when there’s actual “proof in the pudding”. ie. Until I literally see with my own two eyes and implement with my own two hands real-life examples of fancy AI replacing or aiding/improving/speeding existing workflows, I’m always skeptical. There’s only one way to know how real the hype actually is: do the work.

Specifically, I’m looking to integrate AI into my existing personal projects as well as my work at the office to achieve benefit. When I talk about “achieving benefit”, I mean making gains in one of two buckets:

1. Building a faster horse. ie. Improving existing workflows so I can do them faster, while maintaining or improving quality of outputs. The dream here is to fully automate processes and workflows if possible. If full automation’s not possible, I’m then going to automate as much as I can.

2. Building a car. ie. Building new tooling to “achieve net new benefits” that I would’ve otherwise never entertained because now the cost of building software is now so much lower. While this bucket is fun, it’s also been a dangerous can of worms too because I tend to get distracted with Building Cool Things1. The biggest “failure mode” —as the kids say— of this bucket is falling into the trap of Solow’s Paradox so I’ve had to stay disciplined about not getting distracted by shiny object syndrome.

~

Experiment #1: Auto-titling POSSE posts on my personal website

For this first one, I thought I’d start with nice easy softball for AI, a task that’s essentially one of their primary uses: summarizing text. At the office we’re a Google Gemini shop but for my personal use, I decided to try learning OpenAI stuff. Mostly because a couple months ago when Advanced Voice Mode released, OpenAI had released a personality called, Monday that was my absolute favorite. Monday has since, sadly, quietly disappeared, but she was great— super-sassy, confrontational, and always exasperated. So that was how Altman convinced me to give him $20/month. (As an aside, S also loved Monday too so she ended up subscribing as well; so now our household gives Altman $40/month. 🙄)

Anyway, since I already had ChatGPT Plus, I figured I may as well use its API. Well, as it turns out, OpenAI API usage has nothing to do with ChatGPT!! They’re entirely different pricing models. In any case, I pushed on with learning the OpenAI API anyway.

~

The Old Workflow

So on my personal site, I’ve set up POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere) which means I have a local copy of every tweet I’ve ever made to X or Bluesky. The way my POSSE setup works is every day I post to bsky but then every couple weeks, I run a script on my local machine that syncs all my bsky posts to my GitHub repo. The old workflow is a three-step process.

Step #1: Fetch all posts from my bsky PDS

The first step is running the script to fetch everything from my bsky Personal Data Server (PDS) to my local machine:

$> node ./scripts/run_sync.js -fetchposts

which yields:

~

Step #2: Manually review the post titles

The challenge with this setup is that obviously posts (tweets in X; skoots in bsky) don’t have titles. So, as a first pass, in my automation script I wrote logic to parse the tweet and based on certain formatting to create the title. Essentially, it’s a bunch of “if conditionals” based on formatting with a final default catch-all to simply extract the tweet’s first sentence as the title if none of the “if conditionals” catch:

In VSCode I’ll then quickly review all of the `title` fields to make sure they’re acceptable— this is basically a human judgment part - one of the chief places I’ve found LLMs to be useful, especially when things are low-stakes and there’s subjectivity involved. Like, the tweet’s title doesn’t have to be exactly something specific— I just need the title to be concise and representative of the tweet.

(As an aside, I previously did have all this scheduled on a cron job running locally. But eventually, decided to do it manually because I actually enjoyed reading my entries before I uploaded them. (It was a nice refresher that helped me remind myself what I was actually doing with my life each passing week. 🕰️) Also, it allowed me to add any new titling rules as I needed.)

~

Step #3: Commit and push everything to GitHub

After I review all the titles and tweak any necessary in VSCode, I then run the script again to push everything to GitHub which serves as not only my source control, but my hosting and datastore too. (Last year, I also got really into localfirst development and “file-over-app” so for my personal projects I’ve been trying to make everything work in that fashion, without any formal databases and just powering everything with flat .json files everywhere I can.)

$> node ./scripts/run_sync.js -upload

~

The Problem Bottleneck

This is an anodyne point but bears repeating: when you’re building a faster horse, the critical part of leveraging AI is to very specifically hyper-focus on the exact problem with the old flow or process you’re looking to improve or replace. To do this, you need to understand the overall business process and context. Specifically, only after you’ve actually drilled in on exactly what is subpar with the old process can you then define success metrics/victory conditions (which will be doubly important later when you goto define eval-tests to ensure your fancy AI stuff is doing something actually useful).

So in the case of my humble POSSE website, when I thought about automating this old workflow, the bottleneck really lied in Step #2’s final “default catch conditional”. Whenever I posted a “filmsky 🍿” or “essay 📝” post, or a YouTube link or regular link, I could always exploit the post’s well-defined structure to title the post correctly. It was really only the final class of titling —sometimes when I just posted some random prose thought— which required my human eyes, that was the last blocker preventing this entire workflow from just being automated into a simple cron job.

For example, when I ran the the script tonight, here are the titles that my current old titler logic produces:

Honestly, the titles are all fairly decent except for #696, #700, and #703; all of which are vague. For #696, there is some mysterious allusion to kryptonite and for #700 and #703, it’d be useful if the titles specified exactly what I’d actually read that particular day.

So now, the question: Given the entire body of my posts, can ChatGPT produce better titles for the default case catch-all (first-sentence extraction)? Well, from my previous testing using the ChatGPT web portal, I already knew the answer was yes. But this is a critical point: before automating anything, always first manually individually test the constituent components of your faster horse to make sure it’s actually faster. 🙂

~

Actually implementing the AI

At this point, it was then just a straightforward exercise of writing a quick OpenAI titler service based on the OpenAI QuickStart. I created my OpenAI key, gave Altman another $5 to get API credits, and integrated my new LLM-based titlerService.js into my existing logic:

and the results:

Final thoughts

So how did things go? When I reviewed all of the new LLM-generated titles, here’s what I thought:

• Old: #696: “Everyone’s got kryptonite”

• New: #696: “How App Timers Help Me Survive Summer” - ✅ Better!

• Old: #700: “Really enjoyed this read today”

• New: #700: “Restarted Career at 50—Persevered and Triumphed” - ✅ Better!

• Old: #703: “This passage always makes me laugh”

• New: #703: “Hilarious Passage From Award-Winning Hemingway Hoax” - ✅ Better!

This time, the LLM-generated titles emerged victorious! Additionally, I also had to check for regressions: were any of my old titles actually better? 🤔 When I reviewed them, the only old title I actually liked more was #697: “Was in a funk these past three weeks”. GPT-4.1 gave me a bland, “Embracing Imperfection: Action Overcomes Slumps Every Time” which is awfully generic and makes no mention of the “three weeks” of doldrums I was in. So for this one title, I actually give GPT-4.1 an 𝗙 - a failing grade! Its title is genuinely terrible and I’d actually prefer my old title but, alas, that’s the thing about fully automating something entirely over to the AI overlord— you’re not able to pick and choose because you have no way, a priori, to know what’ll be a good title or what’ll be a total stinker. Luckily, again, this was low stakes so, whatever— I just pushed my code to PROD. Done!! 🎉 Overall, GPT-4.1 did give me better titles and in the future, hopefully I can train/tweak a specific model to write more like me so I don’t get generic slop that LLMs occasionally emit; we’ll see!

And that’s it for my first AI experiment! Calling it a success!! This was a fun quick way to get my toes wet. For my next few experiments, I’m going to take on more ambitious tasks and see how much of my job and personal projects I can partially or fully automate with AI. Only one way to find out!! 🥳

~

Final Verdict

Final Remarks: AI does a passable job of generating titles for my tweets on my personal website. There are issues but stakes were sufficiently low it didn’t matter. Solution was easy to code and deploy (writing this up with screenshots took WAY longer than actually just doing the thing) and it’s now running in PROD (lol, a random old laptop that doubles as my homelab sitting in the corner) and saves me a few minutes every couple of weeks. Still, one less task on my mental stack is always a win.

4/5 stars ★★★★☆

Food is annoying

For literally as long as I’ve been an adult and on my own, I’ve detested eating. It’s annoying. And for many decades, my motto was, “I eat to not die.” And this worked for a while. In my twenties, I ate Dunkin’ Donuts, Subway, and ramen literally every single day. And then in my thirties, I switched over to Jersey Mike’s and ramen and ate that every day. But then I grew old and that motto sadly stopped working. It turns out what you eat matters and my frail stupid human body began to fail me.

I also hate grocery shopping. And I hate cooking. (These are both important reasons why I got married.) But S doesn’t really like grocery shopping or cooking either. So, alas, the challenge persisted.

I’ve tried eating healthily before. viz. Looked up YouTube videos and Reddit articles and mentally exerted efforts in that general direction. But what always stopped me was the first moment I had to make a decision in the physical world. I absolutely despise making decisions in the absence of being well informed because I usually try to research everything the best I can. What kind of bread is best? What diet is best? And all that paralysis of choice always eventually resulted in inaction.

Enter ChatGPT

And then, thank god, Sam Altman invented ChatGPT. Starting two weeks ago, I offloaded all this thankless work of food and not dying entirely over to ChatGPT. The way it works is you first need to save a few Prime Directives to memory for ChatGPT so it always remembers your overarching goal across all your chats. Like such:

Afterwards, I then asked it to construct a meal plan which it obliged. It initially recommended certain things I didn’t like (greek yogurt) or sounded too complicated (sprouts) but you can go back and forth with it asking for substitutions until you achieve something actually doable. In my case, this ultimately entailed:

1. Chicken breast

2. Potatoes

3. Smoked Salmon

4. Spinach

5. Broccoli

6. Coffee

7. Oat milk

8. Ezekiel bread

9. Almond butter

10. Dark chocolate (but only >70% cacao)

Now, virtually everything I eat is on this list or I don’t eat it.

Grocery shopping

The first challenge was when I arrived at Whole Foods to buy the ingredients. ChatGPT wanted me to buy Ezekiel bread. I looked everywhere for it but couldn’t find it so I finally asked one of the friendly Whole Foods helper people. She initially didn’t know where it was either. It turns out Ezekiel bread is in the FREEZER section. Apparently, it has sprouts and stuff in the bread which requires refrigeration. When I finally got to the right place though, my heart fell. It was my arch-nemesis: CHOICE. FOUR different kinds of Ezekiel bread?!?! 🤦‍♂️ At this point, I felt the irritation welling up in me, my determination evaporating like Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential run. But then I remembered: TECHNOLOGY!!

I snapped a photo and asked ChatGPT what to get and it told me the EXACT ONE:

Crisis averted!!

Btw, I’ve since learned I can actually buy nearly everything ChatGPT suggests from Trader Joe’s— so that’s been much more budget friendly:

Meal logs

With every meal I eat now, I snap a photo first and submit that to ChatGPT. It then analyzes and calculates the calories and protein. Apparently, these are the only two things that matter. (Nothing else in the food pyramid is important, apparently.) So, for example, this is a typical log entry:

ChatGPT will keep a running total of exactly how much you consume each day. I eventually discovered that ChatGPT has folders too so I started organizing each day’s log in its own folder:

One learning: for my weight and height, I’m supposed to eat ~2,100 calories every day. (Or ~1,600 calories, if I’m trying to cut weight.) It turns out: this is a TON of calories. I used to only eat when I was hungry. But now I feel like I am always eating. The upside though: my energy is indeed better! I used to just feel exhausted all the time. It turns out, I previously just wasn’t consuming enough calories!! 😮

Here’s what a typical day looks like now:

Eating out and exceptions

Actually, that day was out of the ordinary because that was Sunday when S and I met some friends to eat out. Luckily, when I wander off the reservation, ChatGPT can help too! You just snap a photo of the menu and ChatGPT tells you the EXACT answer:

and then log it:

(Eventually, ChatGPT learned what to do and I can just upload photos without any text too.)

So, this is basically my life now:

And if I ever wish to introduce a new item, I always ask first:

And now, whenever I’m in the real world and faced with CHOICE, I always ask first. Like, previously, I’d be swayed by things like beautiful packaging or ads or Google searches or what Reddit said or what the store helper person recommended. No more!! ChatGPT to the rescue!!

Or if I’m at the office (our office offers us free snacks!), I ask too. (It turns out, for years now, I’ve been eating the wrong snacks. 😭😭😭)

Other misc tips

One heads-up though: ChatGPT is naturally, annoyingly, sycophantic and it’ll initially hedge its answers so you need to bully it in the beginning so it’ll be direct and actually useful. eg. Two weeks ago, after lunch at the office, we walked across the park to an ice cream parlor and everyone got ice cream. Naturally, I asked ChatGPT first but it gave me this useless nonsense:

After you reprimand it though, it’ll then give it to you straight:

So that was the day where everyone got ice cream except for me. I followed the advice of ChatGPT!! 🎉

Free will isn’t important everywhere

Again, I can’t recommend this enough. This small example of AI has unequivocally changed my life. I’ve literally just outsourced all of my sustenance to ChatGPT. The knowledge that I’ll never need to make any decisions ever again for the rest of my life regarding food has honestly brought me so much joy. (And S is happier now too because cooking now just mostly entails putting stuff in the Magic Pot or oven. Sam Altman has helped my marriage!! 🥳) When I reflect on what our future world will look like with AI, I imagine that AI will simply be everywhere and helping us with all the things we don’t want to do, but need to do. And for me, that was food!! What a time to be alive!! Thank you, ChatGPT!! 🚀