h. Play

Like, I’m tired of drinking water and wiping my face.

People are sedated. That’s the biggest change.

It’s hard to remember how 10 years ago was. Before the pandemic. Before people increased their phone usage by 1,000%. But things were more solid. Sharper. That’s saying a lot because the 2010s were a continuous loss of control.

Today we are in a constant blur. We don’t understand anything. Everything is sus. So, sedation (endless entertainment, widespread gambling culture etc). Social isolation (group chats, exclusive membership, etc). And hivemind mindset (see above).

In the past decades, the last bastion of  “checking on wtf is going on in the back” was the press. People would read articles, investigations and stay on their feet. This is completely gone. Folks don’t have opinions or personal perspectives. It’s all regurgitated from our digital hoses, making us more docile and fragile. People in power abuse that shit.

The press died through the internet, Meta and Google adwords. It became a weak ass bitch and when it wasn’t, billionaires killed it. Gawker is the first publication where I read that Mr. Cosby had raped a couple women and I remember thinking “boy ya’ll better have some good lawyers”. But they were sadly more than right and were sued for $140M for some unrelated stupid sex video which killed them.

Anyway, there is absolutely nothing independent checking on anything in America at the moment. The moment is all about collusion and merging quietly. It’s frightening.

The stream. The feed. They’re washing away any kind of analysis. Things are already somewhere else. People don’t have the time to truly take it in and question things properly. It’s all in movement, as if life was all about reacting, constantly.

We know life needs steadiness. Some static quality to it. The horizon, the sun, the sky. The constant flow and acceleration make us make tons of mistakes. Make us lose the plot. Make us forget of all the progress we can make without a private company’s growth concerns in sight. We have so many tools to help ourselves.

Keep looking. Keep searching, reaching for other solutions. Break free from sedation.

A week later and I already don’t care about the doom and gloom AI scene.

This week a few people voiced their lack of concern about the AIpocalypse. It seems more and more obvious that a bunch of folks want more money for “AI safety”. Bro, just disconnect the ethernet cable and the AI won’t go nowhere. And if it’s too late, why do you need money for?

Meanwhile I’m building some software with an AI agent for my customers, and the feeling of freedom is like running down a hill, laughing your ass off. Iteration speed is unmatched. There’s no going back. I go home trying to visualize the ramification of such powerful tools, and it’s leaving me thinking for hours.

In the meantime people are head down their phones at all times everywhere I look, and then I get snaked by a Waymo car, passing on the right using the useless, gentrification-stamped bicycle lane.

Life is good for me, and pretty damn wierd too.

Basing all decisions, designs and processes on data points, has been making the world bland and pale.

Very long article very well worth the read (phenomenal work, that scene writes a lot, or is it bots now?):

https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse

A Harry Potter fanfic used as a recruiting pipeline. Psychological workshops that former participants describe as coercive. A program for breeding smarter children, promoted by an AI institute. A sex worker from Idaho who became one of the subculture’s most-read writers and now runs an AI-doom propaganda residency with Grimes, Elon Musk’s ex-girlfriend. A splinter sect that fled to tugboats and whose members have been linked to six deaths. And a blogger who wanted to abolish democracy, found the ear of several billionaire patrons, and watched his ideas come to fruition in the vice president’s office.

I am aware, that if you are not lurking on the internet as much as I do, of how utterly insane that paragraph sounds. However, every bit of it is heavily documented by numerous sources.

Uh,

I mean in a sense morbidly online people who have been morbidly online their entire lives, self-centered, coming from religious backgrounds and tripping out, right. That makes sense.

But also no, what the actual fuck is going on?

In the middle of this wonderful book called Two Wheels Good. The History and Mystery of the Bicycle.

And it hit me. Reading is like a conversation with myself. The author goes somewhere, I follow, stop them, create my own reasoning, let them keep going. Try to predict where it’s going. Etc.

It’s as if we were trading the wheel on the freeway. I take the wheel because a paragraph reminisces me of something lived a while ago. A similar situation, maybe or something related. Then I wander a bit around it, trying to see multiple perspectives. Working up my memory and imagination. And then I go back to the block of text and its muse, the author. Who takes back the wheel and I just look around, observing.

There is none of that with video and audio.

You become a complete prisoner. If you voice yourself, you can’t. It will be weak, under breath. You never really use your intellect when you’re listening to someone or watching their live feed.

This is why reading is so fundamental. It is the best tool for intelligence, period. It is a gym for the brain.

It doesn’t work with a conversation with someone or multiple people, for people are biased and have agendas. When you read, it’s just you and the author. That’s a clean state to build up from because there’s only your bias and the author’s to deal with. No third layer that fucks it all up.

There’s truly a hivemind culture born from social media/phones/podcasts use, no reading whatsoever, and it’s not helping our world.

Recently I really have been feeling the sedating effect of all-day videos that people are going through. People read less. Despite more access to knowledge than ever, people question less than ever.

I’m concerned.

‘was reading Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden (1973) this summer after reading Gillian Anderson’s Want (2024).

First of all,

And then,

But! After the turn on and hot fantasies, it is very interesting.

It was published 50+ years ago and despite everything that improved in western sexual culture (for lack of better term), all the inclusivity,  the freedom, women are still not sexually that free. It is still so hidden and weird. It starts early:

I mentioned in an earlier chapter that I think a woman’s divorce from sex begins with her childhood exclusion from adventure and exploration, both physical and mental, and those limited, limiting toys and games allowed to her. It’s as if it were a crime for a young female body to get knocked about and bruised in play, as if the crime were in the contact of anyone or anything with her body. And the feeling that it’s a crime to be touched, even by herself, increases in her teens, so that if she stumbles upon it by accident, the ground for guilt has already been prepared.

We still prevent young girls from doing what young boys do that is, enjoy your own body and stretch its limits. Jump as high as you can. Smell your armpits, toy with your genitals. It’s still in 2026, kind of a thing “boys do” and “girls do too, but kind of shouldn’t because uh we don’t know lol”. It is still not clearly “your body, yours forever, use it, cherish it” for all. It must be absolutely confusing for preteens. We set women for eternal confusion/guilt right from the start (I can’t even imagine the religion added layer). Nancy goes on:

If her own hands are hesitant to touch what’s obviously and tangibly hers, how much chance does her mind have of exploring the possibilities of that body? And where would she get the rudimentary material her imagination needs to build with? What books or magazines offer any more than her childhood toys, incentive or ideas for sexual fantasy concerning this body that’s so out of bounds?

Yo no sé. And the plot thickens in today’s world. Young girls have smartphones and check porn, I imagine. If you’re a 12-14 year old girl excited about things you see in porn in your own privacy, how do you deal with it? How do you feel, is guilt super strong? Are you willing to talk about it with friends? I imagine that it’s still difficult and risky. Society is extremely ambiguous around women’s sexual freedom, despite a skyrocketing sex toy industry and the common understanding that women are just as sexual as men. But it’s not fully acknowledged. It’s fucking bizarre! It’s the result of patriarchy’s little hold left. But that hold is actually super strong.

By the time she’s twelve they’ve got her senses all tied up: Nice Little Girls don’t do “those things”; Nice Little Girls also don’t look—thus the fig leaf, just in case they do. And as Nice Little Girls don’t even think about those things, even the fig leaf becomes a mystery. Later, when the mystery is solved and the fig leaf removed, women look (at least some do), but they still don’t speak. The conspiracy of silence that began with her mother, and which makes each woman her own jailer, keeps women verbally tongue-tied and as securely blocked off from their minds as their minds are from their bodies.

Even in secured group chats today, girls probably are not saying everything like boys have been instructed to.

No one wants to know, to hear, or to talk to her about it—she’s “not old enough,” the subject’s is “not nice,” and she knows that hearing about it would make Mummy “nervous”—that much she does know. All this only makes the forbidden bits of knowledge more provocative. And so these thoughts join the other odds and ends of exciting, sometimes disturbing sensations, daydreams, the other secrets she’s been accumulating—or repressing—while growing up. By the time she’s stopped playing with dolls, during that long lull before she begins any meaningful contact with boys (I don’t necessarily mean sex), she’s got enough powerful imagery packed away in her head to staffer the horniest writer of the most exotic porn she ever found in her older brother’s room.

I had never thought about that. This checks out with how adult women often talk about sex so elusively. Half a century later. smh.

The contrast with boys is immense. At the same age we’re supposed to start “chasing pussy”. The preteen stage for boys is when ejaculation starts being a reality and we’re supposed to let that energy consume us, making us real dudes or something. There is zero guilt for us. There shouldn’t be any for girls.

My favorite excerpt from that book, a woman writing to Nancy:

I don’t pretend to know what makes people work but I’d be willing to bet that if more people were more open and let themselves go during sex, their brains as well as their bodies, the world would be a better place. I doubt that so many people would be so aggressive and power-crazy if they found a suitable sex partner who would accept all of them. If people could free themselves of deep-rooted sex guilts they’d spend more time becoming good lovers and wouldn’t have so much time for revenge and wars. Good sex makes my husband and me very mellow. Who would think of hating and fighting and plotting to get someone else if they’d just been very sexually satisfied, no matter what means they employed to reach that happy goal? Not many, I’ll bet.

I truly believe that too. First, men’s entire goal in life is to get rich to have sex with whoever because if you’re rich, you can have sex with whoever you want. Men’s culture is still that narrow and corny.

From Epstein to Mazan, men are still on that stupid “only us are horny, women are holes, let’s pay and let’s go”. Which is fucking insane and dumb as hell.

A society based on free sexual movement wouldn’t be about depravation. I think it frees one to have great sex whenever. It allows great focus on other tasks, there’s no wandering.

We need this to develop any next frontier stuff. If we ever do, we can’t go to Mars with the state of our sexual culture. That would be erroneous and suicidal.

The choices we make about AI now are critical | Bill Gates

Through my day job, I have access to the latest models. They keep getting better. They are really much better than 18 months ago. I predicted that data optimization and improvement might allow this.

Now we don’t know how far we can get, but it’s getting scary/exciting. And exhausting.

We need a new society model. Right now.

In a capitalist society, employment is the way most people get the money they need to pay for the basics of life as well as being a key source of dignity and social connection.

That is all over. In a capitalist society, companies use the best tools to produce what they need to produce. People truly compete against a 24/7 slave that will never get sick or pregnant, and who’s also getting better all the time. There’s no competition here. We’re getting decimated.

This would be the worst possible time for humans to lose their critical thinking skills. In an era of deepfakes and misinformation that can be tailored to you individually, the ability to tell what is true from what is not becomes an essential life skill.

Oh, that essential life skill is fighting for its life. Social media has already spent 15 years making people’s critical thinking skills an ersatz of what it was. Almost no one born with the internet and smartphones has the capacity to think critically. They’re all parrots. The hivemind has taken over. It is horrible. I suspect AI companies are kind of cool with that (future $$$).

This issue cannot be resolved without a new society model.

As people who spend their lives thinking about what it means to be human, religious leaders can play a key role in this.

Absolutely fucking not. Being human is being what we are now, doing what we do. Religion is the least interesting or important thing in today’s world. We preserve our humanity by keeping it simple. Respectful. And democratic. There’s no need for religion, which only brings conflict, in there.

The highest priority is a monumental task: creating a domestic and international framework for dealing with AI.

The task isn’t about AI, which is AI-ing well. The task is  international UBI. The task is new society model, due to unprecedented automation push through AI. AI is like a wild horse that we cannot really tam at the scale of the planet. Capitalism has always been a wild beast, and that’s how it functions best: by being free to do as it pleased. That’s how we got those incredible gains on so many fronts, for decades: capitalism and innovation. We cannot contain them. We need to protect people (UBI now), and let the wild horse run.

Something in the care they gave my dad was irreplaceably human. No robot could or should have done it.

That’s understandable, but that’s romantic. My foster mom has Alzheimer’s as well and a robot taking care of her 24/7 in her own house would have been much better than being patient #526 in a retirement home with humans who can be good but also not good at all because it’s a job to pay bills, first and foremost. With a robot I would get automatic daily reports on her health, the robot would have never let her fall like 10 times in two years, I would talk to her every single day and she wouldn’t be as affected by the decease because she would still be in her home of 50 years instead of a place she doesn’t know, full of people she doesn’t know either.

I believe that as AI and robots improve, we’ll set aside certain things for only people to do. I’ve started calling this domain Human Reserved, and it’s an example of the kinds of ideas we’ll need to consider.

Capitalism doesn’t work that way, Bill. The second a machine can do well something a person does, everyone in the world switches to the machine. Ask the sex toy industry. This is the past 100 years. Again: we cannot compete against a 24/7 slave. My dad keeps adding features to his custom software and needs less people than ever to output more. The dynamic cannot be changed by creating exceptions. That will only enable conflict and unfairness.

As workers are pushed into different jobs, they will need retraining and other support from the social safety net. But they will be working less, which means they will be paying less in income taxes, and government revenues will drop just when the demand for those services is greatest. The funds will have to come from somewhere at a time when budgets are stretched.

This is bullshit. Governments literally create money! When a company says “I need $100M right now” and asks a bank for a loan, the bank doesn’t have the money either and asks the government “I need $100M worth of bonds right now” and the government creates that shit, out of thin air. Boom, here’s a $100M, please pay me back in the next 60 years. That’s how money is created. Checks and balances are an afterthought. The US, France and Japan combined debt today is 53 trillion dollars. 53,000 billion dollars. No brain can parse that number. Who will pay? No one knows. Shouldn’t those countries face enormous sacrifices already? That’s not what it looks like. It’s hot, but no one is burning. Economic debt is pure BS.

My point is, the classical economic view that Bill grew up on, that Boomers believe in, does not exist anymore. Taxes to raise money is some 1900s paradigm that hasn’t worked in a while. Today and moving forward, just give money to people directly so that they stop scheming and doing stupid shit to make money, like starting idiotic businesses or betting on phones. That’s what needs to happen. And people scream “that’s communism!” if you share money created by massively automated systems and I’m all like “how tf you care so much about naming something? Irrelevant ass shit”. Make something work, and let it be. If people choose to use that income to drink to their deaths instead of investing in themselves and in good times for a long time, let it be. If that allows tons of people to heal, let it be because that is progress.

While I was typing this, a new GPT came out. And it is apparently, again, a massive improvement?

UBI now y’all. It is obvious.

Old car outside:

Old car inside:

New car outside:

New car inside:

So, yeah. Big change.

My 1999 old car’s engine was starting to go awol at traffic lights, stalling to zero noise and back. Probably a small piece to change but as its MPG is bad, and that my mechanic was like “I’m afraid your lil shitty ass car is not interesting to nobody”, it was time to go ahead and upgrade a vehicle. 500 miles shy from 100,000 miles.

The 2023 Haroldmobile is such a massive change, it is shocking. Switching from RWD to FWD is so great. Sticking to the road like glue.

The wild thing at first was getting used to the hybrid car making zero noise at traffic lights. “Oh God not again I just BOU right, electric mode he he”. This happened more times than I’d like to acknowledge, but whatever.

The absence of constant vibrations when driving is both fantastic and something odd. There’s no physicality with the new car, outside of the wind with the windows down.

I was driving the old car. Feeling it. Looking at its needles move predictably. “Launching” it to use momentum to pass a hill.

Now I just zip through things. No noise. Just gliding effortlessly, listening to the sound of my music sounding better than ever.

I pilot a 2D spaceship full of beeps and boops, robotic voices and telemetry tracking my ass. I used to drive a small truck without a functional oil gauge. X-wing VS Millenium Falcon.

It’s dope and weird and kind of sad and exciting at once.

I read that book recently and it was good. Interesting things to me about him:

• Grew up in a house where folks read. A lot.
• He loved reading about everything.
• He also read everything he could about technology.
• Fascinated by the possibilities offered by computers.
• Focused on what the future could be (what should exist but doesn’t yet?).
• Highly interested in possibilities and opportunities (what if).
• Loved Blaxploitation and Jimi Hendrix.
• Taught himself the guitar at 16 and never spent a week without playing, until his death.

I feel close. I’m not the co-founder of a trillion-dollar company, but I grew up quite similarly and I’ve been doing my own thing for sure.

At some point in the book, Paul says:

“It was 1967 and artificial intelligence was the hot theme in science-fiction. […] I closed with a prediction: “In fifty years, a robot with a fairly large brain cell capacity will be within reach”. Today it appears that I was highly optimistic. With 2017 around the corner, we’re still not close to match the abilities of the incalculably complex human brain.”

Paul passed away in 2018. Less than ten years later, the best AI is so good at so many things that it is literally making people pause about what the world is going to be in five years. We have no idea.

AI in 2026 does things that seemed absolutely not possible in 2017. I wish Paul had seen this with his own eyes and I wish I could hear his predictions. This man could write hand assembly! He would be so blown away, crying.

Lots of interesting things in the book like how Paul coined the name Micro-Soft, how important documentation was to the business, or how Bill Gates was making $2.25/hr programming in 1975 (software wasn’t valued much back then) or how involved Microsoft was already in 1979 in Japan (I had read how game programmers were hitting up MS in the early 80s to get help).

An interesting point compared to today’s tech business, is that no one was trying to “get rich”. They were all in “how to sustain a business that is ours, so that we keep doing cool stuff the way we want, and drink colas all day” mode. How Microsoft became a behemoth and made thousands of millionaires and a few billionaires, is secondary. First came the pride of making something useful, sold fairly. Nothing more, nothing less.

The fact that today’s tech is relentless in making people addicted, weakening people mentally, abusing every single skinner’s box tricks, makes it truly look like a nightmare compared to those early IT days of hippies in Albuquerque.