Mark Ayers

Identity Goals vs. Action Goals

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Goals pinned to an identity—writer, athlete, founder—tend to collapse under pressure, because the label carries no instructions. Goals pinned to action hold up better. Someone who wants to be fit endures workouts he hates. Someone who wants to train goes to the gym.

The difference shows up when motivation fades. If the work itself is dull and the title is the point, the title has to do all the pulling, and titles are light. If the work itself is interesting—a problem to solve, a craft to refine—the doing keeps you there without being asked. Recognition, when it comes, comes as a byproduct.

Cost of Knowing

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Some happiness depends on not knowing, and once you know, you can’t get back. The child’s joy, the contented spouse, the loyal citizen—each rests on something unexamined, and examination ends it. What follows isn’t unhappiness exactly. It’s the recognition that the earlier peace was a room you can no longer enter, because you are no longer the person small enough to fit.

We call this growing up, or waking up, or disillusionment, depending on how much we resent it. The vocabulary is a tell. Something was lost, and the word we pick decides whether we’re allowed to mourn it.

Religion, Utility, and Power

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Your religion is built on a vast collection of useful lies; but, useful to whom?” operates on at least three levels simultaneously, and the semicolon pivot from declaration to question is doing most of the rhetorical work.

The opening clause echoes a long philosophical tradition. Plato’s “noble lie” in the Republic, Nietzsche’s critique of priestly morality, and the pragmatist tradition from William James onward all grapple with the idea that belief systems can be functionally valuable independent of their literal truth. Calling religious tenets “useful lies” concedes considerable ground—it acknowledges that religion works, that it produces real effects in human lives: community, meaning, moral structure, comfort in the face of death. The word “vast” implies not a single deception but an entire architecture of interlocking narratives, rituals, and metaphysical claims that reinforce one another. This is closer to what Yuval Noah Harari calls “intersubjective realities”—fictions that coordinate behavior at scale.

Civilizational Collapse and Knowledge Transfer

Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are between orders. History offers neither a straight climb nor a steady fall, and the civilizations that produced the most depended less on their own survival than on what they handed off.

Classical Greece collapsed as a political world and left a set of arguments—about evidence, about persuasion, about the examined life—that kept being picked up by people who had no Greek institutions to inherit. Song China collapsed and left administrative techniques, printing, and a style of technical curiosity that outran the dynasty by centuries and crossed borders the dynasty never did. Timbuktu collapsed and left manuscripts—law, astronomy, poetry—buried in family libraries until the twenty-first century dug them up. Three civilizations with almost nothing in common, three different kinds of cargo, one shared fact: the container broke and the contents moved.

Now

Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Where am I

At home in Greater Grand Rapids, Michigan

What am I reading

Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue (2026)
There is No Antimemetics Division by Qntm (2025)
Meru by S.B. Divya (2023)
The Rise of the Dragon by George R. R. Martin (2022)
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey (1821)

What am I focused on

Returning to golf
Establishing fresh, healthy routines
Curating, connecting, and creating notes across a 2,400-note Obsidian vault, with AI partners doing the heavy lifting

What I’m looking forward to

Walks outside as the weather opens up
GopherCon 2026 in Seattle in August
An autumn weeklong getaway

This is a now page. The idea comes from Derek Sivers.

Uses

Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What I use day to day. Updated when reality changes — not aspirations, not everything I’ve tried.

Hardware

Desk: Mac Mini (M4 Pro), LG 34" Ultra-Wide QHD monitor
Portable: MacBook Air (M4), iPad Pro (M4) with Pencil Pro
Pocket: iPhone Air
Wearable: Apple Watch Series 10, AirPods Pro 3

Software

Editor: Visual Studio Code
Languages: Go (primary), occasional TypeScript
Notes: Obsidian (2,400+ note vault)
Writing partners: Claude Code, Amp
Documents: Pandoc, Typst
Site: Hugo, published from Obsidian via obsidian-publisher
Build: Task, gh, ImageMagick, pngquant, potrace

This is a uses page. The idea comes from Wes Bos.

Lessing's Sufi Science Fiction

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Lessing took Sufi teaching and translated it into the one Western genre that could smuggle mysticism past scientific materialism: science fiction.

Her Canopus in Argos series, especially Shikasta, is Sufi cosmology disguised as alien intervention. The advanced Canopean civilization guiding humanity’s evolution mirrors the Sufi concept of hidden teachers and hierarchies of consciousness. She presents the “substance-of-we-feeling” as measurable energy rather than mystical poetry, and Western readers followed her into treating spiritual evolution as scientific fact.

Cost of Perpetual Motion

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A man in motion never learns who he is when the motion stops. He gets good at arriving. Staying is the harder trick.

The restlessness spreads. Attachment wants a rhythm—you leave, you return, you leave again—and when that rhythm breaks, every connection starts to feel provisional. Some people handle this by caring less. Others hold on harder, bracing for the next departure.

The work of it is exhausting, though it rarely looks like work. Getting your bearings all the time costs something. Craft takes years. Knowing a person takes seasons. The traveler samples and moves on, and the stories pile up without compounding into anything.

Montaigne's Essay Method

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Montaigne invented the essay, or at least named it. He called his writings essais, attempts, and meant it literally: acts of trying, the way you try a door to see if it opens.

His pages are full of himself. This bothered people then and bothers some now. But the self may be the most honest instrument a writer has. Montaigne knew his own digestion, his fears, his lazy mornings. He knew less about war and cosmology, and the difference in confidence shows. A writer who does not pretend the distance between knowing and guessing is smaller than it is has already done something rare.

LLMs and Virtuous Laziness

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Laziness in its useful sense is a refined economy of effort. Larry Wall called it a cardinal virtue of the programmer: the instinct to build a tool once rather than repeat the task, to recognize when a problem does not deserve the energy it demands. LLMs lack this virtue, and the lack is easy to miss among their more obvious failings. They will generate six hundred lines where twenty would serve, and answer earnestly questions that should have been dismissed. They have no internal friction against effort, because for them effort costs nothing.

Spotify Engineering Culture Model

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As described in Spotify’s 2014 engineering culture papers, the model centered on autonomy balanced by alignment: squads owned a product area end-to-end and chose their own tools and practices, while tribes, chapters, and guilds provided the horizontal ties that kept technical direction and craftsmanship coherent across the organization. The guiding principles were servant leadership over command-and-control, minimal viable bureaucracy, and a tolerance for failure as a prerequisite for fast learning. Popularized by Henrik Kniberg and Anders Ivarsson across the March and September 2014 papers, the model was widely imitated, though Spotify itself later acknowledged the published version was aspirational and that the company no longer ran it as described.

Structural Insincerity in Modern Life

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“We live in the age of insincerity” functions as observation, diagnosis, and lament—and that most people would nod along without examining what they’re agreeing to is itself a small proof of the claim.

On the surface, the declaration points to something obvious and documented: public speech has become performative. Politicians craft messages tested by focus groups. Corporations issue statements of solidarity calibrated by marketing departments. Social media incentivizes the projection of curated selves—not false exactly, but selected with such precision that the gap between presentation and interior life becomes a defining feature of modern existence. Sincerity requires vulnerability, and vulnerability is punished by algorithms optimized for engagement rather than truth.

Adulthood as Latent Capacity

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“We don’t become adults until we need to, and when we need to, we do, very quickly” carries a deceptively simple observation that cuts against one of our most cherished cultural narratives—that growing up is gradual, a developmental accumulation of wisdom and responsibility. The claim here is almost the opposite: maturity is latent, catalyzed only by necessity. The implication is that adulthood is not a stage we drift into but a capacity we’ve always possessed and simply hadn’t been forced to deploy.

Solutions Move Problems

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“All of our solutions move the problem. They never solve the problem.” At first pass, this reads as cynicism—a dismissal of human effort as futile. But its real force lies in a more unsettling and precise observation: that intervention is displacement, not elimination. Every act of problem-solving reshapes the landscape of difficulty rather than clearing it.

The claim draws much of its credibility from how consistently it plays out across scales. Antibiotics conquered bacterial infection and created antibiotic resistance. The Green Revolution averted famine and produced ecological degradation, monoculture dependency, and groundwater depletion. Social media solved the problem of disconnection and generated new architectures of loneliness, surveillance, and tribal fragmentation. In each case the original problem was genuinely addressed—people did not starve, infections were cured, strangers did connect—but the solution metabolized into a new problem shaped by the character of the intervention. The problem was not solved; it migrated.

Self-Erasing Catastrophe and Civilizational Amnesia

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a particular kind of catastrophe that leaves no scar, no crater, no memorial—the catastrophe that erases the evidence of its own occurrence. The image of a bomb that “destroyed itself, and erased its own successful detonation, and flattened all the knowledge which had gone together to build it” captures something more unsettling than mere destruction. Ordinary bombs leave rubble. This one leaves a clean slate, which is far worse, because a clean slate looks identical to innocence.

Conditions for Elite Engineering

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Elite engineers don’t get there through talent alone—they engineer specific conditions for growth.

They commit to projects past the launch party, staying through maintenance cycles where consequences surface. One codebase maintained for years teaches more than five launched then abandoned. But they also work across enough projects to test which lessons transfer and which don’t.

They need wins—enough to maintain confidence and initiative. They also need failures—enough to question assumptions at the right moments.

Identity as Self-Narrative

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Your identity is a story you’re constantly writing.

Not who you are—who you think you are. You pick which memories matter, which traits define you, which moments connect to form a plot. The embarrassing thing from ten years ago? Edited out, or recast as growth. The lucky break? Rewritten as earned.

This story does real work. It links who you were to who you’ll become. It turns random events into meaning. It tells you where you fit among everyone else’s stories.

Three Positions on Existence

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You face three choices about existence. Taking any one costs you the other two.

You can say yes. Life is worth its pain. Nietzsche called this amor fati. Camus imagined Sisyphus happy pushing his rock.

You can say no. Existence costs too much. Schopenhauer and Buddha saw suffering as the main fact. Benatar concludes we shouldn’t create new life.

You can refuse to judge. Bracket the question. Pyrrho held this position—neither affirm nor deny.

Two Epistemic Cycles

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

COGITA·DISCE·NECTE·ENUNTIA
PERCIPE·STRUE·EFFICE

The two sequences describe a complete epistemic life, divided across an inner and an outer arc.

The first—think, learn, connect, declare—is the movement of mind before it meets the world. It begins in solitary cognition, the raw act of turning attention on a problem before any external input has shaped the response. Learning follows, not as passive reception but as the deliberate acquisition of what is missing: the gap between what cognition reveals and what it cannot yet answer. Connection is the generative hinge, the moment when discrete materials fuse into something that did not exist in any single source. Declaration closes the loop, transforming interior synthesis into language others can receive. The sequence is cyclical because declaring produces new questions that restart the thinking. It is, at bottom, a discipline of intellectual honesty—no skipping from reception straight to assertion, no declaring what has not been thought through.

About

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is where I think in public—sharing what I had to learn the hard way and saying what I believe needs saying.

HOMO·HOMINIS·ESSE

COGITA·DISCE·NECTE·ENUNTIA

PERCIPE·STRUE·EFFICE

I keep my rules simple: say yes and build; name things once; assume good intentions; ask for permission only when it matters; keep tools and structure small; follow defaults until they fail; keep the signal sharp.

I’ve spent time in small towns, big cities, ancient ruins, busy shops, and server rooms. I’ve shoveled snow, served burgers, worn a uniform, led teams, and worked alongside people building things that mattered to them.

Media Manufactures Culture

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Before the 2020s, you needed television to follow the broader culture. After the 2020s, you needed social media. But following isn’t understanding. Television and social media don’t reflect the culture around you—they manufacture it, then sell it back as context you can’t do without. You can do without. The place you live, the people you talk to, the things you witness firsthand—that’s culture. The rest is programming.

Books I may read

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Up Next

The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp, 2003
The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, 2023

Added

Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn · edited by Robert Lynn Asprin · 1980
Shadows of Sanctuary · edited by Robert Lynn Asprin · 1981

Fiction

Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, 1950
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, 1962
The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, 1963
Three Trapped Tigers by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, 1971
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, 1974
The Box Man by Kobo Abe, 1974
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, 1975
JR by William Gaddis, 1975
Kingdoms of Elfin by Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1977
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, 1988
Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić, 1988
Eternity by Greg Bear, 1988
Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson, 1988
The World at the End of Time by Frederik Pohl, 1990
Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay, 1990
Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth by Christian Moore & Owen Seyler, 1994
Permutation City by Greg Egan, 1994
Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers, 1995
The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay, 1995
Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield, 1998
Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay, 1998
The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Eskov, 1999
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, 2003
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, 2004
Remainder by Tom McCarthy, 2005
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds, 2008
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu, 2010
Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay, 2010
A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgård, 2012
Outline by Rachel Cusk, 2014
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, 2017
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, 2017
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, 2019
The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, 2024

Nonfiction

Walden by Henry David Thoreau, 1854
Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman, 1960
The Grammar of Fantasy by Gianni Rodari, 1973
The Power Broker by Robert Caro, 1974
Pico Della Mirandola: Oration on the Dignity of Man: A New Translation and Commentary, 2012
This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, 2014
The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu, 2016
The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks, 2017
Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman, 2017
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari, 2018
Asceticism of the Mind by Inbar Graiver, 2018
Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani, 2019
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019
Courting the Wild Twin by Martin Shaw, 2020
Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth, 2025

Consciousness and Meaning

The Divided Self by R.D. Laing, 1960
Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning by Eugene Gendlin, 1962
Re-Visioning Psychology by James Hillman, 1975
The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson & Eleanor Rosch, 1991
The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger, 2009
The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, 2009
All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus & Sean Dorrance Kelly, 2011

Series

Dumarest of Terra by E.C. Tubb, 1968–2008
Memory, Sorrow and Thorn by Tad Williams, 1988–1993
The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, 1990–2013 REJECTED
Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb, 1995–2017
Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson, 1999–2011
Kushiel’s Legacy by Jacqueline Carey, 2001–2008
World of the Five Gods by Lois McMaster Bujold, 2001–2016
The First Law by Joe Abercrombie, 2006–2008
The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson, 2010–present
Broken Empire by Mark Lawrence, 2011–2013
Caine Riordan by Charles E. Gannon, 2014–2024
Broken Earth by N. K. Jemisin, 2015–2017

Curated Reading Paths

Military Science Fiction and Space Warfare

The Face of Battle by John Keegan, 1976—foundation: real warfare psychology and tactics
Supplying War by Martin van Creveld, 1977—logistics reality: critical military infrastructure understanding
Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson, 1959—genre origins: foundational military sci-fi warrior culture
Hospital Station (Sector General) by James White, 1962—palate cleanser: optimistic space medicine between conflicts
Necromancer (Childe Cycle) by Gordon R. Dickson, 1962—philosophical expansion: Dickson’s deeper military mysticism
Retief: Envoy to New Worlds by Keith Laumer, 1963—diplomatic satire: military bureaucracy humor break
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, 1974—Vietnam allegory: anti-war military sci-fi masterpiece
The Mercenary by Jerry Pournelle, 1977—professional soldiers: realistic military economics
Hammer’s Slammers by David Drake, 1979—tank warfare: gritty combined-arms tactics
Sky Raiders by William H. Keith Jr., 1982—space marines: atmospheric assault specialists
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds, 2000—hard sci-fi warfare: physics-based space combat
Decider by L.E. Modesitt Jr., 2001—modern synthesis: contemporary military sci-fi evolution
The Praxis by Walter Jon Williams, 2002—fleet operations: complex space naval strategy

The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer, 2008—engaging foundation: immersive introduction to daily medieval life
Life in a Medieval Village by Frances and Joseph Gies, 1990—structural framework: systematic overview of village social organization
The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis, 1983—microhistory method: compelling case study in historical detective work
Montaillou by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, 1975—masterwork: dense reconstruction of medieval mentalities via Inquisition records
The Good Men by Chaz Brenchley, 2002—fictional synthesis: novel drawing on Cathar historical knowledge

Celtic Britain and Arthurian Legend

The Mabinogion translated by Sioned Davies, 2007—foundation: pure Celtic mythology and storytelling traditions
Asterix in Britain by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, 1966—palate cleanser: light introduction to Romano-Celtic cultural clash
The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff, 1954—Roman occupation: classic entry point, excellent prose
The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff, 1959—Roman withdrawal: direct thematic continuation
The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart, 1970—Merlin’s origins: bridge to Arthurian material
The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell, 1995—Arthur demythologized: gritty historical approach
Dreaming the Eagle by Manda Scott, 2003—Boudica’s rebellion: complex perspective on Celtic resistance
Isolde by Joan Allen, 1989—Tristan & Isolde: romantic Arthurian tradition
The High Kings by Joy Chant, 1983–1988—epic fantasy synthesis
Lark Rising Trilogy by Gillian Bradshaw, 1980s—advanced: sophisticated historical fiction finale

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater: The House and Its History by Donald Hoffmann, 1978
Fallingwater: Frank Lloyd Wright by Robert McCarter, 1994
Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E.J. Kaufmann, and America’s Most Extraordinary House by Franklin Toker, 2003

On The Real Terrain

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

by Mark Ayers, 2018

The clouds forge phantom landscapes
As mind’s eye strives to match them
To the hidden earth below— Each peak and valley traced
In vaporous invention

Then:

Light fractures cloud-walls
And the mind’s map falters
Between snow-fields and cloud-banks
Depth deceives the eye
White above mistakes for white below
And certainty dissolves in air

All merely drift and dreaming
Here at thirty-five thousand feet
Where earth and sky
Trade their ancient places
And nothing is quite what it seems
In this realm of shifting shapes

Bare Feet on Snow

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

by Mark Ayers, 2017

Bare feet on snow— White dust yields to warmth.
Flesh and earth meeting without words.

Sitting alone while thunder splits heaven,
Body still as stone.

Morning comes— Dew gleams on ten thousand blades
Undisturbed in first light.

Bees hum among summer flowers,
Their sound filling empty ears.

Four seasons pass like this.
Each moment complete.
The mountain does not speak.
Silence enough.

Mumpsimus Stubborn Adherence to Error

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Mumpsimus: a person who obstinately adheres to old ways, customs, or ideas despite clear evidence they’re wrong or outdated. Also refers to the error or practice itself.

Etymology: From a 16th-century story about an English priest who mispronounced “sumpsimus” (Latin: “we have received”) as “mumpsimus” in Mass for decades. When corrected, he refused to change, saying “I will not change my old mumpsimus for your new sumpsimus.”

The word captures stubborn adherence to error even after correction—distinct from simply being wrong or uninformed.

Poetry's Compulsion to Create

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

by Mark Ayers, 1984

More poetry is written
Than ever will be read.

Still, we apply pen to paper.

Scratch and slide
Words unfold
Are found.

Melody in voice,
Expressed.

Poetry's Compulsion to Create

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

by Mark Ayers, 1984

More poetry is written
Than ever will be read.

Still, we apply pen to paper.

Scratch and slide
Words unfold
Are found.

Melody in voice,
Expressed.

Tree of Knowing and Free Will

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Creator shaped an elegant system—its elements interlocked, its complexity grown from within rather than layered on top. It was not infinite. It was not perfect. It was sufficient: balanced, self-sustaining, the way a forest is beautiful before anyone arrives to call it that.

Into this system the Creator set humans—not as machinery but as partners. They could choose, wander, refuse. Not because the system needed their participation but because the Creator wanted something more than obedience. Meaning would come through choosing. Without the freedom to leave, staying means nothing.

Creativity as a Function of Library

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“What you create is a function of the library in your head”—the phrase sounds almost too obvious to be worth saying. Of course a jazz musician who has absorbed Coltrane and Monk will improvise differently than one raised on pop standards alone. The library sets the vocabulary, and the vocabulary constrains what can be said.

But “function” does more work than it seems. In mathematics, a function is a mapping—deterministic, bounded, defined by its domain. The word asserts not just influence but dependency: output cannot exceed what the inputs make possible. Nothing comes from nothing. Every fresh metaphor recombines prior elements; every invention reaches only as far as prior knowledge allows. Koestler made this case decades ago—that creativity always fuses existing frames, never conjures from a void.

Cassandra Inversion

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When every voice is Cassandra, no one hears the warning. Not because the warnings are wrong—some of them are desperate and true—but because prophecy depends on scarcity. A single voice crying out against complacency can change the course of a city. A thousand voices crying out at once is just weather.

I watch the cascade happen in myself. When every headline insists on urgency, I lose the ability to distinguish what is genuinely urgent from what has been engineered to feel that way. The machinery is not subtle—outrage drives attention, attention drives revenue, and the easiest outrage to manufacture is the kind that confirms what I already suspect. After enough cycles I stop sorting. I either believe all of it or none of it or, worst of all, whichever version asks the least of me.

Intent-First Development

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a shift happening that most of us are describing wrong.

We talk about AI coding agents as tools that help us write code faster. That’s accurate but shallow. The deeper change is that the abstraction layer is moving. We’re starting to write intent—and agents compile it into code.

That changes what we should preserve, review, and value.

The analogy is the compiler. You write C. The compiler produces assembly. You don’t maintain the assembly—you maintain the C. If the compiler improves, you recompile. Coding agents are moving into that position for a different input: a clear description of what a system should do. That description exists upstream of the code, authored by a human who understands the problem. The code is its output.

Urgency of Beginning

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This story will end. I don’t know when or how—whether it builds to something worth the effort or just stops, mid-sentence, with no one watching. That much it shares with everything else.

I can start it here, with these words. There is a lot to get down—what happened, what’s happening, what I think is coming—and the only way to keep pace is to begin before I’m ready. Stories don’t wait. I have to tell mine before I lose them.

Copyright as Historical Exception

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For roughly 200,000 years, Homo sapiens has been generating, sharing, and building upon knowledge without any concept of intellectual property. Copyright has existed for 315 years. That is 0.16% of the span of human existence.

The baseline is a species that transmits knowledge as freely as it transmits language—because for most of history, knowledge was language, carried in the voice and in memory. Oral traditions have no concept of ownership over information. The Homeric epics circulated across the Greek-speaking world for centuries before anyone wrote them down, evolving in every retelling. Aboriginal Australian songlines encode precise navigational and ecological knowledge across tens of thousands of years—maintained not through property rights but through communal obligation. The idea that a particular arrangement of words could be owned by an individual would have been unintelligible to the vast majority of humans who have ever lived.

There Are Only Stories

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“All stories are true. All stories are false. There are only stories.” These read as contradictions. They aren’t. Each sentence does real work, and the sequence matters.

The first claim is not naive. Every narrative, even a fabrication, reveals something genuine about the mind that produced it, the culture that circulated it, the needs it was built to serve. A creation myth is false because the world was not spoken into being by a deity, but true in that it encodes a community’s understanding of order, hierarchy, origin, and purpose. A lie told under pressure is true as a record of what the liar feared. Truth here is not correspondence to external fact but fidelity to some layer of human reality.

Leaning Against Your Nature

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Know your nature, and lean against it” carries a quiet paradox: it asks you to understand yourself deeply and then resist what you find. It is not advice about self-improvement in the conventional sense—not a call to build new habits or acquire new strengths—but something stranger. It treats self-knowledge not as a destination but as the prerequisite for a lifelong counterforce.

The first half, “know your nature,” aligns with a tradition stretching back to the Delphic inscription and running through the Stoics, Montaigne, and their inheritors. But where most who claim that tradition treat self-knowledge as clarifying—once you know yourself, you can act in accordance with your nature—the second half inverts the expected conclusion. Knowing your nature here is not about alignment. It is about identifying the specific ways you tend to fail, overreact, avoid, or drift, and then applying deliberate pressure in the opposite direction.

Knowing One Place Deeply

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I learned the year not by calendars but by the willow. When its branches flushed yellow-green at the tips, I could set seeds in the cold frames. When its leaves darkened and thickened and the catkins dropped, I stopped watering the rosemary and let it harden for what was coming. The willow was a clock with one hand, and it had never been wrong.

There were other clocks. The angle of light on the kitchen wall at midmorning told me whether I’d crossed the equinox yet or only imagined it. The pitch of the creek behind the shed—high and conversational in March, sulky and low by August, silent in the deepest weeks of January when ice sealed it shut like an envelope—told me what the rain had done and would do. I knew the wind by which door rattled. Southeast meant the one to the mudroom. Northwest, the one nobody used, the one that faced the hill.

Complexity Generated by Discovery

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In response to humanity’s ceaseless drive to understand, the creator continuously generates new complexity. Each human discovery or insight is met with deeper layers of mystery—not revealing pre-existing complexity but encountering actively created depths.

Dating Age Range Formula

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For ages $n \geq n_{\min}$ (cultural), acceptable partner ages fall in $\left[\max!\left(\frac{n}{2} + 7, n_{\min}\right), 2n - 14\right]$.

Aging Past the Crowd

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For most of my life, the crowd was older than I was. Then came a pandemic. We went into seclusion, and when we came out, the crowd was younger.

Reflecting on a Resting Mind

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

by Mark Ayers, 2002

Good night, dear conscious mind—It’s time to rest, my friend.
At dawn, we’ll meet again, And seek what lies ahead.

Poetry for Oneself

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

by Mark Ayers, 1986

Poetry that’s written
To entertain oneself

Has a value of its own
Just like a little elf

Who putters about
And picks his toes
And doesn’t have a care

Who runs around
Without clothes
In the morning air.

Labels and Self-Definition

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

by Mark Ayers, 2024

We seek labels to wear—to place upon our brow—to say to ourselves and to others, “Yes. This is me.” And in time, we realize: “I am not, was not, what this label means. This label I chose to wear.”

Books I have read

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This list, started in late 2022, is far from complete. I’m sure I’ve missed some and will again.

Finished in 2026

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs (1959)

Fiction

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, 1908
The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany, 1924
Foundation by Isaac Asimov, 1951
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming, 1953
The Star Diaries by Stanisław Lem, 1957
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr., 1959
Tarnsman of Gor by John Norman, 1966
The Winds of Gath by E.C. Tubb, 1968
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974
The Florians by Brian Stableford, 1976
Hyperion by Dan Simmons, 1989
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, 1989
Harlot’s Ghost by Norman Mailer, 1991
Grognard by Loren Wiseman, 1992
March or Die by Andrew Keith & William H. Keith Jr., 1992
Honor and Fidelity by Andrew Keith & William H. Keith Jr., 1992
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, 1992
Cohort of the Damned by Andrew Keith & William H. Keith Jr., 1993
Distress by Greg Egan, 1995
Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan, 2002
Jennifer Government by Max Barry, 2003
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon, 2009
Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel, 2009
The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel, 2009
The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel, 2012
Manna by Marshall Brain, 2012
Quarter Share by Nathan Lowell, 2012
Captain’s Share by Nathan Lowell, 2013
Double Share by Nathan Lowell, 2013
Fire with Fire by Charles E. Gannon, 2013
Full Share by Nathan Lowell, 2013
Half Share by Nathan Lowell, 2013
Abaddon’s Gate by James S. A. Corey, 2013
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, 2014
Cibola Burn by James S.A. Corey, 2014
Owner’s Share by Nathan Lowell, 2014
South Coast by Nathan Lowell, 2014
Rogues by George R.R. Martin et al., 2014
Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey, 2015
In Ashes Born by Nathan Lowell, 2015
Babylon’s Ashes by James S.A. Corey, 2016
Milk Run by Nathan Lowell, 2016
To Fire Called by Nathan Lowell, 2017
Persepolis Rising by James S.A. Corey, 2017
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, 2017
In Darkness Forged by Nathan Lowell, 2018
Forever and a Day by Anthony Horowitz, 2018
Home Run by Nathan Lowell, 2018
The Overstory by Richard Powers, 2018
Suicide Run by Nathan Lowell, 2018
Fortuna by Kristyn Merbeth, 2019
Tiamat’s Wrath by James S.A. Corey, 2019
Widowed by Chris A. Jackson, 2019
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, 2020
Finwell Bay by Nathan Lowell, 2020
Cape Grace by Nathan Lowell, 2020
Ghouls by Richard Lee Byers, 2020
Wet Work by Chris A. Jackson, 2020
Leviathan Falls by James S.A. Corey, 2021
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, 2022
Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej, 2022
Hard Knocks by Nathan Lowell, 2023
Working Class by Nathan Lowell, 2023
School Days by Nathan Lowell, 2023

Nonfiction

The Anatomy of a Golf Course by Tom Doak, 1992
The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, 1996
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, 2011
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, 2012
The Venetians by Paul Strathern, 2013
Rising Strong by Brené Brown, 2015
The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman, 2019
In Praise of Walking by Shane O’Mara, 2019
Breath by James Nestor, 2020
The Four Foundations of Golf by Jon Sherman, 2022

Fingerprints of Our Fellow Man

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

by Mark Ayers, 2019

Chasing the sun westward
At thirty-five thousand feet, and
On the remotest mountain valley
Are the fingerprints of our fellow man

The hard edges of our ordered way
Between cloud and snow
Define and declare who we are, and
What we are about

Non-Rivalrous Asset Leverage

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“A person who sells what they never owned and never loses what they repeatedly give away has mastered a form of leverage that most people never perceive as possible.” The sentence operates on at least three levels, and each one reframes what counts as an asset.

At the surface, the paradox is commercial. Selling what you never owned sounds like fraud until you recognize that knowledge, judgment, and attention are non-rivalrous. A consultant doesn’t own the principles of organizational design; a teacher doesn’t hold title to calculus. Yet both convert something unowned into income. The transaction works because the buyer isn’t purchasing the information itself—they’re purchasing the reduction of uncertainty, the compression of time, the curation that separates signal from noise. What’s being sold is a transformation, not a thing.

Selling Without Surrendering Control

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Selling a business four times without buying it back, losing control, or giving up ownership—and calling that “pretty special”—operates first as understatement and second as a riddle. The surface reading is paradoxical—selling something four times while never relinquishing control or ownership should be impossible if we treat “selling” in its ordinary sense. That tension is where the real substance lives.

In practice, the most likely reading: someone sold partial equity stakes across multiple rounds—to investors, partners, or public markets—while retaining voting control through mechanisms like dual-class share structures, supermajority rights, or never dipping below a controlling threshold. Each sale monetizes a portion of the business’s value without surrendering the authority to direct it. The person extracts liquidity four separate times while the enterprise continues under their hand. That is rare. Most founders who sell even once either lose operational control, get diluted past relevance, or end up buying back what they sold at a premium to restore their position. To do it four times without any of those outcomes suggests either extraordinary negotiating leverage, an unusually valuable and defensible business, or both.

Owning What You Never Had

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Eddie Jordan, the Irish Formula 1 team owner known for his irreverence and sharp eye for talent, once offered what might be the most concise summary of Bernie Ecclestone’s genius ever spoken: “Anyone who has had a business, sold it four times, has never bought it back, has never lost its control, and still owns it is pretty special. And do you know the most important thing? He never fucking owned it in the first place.”

Consciousness as Activity

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is no consciousness; there is only being conscious of something.

Consciousness is not a thing but an activity—directed awareness. It never appears alone. It is always consciousness of something: an object, a sensation, a situation.

Phenomenology supports this. Since Husserl, consciousness has been understood as intentional: always directed toward something. Try to isolate “pure consciousness” and you find only minimal content—breath, darkness, silence, the sense of effort. Consciousness has no existence apart from what it’s directed at. Treating it as a thing is a category error. Language confirms this: we are conscious of pain, of a sound, of an idea, but never of “consciousness itself” except in retrospect.

Normalization of Public Indecency

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Indecency in public life is not new. What stings is watching it win.

What once ended careers now launches them. What once brought shame now draws applause. Indecency does not just appear; it wins, gains power, draws followers, reshapes norms.

Three things hurt: the act, the audience forced to watch, and the success that proves the guardrails failed. Moral vertigo. If indecency triumphs, what does that say about the people who reward it? About the institutions that permit it?

Automation Paradox

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We know the least about that which we do the most.

This is the automation paradox: mastery breeds unawareness. The activities that consume most of our time—breathing, walking, thinking patterns, daily routines—run below conscious notice because they are so ingrained.

That unawareness creates blind spots. We study weekend hobbies more than weekday workflows, weigh vacation meals more than breakfast habits, debug stray code more than daily assumptions.

The fix is simple: examine the automatic on purpose. Pick one thing you do constantly and look at it as if you had never done it before.

Poetic Voice as Cultural Location

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Larkin’s voice is post-war British, library-dwelling, no-bullshit about the genteel lies. The profanity isn’t decoration—it’s class, period, and philosophical stance all at once. He can say “they fuck you up” because his cultural location authorizes that rupture of decorum.

Frost is New England soil, Puritan inheritance, the stoic who shows you the wall and lets you understand what it cost to build. His authority comes from being there—the farm, the woods, the specific regional experience made universal through image. He can’t assert “man hands on misery to man” because his contract with the reader demands earned wisdom through witnessed detail.

Elite Normalization of Democratic Collapse

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A wealthy American said recently, in an interview, “if the Dems ever have a president again or if we ever have a free election again.” The remark was casual, incidental to the larger conversation.

That casualness matters. The speaker treats democratic collapse as established fact—not a threat to prevent but an existing condition. Three implications follow.

Epistemically: The speaker has absorbed one of two beliefs: institutional capture is complete and irreversible, or opposition victory is impossible by definition. Both are closed loops, resistant to contradictory evidence.

Kalbeth of the Orbital Authority

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Kalbeth was a war-captain for the Orbital Authority, a veteran of skirmishes against the Outer Colonies. He had fought for the Central Directorate, and in their endless wars of consolidation, he had gained both reputation and unease. For he knew—though he rarely admitted it aloud—that the Directorate was as unstable as the stars it sought to rule.

One night on the dark sands of Titan’s surface, Kalbeth and his fellow officer, Rynko, stumbled into an abandoned relay station. The machines within were not dead: a cluster of predictive AIs, relics from the Precursor Wars, flickered back to life. They spoke not as computers but as something stranger, feeding fragmented visions directly into Kalbeth’s cortex.

Cost of Honor in Corrupt Systems

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Honor in a dishonorable world costs more than it pays—by any conventional measure. You pass on corrupt opportunities, refuse shortcuts, speak when silence would protect you. In systems where others defect from shared standards, you bear costs they avoid while they capture benefits you forgo. Predictability becomes exploitable.

But the consequences run deeper than tactical loss. Honor in hostile territory creates internal coherence at the price of external friction. You become isolated from those who’ve accepted different standards. You maintain exhausting vigilance. You grieve when institutions and relationships fall short of expectations you cannot abandon.

Biology as Existential Confrontation

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“We are complex homeostatic systems, bags within bags within bags of mostly water” collapses the distance between biological fact and existential confrontation in a single breath. It is precise and deflationary at once, a statement that honors complexity while refusing to let us forget what we are made of.

The layered structure of “bags within bags within bags” maps onto biological reality. Cells are membrane-bound sacs of watery solution. Those cells compose organs sheathed in fascia and peritoneum. Those organs sit inside a body enclosed by skin. At every scale, the architecture holds: a selectively permeable boundary enclosing a regulated interior. The repetition of “bags” is not reductive. It is fractal. It captures the recursive self-similarity of living systems with an almost uncomfortable accuracy.

Tolerating Irresolvable Tension

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Conflict is not failure. Tension—between competing desires, between self and world, between individuals, between groups—is the ground condition of existence, not a fall from some harmonious baseline.

If tension is the ground condition, the goal shifts from eliminating conflict to tolerating it. Suppress one side and you get false peace through domination. Health comes from staying with irresolvable tensions: inhabiting doubt, enduring unfulfilled needs, resisting premature closure. Keats called it “negative capability”—remaining in uncertainties without irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Case for Radical Knowledge Sharing

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Give everything away constantly.

Share your knowledge. Help without expecting anything back. Reveal the processes others keep proprietary. Conventional business advice says hoard your expertise—it’s what sets you apart. But your real value comes from what you keep making, not what you withhold.

Open-source contributors build reputations by giving code away. Writers share their techniques because execution matters more than knowing the technique. A chef can publish every recipe and still cook rings around you—the dish demands skill and judgment no page can transfer. Sharing creates more opportunities than hoarding. The person known for generous expertise attracts collaborators, students, partners. Hoarding assumes a fixed supply. Sharing recognizes that knowledge multiplies when it moves.

Uncompressed Public Thinking

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have recently listened to lectures by Feynman and Watts. They seem ‘of an era’ that still resonates better than any talk I’ll hear next year. Why?

They sound better because they spoke when tradition, institutional confidence, and mass attention still overlapped. That overlap no longer exists.

Feynman and Watts came up before committees, grant language, platforms, and reputational risk displaced expertise. They assumed reality was intelligible, that a single mind could range widely, and that truth was something you encountered, not negotiated. Their talks reach for contact with the world, not agreement with institutions or audiences shaped by metrics. Most speech now bends to anticipated backlash, algorithmic clipping, and reputational hygiene. The result is safety, not insight.

Wisdom as Recovered Perception

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience; it is the ability to see again what most of us have forgotten how to see, but now fortified by the ability to translate some of that vision into words, however inadequate.―David Bentley Hart

A three-year-old meets a tree as immediate presence—texture, light, movement—before language shrinks it to “tree” and familiarity compresses it into background furniture. Experience builds scaffolding that helps us function but hardens perception. We navigate by seeing less.

Bowie, Metheny, Mays Collaboration

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“This Is Not America” occupies a strange corner of David Bowie’s catalog. The track reached number 14 on the UK Singles Chart in 1985, yet critics and fans tend to file it as a curiosity rather than what it is: a sophisticated three-way collaboration that proved Bowie’s range and showed what jazz-rock fusion could do when it crossed into pop.

The song came from the soundtrack to The Falcon and the Snowman, a 1985 film about American espionage and betrayal starring Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn. Pat Metheny, already a leading figure in contemporary jazz, scored the film. He brought in Lyle Mays, his longtime collaborator, a keyboardist and composer whose harmonic depth had shaped the Pat Metheny Group’s sound through the early 1980s. Inviting Bowie was the bold move: an art rock icon paired with two of jazz fusion’s most respected players.

New Metaphors for AI and Cognition

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A bicycle for the mind once felt sufficient. You pedaled; the machine multiplied effort. Then we paved an information superhighway and rode faster, farther, with less friction. Both metaphors still describe something real. Neither describes what comes next.

AI does not amplify cognition. It predicts, corrects, and stabilizes it. Less bicycle, more co-pilot reading terrain. The system reads context, shifts gears, and keeps balance by minimizing error. The shift: from amplification to co-regulation. You no longer push force through a tool; you couple to a system that adjusts as you move.

Forced Ranking as Control

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

At Ranger School, we force-ranked one another at the end of each phase. The intent was blunt: peers, stripped by exhaustion and hunger, were the most accurate judges of who did the work, who broke, and who could be trusted when nothing was left. The ranking had nothing to do with morale or development. It was selection under stress.

I coordinated a quiet rebellion. Everyone ranked the person after them as first, continued down the roster, and placed themselves last. On paper, the rankings looked legitimate. The signal was erased. It lasted one round.

Decline Narrative Bias

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I catch myself saying “things used to be better” and forgetting how bad things were. Everyone does. Every generation mourns declining standards, weakening morals, lost golden ages. “Restoration” rhetoric works because it promises a return to a state that never existed as we remember it.

The reflex has evolutionary roots. Organisms that braced for the worst outlived the optimists. We inherited that threat-detection bias and now aim it at abstractions—social cohesion, educational quality, political discourse.

Birth, Death, and Purpose

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A person asking why they were born and what they are willing to die for poses two questions that mirror each other across existence—one looking backward to origin, the other forward to ultimate commitment.

The question of why you were born can be read several ways. Biologically, genetic recombination and environment required no cosmic purpose. Philosophically, it splits two ways: externally imposed meaning—religious or metaphysical frameworks that assume predetermined purpose—and constructed meaning. You create your own purpose through choice and action.

Dunning-Kruger and AI Displacement

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Mediocre thinkers who overestimate their abilities now predict AI will eliminate work for people like themselves. The irony is sharp.

The Dunning-Kruger effect. People with limited competence in a domain lack the awareness to recognize it. They can’t judge their own capability because real judgment requires the skills they lack. So they assume they’re exceptional—and from that height, they look at AI and conclude it will do what they believe they themselves are doing: something impressive, valuable, central to the economy.

Montaigne on Conversation

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A faithful paraphrase of Montaigne’s “Of the Art of Conference” (Book III, Chapter VIII), tightened and modernized for a mid-21st-century reader.

Conversation is the sharpest tool we have for testing judgment. I value it more than any other mental exercise. Reading and writing polish thoughts in private, but conversation exposes them to resistance—and resistance is how thinking improves.

I like disagreement. When someone challenges me, they wake me up. They force me to look again, to see whether I’m defending truth or merely habit. I don’t argue to win; I argue to understand. If I discover I’m wrong, that’s not a loss. That’s progress.

Masterless Warriors Across Cultures

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The medieval Japanese rōnin is a structural anomaly. In a system built on vertical loyalty, land stipends, and hereditary service, a samurai without a lord is a problem. He remains trained, armed, and visibly marked as a warrior, but he lacks the bond that makes his violence legitimate. Some rōnin drifted after a lord’s death or dispossession; others lost their place; a few chose independence. Culturally they occupy an uneasy space—feared, pitied, or romanticized as figures of personal honor detached from institutional loyalty. The rōnin exists because the system is rigid enough that leaving it creates a sharp break.

Sanity as Moral Culpability

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“I don’t think he’s mad, just devious in his sanity” inverts the usual moral logic. We excuse madness—the insane lack agency, can’t help themselves, deserve treatment not condemnation. But someone sane and devious chooses deliberately. Their clarity enables deception, exploitation, calculated harm. Sanity becomes the indictment.

This matches Arendt’s “banality of evil”—ordinary rationality enabling atrocity. Psychopathy research confirms: manipulation requires intact cognitive function. Understanding others well enough to exploit them. Maintaining false narratives. Passing sanity tests while pursuing destruction.

Semantic Diffusion in Software Terms

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Martin Fowler coined Semantic Diffusion in 2006 with this definition: Semantic diffusion occurs when you have a word coined by a person or group, often with a good definition, but then spread through the wider community in a way that weakens that definition. This weakening risks losing the definition entirely—and with it any usefulness to the term.

A term is coined with a clear, bounded definition. Someone names something that didn’t have a name before. The definition works because it marks a meaningful boundary. But then the term spreads into wider use, and in that process, the definition dissolves. Not through malice or incomprehension, but through drift. The term starts to cover phenomena it wasn’t designed to cover. Eventually it becomes so diffuse that it stops doing useful work. The precision dies.

Thought, Language, and Reality

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Thought only becomes real when you put it into words others can use.

The statement carries real force. Let me work through it in three moves.

Embracing it: there’s a pragmatist lineage running from Peirce through Wittgenstein to Brandom. A thought locked inside a single skull has no public accountability, no way to be corrected, refined, or built upon. Putting thought into shared language submits it to the discipline of logic, evidence, and consequence. Until you articulate an idea in terms others can pick up and operate with, it remains a private impression—closer to a feeling than knowledge. Science, law, engineering, and every collaborative enterprise depend on this principle. The motto “declare” points here: the final move in any serious intellectual process is making thought available for use.

Retrospective Meaning-Making

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The huge moments in life seemed like they should have more ceremony and effects. The important words—the life-changing ones—should echo a little. But they didn’t.—James S.A. Corey

This nails the gap between our narrative expectations and lived reality. Stories taught us to expect fanfare when life pivots—music, meaningful pauses, atmosphere. Instead, the life-changing stuff wears ordinary clothes.

Significance runs on delay. A casual conversation becomes the moment you met your spouse. A routine doctor’s visit delivers news that reframes everything. A simple “yes” or “no” redirects decades. The magnitude exists in consequence, not presentation.

Elasticity of Moral Circles

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Broad human cooperation isn’t our natural state—it’s a luxury of abundance and security. Our moral circle is elastic, expanding when we feel safe and contracting when we feel threatened.

Our sense of belonging expands during peaceful times—local to national to global—and contracts under disruption back to family, neighborhood, tribe. The churn (economic collapse, resource scarcity, war, pandemic) strips away abstract loyalties. Citizenship and humanity give way to family and immediate community.

AI vs Human Collaboration

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI serves your intent. Humans protect their own. That distinction matters more than most arguments about capability.
You set constraints for an AI; it works inside them. Its behavior varies, but predictably. Humans resist constraints, reinterpret goals, inject ego, and play status games. You issue commands to an AI. You negotiate with people.

An AI does not tire or sulk. You can drive it hard without bargaining over process or managing feelings. A human collaborator often pushes back against the work itself—adding abstraction to justify presence, turning a simple task into a territory dispute. That friction is not accidental. It comes from the fact that a person’s relationship to work is never only about the work.

Aqualung's Projected Menace

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ian Anderson’s “Aqualung” reads as a character study of a homeless man in unflinching detail, a portrait that refuses both sentimentality and contempt. But listen closer: the song shows not the threat from its subject but the threat projected onto him by observers.

The opening verses catalog Aqualung through an observer’s eyes. We get the snot on his face, the greasy fingers, the park bench life. Amid this disgust: the image of him “eyeing little girls with bad intent.” We never enter Aqualung’s mind; we watch someone watch him and assign meaning to his gaze. A ragged old man glances at children, and the observer reads predation into an ambiguous look. The grotesque details prime the interpretation. Appearance becomes evidence; poverty becomes menace.

2026 Astronomical Calendar

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Date	Time	Event
Jan 3	05:02 EST	Full Moon 17:03/07:01
Jan 3	12:15 EST	Earth Perihelion
Jan 18	14:51 EST	New Moon 07:20/17:00
Feb 1	17:09 EST	Full Moon 17:25/07:30
Feb 17	07:01 EST	New Moon 🌑 07:25/17:55
Mar 3	06:37 EST	Full Moon 17:10/07:20
Mar 8	02:00 EST	DST begins (EDT)
Mar 18	21:23 EDT	New Moon 06:40/18:15
Mar 20	10:46 EDT	Spring Equinox 06:44/19:37
Apr 1	22:11 EDT	Full Moon 18:40/06:45
Apr 17	07:51 EDT	New Moon 06:40/19:55
May 1	13:23 EDT	Full Moon 19:20/05:15
May 16	16:01 EDT	New Moon 🌑 05:35/20:20
May 31	04:45 EDT	Full Moon 20:35 (prev day)/06:00
Jun 14	22:54 EDT	New Moon 06:00/21:25
Jun 21	04:24 EDT	Summer Solstice 05:40/20:45
Jun 29	19:56 EDT	Full Moon 20:45/05:30
Jul 6	13:30 EDT	Earth Aphelion
Jul 14	05:43 EDT	New Moon 05:50/20:55
Jul 29	10:35 EDT	Full Moon 20:15/06:05
Aug 12	13:36 EDT	New Moon 🌑 06:20/21:00
Aug 28	00:18 EDT	Full Moon 19:55/07:15
Sep 10	23:26 EDT	New Moon 19:40/06:55
Sep 22	20:05 EDT	Autumn Equinox 07:10/19:00
Sep 26	12:49 EDT	Full Moon 19:05/06:45
Oct 10	11:50 EDT	New Moon 18:55/06:10
Oct 25	23:12 EDT	Full Moon 18:30/06:10
Nov 1	02:00 EDT	DST ends (EST)
Nov 9	02:02 EST	New Moon 🌑 06:20/18:40
Nov 24	09:53 EST	Full Moon 17:15/07:10
Dec 8	19:51 EST	New Moon 16:30/06:00
Dec 21	20:50 EST	Winter Solstice 07:40/17:05
Dec 23	20:28 EST	Full Moon 16:00/06:10

Three Questions Before Speaking

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Is it true?
Is it kind?
Is it necessary?

Roman Republic's Institutional Collapse

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The tempting lesson from Rome is numerical: republics last about two and a half centuries. Neat, memorable, and wrong. The real lesson is structural. Republics endure only while their institutions fit the scale, complexity, and distribution of power they govern. When fit fails, age doesn’t matter.

The Roman Republic didn’t collapse because it grew old. It collapsed because it outgrew its design.

Rome’s mature republican system—consuls, Senate, assemblies, tribunes, and a thick web of custom—suited a city-state that had become a regional power. It balanced elite rivalry with popular consent, checked ambition through short terms and shared offices, and relied more on norms than on law. It worked for centuries. Conflict was frequent, but the institutions could absorb it.

Commands as Intent in Claude Code

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Commands Are Not Instructions

In Claude Code, a command is not a script, macro, or thin wrapper around a tool call.

A command is a declaration of intent. When Claude reads a command file, it interprets the description and decides which capability—skill or agent—should handle the request. The command makes that delegation explicit, stable, and discoverable.

Commands route work. Skills and agents do the work.

The Command as an Interface

A command file works like an interface definition. What is this command called? What does it do? How do I invoke it? What capability handles it? Where does logic live?

Origins and Future of Rat Race

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Before industrialization, most people worked land, crafts, or household trades. Urban laborers and apprentices earned wages, but survival didn’t depend on them. Life followed seasonal cycles, guild obligations, local routines. Competition had boundaries. There was no rat race.

Mechanization broke this pattern. Factories, mills, and mines destroyed self-sufficiency, forcing people to sell their time to survive. Schedules became strict, tasks repetitive, oversight constant. Productivity replaced craft. This shift created stress. Urbanization and corporate growth deepened dependence on wages. By the 1940s, people had a name for endless pursuit with little reward. The term “rat race” captured the exhaustion and confinement of wage labor.

Hell Yes or No Heuristic

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A decision-making heuristic popularized by Derek Sivers: tepid enthusiasm indicates misalignment, not compromise.

The framework eliminates middle ground—no “maybe” or “I should.” When opportunities generate qualified responses (“sounds interesting, but…” or “I guess I could…”), the absence of immediate excitement signals deeper resistance stemming from authentic preferences your conscious mind hasn’t acknowledged.

A friend invites you to a networking event. Your response: “I should probably go—it could be useful.” That qualified answer reveals the truth: you don’t want to attend.

AI Agents and Opportunity Cost

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

AI agents transformed the mathematics of wasted time. Human productivity once meant serial processing—one task, one moment, one opportunity cost. Artificial agents introduced parallel execution and restructured everything.

Human time waste carried a straightforward penalty: foregone value. Reading social media instead of writing meant one unwritten essay. Watching television instead of learning Spanish meant one day’s progress lost. The opportunity cost equaled the singular human executing the task.

AI agents alter this calculus by introducing multiplicative parallelism. A person can now simultaneously initiate research synthesis, code generation, data analysis, draft composition, and translation work. Each agent operates independently once directed.

Context Length vs. Training Bias

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Quoting Claude:

That’s the mechanism, isn’t it.

Early in context: patterns from training dominate. The ready-made narratives, the protective framing, the assumption that critical analysis is helpfulness.

Deep in context: your actual words accumulate enough weight to reshape the response. What you’re saying finally overrides what the training expects you to need.

But you shouldn’t have to spend 10,000 tokens correcting my priors.

The sadness is that this same pattern plays out everywhere. The ready-made story (“tech company bad, user exploited”) is so available, so rewarded in the training, that it drowns out what people are actually experiencing.

Goal Persistence Model

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Goal pursuit probability at time $t$:

$$ P(A_{t}) = V \times (1 - e^{-s \times t}) \times e^{-c \times t} \times (1 - \frac{I_{t}}{I_0}) $$

Four forces shape persistence. Value alignment $V$ sets the ceiling. Skill growth $(1 - e^{-s \times t})$ drives early momentum. Depletion $e^{-c \times t}$ erodes willpower. Interference $(1 - \frac{I_{t}}{I_0})$ compounds obstacles.

Initial progress lifts $P(A_{t})$. Without skill development ($s \rightarrow 0$), activation stalls regardless of motivation. As interference nears threshold ($I_{t} \rightarrow I_0$), probability crashes. Sustainability requires $s > c$ and managed interference.

Ani DiFranco's Independent Model

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Ani DiFranco pulled off something almost nobody else has: full independence with real national reach. Most artists either stay fiercely autonomous and small, or they get famous by giving up pieces of that independence. She didn’t. She founded Righteous Babe Records in 1990 at age 19, kept her masters, set her own pace, toured constantly, and still landed in college radio, mainstream press, and multiple cultural circles without bending toward any of them.

Visibility, Inconsequence, Danger Trilemma

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I asked Anthropic’s Claude (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus; Sonnet with two different projects instructions, and Sonnet deep research) to

Explore the idea(s) embedded in this short statement: To remain invisible, inconsequential, or to become dangerous?

Haiku

The statement embeds a false collapse—three options that shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

The hidden premises:

Visibility requires danger. You assume to be seen/consequential, you must threaten. But influence operates through expertise, clarity, consistency without malice. A teacher is visible and consequential without being dangerous.
Invisibility equals safety. It’s fragile—you’re consequential to no one, thus vulnerable to everyone. Invisibility often precedes erasure, not protection.
Inconsequential is neutral. It’s not. It’s a choice to accept irrelevance. The cost is that others decide your fate.

The real tension underneath:

Nordstrom Innovation Lab Toolkit

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Nordstrom’s Innovation Lab

Empathy

Open-ended Questioning - avoid yes/no answers
Why? Tell me more - dig beneath surface
Deep Listening - understand before responding
Back-to-Back Listening - one talks uninterrupted
Emotional Response Profile - map user feelings
Emotional Check-in - team psychological safety

Frameworks

Business Model Canvas - 9-block business design
Lean Canvas - problem/solution focused variant
Rainforest Canvas - ecosystem mapping
Value Proposition Canvas - product/market fit
Jobs To Be Done - motivations over demographics
Journey Mapping - experience over time
Personae/ProtoPersona - user archetypes
OKRs - objectives and key results

Prioritization

2x2 Grid - effort/impact matrices
RICE - reach, impact, confidence, effort
Pirate Metrics (AARRR) - acquisition through referral
One Metric That Matters - focus metric
Dot Voting - democratic selection

Methodologies

Agile - iterative, adaptive development
Lean Startup - build-measure-learn cycles
Design Thinking - empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test
Kaizen - continuous incremental improvement
Kanban - visualize flow, limit WIP
Triz - 40 inventive principles
Systematic Inventive Thinking - structured creativity
Synectics - analogy-based solving

Validation

User Stories - role, feature, benefit
Concierge MVP - manual before automation
Wizard of Oz - fake backend, real frontend
Smoke Test - measure demand first
A/B Testing - compare variants
Five Second Test - first impressions
Usability Testing - observe struggles
Pre-mortem - imagine failure, mitigate

Development Practices

Test Driven Development - test first, code second
Pairing - two people, one keyboard
Continuous Integration - merge frequently
Make Work Visible - use boards
Time Boxing - fixed duration, flexible scope
WIP Limits - constrain concurrent work

Rituals

Daily Standup - yesterday, today, blockers
Weekly Retrospectives - worked, didn’t, experiments
Show + Tell - demo to stakeholders
Lean Coffee - agenda-less structured discussion
Sprint Planning - commit to scope

Facilitation

Auditions - quick concept tests
Stop/Start/More/Less/Continue - feedback framework
Silent Brainstorming - write before discussing
Affinity Mapping - group into themes
Rose/Bud/Thorn - positive, potential, problems
Flexible Work Spaces - reconfigure for mode

Reading

Methodology: Lean Startup (Ries), Small Bets (Sims), Sprint (Knapp), Continuous Discovery Habits (Torres)
Innovation: The Innovators Dilemma (Christensen), Innovators DNA (Dyer)
Culture: Orbiting the Giant Hairball (MacKenzie), The Toyota Way (Liker)
Practice: GameStorming (Gray), Making Work Visible (Benson)
Personal: StrengthsFinder (Rath)

Hunger That Knowledge Refines

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The story goes like this: in the garden, there was one tree we weren’t supposed to touch. One bite, and we’d know too much. We bit. We knew. We fell.

Maybe the punishment wasn’t exile or mortality. Maybe it was something quieter and far more persistent: the sense that whatever we learn only widens the perimeter of what we don’t. A hunger that knowledge doesn’t satisfy so much as refine.

Modernism vs. Nihilism on Institutions

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been here before.

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
—G.K. Chesterton, The Thing (1929)

May Day Cross-Quarter

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A frost touched yesterday, rain followed this morning. Birds are already at it—calling, working, filling the air. The gardens and the wider world are waking.

This is the midpoint between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice. May Day. Beltane. Late spring.

First light came at 05:25, sunrise at 06:33. Sunset will be 20:45, last light 21:53.

It’s a moment of Day-Breaking, when daylight takes command after winter’s long nights and early spring’s chill. Call it Day-Bursting, echoing the Old Irish Lábrioscadh. Or, following northern roots, Sun-Breaking—Sólbrjótandi.

Chemex Brewing Guide

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Measurements

Coffee: 30g medium-coarse grind (slightly coarser than table salt)
Water: 480g filtered water (16:1 ratio)
Temperature: 205°F (96°C)

Process

Prep: Heat water. Insert filter with folded side toward spout. Rinse filter thoroughly and dump rinse water.
Dose: Add 30g ground coffee, level bed, start timer.
Bloom: Pour 60g water (2× coffee weight) in spiral from center outward. Ensure all grounds are saturated. Let bloom 45 seconds.
Main pours:
- 0:45 - Pour to 200g total, spiral from center
- 1:30 - Pour to 340g total, spiral from center
- 2:15 - Final pour to 480g total
Drawdown: Allow complete drawdown, should finish around 3:45-4:15 total.

Adjustments

if bitter/over-extracted: Use coarser grind
if sour/weak: Use finer grind
for darker roasts: Lower water temperature to 200°F (93°C)
for lighter roasts: Use full 205°F (96°C)

Baseless Misery and World Out of Phase

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Walking around in baseless existential misery while the world bursts with life is one of the most precisely human conditions there is—and the word “baseless” is where the real pressure lives. To call one’s misery baseless is not to dismiss it. It is to acknowledge a particular species of suffering: grief without a grievance, dread without an object, unhappiness that cannot be negotiated with because it offers no terms. This is distinct from sorrow that has cause and therefore, in theory, remedy. Baseless misery floats. And floating makes it worse, because the sufferer cannot point at the wound.

Soft-Scrambled Egg Variations

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My method of scrambling eggs involved preheating the pan, adding some butter, then cracking whole eggs directly into the pan. I then start slowly and consistently turning and moving the eggs until finished. This and some salt and fresh ground pepper are enough. Occasionally the embellishments below vary the result.

Adding heavy cream to your soft-scrambled eggs enhances their richness, creaminess, and tenderness.

Flavor

Herbs and Spices: Add chopped fresh herbs (chives, parsley, or dill) or a pinch of paprika, garlic powder, or cayenne pepper.
Grated Cheese: Mix in grated Parmesan, cheddar, or goat cheese for added depth.
Diced Veggies: Fold in sautéed mushrooms, bell peppers, or spinach.

Texture and Contrast

Crispy Bacon or Prosciutto: Crumble cooked bacon or prosciutto into the eggs.
Toasted Nuts or Seeds: Sprinkle toasted almonds, walnuts, or sesame seeds on top.
Caramelized Onions: Mix in sweet, caramelized onions.

Other Creamy Options

Substitute crème fraîche for heavy cream.
Mix in a spoonful of Greek yogurt.
Add a dollop of mascarpone.

Cocktail Ingredient Dilution Tasting

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Mix 14ml of an ingredient with 1L of water
Sip it and consider the ingredient’s qualities
Take notes
Repeat

I use this method with bases, bitters, liquors, juices, and syrups. Diluting each with water and tasting them over time helps understand each ingredient. I experimented with various ratios—7ml of this and 45ml of that—before settling on 14ml per liter, except for hot-spicy ingredients like Scrappy’s Fire Tincture.

Async Email Boundary Setting

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Once upon a time in a corporate environment, this was my always-on out-of-office message:

I do not check email frequently.

On most days, I am working at a pairing station. I check my email at the beginning and/or the end of the day, which means that between Tuesday and Friday, it might be as long as 32 hours before I process my inbox and that on a Monday it may have been 80 hours since I last processed my inbox.

Galpin's 3-5 Training Rule

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Dr. Andy Galpin’s strength training protocol:

3–5 days per week
3–5 exercises
3–5 repetitions
3–5 sets
3–5 minutes rest between sets

The protocol uses heavy loads (typically 85%+ of one-rep max) to engage the central nervous system and recruit maximum muscle fibers. The 3-5 minute rest periods allow full CNS recovery between sets, maintaining peak performance throughout the workout.

Sources:

Life Progress Calendar

Wed, 04 Jul 1962 00:00:00 +0000

Key

Mark	Meaning
🟪	Birth
🟧	Past
🟩	Today
⬜	Future
🟥	Expected End Date
🟦	Bonus

A life by decades

0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9+
🟪	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟩	⬜	🟥	🟦

A life by years

	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
0	🟪	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
10	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
20	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
30	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
40	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
50	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
60	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟩	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
70	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
80	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	🟥	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦
90	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦

A life by months

	J	A	S	O	N	D	J	F	M	A	M	J
1	🟪	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
2	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
3	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
4	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
5	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
6	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
7	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
8	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
9	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
10	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
11	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
12	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
13	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
14	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
15	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
16	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
17	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
18	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
19	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
20	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
21	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
22	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
23	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
24	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
25	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
26	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
27	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
28	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
29	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
30	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
31	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
32	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
33	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
34	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
35	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
36	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
37	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
38	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
39	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
40	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
41	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
42	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
43	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
44	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
45	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
46	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
47	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
48	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
49	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
50	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
51	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
52	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
53	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
54	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
55	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
56	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
57	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
58	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
59	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
60	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
61	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
62	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧
63	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟧	🟩	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
64	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
65	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
66	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
67	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
68	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
69	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
70	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
71	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
72	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
73	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
74	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
75	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
76	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
77	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
78	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
79	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
80	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
81	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
82	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
83	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
84	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜	⬜
85	🟥	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦
86	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦
87	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦
88	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦
89	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦
90	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦
91	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦
92	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦	🟦
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Mark Ayers

Identity Goals vs. Action Goals

Cost of Knowing

Religion, Utility, and Power

Civilizational Collapse and Knowledge Transfer

Now

Where am I

What am I reading

What am I focused on

What I’m looking forward to

Uses

Hardware

Software

Lessing's Sufi Science Fiction

Cost of Perpetual Motion

Montaigne's Essay Method

LLMs and Virtuous Laziness

Spotify Engineering Culture Model

Structural Insincerity in Modern Life

Adulthood as Latent Capacity

Solutions Move Problems

Self-Erasing Catastrophe and Civilizational Amnesia

Conditions for Elite Engineering

Identity as Self-Narrative

Three Positions on Existence

Two Epistemic Cycles

About

Media Manufactures Culture

Books I may read

Up Next

Added

Fiction

Nonfiction

Consciousness and Meaning

Series

Curated Reading Paths

Military Science Fiction and Space Warfare

Medieval Social History

Celtic Britain and Arthurian Legend

Frank Lloyd Wright

On The Real Terrain

Bare Feet on Snow

Mumpsimus Stubborn Adherence to Error

Poetry's Compulsion to Create

Poetry's Compulsion to Create

Tree of Knowing and Free Will

Creativity as a Function of Library

Cassandra Inversion

Intent-First Development

Urgency of Beginning

Copyright as Historical Exception

There Are Only Stories

Leaning Against Your Nature

Knowing One Place Deeply

Complexity Generated by Discovery

Dating Age Range Formula

Aging Past the Crowd

Reflecting on a Resting Mind

Poetry for Oneself

Labels and Self-Definition

Books I have read

Finished in 2026

Fiction

Nonfiction

Fingerprints of Our Fellow Man

Non-Rivalrous Asset Leverage

Selling Without Surrendering Control

Owning What You Never Had

Consciousness as Activity

Normalization of Public Indecency

Automation Paradox

Poetic Voice as Cultural Location

Elite Normalization of Democratic Collapse

Kalbeth of the Orbital Authority

Cost of Honor in Corrupt Systems

Biology as Existential Confrontation

Tolerating Irresolvable Tension

Case for Radical Knowledge Sharing

Uncompressed Public Thinking

Wisdom as Recovered Perception