michael-dean-k/

I was able to launch this website in <15 minutes. The setup is local and simple. I have a /writing file in my Obsidian vault, and then subfolders for /code, /publish, /working. /Code holds the site design, /publish my archive, and /working files have .gitignore to not push templates and notes and such. Claude Code handles the website, and different skills help me manage tags, do the menial ops stuff, and push to the Internet. All I have to do is sync a single folder to Github, and the changes are live (hosted on Netlify for free).

Compare this with my first website prototype. I was endlessly iterating on designs and fonts, and thought that I had to organize, filter, and polish my five year archive before I could get started. Probably spent hours on it before burning out on the haul. With this second version, the principle is essentially, "if it doesn't immediately produce something of long-term value, it's not worth systematizing." Now the approach is to move forward here, and slowly fill in the backlog as I'm inspired.

No need to widely share this yet. I'll make little changes day-by-day until it becomes my main place. So many things to consider. For example, I decided to add an initial on the name ("michael-dean-k"), but without hyphens ("michaeldeank"), my wife confused me with "Michael Dank."

A fiction plot came to me in the car: an ASI constructs an airtight waterproof bubble around a town, and everyone is puzzled why, until suddenly it usheeschatrs in a Biblical flood that kills everyone in the world, except the people inside the bubble. They choose this town because someone inside of it was determined to be "the supreme human," a genetic and moral code that is exemplary of how all humans should be and live. It turns out it was just a regular guy who said "please" and "thank you" to this chatbots, a kind of "reverse sycophant." We find out, in a very Vince Vaughn-esque apocalyptic romcom, that he's a mediocre fallible guy, but more remarkably, also immune to the crooning and praise from both his neighbors and overlords. He has every opportunity to step into the role of messiah, but would really rather not, and instead continue his pre-flood existence.

The tongue of the muse! A surreal experience in the shower just overcame me. It was something like a stream consciousness reception, line by line, enacted through and almost creepy mumbled Brisith accent (as if I can only access the Source through a character), and coherent words and ideas would emerge as if no planning or involvement with my own conscious thought or intention. “Pettiflicks," was just one of the hundreds of words I invented. They all seemed to cohere in the moment, but were probably nonsense. Even if it truly was unintelligible, I find myself filled with hope that inside me is some alien non-Self, a continent of shadow figures that, if I learn to tap into, can write through me, as if they are conduits between my soul and the page without me in the way (obvious source of inspiration here is Pessoa). This all sounds quite esoteric as I type it, and I suppose I do fear the realms of mysticism and possession that come with "automatic writing," but my shower session felt more playful and critical, almost Shakespearean, void of malice or evil. Exiting the state, there was some residual enthusiasm. When I went back to my wife, she asked me of the weather, which triggered a whole performance: “27! ... the 27th ... of April! ... at 11:03 ... and then I ran to the window and threw it open, let out a long dramatic sniff, and screamed "53 degrees!" and was only off by 2.

I got charged $4,500 for a band-aid.

For that price I could’ve bought 90,000 band-aids on Amazon (two for each person in my NYC neighborhood), but emergency room band-aids must be of a different substance.

A month ago we cut my newborn daughter’s finger with a nail clipper and it wouldn't stop bleeding for an hour. The on-call pediatrician—who was naturally grumpy since it was after midnight—insisted we go to the ER, and after 5 hours in the waiting room, the bleeding stopped right before we were called in. After one minute with the doctor and five with the nurse (most of it small talk about islands in Greece), we left with a band-aid on a dry scab. I assumed it would be an expensive lesson, a few hundred dollars to breathe hospital air, but we were charged a whole family’s round-trip tickets to Athens.

What's weirder than American private healthcare is how used to it everyone is. A family member said, “well, it was March, so you didn’t hit your deductible yet.” I’m willing to pay the $577 for the emotional labor of fixing a boo boo, but the remaining mystery, the $3,923 on yesterday’s mail bill, feels beyond reason. I’ll be requesting an itemized breakdown to call their bluff, and if they don’t bring it down to a normal but still ridiculous level ($500 for a band-aid—10,000x above market price) I will evade the debt collectors until they tank my credit and jail me.

I find “do you believe in God?” to be an impossibly vague question. Which god? The Christian God? Old Testament God? One or all of the Hindu Gods? Chris Farley God? I guess the question I find more interesting is asking “what is God?” and even better, “What is your most specific conception of God, what is required of you in your relationship to ‘it,’ and how does your life change because of that relationship?”

An atheist is one who just ignores this line of questioning. They’d say, “There is no supernatural, I can use logic to disprove it, so I can dunk on superstitious believers.” And if that’s all God is, then you’re missing out on a whole dimension of existence. As if you’ve never had sex. Or tried a mind-altering drug. Or whatever. SYK, I am an understudied heretical Greek Orthodox Christian. Being understudied and heretical is a bad combination, because I am likely refuting points I don’t understand, but alas, that is what I am, and I hope to each year become more studied and more heretical.

My intuition is that the Christian notion of God and Christ is misguided, malformed, not living up to its potential, with a whole bunch of categorial mistakes. SYK, again (so you know), I don’t dismiss it, and would even say that “becoming Christ like” is the most important thing you can do, and that can all be true without him literally having a virgin mother or resurrecting from the dead. We can respect and worship mythology without demanding it to be physically real. The metaphysics matter more!

But metaphysically, here’s what’s wrong with God. In my model, God does not have consciousness, meaning it’s not a real-time entity, looking down on each of us, listening to our prayers. God is also not the admin of a shared server where we all go when we die; there can be an afterlife Odyssey more beautiful and supernatural than anything we can conceive, but maybe it is single player and lives in our head and stretches our 3-minute death into 3,000 years experiential years in dream-space. Who knows. I think the main point I want to debate is that God isn’t conscious.

“Divine intelligence” makes more sense to me, and is a different thing than consciousness. Humans and animals and maybe even machines, can have consciousness, but God is greater than all of that. God is more akin to the arena, the thing that all agents live within. God is not the whole arena though, more like a property within it. If we’re talking about “divine intelligence,” this veers into “intelligent design,” which IIC is something like, “the structures in nature are so elegant and unlikely that someone external must have designed this!” This taps into “God’s plan” territory. Again, this sees God as an omnipotent architect, with great intention between all decisions. This doesn’t seem to be the case. There is the theodicy question: why does suffering exist? Why serial killers and avalanches and Hitler and the vast nothingness? Why is that part of the design? There are all sorts of rationalizations (“to develop our character”). More likely, I think it’s more of a spray-and-pray design, a chaos generator.

The universe is a cumshot. Consider how many billions of sperm are needed in order for one of them to find the egg, for conception to happen, the miracle of life. This seems to happen at all scales of nature. Redundancies matter! If we are cosmicaly inside one tier of a fabrege egg, black holes burrowing into new space-time pockets, exploding matter endlessly inward, then there really is a raging, uncontrollable, chaotic force at the root of everything, and it doesn't have a plan! That is terrifying. Yet, from all the noise, two particles come into proximity, orbit, fuse, bind, transcend themselves into a higher order of novelty, harmony. This is God, I think, and it happens at every scale. You need a blind, idiotic chaos generator to create a supermassive variety of things, and God is the rare and unlikely event when two things come into contact to form something beautiful, to make a third. Love.

I guess “God is Love” is the most accurate theological statement I can get behind, because it explains every scale: the cosmological one, the societal one, the interpersonal one, the creative one, the psychological one.

The infinite monkey theorem is often stated as, “if you give an infinite amount of monkeys an infinite number of time, one of them will eventually write Hamlet.” This is very off. I assume most people think it’s off because they know monkeys can’t write (which misses the point). I think it’s off in the other direction; it misunderstands what happens when you multiply infinite x infinite. You won’t just get one Hamlet; you’d get a whole lot more.

Let’s start with a single infinite: a monkey with infinite time. Imagine putting said monkey in a magic bubble that gives him immortality, endless focus to type random characters, and the ability to survive the death of all universes, quantum foam, or whatever. This monkey has a lot of time. Endless time. He won’t just write Hamlet once, he’ll write it many times. Actually, infinite times. Sometimes the monkey will go several million/billion/trillion years without writing Hamlet, but that’s okay because he’s on adderall, can’t die, and has only one job.

Now imagine there are infinite monkeys, too. In every frame of reality (assume this an Unreal Engine monkey simulator running at 120 FPS), the Creator can spawn monkey bubbles, 2 or 2 trillion bubbles, or however many bubbles are necessary for one of them to begin writing Hamlet in that moment. Then in the next frame (0.0083 seconds later), more monkeys are spawned until one of them starts Hamlet too. Over and over. (What we do with all the unsuccessful monkeys is a different problem.) Since all of these monkeys have internet, there are 432,000 Hamlet uploads every hour. And if these infinite monkeys started at the dawn of our universe, they would have written Hamlet 2.18×10^20 times.

The big idea is that when you multiply infinite x infinite, not only does the unlikely thing happen, but it becomes the new grammar of reality.

This thought experiment feels prescient now, because, of course, AI. While agents can replicate & work at radical speeds, it’s not literally infinite. Even if some monkey virus infected every computer on Earth, and did a years worth of work in a day, that’s still finite. But even if you multiply an astronomical x an astronomical, or even just a very big x very big, a similar effect happens: the unlikely thing becomes omnipresent.

I first started to notice this in the Sora app (which I haven’t heard about in months BTW). If you’re familiar with the “Wazzup” 1999 Budweiser commercial, you might remember that it involves two guys yelling “ZUUUUP” into a phone, with the video rapidly cutting back and forth between them. Now, you can prompt anyone into that meme. And so you can just swipe right and find the LOTR cast going “ZUUUUP,” and all the American presidents going “ZUUUUP,” and every member of the animal and pokemon kingdom going “ZUUUUP,” and everyone in your phonebook who uploaded their likeness to the app going “ZUUUUUUP,” as if every conceivable piece of media, IP, and matter just collapsed into this singular point, an arbitrarily selected commercial from 25 years ago.

Now this is a simple, harmless example. But it gets weirder when you imagine a single person’s intentions leveraged to such an extraordinary degree that they become the entirety of the Internet. It would be like, after I publish this note, all the comments came from fake accounts based on real people I know, but they each post a link to a version of Hamlet where all the characters are monkeys. And then I go to Reddit, or check my email, or listen to my voicemail, and it’s just monkey Hamlet everywhere. This is an exaggeration, but I’m trying to make a point that is something like an offshoot of the dead Internet theory. It won’t just be fake AI stuff that tries to blend in, but an assault of the bizzare, a thousand oddly specific info-viruses that we won’t be able to escape, orchestrated towards various ends that we won’t be able to wrap our heads around.

I generally don’t think the open Internet, as it’s designed today, will be able to stand it. I also don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, because the web today has ossified and enshittified and is probably due for a shakeup. I do think there will be some chaos/danger ahead, and we’ll have to each figure out how to navigate that safely, but I imagine we’ll reassemble into smaller communities, sheltered from the near-infinite, where you trust/know the 15-150 people involved, within the Dunbar limit. From this disaggregation, I think there’s a slow path of building back better and bot-resistant, and it’ll possibly be a much better place than the before-infinite-monkey times.

You guys said you like snakes, so I built SNAKEPIT: Every dot is a log from last year (so 408 mini-essays), and when they collide, they combine into a new snake that is +1 in length (told Claude to “use traditional snake physics”). Next step is to have it generate new logs based on combos, making this like a petri dish for idea sex, where most mutations are slop, but some could be unexpected/interesting. Step 2 is to make it an experimental open blog, where anyone can upload ideas. Step 3 is to give the snake a sense of smell using vector embeddings, so it’s not just random, and they sniff towards related ideas. Step 4 is to build a Substack Notes integration, so instead of finding writing through an engagement-ranked feed, we find writing through snakepit.

My wife and I joke that when the obstetricians ask her, “what is your pain management strategy?” she’s going to say “Led Zeppelin,” which cues me to blast “Immigrant Song” at 100% through her BOSE speakers. In all my baby-book reading, when they’ve mentioned “music” during labor, I imagine soothing, meditative music—like Enya or flukes—to calm the screaming mother; but maybe the other direction is more productive? The experience is so intense that Zen garden music could potentially feel toyish and tone deaf to the experience at hand. If you’re experiencing the extremes of pain, it might help to have blaring technical instrumentation in your ear, to moan in harmony with Robert Plant. I mean, the whole strategy is to distract your mind from pain by focusing on specific things, and it does in fact require 100% of your bandwidth to really listen to Bonham fills of Page riffs. She wants me to make her a hard rock playlist.

The T800 is not a graphing calculator, it’s the new robot for China that can do roundhouse kicks. The promo reel is something like a cross between Rocky and The Terminator, replete with synth violins, and cinematic shots of a boxing gym. This thing can jump, spin, and kick you in the face. It is super fluid, unnaturally fluid. Why do we need kungfu bots though? I think the goal is to create reels that invokve awe, terror, and surrender: look, China is winning. This is not about “make something people want.” This is optics. We are building a master race, and we are ahead of you. Later in the reel, it is sparring with a child, before giving him a pound (so you know it has a heart). The T800 has no eyes, but a visor of light across its head. Oh great, now it’s using a hammer to repair it’s own body. Available for 180,000, 240,000, 280,000 or 360,000 RMB ($50,198). That seems, cheap? I mean, for the price of Tesla, you can get a sometimes-functional robot to spar and injure your friends? (If you think the reel is AI, here’s a behind the scenes: Link, Link, YouTube.)

Four Santas at the edge of Bryant park, each with a bike carriage and $60 glow light speaker, each blaring a different holiday song, co-constructing a wall of cheer, a terrible cacophony that blends with traffic and engines on 42nd, and for some unreasonable price, you can take selfies for $100 as they lap the Christmas market. People must do this. Otherwise they wouldn’t come back. If I were an out-of-towner, and in a festive mood, I guess I could see the appeal of a postcard moment like this, of being ushered around the center of the world by the boss himself, it just feels a lot funnier and weirder when you know the same place on a cold January morning commute. I am not a Christmas cynic, I’m just struck by the novelty of the sight, and in lieu of a picture, this is what comes out.

I had a horrific dream last night. We were in an oversized living room, and there was an inter-dimensional parasite that would one-by-one, burrow into each person’s ass. Whether you then exploded or not was somehow a testament to your character. It went up mine at least twice. I survived, and the second time the parasite coiled up and turned into an egg. I think I won this tournment? Was this a Harry Potter dream? Actually no, this thing was slimey and shadowy and probably from the Stranger Things univese. Actually, I probably had this dream because Season 5 of Stranger Things just dropped.

Stranger Things features possessions, ghosts, monsters, and every breed of supernatural evil, but all packaged in a way to be maximally accessible. It is a cultural juggernaut, the beast of Netflix. It gets billions of views, and is the #1 show in 90 countries. It is cross-generational and nostalgic for both kids and parents, resurrecting songs from the 80s back onto the billboards.

Is it weird that a hit show normalizes paranormal and grotesque violence? I mean yes, in the end, I’m sure the kids will win, but are we not poisoning our subconscious? I guess this reflect a general hesitation to the whole genre of horror. I do think there is something valuable to virgin eyes—if you see CGI evil, even once, it could haunt you eternally. Many other cultures see Halloween as soul-damning (my sister-in-law, a true Orthodox Christian, recently went upstate to visit a monastery on the night of Halloween, to avoid the inevitable images of teenagers dressed as cadavers).

Could I beat Alcaraz at tennis if he were blindfolded? I mean, probably, unless he could reconstruct vision through sound, which I’m pretty confident he can’t. All I’d have to do is (a) lob the ball and get it in on my serves, (b) assume he’s unable to serve blind—through muscle memory he might score some aces, but not enough to win a set, and so he might resort to lobbing, which I could return.

To make this more interesting, I’d allow Alcaraz to have a doubles partner, except the partner has no racket. His job is to hold Alcaraz by the shoulders, usher him around, position him in the right spot, and yell “swing!” That might make it close, especially if they practice in advance.

I asked AI how to give Alcaraz a handicap so the odds are closer to 50/50, and it is considering some options: give him his eyes back but replace his racket with either a frying pan or a 2x4, give him his eyes back but place 4 folding chairs randomly on his side of court and require him to hold a leash of a large dog in his non-playing hand, give him his eyes back but replace his body with a robot and force him to control his body off site with an Xbox controller, etc.