Pin hole.
Laundry drips thought.
Discipline holds it all,
but it may break the wheel..
Riding A Wave
I’ve been in the Pin Hole this weekend.
A thought arrived and I just needed to get it out. I’ve only written about 1600 words, but most of that is just notes. Raw fragments, scattered ideas, sentences and that are really just scaffolding for what might come next. Still, the idea has been with me at all times. I’ve been thinking about it walking to and from the coffee shop, doing the washing up, and whilst hanging up the laundry. It’s as if the entire shape of the piece just arrived fully formed, it was really hard to ignore.
No matter how much creative work you do, it’s always such a strange thing to experience when it happens. You can spend months grinding away on other things, and then suddenly the stone itself decides to split and reveal what’s inside.
One of the things I firmly believe is that everyone should have some kind of discipline with their creative work, because you need to be ready when the idea arrives. Discipline doesn’t guarantee anything, but it does ensure that when lightning does strike, you’ve got a place for it to land. Making something every week, over a long period, allows you to:
- build out the tool set of possible places and forms the idea can fall into;
- have the muscle memory to sit down and focus when focus is required;
- and, most importantly, to have built ‘the practice’ of getting an idea out of your head and into the world.
When an idea seizes you, you have to move with it, let it take you over for a while. Ride the wave. Stay in the pin hole for as long as it will hold you.
I’ve also come to realise that when an idea arrives like this, charged with energy, complete with direction, it isn’t just another thing to work on or get around to. It’s the thing that must be worked on when time allows. The thing I need to do be doing now, and next. Yes, it’s put a stick in the wheel of my best-laid-plans bicycle, scattering schedules and intentions across the pavement. But that’s just how these things go. Ideas rarely respects the timetable.
When it comes, you either follow or watch it vanish.
On The Blog
Cloudflare’s NET Dollar: AI Agents, Crypto Rails, and Web Payments
Wrote this off the cuff, had quite a good reception already. A speculative intellectual current thats been flowing though my life for the last decade seems to be finally arriving.
Yesterday’s Cloudflare announcement seems to have caught the wider developer community off guard. But it’s hard to follow everything and if you hate blockchains then you have no idea whats going on. Things are moving really quickly however, it was only two weeks ago that Google’s paper on ‘Virtual Agent Economies’ dropped, and their follow up announcement on the 16th Sept that they would be supporting the Agent-Payment-Protocol (A2P) which extends the x402 protocol developed by Coinbase and the Ethereum foundation amount others.
BYENNE
Posts continue to go up over on BYENNE:
Good strategy sounds like
the stories you wish were told
before you arrived.
Like memory,
but forward.
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Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Added two new draft chapters to SLOP MACHINES. The first being ‘Patchnotes on the Patriarchy’ about manosphere identities alpha/beta etc and I also did a re-write of my chapter on ‘Playability‘
- Did an interview for Bankless newsletter on the game I’ve been working on. Dunno when it’ll be out. Also podcast.
- Wrote the final guidance piece for a client on next 18months of local models and the proliferation of tensors chips into different hardware.
- Booked my flights and hotel for Berlin. I’ll be in town 23rd – 27th Oct.
- Episode 302 was nearly ready to go. I just needed to get the zines printed. Seems like plans have changed
- Hung out with Kara Kittle
Terminal Access
This epic and very transcription of a translated interview with a Software Engineer working on AI in China is really worth reading if you want to understand the industry over there, and the geo-tech-politics of whats going on currently from a Chinese perspective.
“‘Chinese AI’ is merely a geopolitical label,” H said. “All LLMs fundamentally compress and regenerate collected data.” Yet despite this universalist perspective, he articulately mapped the profound topological differences between Chinese and American AI ecosystems while understanding the China model’s essence with surgical precision.
I knew I needed to extract everything from his brain, so I scheduled a three-hour follow-up call.
Dipping the Stacks
The appropriate amount of effort is zero
I invite you to go about your day and practice dropping the effort. See how weird it feels, but notice how the activity is still getting done. See what it’s like to drop the energy too low, where you might become lethargic or your performance drops.
Archaeologists are consummate worldbuilders. Primarily a concept explored within fiction and game creation, worldbuilding is the act of integrating history, ecology and geology to bring an imaginary world to life.
Why 95% of AI Commentary Fails
These are — to understate — not screenshots from a paper saying “95 per cent of organisations are getting zero return from AI.” Rather, this paper is wildly bullish for the frontier labs
Hasan Piker Thinks America Might Be Cooked
Some would argue that if the Democrats were smart, they’d go all in on leftist populism and subsidize a Piker-led creator bootcamp to help beat back Trump 2.0. But Piker has no faith in liberal politicians; he thinks Kamala Harris, who currently leads in many polls about prospective Democratic presidential candidates, has no shot in 2028. He’s not even convinced there will be elections in 2028.
The words we use to talk about nature are disappearing. Here’s why that matters.
Once upon a time, the English language was full of stories with “blossoms,” “rivers,” and “moss.” But these words are disappearing from our vocabularies — and along with them, our connection to the natural world they describe.
A study published in the journal Earth earlier this summer found that the use of nature-related words declined more than 60 percent between 1800 and 2019.
Reading
Still re-reading Gordon White’s Ani.Mystic before bed. This re-read is a much deeper one than the first time I read it. I’m hi-lighting different bits as a go, more important things are resonating with me. Still excellent, only growing in importance.
I’ve been trying to steer clear of going outside with headphones on so still chipping away An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence by Zeinab Badawi, but I also added another Warhammer 30k audio book I realise I skipped in 2019 – Battle for the Abyss by Ben Counter. I need to match my goodreads up with a list of the complete series. I must be missing more.
The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte. and The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe by Richard Rohr are on pause until Ani.Mystic is done.
Music
Wave Cage – Cosmosis//Disco Chicken (singles)
I’ve been listening to a lot of Wave Cage recently. They describe themselves as Beep Boop Jazz, which in all honesty is the pefect description.
Their songs have a soundtrack/scape quality which I very much enjoy. Cinematic almost. Like a fusion of beebob jazz and cyberpunk noir. I’ve very much enjoyed making my way though their back catalogue this week; walking around, travelling too and fro with this playing in my ears. It’s been a mood.
Remember Kids:
…how was it possible that the presence of a fennel who could not be seen, smelled, or touched was sufficient for the chili seeds to hurry their germination and for seedlings to change their growth trajectory?
Thus Spoke the Plant – Monica Gagliano
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