Communal static blooms,
and collective weather forms.
Dream-fruit bruises softly,
whilst grammar chambers set.
Distant engines always answer.
Creative Loop
One band is a collective endeavour, two bands make a scene.
I’ve written and talked about all this before so i’m not going to repeat my self. Other than to say that one of the most formative times in my life, and my introduction to ‘the creative world’ was the hardcore punk scene in Margate in the late 90’s and early 00’s. If you wanted culture any culture at all, you had to do it together.
I recently watched this 15 year old lecture by Brian Eno, where he goes into his concept of Scenius in more detail than I have previously come across. So good.
I am aware that the meaning of the term ‘scene’ has been under constant re-negotiation since the Internet arrive, and what a scene ‘is’ and ‘isn’t’ is something people have very strong opinions about, and I’m going to steer clear.
However; years and years ago now, before AI entered mainstream consciousness, I remember having a conversation with Mat Dryhurst about DIY punk and Scenius etc, but the main topic of conversation was about what is like to be in one. And one of the things I took away from that evening in the pub is that ‘scenes’ are so generative because at their core, people produce work for themselves and show it to their friends. All a scene really is, is just people just prompting each other in a tight feedback loop.
With that in mind I want to mention two things that have come back this week as part of the loop.
World Soul Fruit Fight
I received an email this week from Duc de Berry / Billy Crosby creator of the sprawling personal site hoofofconcept.com with a link to a 3 part audio project called World Soul Fruit Fight.
The email opened “monsters in the mirror is my fav bit of media I’ve be consumed so far this year” and then went on to explain they had generated three tracks with Suno, based on outputs from my Slop Machines GTP link where you can chat with the current draft of my in progress book. The grounding for it also contains worldrunning.guide, and a bunch of other unpublished writing.
Track 3 is my favourite. It’s amazing.
Listening to them for the first time, as an experience, was a bit like being inside a hallucination or a dream. The referencing of my ideas and imagery so familiar to me from my creative work comes in an out. There’s a bit about buying a sunset, the screen as a mirror, and the mall of abandoned brands… all appear in track 3 alone. It’s a very weird, wild, and inspiring feeling.
If unlike me, you don’t want to listen to synthetic media, do head over to hoofofconcept.com and browse around. It’s very zanny. I love it.
Claude Skill Creator
I’ve been a bit overwhelmed by the response the to Hard Worlds posts I put out 2 weeks ago. A fork of Anthropic’s official skill creator now exists over on Github, which implements the ontology/theory derived from the knowledge object I supplied alongside the essay .
You can read the full write up on what happens when you use it against a mature skill file on twitter, but I’ve quoted the main results below. Overall, a massive success.
The SKILL.md is now a router that identifies what I’m asking for (drafting a thesis section? reviewing a risks edit? formatting the docx?) and loads only the relevant room file and exemplar. For this deal memo skill, context load per task dropped to 13-19K characters.
That’s a 74-87% reduction.The renderer (render_memo.py) takes a typed JSON intermediate – where each content block has a type like section_header, bullet, labeled_sub_bullet, risk_bullet – and produces the formatted Word document. The model’s job is to classify content into types and populate the text. The script handles fonts, spacing, tab stops, margins, bullet characters, page setup, and numbering and the model never touches python-docx.
The validators run automatically as part of the rendering pipeline. One checks the JSON structure before rendering (does the thesis have deal terms? are there enough risks? is CARR in the financials?). The other checks the text after rendering (e.g. no customer quotes in the body, risk labels under 4 words, CARR figures consistent across sections). I calibrated the structural validator against all 19 of my prior memos (a benefit of being at Battery for 10+ years!) measuring what’s always present, usually present, and sometimes present so the severity levels (fail vs. warn vs. info) reflect actual patterns rather than aspirational rules I came up with in conversation with skill-creator.
The result is that formatting bugs went to seemingly zero for this skill. v1 had a frustrating problem with competitor entries being standalone paragraphs – it was actually stated four times in different locations and still kept failing – and that issue is structurally impossible in v2 because competitor entries are a different content block type than section headers, and the renderer makes them sub-bullets by construction. The model can’t produce the wrong format because the wrong format doesn’t exist in the type system.
I do think this way of thinking about agent environment design has applications far beyond the creation of just skills though. But its early days yet, and the essay is still travelling out into cyberspace. Looking forward to seeing what happens next.
Start Select Reset 📑
Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.
As a thank you, I send you my zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.
Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- FULLY finished the first draft of chapters 1-9 of SLOP MACHINES. 71k words. I think i’m going to do a big edit pass and and prepare myself for the closing chapter that way.
- Had a great call with Rich from Archetypal.
- Vibe coded my first proper app in AI Studio to get something done, and have been burning though free Gemini API quota every day since lol.
- Got a lot of gossip from pals in the UK game industry, sounds grim.
- Honestly there was drain chaos in my house this week and I lost ALL of Friday to it.
Terminal Access
Publishers weekly starred my friend Andrew Dana Hudson‘s newest novel Absence (our May 5th)
The thoroughness with which Hudson imagines how individuals and society would have to rewire themselves to contend with this bizarre phenomenon lends his tale impressive philosophical heft. The result is a poignant exploration of loss, grief, hope, and the fragility of existence that will resonate with readers beyond the fantasy and horror genres.
Dipping the Stacks
Study visually captures hard truth: Walking home at night is not the same for women
While men tended to focus on the path or a fixed object (like a light, the walking path or a garbage can), the women’s visual pattern represented a scanning of the perimeter (bushes, dark areas next to a path).
The infinite scroll goes on trial
Social platforms adopt these features because they increase the amount of time that people spend using them, and time spent correlates directly with revenue earned. And so much of Zuckerberg’s time on Wednesday was spent insisting that Meta no longer emphasizes time spent on its platforms as a core objective.
Hunting for the world’s most mythical cannabis: Big Sur Holy Weed
It was beginning to dawn on me that holding weed to the same standard as something like wine or wagyu beef ignores the biggest reality facing cannabis. In my rush to validate history, I was actually ignoring history. Yes, cannabis is unique and there are genetic lines and unique growing regions worth preserving, but it’s also been muddled by a century of violent criminalization.
Brace for the Fuckening | justin․searls․co
Ultimately, unless we see AI crash and burn catastrophically, I feel pretty comfortable predicting that if the only sounds your job makes are clickety-clack and yackety-yack, the bulk of your colleagues—and very possibly you—are going to be caught up in the gravitational vortex of what Andrew Yang is calling The Fuckening.
My journey to the microwave alternate timeline — LessWrong
What I find uniquely cool about Marie T. Smith is that she started with no credentials or qualifications: she was a random housewife who simply fell in love with a new piece of technology, spent a decade pushing it to its limits, and published her findings as a cookbook. Just a woman and a magnetron.
Reading
I finished reading The Heart of Prayer by Rupert Spira. It’s very interesting reframing of his first book Being Aware of Being Aware very helpful to see the same argument recast through the language and lens of ‘God’.
Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky audiobook is out! I’m burning though it! So good!
Music
LULO ELEKTON (Genre)
Last week i wort about how I had been injecting the Indonesian house music into my ears? Well i fell a bit deeper down the rabbit hole and I present to you Lulo Elekton, the hottest night out in Southeast Sulawesi Indonesia.
I have decided that Techno clubs would be 1000% more tolerable nights out in my 40s if they combined Kaely, or Regency era country dancing. What are we doing here in the west? There’s zero cultural innovation happening! meanwhile in Indonesia this is all the rage! And it’s live music!!
Remember Kids:
A week later Kilby demonstrated an integrated flip-flop circuit, made again of germanium, that incorporated two transistors. It, too, performed as he expected. Both of these prototypes were extremely awkward realizations of the much more sophisticated ideas he had penned into his notebook two months earlier.
Crystal Fire by Michael Riordan