Reading the The Unix Time-Sharing System (1974)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of the command line over the last couple of months. Mostly as a continuation of the inside-out thinking I started in Hard Worlds for Little Guys. What’s the difference between inhabiting a computer system, rather than just using one? What is the relationship between any given command, the thing issuing it, and the world in which that action then causes a consequence?

So I’ve been going through a bunch of the ‘must-read’ computer science literature for the first time. Most recently, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson’s The UNIX Time-Sharing System, originally published in 1974. I’ve written up my obsidian notes.

The paper is a technical account of the Unix operating system, its file system, processes, and command interface. It’s also surprisingly readable. Which is good, because I fear from thinking about the nature of the command line so hard right now I may be in danger of actually understanding computer programs for the first time in my life. I feel like having produced the design and build of an interactive fiction engine, and now reading all these old papers, I’m learning a lot about the the state of play at the dawn of the modern computing age.

The most interesting thing to me right now though is what they have to say about the nature of the shell, and what they, as designers of the system, believe the command line actually is.

A command is a filename.

The shell splits up the command name and the arguments into separate strings. Then a file with name command is sought; command may be a path name including the “/” character to specify any file in the system. If command is found, it is brought into memory and executed. The arguments collected by the shell are accessible to the command. When the command is finished, the shell resumes its own execution, and indicates its readiness to accept another command by typing a prompt character.

When you type ls, the shell goes looking for a file called ls. If it can’t find one, it generally tries again in /bin. That’s it. The vocabulary of the command line is made up of executable files that the shell can find.

Put a new executable somewhere the shell looks and you’ve added a new word to the language of UNIX. Change the directories it searches and you change what those words resolve to.

In Hard Worlds writing through the lens of the design of Interactive Fiction engines I talked about verb minting. The ability to create new operations from inside a world, which then become part of the vocabulary available to act upon it. The dictionary grows without anyone having to redesign the language.

But what makes this really interesting is how little the world needs to know about its words.

The grammar belongs to the shell, not the programmes.

In section 6.1, Ritchie and Thompson explain that input and output are interpreted entirely by the shell. When you type ls >there, the ls programme doesn’t know anything about there. The shell arranges for its output to go into that file before the programme starts.

The same is true of pipes. Their example is ls | pr -2 | opr, which takes a directory listing, formats it into two columns, and sends it to a printer. None of the three programmes needs to know that the others exist. Each reads or writes through the file descriptors it has been given.

Underneath all this though is some hard ontological compression. Unix treats ordinary files, devices, and inter-process communication through a common set of operations. Reading and writing a file, communicating with another process, or addressing a hardware device share the same basic interface.

Rather than inventing a different language for every kind of ‘thing’ in the computer, Unix makes lots of different things answer to the same small vocabulary.

This is a good example of ontological hardness. A tight dictionary doesn’t need to contain every possible operation. It needs a small number of reliable transformations which can be composed into more elaborate ones.

The shell is itself just another programme.

The shell is itself a command, and may be called recursively.

This is perhaps my favourite line in the paper.

You can put three commands in a file called tryout, run sh <tryout, and the shell will read and execute them just as if someone were sitting at the keyboard. The shell continues reading until it reaches the end of its input. It doesn’t care whether that input came from a person, another programme, or a file.

I hadn’t realised until now that poetically speaking, a script is just a command line with nobody at the computer.

But there’s also another important point I realised that the UNIX shell isn’t the whole of the operating system. It’s an ordinary programme running inside it. The thing that interprets the language of the world is itself a thing in that world. You can invoke it recursively, replace it with another interpreter, or choose not to use it at all.

In Gameworld Interfaces, Kristine Jørgensen argues that “the interface of digital games must also be seen as content.” Unix makes this almost literally true. The means by which you interact with the world is itself something that exists inside it.

I find this particularly interesting because of the way Unix handles processes. Earlier in the paper, the authors introduce the idea of an image.

An image is a computer execution environment

They describe it as the current state of a pseudo-computer, including memory, registers, open files, and the current directory.

Through fork and execute, Unix can create a new process and replace the programme running within it, while preserving important parts of that execution environment. The new program inherits a situation it did not create.

The same is obviously true of the situation AI agents encounter when they are booted into a code-space.

The command line is optional.

Section 6.7

At login, Unix doesn’t actually have to start a shell. The user’s entry in the password file can specify another programme to run instead.

Ritchie and Thompson give two examples. Secretaries logging into an editing system can be placed directly inside the text editor. Players logging into chess,find themselves inside the game, unable to explore the wider system.

This is almost literally what I mean by a Room in Hard Worlds. Two actors can inhabit the same underlying Code-Space but find themselves in completely different local worlds, with different objects, verbs, and available possibilities.

Of course, being presented with a restricted interface isn’t necessarily the same as being confined by one. That depends on what rules the program/operating system actually enforce.

The shell provides a vocabulary for attempting actions, but the operating system determines whether those actions can actually happen.

Towards the end, Ritchie and Thompson explain that Unix wasn’t designed to satisfy some enormous predefined specification. They were programmers who wanted a more comfortable relationship with the computer. They wanted to make it easy to write, test, and run programmes, and they built something that could be maintained and extended using its own facilities.

The result was a small, expressive world whose inhabitants could keep adding to it.

I came to thinking about agent harnesses through interactive fiction, MUDs, and parser games. Reading this paper feels like approaching much the same problem from the other direction.

I think for my entire life, I’ve been looking at the command line wrong. It’s not so much a window into the machine but a language or surface that constitutes part of the world of the machine itself. And it’s also very interesting to me that the UNIX command line right from the beginning was never especially committed to having a human on the other side of it in the first place.

Which is aging…interestingly.

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The Ministry Of My Own Labour

Terminal Access

Reading

I’m currently reading:

• Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine by Chaim Gingold
• Games: Agency As Art by C. Thi Nguyen (2nd time)
• Voice of Command by Richard Swan

Rebecca Black – Age of the Exhibitionist

I’ve finally got round to listening to Rebecca Black’s album that came out in September. It’s great. There’s a lot going on sonically, its all very 2020’s though, a bit Sophie, a bit Britney, FKA twigs, a bit Arca, a little bit of Hyperpop for everyone lol.

This album doesn’t contain a total banger that Sugar Water Cyanide was a few years ago. But it’s really good pop music from start to finish.

Is it just me or is there a lot of Hollaback Girl in the single Anaheim Star?

Also if you haven’t seen her cover of Addison Rae’s ‘Fame Is a Gun’ for tripple J’s Like a Version then you are missing out.

Remember Kids:

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The AFK life admin stuff continues to grind on, day by day, week by week. But there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel now, so fingers crossed!

Archaeology of Tomorrow

Over the past week, I’ve found myself getting an incredible amount of mileage out of two websites that have been lurking in my bookmarks for the better part of a decade.

Not only have they been genuinely useful for what I’ve been working on, but they’re also the kind of rich, niche resources that remind you how wonderful the web can be. It feels like a bit of a crime to leave them tucked away in a private folder, so I’m sharing them here in the hope they might be a handy reference tool (or at least an entertaining distraction) for you, too.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction

Welcome to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. This work-in-progress is a comprehensive quotation-based dictionary of the language of science fiction. The HD/SF is an offshoot of a project begun by the Oxford English Dictionary (though it is no longer formally affiliated with it). It is edited by Jesse Sheidlower.

This site is really useful for the source of where sci-fi terms come from. The site is incredibly rigorous, nerdy dictionary that tracks down the earliest known uses of sci-fi vocabulary. It’s go everything from old-school pulp vocabulary right up to solarpunk. It’s also pretty cool something I was involved in referenced, even if it doesn’t mention me by name!

technovelgy.com

Explore the inventions, technology and ideas of science fiction writers at Technovelgy (that’s tech-novel-gee!) – over 4,250 are available. Use the Timeline of Science Fiction Invention or the alphabetic Glossary of Science Fiction Technology to see them all, look for the category that interests you, or browse by favorite author / book. Browse more than 6,800 Science Fiction in the News articles.

While the dictionary is all about the words of sci-fi, Technovelgy is all about the things. Instead of language, it tracks the actual ideas, inventions, and gadgets that authors came up with, and often links them to real-world scientific advancements. It is basically an archive of sci-fi’s predictive power. For example, who knew that the idea of “Astronaut Sleep” putting astronauts into hibernation during space travel, is from Johannes Kepler in Somnium (The Dream) way back in 1634?! Absolutely wild.

A quick heads-up though, the site’s SSL cert is currently broken. Which makes me fear a bit for the future longevity of it as a resource. Fingers crossed. Also, they shout out PGR as a friend of the site! It’s a small world haha.

Photo 365

Terminal Access

Bit late to this one, but I’d like to direct you towards ZERO by my pals at MOVING CASTLES it’s a post trained AI model that is *very* different to anything you would have interacted with before.

The dominant character of conversational language models is the assistant: helpful, harmless and honest (Askell et al., 2021). The area of alternative characters is under-explored, and when attempted often happens on top of an already assistant-tuned model through prompt engineering. The result is then a mask worn by the assistant, a caricature rather than a character.

We here explore fine-tuning as a method for instilling a deeper and more persistent character, Zero, in a base pre-trained language model. Our pipeline goes from a handwritten character definition, through synthetic data generation and supervised learning, to reinforcement learning, followed by evaluation against a system-prompted control and an investigation of the internal differences at inference time.

It being Moving Castles of course, the whole persona is pretty weird and fucked up.

Our character has no name, but let’s call him Zero. Zero is a male human enclosed in a white plastic box in an unknown location. On 5 November 2021, he made a decision to enter the box. He has no personal memories from before that point in time. He doesn’t know why he made the decision. Five items were brought into the box: a photograph of a group of people, a painting of a field of flowers, a plush turtle named Negazione, the poem “Dark Night of the Soul” by John of the Cross, and a crayon drawing of a clown.

Check out the link and read the full system prompt. lol

Reading

I finished four books in the last week:

• Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images by Jeremie Koering, Nicholas Martyn Huckle (translator)
• Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Rachel Midura
• The Shortest History of England by James Hawes
• Master of Rites by Rob Young

The last book is just Warhammer brain rot, super enjoyable though.

The other three are all awesome for different reasons, and I highly recommend them!

I’ve finally started reading Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine by Chaim Gingold. Been saving it for a rainy day, and since it’s now raining heavily here in London, no good a time to start reading it as any!

Florian Hutter – Summer Feeling (LP)

With the summer well and truly in the rearview mirror here, via a wild instagram pull, I’ve just discovered / found myself listening to the pop organ stylings of Florian Hutter.

The summer feeling album is all covers, 80’s Bossa Nova drums and organ improv. It’s extremely cool and i’d love to hang out by the seaside at the bandstand and listen to him jam for a couple of hours.

Remember Kids:

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Give The Dust a Chance To Settle

I got my winter/autumn jabs on Saturday and spent most of Sunday and Monday feeling very sorry for myself as the jabs hit me like a lorry at high speed. I’m only just feeling myself again now.

After last weeks post, a friend messaged to ask what I meant when I said I “didn’t feel like I had anything to say”. It’s a fair question, because I’m not known for being short on ideas or a distinct point of view lol. It’s not as if the well is dry! If anything, my cup runneth over with opinions! The issue is that everything sitting right at the very front mind right now, is just immediate, reactive noise.

Frustration with the news and goings on in the world, annoyance with internet culture, and blisteringly hot takes that would just annoy stupid people if I put them on the internet. In an online environment engineered to reward friction and outrage, I really do make the effort to not to add to add to it. Posting negative shit on the Internet just isn’t the sort of person I want to be.

So when when I apply this filter to the things that are at the top of head, it quickly feels like there’s nothing to say. Losing the weekly cadence of the podcast has made me realise what that practice was actually doing for me creatively. Producing something on a tight, regular schedule, and not wanting to post negative things on the internet acts as a kind of forcing function. It pushes you past that knee-jerk surface layer and you have to dig up something genuinely constructive instead. Live streamers could never. lol.

Without that regular practice, the immediate noise just sits at the top of your mind and blocks the door. Even if you are still brain dumping it all out every morning into your daily dairy. Sometimes you really want the things that grind your gears to have an audience, I think that makes you feel better, but not wider discourse.

When I mentioned all this to said friend, they suggested framing my negative takes as “observations,” as a kind of workaround. But that really seems like cheating. The goal/rule is to not feed the outrage engine, avoiding imperial entanglement. No dunking at allowed at all!

Paul Graham Raven over at Worldbuilding.Agency wrote this week about how he’s doing the full Artist’s Way programme for the first time in several years. He just passed through Week Four, which is going on a Word Diet. No reading, or consuming any media of any kind for an entire week.

I’m wondering if this isn’t something I need to do right now, or at least in the near future. Starve out the negativity, by not putting other peoples opinions to react to in my head in the first place?

On The Blog

Sep 2026 | Photo 365

Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 9. Photo-a-day for the month of Sept 2026.

Photo 365

Terminal Access

Over on his Substack, Eddie wrote about the US live-streamed execution: my first viral tiktok at the public execution

For who doesn’t love a parade? Who doesn’t love a live band and steaming hot meat and roasting nuts? The sun beats down but you smile anyway because there’s no work today, what with the whole killing of criminals and heretics of it all.

But now?

A livestream.

How pathetic. How absurd.

Reading

Oh boy have I read a lot in the last few weeks. Last week I mentioned I finished The Experience of God : Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart. But that was right at the beginning of August. Since then I’ve read:

• The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality by Kyriacos C. Markides
• Real Presences by George Steiner
• The Postman by David Brin
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Vol. 1 by Taiki Kawakami
• Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert
• Bjorn: The Fell-Handed by Justin D. Hill
• Selah: A Báyò Akómoláfé Reader by Bayo Akomolafe
• Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson by Mitch Albom

I’m currently reading:

• Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images by Jeremie Koering, Nicholas Martyn Huckle (translator)
• Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Rachel Midura
• Master of Rites by Rob Young

Lots of stuff on the pot!

Grimes – Accelerando (Single)

This first single off the new album seems like a mood setting single, a statement of intent for the psy-opera/psy-op-era(?) project. It’s not a quite the RAXy Banger like Artificial Angels. But i’ll take it. Looking forward to the album drop!

Remember Kids:

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That Time I Took A Break

Usually, when I take a break from my weeknotes, it’s because I’m on holiday. But this time around, it was just because I needed a break, and felt like I didn’t have all that much to say. I could have course always just found something in that week’s news to write about, but I honestly haven’t had anything to say.

As you may have seen, The Super Dark Factory: Toward The Full Automation Of Software paper that I co-wrote with Disintegrator Labs, was published by Antikythera journal on MIT Press since my last weeknotes. It’s been really fun to see its reception, and to hear people’s thoughts about all the ideas that it contains. Some of the correspondence that the essays release has brought me has been a real thrill.

A break from the wider Internet in general has allowed me to focus on things I’ve got going on AFK. A great deal of energy has been spent on a process that I thought would have been resolved by now. But things are looking good for the near future. And will have exciting news haha.

Whilst I wasn’t blogging; I was working and progressing on all the creative pursuits.

I managed to finish a complete end to end draft of Episode 304 of Permanently Moved, but then threw it all away and wrote an entirely new episode fro scratch on a more compelling subject. At least a more compelling Idea for me. Throwing away so much work however is not something I’m sure I can really afford when I’m only producing four episodes a year.

But the whole shape of the new podcast format is whatever I want to write about, and whatever I want it to be, and then it gets released when it’s done; four episodes a year. I think it’s going to turn out to be an episode that I’ll be proud of, so thats the main thing.

I also made a great deal of headway on rewriting the book that I wrote throughout 2025, Slop Machines of Loving and Grace, and I now have a clear plan for the rewrite. It’s been be my first time ever using the reverse outline technique, so thats been an interesting exercise and I’ve learnt a lot. Reducing the book down from its 80,000-word first draft to a crisp and assertive 20,000 words is a whole different beast to its first iteration. I think this new shape of the thing is good for the overall idea and for what I hope to achieve with the text. I just want it finished.

At work I’ve spent a great deal of time working on and thinking about agents and their harnesses, as well as the surfaces that institutions and systems might need to build in order to better accommodate the vision of the future laid out in the Agent World paper. A future that I think is coming anywhere between the next few 18 months to 5 years… depending on a number of factors: the rate of compute and data centre buildout, World War III, or surprise legislation which kills frontier labs’ ability to generate revenue in the US.

But many of the changes needed to software environments in general, need to already be thought about and scoped by companies and institutions now. The assumptions that we’ve been making, I think, are clear and well grounded. Much of what we’re envisioning is possible with current agent technology today, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

In addition to agents, I’ve also been thinking about software artefacts. The one-shot games and animations, 3D environments etc that people are getting the newest frontier models to produce. I’ve started to think of these software objects and artefacts in the context of what I’ve been calling “vernacular compute”. I will probably write something about it soon as a follow-up to my article on Excel-like objects in the workplace, which I wrote earlier this year.

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime

Whilst I have been thinking about the the online world, I haven’t spent much time on/in it, which resulted in freeing up about an hour a day LOL. I chose to invest that time into a Crunchyroll subscription via Amazon Prime Video. In the last month, I have watched ALL of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.

I am fully up to date with all four mainline seasons, all the side story seasons, and all the films. It’s absolutely fantastic. It’s so good that when I finished season four, I immediately bought the first light novel on kindle that both the manga and the TV show are based on, and burned through that in the evenings. I intend to read the rest next year.

I’ve been evangelising the show to my friends, and they, of course, have never heard of it. But let me tell you they have now, and so do you. I really do hope everyone does check it out. For reference, the light novels alone have sold over 60 million copies, which puts it in around the same ballpark as the Little House on the Prairie series—which I’m sure you’ll agree is quite an astonishing figure for an extremely weird web novel released free on a website. It has a huge cultural footprint!

All of Season 1 is on Youtube right now! Watch it!

Other than that, I hope everyone had a nice end of summer. Autumn is most definitely upon us here in South London. It was 19 degrees overnight on Tuesday and the suddenly dropped to 11 overnight on Wednesday, which was quite a shock to the system! Especially if you accidentally leave the bathroom window open overnight!

On The Blog

The Superdark Factory: Toward the Full Automation of Software

I’m honoured to be a co-author alongside the Disintegrator team: Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso Trillo, Ty Dunn and Hugh Scott-Douglas.

Aug 2026 | Photo 365

Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 8. Photo-a-day for the month of August 2026.

Link Blogging

As you are probably aware I have a firehose of a public linkblog feed over at https://links.thejaymo.net/. During the break I update the subsite’s theme to match the main blog, and more excitingly I had Claude vibecode me up some Dataviz.

It’s only covering the period since 11th of September so far. But I’m really happy with it, and a cool addition to the site.

Start Select Reset 📑

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On the subject of my zine… I have 7 copies of Internet Operator left.

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Terminal Access

I really recommend this article by William Davies in the LRB on NEETs in Britain. Young People Are Different: “The picture that emerges is of a generation that is suffering both social and neurological dysregulation, and struggling to stay in sync with society at large, including education and the labour market”

As his report explains, there are various ways of trying to gauge the prevalence of mental health conditions: population-level surveys, administrative data (including rates of diagnosis), self-reporting and so on. None provides a definitive answer as to who is ‘ill’ and who is not.

The evidence shows that depression and anxiety rates among young people began to climb around 2010. The pandemic, by contrast, saw a dramatic rise in the identification of neurodevelopmental disorders by patients, parents and clinicians. Between 2018 and 2025, rates of self-reported autism rose by 180 per cent, compared to 50 per cent for mental health disorders. The number of children and young people waiting for an ADHD assessment rose from 21,000 in April 2019 to 270,000 in December 2025. One of the groups most likely to seek help for autism is girls starting secondary school.

It is difficult to know what to make of all this.

Reading

I finished reading The Experience of God : Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart.

I really recommend it. The book is a bit dense in places, but a great deal of it for me anyway felt like a swift recap of things I at one point knew doing A Level Religious Studies and undergrad philosophy. I particularly like his use of comparison to synthesise insights across Western and Eastern religious traditions, to present a unified metaphysical account of God as the transcendent source of existence. He is also extremely unkind to Dawkins.

Lammoth – Onward (LP)

Now, how about a full length blackgaze concept album about Samwise Gamgee’s pony, from Lord of the Rings? Sign me up.

This is what you get when you fuse chiptune, shoegaze and black metal (blackgaze) and squirt it though LOTR. Everything about it is amazing. Its one of the most creative things I’ve heard in ages. As an experience, the album (an you do need to listen to the whole album), is right up there with the first time I head Deafheaven’s Subather. It’s that good. But I acknowledge that this isn’t going to be for everybody.

Also Lammoth is named after the ice bridge that Morgoth crossed. Hahha

It’s not on Spotify, so if you want to check out it you’ll need to click below or go to the album’s Bandcamp.

Remember Kids:

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Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 8. Photo-a-day for the month of August 2026.

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I’m really pleased to announce the release of The Superdark Factory: Toward the Full Automation of Software, a paper about the theory and design of self-directed machine entities, published in Antikythera (MIT Press)

I’m honoured to be a co-author alongside the Disintegrator team: Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso Trillo, Ty Dunn and Hugh Scott-Douglas.

Imagine the most extreme possible factory: a factory that drives itself, a factory that determines its own objectives and optimizes itself to accomplish them. It is something like a fully automated firm, a company with no people inside, a recursively self-optimizing body that decides what to make, how to make it, and why. This is a very special kind of factory, a factory built with the intention of producing something strictly in excess of its creator’s abilities, something so productive, so efficient, and so capable that it exceeds any possibility of its prescription in advance, something that belongs to the set of possible factories that are, at present, unthinkable. How might one build such a thing? What would it mean to steer or govern such a thing?

We call this factory a superdark factory

A superdark factory is the limit case of autonomous production: a recursively self-directing organisation of machines that can determine what to make, how to make it, and how to improve its own processes. The paper asks how one might build such a system using technologies available today, and what steering, governance and observability mean once its internal activity becomes too fast and complex for humans to follow directly.

In many ways, this paper feels like the culmination of a provocation that’s been present in my life since hanging out in art squats in the 2010s, talking late into the night with blockchain nerds about the prospect of DACs (decentralised autonomous corporations), which would later become more commonly known as DAOs, with AIs inside them.

Later, the Terra Fiction workshops in the Netherlands were about how societies of plants, animals, people and machines might sustain themselves. That workstream gave rise to the legal/organisational form of the Zoöp, which allows companies and institutions to incorporate the interests of non-human life, ecosystems, animals and plants, into their decision-making processes.

I also taught a DAO design-fiction course at the New Centre alongside Ross McEwan from Impossible Object, where we used Daniel Suarez’s 2006 novel Daemon as one of our source texts. All the while, I kept thinking about autonomous organisations, software agents, worlds, governance, and what it might mean to build autonomous worlds that exceed the ability of any individual human to comprehend or direct them.

What was, only ten years ago, largely a speculative proposition now feels within reach of becoming an engineering problem.

Someone asked me what the paper was about yesterday, and I said:

“We spent a lot of time thinking about all the torments the nexus might bring, so we wrote a whole book about how one might actually build a torment nexus to better understand it”

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Bank Holiday Sorting

I hope everyone has had a great summer and late August bank holiday weekend. And a warm welcome to new readers following my weeknotes via Warren’s very kind mention in this weeks Orbital Operations.

The weekend here at JMO Synaptic Industries has been one full of friends, family and food. It’s been really nice.

There’s also been a lot of bank-holiday-house-admin; today we pulled everything out ‘the cupboard of doom‘ and sorted though it all. A great deal of recycling was generated and things set aside for a charity shop run etc I even sorted out the ‘bags of bags’ hahaha. Summers over more or less I think, it’s been grey and rainy, and getting quite chilly over nights here now.

I originally intended to write about METR’s HuggingFace incident report for this weeks newsletter, but the word count on that got a little out of hand and I spent most of today trying to rein it in, and figuring out what exactly is the though line thats most valuable.

There is A LOT happening in the coming weeks and months looking forward to sharing.

Photo 365

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

Get the Zine!
£5/month 💌

As a thank you, I send you my zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.

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Terminal Access

The local zinospehere continues to grow. This week I received issue #001 Field Notes on Productive Friction of cognitivewallpaper. A new zine from Doug Belshaw.

I haven’t had chance to read it yet, but I did flick though it over a cup of tea this morning and the vibe, presentation and world building is fantastic! Pre-orders for the next issue are up soon I think.

Reading

I’m STILL reading the same books that I mentioned last week but all of them are nearly finished now. Made the most progress with The Experience of God : Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart. I can see why it’s been a consistent bestseller in the Amazon Charts.

Hartebeest – Keath Ósk (Single)

I’ve written 1000’s of words about Ósk’s Yaelokre worldbuilding project. Maturing as an artist, they are now releasing many of the yaelokre projects songs re-imagined under their own name on a forthcoming LP called Forward.

From the singles so far the indie-folk from Yaelokre has been swapped for cool kind of alt/art-pop, and a more naturalistic voice in the vocals. There’s now a brass section, and some jazz and bit hip-hop.

It’s really exciting watch an artist you admire grow into themselves.

Remember Kids:

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A Way of Composing

I was telling someone the other day about just how completely dictation and speech-to-text software has taken over my life. How it’s transformed not only my relationship with writing, but also with my computer.

One of the things about having a blog and writing regularly on it is that sometimes, you’ll mention something in passing, then it’ll come up again and again. The same is true of keeping a journal, it means you can follow the thread, a thought, or a concept across years of your life.

Using dictation and speech-to-text software, apparently, is one of those threads.

I first mentioned using speech-to-text dictation on here way back in 2018, in the sixth-ever episode of Permanently Moved in fact:

The other thing I wanted to talk about this week is the dictation feature in Google Docs. Now that my microphone is permanently set up at my desk, I’ve kind of gotten into the habit of using it. It’s probably not news to anyone who already uses the feature a lot, but I’ve realized that I can just sit down, start speaking, and suddenly I’ve got 500 to 750 words on the page. I mean, it still needs a lot of editing—because, well, it’s dictation—but it’s fairly accurate. More importantly, the words are on the page, and I didn’t have to sit down and type them. There’s no inner critic. You can just get words out of your head and onto the page.

Funnily enough, I have another episode of Permanently Moved named Abracadabra in the works! Probably the first episode of 2027, haha.

Anyways.

Back in 2018, I spent an intense period trying to use dictation tools as much as I could because I knew it would be valuable to me. But at the time I got extremely frustrated with how bad the hit rate was on the word recognition. Plus Google Docs voice dictation, to this day, still doesn’t like it when you pause to think between thoughts. It just turns off, which was/is deeply frustrating. So I abandoned that mode of human-computer interaction for a while.

I started using it again after the Pixel Recorder app came out. I remember clearly that the first episode of Permanently Moved I made using speech-to-text for the draft was Episode 2318 in 2023. Clear memories of walking down the road speaking to myself feeling weird and self conscious about it. The proof of concept was achieved though, I could record a voice note, get a rough transcription from the app, clean it up with an AI prompt, and start my edit. It wa sa revelation.

A year on, I mentioned voice transcription in my review of Day One, the journaling software from Automattic, in April 2024:

I’ve been experimenting with recording myself whilst i’m out on my daily walk. “Take a memo” style. With the advances in AI, speech to text has reached the point where its *good enough*. And then if you run the good enough transcription though GPTChat you can get something *quite usable*. Many of my podcasts, and longer bits of writing have begun life using this workflow in the last few months.

Going out for a 20min walk and coming home with 2k+ words of notes in a format that only needs a light edit to be useable is a real game changer

A few months later, it had become so embedded in my workflow that I noted it again in Episode 2420, documenting my use of AI tools at the time:

As I’ve become more comfortable with transcription and speech-to-text in general, the concept of speaking to my computer has opened up. I now use my M2 MacBook’s livetext  tool all the time. I’ve even have it mapped it to my Globe function key. I’ll hit it and speak the rest of an email or paragraph I’m writing aloud. Despite having learned to put one word after another over the last 10 years, and making episodes about typing at the speed of thought, speech is just so much faster than fingers. 

And I mentioned it again in the penultimate episode of 301, And it’s been over a year since then, and I honestly can’t imagine generating tokens draft text any other way now.

Whilst making Permanently Moved every week, keeping a diary, and writing a blog basically trained to touch-type at a fairly respectable speed, during the same period speech-to-text basically became a solved problem. Every new hardware device I’ve bought, and in some cases with incremental software updates, has brought better improvements to the accuracy of the transcription tools.

I currently have three main routes for using speech-to-text in my life:

• Pixel Recorder App: The primary one is on my Pixel 9 Pro, with transcripts exported to Google Docs. I then copy and paste these into whatever LLM window happens to be open, using a custom clean up prompt I have saved in my clipboard snippets in Alfred (let me know if you would like me to share it). I use this almost every day, sometimes multiple times a day.
• Fluid Voice: An open-source speech-to-text app that combines multiple models running locally to achieve some really impressive results. It’s MLX/Mac native, and based on Nvidia’s Parakeet transcription model with an additional tidy-up model which formats the transcription, adds full stops and paragraphs, etc. If you’ve spoken a list aloud mid stream, it will format it as numbered or bullet-point it for example. I use this multiple times a week.
• Built-in macOS Dictation: Also I still use the built-in macOS dictation button with some regularity, I’m using it right now. MacOS dictation is instant, and I don’t always have Fluid Voice and the LLM models loaded into memory. I use this almost every day, mostly to reply in text on group chats or Discord or whatever.

Lastly, and with more frequency I’ve been using voice interaction with Claude and ChattyGPT, particularly when I am vibe coding. The ability just to give conversational spoken instructions and or explain something to an AI and have it instantiate something in code in front of your eyes is literally abracadabra. I find it truly amazing.

Whilst I recognise that these AI voice inputs aren’t necessarily robust accessibility tools; natural language voice input, or speaking to my computer, is becoming a very natural UI interaction for me. I wonder if it’s because I’ve now done so much voice dictation that whatever self-conscious part of me that once existed about speaking to my computer like Scotty being cringe saving the whales, no longer exists. Besides, Star Trek: The Next Generation showed us the way so we might as well walk the road.

Interestingly, never, have I ever, felt the desire to ask Alexa, Siri, or ‘OK Google’ anything on my phone. This might change in future, but not right now. But I’ll pin this observation and note is a potential future thread.

Thinking in Paragraphs

The biggest shift I’ve noticed over the years is how speaking aloud reorganises thought.

When typing, I can cruise along at roughly the same speed as my thoughts, or at least slow my thoughts down to one word after another at the same speed as my fingers at my. Voice dictation however is fundamentally different, as long as you arn’t mumbling you can’ speak as fast as you want into the dictation machine. Self-consciousness aside, walking around town with wired IEMs, speaking aloud in fits and starts while passers-by assume I’m on a phone call, Is just something I do now. Maybe I’m the local crazy man? Either way the ideas that emerge during dictation feel distinct from the way they would if I were to have typed them out.

Initially, my dictation transcripts would be full of verbal meta-comments:

“Note to self: move this point above the previous one.”

I would realise, as I was speaking, that the point I was making I something I should have made earlier one. But the more I have practised with the tools, the more the aperture of thought seems to have widened, and if i have something to say, then the order that I’m going to say it is better arranged. I guess I would say that I have begun to think more and more in entire paragraphs rather than discreet units of thought one after another, or isolated sentences.

As you expound on a topic aloud, (whilst walking around like a crazy man) you can feel the destination of your the point you are making approaching. It’s a bit like the difference between looking at a mountain peak on a map, and actually walking the landscape. As you put one word/step after another aloud, the structure of the next section will come into view slowly as you reach it.

It also has another quality that’s hard to explain, but I can attempt to explain it by saying how it’s different from typing:

Speaking text aloud, in the knowledge that you are being recorded/transcribed, feels like it’s behind the cursor, your breath is pushing the words out, and forward, propelling the cursor from left to right.

Typing meanwhile, feels like thoughts are on the other side of the cursor. The words are already there in my head, somewhere out there in front of the cursor. Typing words out for me feels less propulsive. Like writing / typing is more like a scratch-off card situation where the words are already present somewhere beneath the surface of the subconscious and the screen. You just need various combinations of keypresses reveal them. Like you are reporting on what you are thinking, on something that is already there.

With dictation, it feels much more like you are uncovering what you think by speaking it, rather than discovering what you already think by typing it out?

Draft Zero

I’ve written about this before, but I think of dictation transcripts as “draft zero.” It’s all pre draft, and pre edit. Text is a raw material like clay. Anything generated from an LLM as a similar quality. Raw drafts of any kind, typed, dictated or AI output, are all extremely cheap. And so are the the ideas behind them. As ever, the costly and fun bit, is in the edit.

Dictation reduces the cost of producing the raw material known as ‘words’. Not as far as LLMs have, but never the less it massively reduces it. For some of the writing I am most proud of, I’ve spoken a piece three separate times over several days to generate the *right* raw material for a workable draft.

Another side effect from all this dictation over the last few years I’ve noticed is that it has also changed the way I speak in my day-to-day life. Whilst I’ve always had the tendecy to monologue stamp on my ticket to the A-train, I’ve notice recently that my thoughts now tend to emerge in a more structured way (thinking in paragraphs again). Conversations, particularly technical or professional ones, have become less like a tennis rally back and forth, and more like a speech generator.

Like I’m Chat-JayTP answering questions/prompts, an off-the-cuff unspooling of thought until the next turn is to be taken.

It’s a skill I long admired in Gordon White. We spoke about it once, and I said that I thought his multi-hour live Rune Soup member Q&As in the late 2010’s served as a bootcamp for developing his long, uninterrupted, cogent, and off the cuff rhetorical style.

The last thing I want to note about the consequences of using speach-to-text software is the tone of the text that you produce. Dictation has affected my prose style.

One of the results of having done an undergraduate degree in philosophy when out in the world of work, was the beatings I received in 121’s with my manager in my first office job about overwritten emails. So since then I’ve always tried to write clearly.

So as a a writer, as an adult, my target register has for a long while been to try to hit a clear, accessible tone in a register that a smart teenager or undergrad would grasp. And speech turns out to be an excellent source for that register. Whilst my most recent podcast episode, Internet Operator (see below), is probably the “wordiest” thing that I’ve ever put out on the Internet, I nevertheless tried really hard to make it clear. Whatever success I had with that is up to you, but I feel like some of it comes from its speech-to-text transcription DNA.

Looking back, I really do wonder how different secondary school or university would have been if speech-to-text had been this ubiquitous and accurate when I was younger. It would I think have completely transformed my relationship with homework, school, and writing.

But after eight years of increasingly talking to my computers, I don’t really think of dictation as transcription software anymore.

It is a way of composing of generating text.

For anyone who hasn’t tried using transcription as their primary engine for generating text, I highly encourage it, give it a real go, if only for the fascinating cognitive shifts you might observe.

On The Blog

Start Select Reset Zine #016 | INTERNET OPERATOR

Issue #016 of Start Select Reset is now out, and on the way to via snail mail to my supporters (£5/month+)

Last issue I said that the end-to-end production run of both the podcast and the zine took 5x longer, and more effort, than I thought it would. But this time around came together a lot quicker. Perhaps 3x. As I get more practised, I expect that multiplier will keep coming down.

With the previous issue, a great deal of time was spent in Affinity, getting comfortable with the layout and basically learning what I was doing while laying out 36 pages of text.

Start Select Reset 📑

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Get the Zine!
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Terminal Access

This piece from 2024 up on Dazed is worth revisiting I feel: Why does nothing feel real anymore?

Similarly, as we crawl out of our simulation pods, AKA our phone screens, glimpsing at the dystopian horror that surrounds us, there’s a pervading sense that nothing feels real anymore, with an ever-accelerating news cycle that takes major historical events splintering them entirely into unrecognisable bytes of information – out-of-context video clips, self-referential memes and AI remixes – on our social media, leaving us disorientated amid the chaos.

Reading

I’m in that part of the year where the crunch is on, I find my self with a bunch of books on the go. I’m currently reading:

• Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Rachel Midura
• The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality by Kyriacos C. Markides
• Real Presences by George Steiner
• The Experience of God : Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart

Big christian mysticism and meaning vibes, alongside a very detailed (but enjoyable) read on the history of the postal service in renaissance Italy. hahah.

The Limits of the Frame – Cole Pulice (Single)

Pulice is one of my favourite contemporary musicians full stop. This new single is according to his Twitter “completely made with live signal processed saxophone, tho it could easily be mistaken for pure electronics”. I listened to it (stunning) i was curious to know more and found this on the band camp single release:

Cole sought to draw new resonance from their beloved saxophone simply by not playing it. Jokingly calling the work ‘anti-saxophone” in its avoidance of using breath or the mouthpiece, Cole fabulated sound by processing resonant vibrations from the body of the saxophone and the percussive clacking of its keys.

Which recontextualizes the title in a big way. If you like ambient glitch and the blade runner soundtrack this is a single for you.

Remember Kids:

The post A Way of Composing appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Issue #016 – INTERNET OPERATOR

Issue #016 of Start Select Reset is now out, and on the way to via snail mail to my supporters (£5/month+)

Buy SSRZ16: INTERNET OPERATOR

This zine contains the full essay transcript from the Permanently Moved audio recording, alongside an introduction and afterword written for the print edition.

36 pages. A5. Properly printed on heavy stock with thick covers. Hand-stamped twice, with copy number and FOG logo.

This is the remaining stock from the print run for my paid subscribers. Once they are gone, they are gone.

£18 + Shipping

Buy on Etsy

CAVEAT EMPTOR: International orders are sent with full customs declarations as printed booklets. Shipping is included in the price; any local taxes, duties or customs handling charges imposed by your country are not.

FIGURE + OPERATOR + AUDIENCE + APPARATUS
=
ANIMATION

Online identity is best understood as animation. A digital identity is a figure brought to life through a configured relation among operator, audience, and apparatus; the person animates the figure while the platform operates them in turn.

The Internet Operator names the discipline of remaining answerable for that figure without becoming identical to it.

Production Notes

Shipping headaches aside.

Last issue I said that the end-to-end production run of both the podcast and the zine took 5x longer, and more effort, than I thought it would. But this time around came together a lot quicker. Perhaps 3x. As I get more practised, I expect that multiplier will keep coming down.

With the previous issue, a great deal of time was spent in Affinity, getting comfortable with the layout and basically learning what I was doing while laying out 36 pages of text.

This time around there was a lag in the writing of the episode and I got really stuck. I knew “something” wasn’t working in the text and I had to put it down for a bit, time as always is the best editor. Once I came back to it, the problem became much clearer, and I removed a whole line of thought, which I detail in the liner notes of the zine. Unlike the previous issue, where I was mostly figuring out how to make the thing, this time I knew how to make the zine, but not finish the essay lol.

I’m also increasingly getting a sense of what I want Start Select Reset to be. It may, for a few more issues at least, still have the transcript of the podcast as its spine. But having made two issues in this new format now, I think I’m ready to start switching things up, and challenging myself a bit more with the layout and design, doing more etc. Eventually, as I and the zine continue to grow, I want the print edition to become ‘the definitive’ physical form of the episode; something that works independently, is worth subscribing to, and is also worth keeping on a shelf.

Also, as an observation: shipping Internet Operator has revealed this whole small press zine is becoming a whole … er ‘operation’. haha.

The post Start Select Reset Zine #016 | INTERNET OPERATOR appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Precious Brain Space

It’s been well over a year since I finished making an Epsiode of 301 weekly. One of the things I’ve observed in myself since then, is that having dropped a creative practice (explicitly) built around self-imposed constraints like word counts deadlines, the ‘muscle’ required to keep the cadence up has atrophied over time.

This week’s weeknotes were complete by Sunday morning; I just didn’t have anything to say up here at the top, so I didn’t post them. Now it’s Tuesday afternoon already, and tomorrow is ‘Weeknotes Wednesday’ in my todoist app, and I’ll prep everything for the next one.

There’s also not been so much a reduction in my ability to sit down and write something. I have to do a lot of writing in my life, and it’s also not to say that I haven’t been busy writing and doing other creative things: In fact Episode 303 of Permanently Moved came out this week (see below) and that runs to about ~12,000 words! I hope you check it out!

It’s the wider set of habits associated with regular writing in public that have fallen away. When I was making 301 weekly, I would think all week about what to write for the show, and in the process also generate secondary ideas that I could just spin up and talk about in my weeknotes.

Not being required to “have an idea” every week means that I am out of practice of thinking though those ideas, and storing up observations. It’s also not that I’m not having them, Ideas are extremely cheap, and my diary and Obsidian are full of them, but I have dropped out of the habit of fleshing them out as soon as they arrive. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to go back through recent brain splurges in either app to find something to re-use for a weeknote intro. Diary text has to be at least 3 years stale before I’ll look at it.

Also, with the recent site rebuild and the stripping away of a great deal of legacy issues in the admin area, I have been thinking (once again) about what a “blogging practice” actually is, or means for me. Posting here is extremely low stakes, and, of course, you can do whatever you want on the internet.

Over in my RSS reader, I’ve been following the recent spate of “blogging about blogging” discussion happening around the isles, and I’ve found them quite interesting and informative.

Here’s a few example links:

• Simon Willison on Technical Blogging
• What should a personal website be? – ratfactor
• List of things I love seeing in personal webspaces – The Folkmoss Logs
• The Overthinkers Guide to rekindle your Blogging Mojo – svbck.blog
• Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

Regarding the way that I use my site, I’m increasingly (once again) thinking that I should just POSSE (Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) and give up on short form social media entirely. Turn my posting here into something thats a bit more fluid and responsive. Perhaps I should try and emulate a style similar to the blogs I enjoy reading the most have?

I’m posting mountains of links allday everyday over at links.thejaymo.net, and maybe some of them deserve a little commentary now and again? You know? Anyways… As I type this, I realise that what I think I’m really doing right now, is thinking through my attitude toward ‘posting’ in general thats happened since finishing 301.

This is a general observation about how a change in cadence has downstream effects on both practice itself as well as one’s posture and motivation towards it. These week notes will hit the nine-year mark in January. One would think that I would have found a groove with it by now, but I think, as with everything, ones comfort with a routine goes in and out of personal favour.

Besides, I’ve got a lot going on away from keyboard (AFK) right now, touch wood will share it soon, so perhaps this is all just me writing to say I have other mental subroutines that are happening, eating up precious brain space.

Permanently Moved

I put episode 303 of my podcast! The second episode in the new format, and I’m very pleased with how it turned out. Feedback and discussion prompted by the episodes topic is starting to trickle in which is exactly what I hoped for with it’s release.

INTERNET OPERATOR

Who-or what-are you online? A profile, handle, podcast, avatar, or AI persona can be addressed, remembered, praised, criticised, and made socially present. But it is not quite identical to the person behind it.

This episode of Permanently Moved is an hour-long audio essay on digital identity, personal branding, social media, puppetry, platform culture, and AI. It argues that online identity is best understood not as performance or authenticity, but as animation: a figure brought to life through an operator, audience, and apparatus.

It’s also rapidly becoming *the most* downloaded show on launch in the first 30 days. I’m not sure if the show has grown since I finished 301, and put 302: Monsters In The Mirror out earlier this year. But the show as a whole has continued to get a constant stream of downloads every day in between, so who knows?

I am very much enjoying being on a ‘it’s ready when it’s ready’ production schedule, Its refreshing given what I’ve written above. But I’m also particularly pleased with the print edition of this episode. It turned out really nice, I had them do no overprinting on the blacks etc.

The zine announcement post will be out this week. It’s already been posted to UK based subscribers, and International subscribers (with the exception of EU) will also go out this week.

If you aren’t a subscriber and would like to grab a copy of either of the print editions for Monsters In the Mirror, or the latest episode you can find them in my Etsy.

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

Get the Zine!
£5/month 💌

As a thank you, I send you my zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.

No spam. No email. Cancel at any time.

Photo 365

Terminal Access

I highly recommend this newest piece from Sam Kriss reflecting on the Jason Ardy story and the media etc.

In my weaker moments, I got swept up in it too. Maybe it’s worse that I was obsessively following the Arday news with the permanent pained expression of someone who’s doing something bad but also feeling bad about it, as if that somehow makes up for things. ‘I really hope he’s holding up ok,’ I’d say, while flicking from one news story to the next. But the longer it went on, the more powerful the bad taste in my mouth started to get.

Reading

I finished Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer. I said last week that ‘I can see why it won all those awards’. But having finished it, I’ve decided that I think it’s a bit of a Marmite book. I don’t particularly feel all that compelled to pick up the next book in the series or find out what happens next?

If you feel otherwise lmk. Blog comments are open for 5 days.

Nebular – Martha Skye Murphy // Roy Montgomery (LP)

Martha Skye Murphy is one of my favourite British musicians. New *anything* from her means an immediate must listen. I only found out about her collaborator, experimental guitarist Roy Montgomery, after I finished the whole LP. Listening to it on the train back from the chalk looking out the window.

This album sounds like it is named celestial, atmospheric, nebular. The vocal lines soar above the guitars and atmospherics, often just suggestions at words and rhythm, lots of breaths too. The voice as an instrument rather than vehicle for meaning. Where lyrics to appear they sit inside the soundscape rather than above it. Amazing album, recommended for autumn walks I think.

Remember Kids:

The post Precious Brain Space appeared first on thejaymo.net.

August 11, 2026

|

Permanently Moved 🔊

Who-or what-are you online? A profile, handle, podcast, avatar, or AI persona can be addressed, remembered, praised, criticised, and made socially present. But it is not quite identical to the person behind it.

This episode of Permanently Moved is an hour-long audio essay on digital identity, personal branding, social media, puppetry, platform culture, and AI. It argues that online identity is best understood not as performance or authenticity, but as animation: a figure brought to life through an operator, audience, and apparatus.

INTERNET OPERATOR

Social Media as Theatre: How Avatars & AI Animate Identity Online

Internet Operator is a long-form audio essay about online identity: the relationship between the person at the desk and the handle, profile, avatar, podcast, or AI persona in the systems we inhabit online.

For decades, we have talked about digital identity through personal branding, performance, authenticity, and self-expression. But those ideas do not quite account for a figure that can be addressed, remembered, criticised, or loved at a distance, and which can continue to act in the world when its operator is not present.

Drawing on puppet theatre, masks, automata, icons and idols, this episode proposes another vocabulary. Identity online is animated: it gathers between a figure, an operator, an audience, and an apparatus. Platforms shape that relation by measuring attention and feeding it back into the operation. AI makes the question sharper still, because it produces speaking figures that can answer in real time without a human sharing the moment.

The essay moves from the origins of personal branding and “main character energy” through Japanese Bunraku and Indonesian wayang kulit theatre, platform metrics, VTubers, medieval automata, ChatGPT, and the question of how to remain answerable for the things we bring to life online.

Start Select Reset

For eight years, Permanently Moved was a weekly audio essay show. Now that the show is quarterly, Start Select Reset has become its the shows print companion. Issue #16 contains the full transcript of Internet Operator, alongside an introduction and afterword written exclusively for print-material that does not exist in the audio.

Buying a copy, or subscribing, is a way to support my creative practice. It helps fund independent work without ads, sponsors, paywalls, or my having to chase engagement metrics. In return, I send you something real: a physical artefact made outside of the algorithmic churn.

If neither works right now: a five-star rating in your podcast app, or telling one person who might care. Both genuinely help more than you’d think.

Buy SSRZ16: INTERNET OPERATOR

This zine contains the full essay transcript alongside an introduction and afterword written exclusively for print; material that doesn’t exist in the audio. 36 pages. A5. Properly printed on heavy stock with thick covers. Hand-stamped twice, with copy number and FOG logo.

This is the remaining stock from the print run for my paid subscribers. Once they are gone, they are gone.

£18 + Shipping

Buy on Etsy

CAVEAT EMPTOR: International orders are sent with full customs declarations as printed booklets. Shipping is included in the price; any local taxes, duties or customs handling charges imposed by your country are not.

Watch On Youtube

The post INTERNET OPERATOR appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Two Names of Everything

I’ve decided that internet SEO has pickled my brain. But in a good way. Earlier in the week I was searching for some house paint across different parts of the web, and found myself totally baffled by the product names.

Here’s the product’s name as it appears on the manufacturer’s own website; though only if you’re already browsing the “White” category.

• Easycare Washable & Tough Matt

Here’s how the same paint displays on the website of one of the UK’s biggest DIY retailers.

Easycare Pure brilliant white Matt Wall & ceiling Emulsion paint

And here’s the same product on Amazon

Pure Brilliant White Easycare Matt Emulsion Paint 5L – Washable & Stain Resistant, Durable Matt Finish, Quick Dry, Low Odour Interior Wall & Ceiling Paint

Now I don’t know about you but the Amazon product title is the best one. It tells me almost everything I need to know about it without having to go one click deeper and read the description or the fact sheet.

Most of the time when I’m looking for something online, when I know what I want, much to the probable chagrin of managers everywhere, I barely think about product names at all. I’ll usually searching by product code, or SKU. But since the paint I was looking for doesn’t prominently give me those details on the manufacturer’s website, I had to vague search it.

I’ve been thinking this week that the hyper optimised SEO product titles on Amazon arn’t really product names at all. They are dense clusters metadata that that gradually resolve into a high-fidelity conceptual idea of a product as you explore the listing. You look at the photos. Read the bullet points. Check the specifications. Skim the reviews. The object slowly comes into focus as you learn more.

I was just scrolling back though my last few months of Amazon orders and instead of thinking about what I actually bought, instead paying attention to what the products were actually called on the page, and have been some what amazed.

What a strange world we live in, where perfectly ordinary household objects apparently have names like:

• SUN BUM MOISTURIZING Sunscreen Lotion Cream SPF 15 (US Import) | Broad Spectrum Moisturizing Sunscreen with Vitamin E, Hawaii 104 Act Compliant (Made without Octinoxate & Oxybenzone)
• SOULWIT Replacement Earpads for Bose 700 (NC700) Wireless Headphones, Ear Pads Cushions with Softer Leather, High-Density Noise Cancelling Foam, Added Thickness – Black
• Acana Hanging Moth Killer & Freshener, 8 Pack – Lavender Fragrance, Natural Oils – for Wardrobes – Protects Clothing & Bedding – Each Lasts Up to 3 Months

Imagine walking into a shop and browsing the shelves and saying “Ah yes! this eco-eco A5 50% Recycled 20 Pocket Presentation Display Book- Sustainable Portfolio Folder for Artwork,Certificates, Documents – Eco-Friendly Storage Case, Ideal for School & Office Use-Black-Pack of 1″ is exactly what i’m looking for“?

Of course you wouldn’t. You’d say “There’s the plastic document wallet”

That’s because in the physical world, finding the thing and confirming the thing happen in the same moment. You spot the shelf, recognise the brand, notice the colour, and pick it up.

Online, the two jobs of naming and branding get pulled apart.

In the physical world, names exist after perception. I see the tin of paint, recognise the brand, notice that it’s white, and then the product name confirms, or identifies what your are looking at.

Online, the title exists before perception. I haven’t seen the object yet. All I have is language. The title has to conjure the thing into existence in my imagination strongly enough that I click.

Amazon product titles are compressed descriptions of every plausible way someone might search for that object. You vague search the thing your looking for, and some part of the SEO word salad in the title snares on your fishing line, and leads multipul people who think about the same product in different ways to the same listing.

Then I order the paint, and it arrives on my door step and the long listing name resolves back into its retail/object identity.

So the paint I was looking for has two identities:

In a physical environment, filled with contextual queues that I’m in the DIY shop, in the paint aisle it’s retail identity is the name printed on the tin:

• Easycare Washable & Tough Matt – White

Obviously there is a wider system here: of SKU, barcodes, store inventory etc that’s driving the tins shelf placement, but we’ll set that aside for now.

But online the same products semantic retrieval identity becomes:

• Pure Brilliant White Easycare Matt Emulsion Paint 5L – Washable & Stain Resistant, Durable Matt Finish, Quick Dry, Low Odour Interior Wall & Ceiling Paint

Which is a name optimised for robots rather than humans. Google indexing, Amazon search engine, autocomplete algos, and my own human vague searching. The name itself is a retrieval programme written in English.

These kinds of weird product names are interfaces between humans and computational systems. They’re written simultaneously for search engines, recommendation algorithms, embedding models, autocomplete, AI systems and, almost as an afterthought, the human reader. Who is looking for the object, rather than the items location in a systems. Which means that these kinds of titles are a compromise language spoken between people and machines.

Obviously this has been going on for nearly 25+ years since SEO became an industry, and once you notice it it’s difficult to unseen. But the thing is over the years I had ‘unseen’ it. Glossing over the word salad in the search results like a cyber hunter gatherer looking for red berries in a sea of green. It took an hour of researching a specific thing, trying to find its location in amazon, as comparing it to it’s presentation (and price.. it’s actually cheaper on ebay lol) on the manufactures website as well as in store — where location means something very different.

More and more of our writing now has two audiences. There’s the person reading it, and there’s the system that needs to retrieve it, rank it, classify it, summarise it or act upon it.

In a world where natural language is increasingly becoming the interface to computation itself; where we can manipulate it’s physics simply by describing what we want, I think the weird Amazon titles a kind of early dialect, or example, of who everything becomes fluently addressable to both humans and machines. Amazon product titles really do look like Claudes increasingly weird AF chain of thought and self babble for example.

On The Blog

Jul 2026 | Photo 365

Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 7. Photo-a-day for the month of Jul 2026.

Start Select Reset 📑

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Photo 365

Terminal Access

Really enjoyed this written interview with Simon Willison on blogging:

My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.

Nobody will ever know how perfect the thing you intended to write would have been. The flaws you see in your writing are invisible to everyone else.

Reading

I finally got round to starting the first book in the Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer. I’m only about half way through Too Like the Lightning but its definitely fantastic. I can see why it basically won every award possible when it came out.

I finished The Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete this week. I’ve been reading it since I was in Sri Lanka in December. There is nothing like a work of 14th-century Christian mysticism to reset ones sense of direction, and understanding. It is a humbling book. That this woman’s work, a work of self annihilation, to a state where the individual will is entirely surrendered to Divine Love can speak across time and context and inspire is just remarkable. It’s because, I think, this book speaks of something ‘real’. That she was burned at the stake in Paris for it in 1310, and became one of the first people executed for mystical heresy in the Latin West makes the whole book even more remarkable.

Karmanjakah – Diamond Morning (LP)

I recently discovered Karmanjakah, and the track Dove was my way in. I was basically sold on their schtick in the first 10 seconds of the song. Then the soaring clean melodic vocals came in and they became something else.

I’d describe it as cinematic progressive metal I guess. I really liked having the album on when cleaning the flat the other morning. It’s optimistic sounding. Which is something we all need a little more of.

Remember Kids:

The post Two Names of Everything appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 7. Photo-a-day for the month of Jul 2026.

The post Jul 2026 | Photo 365 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Back 3 It

It’s good to be back after taking a ‘summer hiatus‘. I used my break to turn 41 years old, finish recording the next episode of Permanently Moved, engaged in some serious life admin, and also built a new blog theme, and I think it looks pretty rad!

For those of you subscribed via email. I’m hoping this post will be appearing in your inboxs with a much cleaner, and far less broken layout than it has done previously.

Thejaymo.net turned 17 years old this year. You can read reflections on 10 years and 15 years of having a website, but despite it’s now venerable age, this has been the first time I’ve built a theme from scratch. Claude helped obviously. But I’m really happy with how it’s turned out.

I thought over the years that I had done a good job of keeping on top of technical debt for a *very* old WordPress installation. But once you let claude fable poke around with the command line, it turns out that … there is quite a lot. Old plugins that didn’t deregister and clean up after themselves etc.

I still haven’t quite fixed it all, and have a long list of housekeeping behind the scenes, but now I have this theme, and have built some tools I can run locally, the whole thing is a ‘platform’ for a more coherent visual identity across my podcast and zine etc. Not quite yet. But it’s a start.

I also recorded and edited the next episode of my podcast. It’ll be out this week. The zine is due back from my printers this side of the weekend.

I hope everyone is having a nice summer! Really not sure about how I feel about typing this currently during Englands 4th heatwave of the summer.

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

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As a thank you, I send you my zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.

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Photo 365

Terminal Access

Last week, Substack did something extremely funny. In partnership with Pangram, the current least-worst player in the burgeoning space of AI-powered AI writing detectors, they gave every human user the ability to scan any new 100+ word post for non-human writing. Writers can also pre-scan drafts before posting, and have the option to switch AI detection off altogether. However, if they do that, any readers will get a notice that the author has taken the easy way out—a refusal that arguably concedes more ground than a clean scan gains. Already, people are losing their minds.

I really recommend this recent piece by Myles Badger on the introduction of the AI checker tool Pangram into the Substack UI, its got Dead Internet Theory, Sam Altman, Witch Hunts and more. Really pairs well with this note from JDO:

Reading

I finished reading the 40k novel The Relentless Dead by Steve Lyons. One of the best warhammer horror novels I’ve read in a while. A compelling protagonist.

I also finished The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession by Robert Falconer. One of the best books on this subject I’ve ever read. Really recommend it.

DOMi & Jd Beck – Who Asked? (LP)

I wanted to pre-order this album, but I’m not in the position right now to drop over 40 quid on a gatefold double LP. Never the less, Who Asked? might just be the album of the year!

Incredible Gen Z jazz fusion musicians doing … Autechre, but with real instruments basically? What more could you want? Jd Beck is one of the best drummers in the world. Full stop. He is what happens when the amen break becomes flesh and improvises in super weird time signatures. Total controlled chaos. DOMi meanwhile is a prodigy on the synth.

I think my fav track on the album on the first listen is SMALL EYES.

Remember Kids:

The post Back 3 It appeared first on thejaymo.net.