2026-05-25
After hacking at factosis I went full tilt on the “finish my thoughts Claud-o, you son of a somewhat-maybe-certainly gun” Kool-Aid.
What follows is the thunked-arc that flowed from one chunk of text to another.
Although my fact finding harness is great, at some point, your current chain of certainty needs a second opinion. So you go off to doc number two and say: “Take this x-ray, see that socket wrench in my stomach? Do you also think it’s a number 15?”
The idea here is that if you have n shots at something, and you start fresh every time and possibly mix it up a little (by getting different models to jump hoops), you will follow different paths, and you should come up with the same answers. Maybe.
Having your multiple opinions is great, but can you distill a golden nugget memory from various approaches to answer x, lock it in a safety deposit box and visit it as many-many times (during bank hours) as you please?
Just look at your gov/company to spot the gold, you’ll see it floating lightly through confluence, memos, 6 pagers and it gets heavier and more chunky as it lands in apps, systems and the 1970s IBeeM cabal.
The piece also floats on over to the value of being a disagreeing pain in the ass. The gold was mined by kicking and screaming pick swingers. Dissent drifted up through the shafts and unions started butting in and force-feeding ‘what-if’ into the system.
This, I think, is woefully underrated. Pushing up against zeitgeist as a skill is something every country/org/system should have.
If many roads led to Rome, it means that along the way people ate different food, met different people, some by sitting on a cart, some by walking. They had different thoughts and emotions about the food they ate, the people they met, which influenced the makeup and bacterial content in their bowels. And, when they eventually did get to Rome, they deposited their organic experience into the stew beneath the streets.
This floated and rolled into the fields where the worms cycled through it, and fed the vine that made the grape that fed the emperor.
So your composed ego alludes to it in your REM cycles; your brain does squats on it during times you don’t consume As-seen-on-TV ads and social media - yes, yes you are special you wondrous ball of stress and independent thought.
You are not shaped by your genes, not shaped by the thought you had when you were five and first saw a dead animal. You are free to think, free to act, nothing predictable there.
Or… is it? Rewind the time tape a little to your mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers, their earth, their cosmos. Then, play it again, adding a narrator in the form of your thoughts, and taking note of what happens in your nervous system due to hormones, biomes and sensory inputs from the outside.
Feeling the shiny wonder of shared stories in Sunday school, feeling the pain when you stub your toe. The physical panic when you choke or read the news and can’t breathe. The dream you had when you were twelve and never remembered. A crumb of the thought you had before you went to bed five years ago, lingering, not fully discarded, causing your next meal to taste a little different.
Your next thought, action explained in one long-ass, first-person-narrated, esoteric-weird-shit mind movie. Free will as a sedimentation of gazillions of inputs.
Well, your determinism also fuels your local vector mather.
Also, determined to automate himself out of a job, man has been chasing improvement ever since he grokked how to use tools.
Back in the days of REAL LIFE, the arrow, making fire and the wheel were all biggies. Bob A. Booey was just as amazed to see chatgpt finding a moonshine recipe, effectively auto-clicking on the first link in google, stripping the ads and grabbing the actual formula from the page for him, as Running Bear was when smoke signals disrupted his messenger service.
It is mostly expensive/lazy fuzzy folks making and adjusting coded patterns to enable them to chill by the pool sipping on frozen margaritas.
As evolution would have it, it starts with the stronger, sneakier, louder selling ideas of fear, safety and happiness. A decision that worked - repeated into a story, a law, a religion, a mission statement - shaping the processes and systems (and the things that live in them) that spawn around it.
Which is precisely who lines up to sell you the next layer.
Second-hand car salesmen, showing you a picture of the future you in a car, happy as a pig in shit driving down the road, while subversively hiding the costs.
The tech billionaire bros, filling you with fear of the borg apocalypse, molding it into future hope and trust, one where Bob A. Booey can grow weed without needing to sell it. If everyone just give us $20 starts paying per token (because, ya know, maybe breakeven is a thing)… come on people.
The Railroad / Car / Radio / TV / Transistor / Home Computer / Biotech / dot.com / Crypto / AGI is right around the corner!
We have to inflate the f*ck out of this useful tech that will help you automate you from A to B. Tweet and blog (look at me, Ma!) the hell out of it, else you will be left out and die alone… come on people.
Meanwhile… hushed voices heard in LLM labs’ boardrooms… “Tell the Forward Deployed Engineers they are not allowed to let the LLM actually do what every meatbag has done since the wheel - work itself out of a job. Build LLM token burners into everything that moves a byte and call it agentic”.
Hofstadter and Spinoza spotted the links in the loops. Sapolsky made it toighter than a toiger in a straitjacket. Wardley sought to make the escalation-of-commitment blackholes, sucking in decisions and pointless systems, visible. Seddon weighed the dysfunction trapped in the darkness.
To close, a joke.
What do you get when ten thousand loops, selfies and journals walk into a bar? You. All material for Reinforcement Learning. And A Gee Eye.