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Learning to build living software. Click to read Squishy Computer, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

Essays / personalSoftware / engineering practiceAI / ML

’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
121 from 7 Mar 2021 to 1 Sep 2026
Posting
monthly (12 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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2026 12

  1. Three horizons
  2. LLMs for theory-building
  3. Agents want flexible schemas
  4. POSIWID
  5. Agents are actors
  6. Barbells
  7. The bottleneck shifts to distribution
  8. Dropping to log-level
  9. Folding context
  10. Deep Future on the Orthogonal Bet Podcast
  11. Specify it only somewhat
  12. Strategy in four worlds

2025 5

  1. Deep Future
  2. Cities are routers in network society
  3. The shape of network society
  4. Cryptography scales trust
  5. Don't fork the ecosystem

2024 11

  1. Where to draw the line?
  2. Places to intervene in a system
  3. Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr
  4. The Zombocom Problem
  5. Raw intuitions about startups
  6. Subconscious is Squishy Computer
  7. Subconscious is winding down
  8. Decentralizability
  9. Create good problems to have
  10. Freedom to exit
  11. Protocols as Weberian Bureaucracy

2023 20

  1. Ritual technology
  2. Artificial Intuition, not Artificial Intelligence
  3. Provocation-driven development
  4. Noosphere at Summer of Protocols
  5. Vertebrate technology
  6. Tools for thought should evolve building blocks
  7. Subconscious Beta
  8. Attractors
  9. Effort is evidence of broken feedback loops
  10. Tools for thought in your OODA loop
  11. Tools for thought: the first 300,000 years
  12. The minimal definition of user agency
  13. Concept design in three easy steps
  14. Trustless protocols are better than trustful ones
  15. LLMs break the internet. Signing everything fixes it.
  16. Feedback is all you need
  17. Pond brains and GPT-4
  18. Everyone will have their own AI
  19. LLMs and hyper-orality
  20. LLMs and information post-scarcity

2022 34

  1. web2 has a bad emperor problem
  2. Subconscious raises a seed
  3. Thinking together
  4. Imagine a notebook
  5. Noosphere design principles
  6. Coevolution creates living complexity
  7. The path of evolution is always through the adjacent possible
  8. Living systems grow from simple seeds
  9. Complex ideas procreate through citation
  10. Noosphere, a protocol for thought
  11. Knowledge structures
  12. Redecentralization
  13. Decentralization enables permissionless innovation
  14. Is open source r-selected?
  15. Soulbinding Like a State
  16. Centralization is inevitable
  17. Cheating Zooko’s Triangle?
  18. One level of indirection at each layer
  19. Layered protocols
  20. Compositional components, emergent protocols
  21. Subconscious Alpha 0.0.4
  22. Credible exit
  23. The internet is modular
  24. Stepping stones in possibility space
  25. Possibility space
  26. Launching Subconscious Alpha
  27. ObservableStore
  28. Block reference mechanisms
  29. Generating your own Oblique Strategies
  30. Magic circles
  31. Subconscious napkin sketch
  32. All you need is links
  33. Creativity can be provoked on-demand
  34. SCAMPER is a procedural idea generator

2021 39

  1. Winter break roundup
  2. What if links weren't meant to be prose?
  3. Camera Roll as a tool for thought
  4. Is web3 a Petri dish?
  5. Subconscious Alpha
  6. Dunbar-scale social
  7. Network intersubjectives
  8. Software scarcity
  9. Saving copies of everything is like low-budget p2p
  10. Slashlinks
  11. Building new weblike things
  12. Weird web3 energy
  13. The state of the web
  14. Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile?
  15. Notes are conversations across time
  16. Composability with other tools
  17. If headers did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them
  18. A Kardashev scale for interfaces
  19. Exapt existing infrastructure
  20. Collapse the distinction between user and programmer
  21. Aggregators aren't open-ended
  22. Knowledge gardening is recursive
  23. Search reveals useful dimensions in latent idea space
  24. Open-ended tools for infinite games
  25. Questions as tools for thinking
  26. Everything Talks Email
  27. Self-Organizing Ideas
  28. Wiki as a Commons
  29. Concept Refactoring
  30. Subtext: markup for note-taking
  31. The Knowledge Ecology
  32. Outward notes, inward notes
  33. Alphabets of Emergence
  34. Hypertext Montage
  35. Thought Legos
  36. Unconscious R&D
  37. Getting lost in the land of ideas
  38. Building a Second Subconscious
  39. The web began as a tool for thought