u/Unhappy-Tour-7209

I’m currently exploring something that feels profound in the sense that this one particular song seems to remix into so many different, quirky genres and experimental attempts, each somehow genuinely good and coherent that it feels more like exploring the algorithmic latent space surrounding a particular beautiful generation, or more like a musical matrix you can explore further, multi-dimensional, similar to how you can approach a mountain from differing angles and experience a variety of different, amazing views.

If this resonates with you I’d like to hear about your experience and also may have a few more questions.

Today is the day!

Ray Bradbury’s short story, called “There will come soft rains” is about an artificially intelligent house that continues to function after the people are mysteriously gone. As with many other examples of sci-fi literature, this story is even more relevant and powerful now than it was when he wrote it in May 6, 1950 — I will let you discover this for yourself instead of spoiling it. But importantly, Bradbury was not anti-technology or anti-AI. The tragedy depicted is in human choices, and unexamined delegation.

Anyway, the last line of the story is literally, “Today is August 5, 2026…”

Enjoy… and reflect!

Pierre Huyghe’s UUmwelt begins with a person inside an fMRI scanner, attempting to imagine a set of images.

Their brain activity is recorded. A neural network then produces thousands of visual guesses about what may have been happening inside that person’s head. Those guesses now flicker across freestanding screens in MoMA’s sculpture garden, continually mutating into forms that feel remembered by something which was never alive enough to forget them. The machine is not recovering the thought. It is building a strange public object from the shadow the thought left in the brain.

Would you consider the resulting image yours, the artist’s, or the machine’s misunderstanding of you?

Source: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5912

For the past three years, I’ve enjoyed using generative tools to bring parts of my imagination to life.

I usually begin with a fleeting thought that, before AI, I might simply have forgotten. After discussing it and exploring where it leads, I turn it into a short essay. From there, I often use NotebookLM to examine the idea from different angles, create images and sometimes produce a video around it.

Most of it goes unnoticed. But that isn’t really the point. These pieces turn thoughts that might otherwise have disappeared into something meaningful I can return to later.

Has AI helped you create something that would otherwise have remained only an idea?

Have you ever experienced a profound emotional reaction to something generated entirely by a machine? Does an empty "concert hall" make a subjective experience less real?

Here is a breakdown of why your capacity for awe doesn't need consensus reality:

1) The biological response is real, regardless of the source: Even if a machine spun it out in twenty seconds for an audience of one, the magic unfolding between your ears is a completely genuine experience.

2) We already project fiction onto human creators: When we love a human-made song, we naturally conjure up a backstory, picturing a tragedy or a specific room that birthed the music. AI doesn't introduce this fiction, it is our immersion conjuring such backdrops.

3) The crowd is a trap; meaning only requires presence: We have been conditioned to think mass reach is the ultimate prize, but massive audiences can actually fossilize creators, trapping them into endlessly repeating past hits. Reputation requires witnesses to exist, but true awe imposes nothing. Meaning does not require witnesses; it only requires your presence.

4) The real danger of abundance is losing shared wonder: The price of infinite, personalized generation is that creations become ephemeral "one-day flies" with no legacy or permanence. This infinite abundance can threaten to flatten our experience, teaching us that a magical unicorn is just a renewable resource, and a renewable unicorn is just a horse. The true discipline is not meticulous generation, but remaining astonishable.

5) Your awe is completely sovereign: No crowd, algorithm, critic, or friend with better taste has the authority to dictate what you are allowed to love. While it is true that everything we make might be "eventually nothing," that doesn't mean it is "currently nothing".

TL;DR: Stop waiting for permission to be moved by something, even if it was made by an AI for an audience of one. Meaning requires presence, not a crowd of witnesses. Your capacity for astonishment is completely sovereign and unauditable, so most certainly go and be astonished.

I’ve been trying for three years now to share what truly moves me online. At first it has been an experiment simply to see who is out there, like setting a fishing net, and hoping to engage with whomever may leave a comment or responds with resonance. Complete crickets.

Then I tried to go out there and actively explore places like Reddit, chat groups, X, Facebook Groups, local MeetUps etc. and whenever I engaged with someone who seemed themselves to perhaps seek connection and discuss their own meaning journey, I experience the same fleeting pattern: a brief initial warm up usually followed by being ghosted when I try to go deeper with THEIR thoughts and big questions, not even weaving in some of what I feel I’ve learned along the way; definitely not preaching, and always trying to stay helpful and not offend. Yet such conversations evaporate quickly making me feel ultimately I must be repulsive somehow in a way I don’t truly recognize or understand.

I literally assumed anyone to be on their own journey through life, exploring what it means to be human on this planet. The big questions. The stuff that I thought could be interesting to go deep with someone, anyone truly.

I recognize this has now turned into a mid-life crisis for me (50m, father of four, debt free and considerably successful on paper, considered highly creative by my family, friends, and work (just got laid off though and maybe forced into early retirement); engineering mindset and I’d wager truly compassionate at heart and secular non-dualism believer; European transplant near Seattle, and, sure, I still have a few old friends, but these past 20 years I didn’t truly make new friends, and I’ve been literally told a few times already by my old friends that my stuff is interesting, but mostly ‘over their head’ - which is completely; not forcing anyone to read my explorations). I feel the perceived isolation has become quite heavy by now, but the therapist I saw for a while now mostly seems completely attesting a proper mental standing. I am shy though and do not know if I’m the obvious problem all along, expecting depth in all the wrong places. Or if I’m just a little bit lost as anyone else truly, and this is just the way it is. 6:00 am in the morning here, and so it’s another day. Just getting this off my chest.

As a reel of what I’m into, just in case you are a potential fish in fresh waters:

1. Pondering the vast scale of humanity; finding interesting metaphors and analogies thereof
2. Realizing the roles we play: at work, in private, the language patterns literally taken from the performative arts
3. The atmospheric commons: breath as a sense and exploring such fun realizations that every inhale there’s statistically an atom of Einstein’s last breath entering your lungs (or literally of any living thing ever…)
4. The quantum entanglement of being: past and future as mere mental constructs, with the present moment perhaps just revolving for a few Femto-seconds
5. Dunbar’s Number ranges and its implications for social connections; the social media crisis and loneliness epidemic (hear, hear) and how to perhaps find a shared way out of that
6. An artist being audience member #1: once it feels whatever wanted to come through you take a step back, consider a piece done, no clap, yet that first peculiar setting where you enjoyed the process and the outcome
7. Words literally creating worlds: like bats echolocate the pathways through the third dimension, humans ‘echolocate’ the emotional dimension with their vocal chords - a sense of sorts too
8. Infinity stares back at you anytime you look up at the night sky. Just look up :)

… and so on. In any case, god bless and have the very best of days.

**2. If meaningful relationships are a public health issue, then social media’s thousands of weak connections may be solving the wrong problem.**

**3. If social media is solving the wrong problem, then Dunbar’s circles of roughly 5, 15, 50, and 150 people may be a better target than unlimited networks.**

**4. If Dunbar’s circles are closer to how humans be naturally organize, then most attention should flow toward the people nearest the center.**

**5. If attention should flow toward the people nearest the center, then regular sharing and listening become necessary rather than optional.**

**6. If people regularly share and listen, then trust, mutuality, and emotional understanding become visible rather than assumed.**

**7. If mutuality becomes visible, then responsibility and leadership can be distributed and rotated rather than concentrated.**

**8. If Elinor Ostrom was right that small groups can successfully govern shared resources, then healthy communities do not require permanent rulers or centralized control.**

**9. If meaningful relationships flourish most naturally in circles of roughly 5 to 10 people, then a village of 150 should be composed of many small circles rather than one large crowd.**

**10. If villages are built from self-governing circles of 5 to 10 people, then growth should happen through mitosis: when a circle becomes too large to remain intimate, it gives rise to a new circle while preserving the village as a whole.**

I’m trying to find… like maybe 5 people who read through these ten statements and kinda still feel this sounds about right. Why 5? Literally looking for folks to form a small circle as such to chat and experiment how a system for this actually could look like. Comment or DM please. For sure feel free to let me know at which number your notions of this diverged and you dropped off, and why? Curios…

The ratio of commoners to the rich and famous seems traditionally quite low… like before the 19th century maybe one in a few hundred thousands made it into some sort of record. Much less the further you go back. Seems like history is an empty room of scattered milestone lighthouses with 99.9% of whatever happened any boring Tuesday completely forgotten. Right?

UPDATE (also commented separately below given there’s been some resonance): I was thinking — given history is obviously such a tiny sliver, and folks here seem to agree, and especially way back when news traveled in months instead of seconds, AAAANNnnddd given how much got forgotten anyway — then the wars and catastrophes are more like just the headlines printed on the overly longer chunks of peace and prosperity of the “boring” in-between forming the paper those headlines are written on. The substance overall seems overly positive. Just like I’d put the ratio of laughs versus tears to an estimated 1000:1 perhaps...

And if that makes sense, the trend line seems to be that good leadership quietly compounds, disproportionately well, while the monstrous few strongmen dominating the history books mostly imposed a chokehold where everything has to funnel through them — disproportionately bad for everyone else. R..r..right?

What’s the point… just feels like history is such a shorthand summary of labels while the untold support making the milestone contributions of the few possible gets such vanishingly marginal mention in comparison.

… just was listening to an old lecture and realizing this STEM acronym gave me a giggle 🤩… that’s all :)

… Monday, April 27th, that day when Sora2 should have been already down and out, there were some unexpected 30 credits. 15 clips later this is what came through 😎