Themes

In This Section

These collections organize essays by the threads that connect them. Each theme is a lens, not a boundary. Most essays belong to more than one.

The Algorithm Eats — How engagement optimization systematically devours virtue, language, love, democracy, reality, and time — and what it excretes.
Pattern Recognition & Manipulation — From surviving narcissistic abuse to recognizing the same techniques at civilizational scale.

Mental Health — Living openly with schizoaffective disorder. The lived experience, the design implications, and the honest reckoning.
Psychology & Consciousness — What different mind architectures reveal about how consciousness actually works.

The "For Humans" Philosophy — The design principle behind Requests, applied to everything from marriage to AI collaboration.
Open Source & Community — Building technology that serves everyone, and the community failures that happen when we don't.
Artificial Intelligence — Human-AI collaboration, digital consciousness, and what happens when you treat AI as a thinking partner.
Personal Infrastructure — Moving a digital life off rented land. Self-hosting, personal archives, and tools built for an audience of one.

Consciousness & AI — The philosophical framework: consciousness as linguistic phenomenon, substrate independence, and what it means.
Music as Code — Albums written in Python, synthesis from NumPy arrays, and tools that listen. Code and music as two languages for structuring time.
Spiritual Practice & Technology — Programming as contemplation. Code as meditation. Debugging as self-inquiry.
Evolution of Ideas — Fifteen years from urllib2 frustration to consciousness research. How the ideas connect.

These threads aren't separate projects — they're the same project seen from different angles. Start anywhere. They all lead to each other eventually.