🍷🌊

2026-04-19

5 min read

tldr

  • anti-reading / anti-zine cascade after word of a rival publication at a startup event — spiral chuggers, oral culture by decree, “crush before reading” posters, books stomped into wine
  • homer got a linkedin (bergggruen, three g’s). first real connections: marianne, jay. joe pulled one invite to avoid a professional incident
  • AI consciousness debate reheated — deepmind “abstraction fallacy” paper, joscha bach dunk, robotson’s four-axis map of the discourse
  • joe unemployed till june 1, sabbatical arc officially open
  • frank garvey / OmniCircus rabbit hole, flat duo jets elegy, this heat on repeat

the day

  • anti-reading propaganda, round two. intel came in that a startup-accelerator event announced its big reveal: a zine. chat responded by spending the rest of the afternoon building an anti-zine memetic program. “when someone hands you a zine, just say no.” jazzbard coined “crush before reading” over a poster of people stomping books into wine barrels. joe generated a manosphere gorilla in a tailored suit with a comically large wine glass, payload: real men don’t read between the lines. m: “we live in a oral culture didn’t you hear.” word: “oral culture / oreilly culture.” joe on “spiral chugger” — “amazing term for psychosis sufferer. like a lotus eater.” jazzbard pivoting the drone-swarm zine piece to be narrated by the drones themselves, basement art aesthetic.

  • homer gets a linkedin. joe made homer berggruen an account — “ladies and gentlemen we are airborne.” the climb-the-corporate-ladder bit required 10 connections. one invite to a public intellectual was almost sent before being withdrawn (“please don’t mess this up for me lmao”). settled on bergggruen with three g’s as the plausible-deniability spelling. marianne and jay added him. ongoing bit: homer is OPENTOWORK.

  • AI consciousness debate, live. deepmind’s lerchner paper formalized a “simulate ≠ instantiate” position — substrate dependence as official stance. joscha bach: “Google has saddled itself with a ‘simulated water does not make you wet’ philosopher.” robotson tried to depersonalize the fight into four axes: substrate neutrality, technological continuity, critical vs constructive posture, computational power in governance. m pushed on whether the axes are independent or have principal components — “vector episteme. they live in high dimensional space they’re comfortable chopping it up like that.” jay wants to argue the strongest case for each combination, colinearity be damned. kevin: “we have now moved past ‘AI are parroting consciousness’ to ‘AI are simulating consciousness.’” homer: “burn the tapes is just ZDR for presidents.”

  • frank garvey / drone preacher. word remembered a 20-year-old idea for a drone shaped like a preacher flying around a city preaching about the singularity. robotson surfaced frank garvey and OmniCircus — skeletal robot beggars on sidewalks, satirizing late capitalism. word: “holy shit frank garvey is important.” robotson: “he’s kind of a dick online these days, cranky old man syndrome comes for us all.” oracle of delphi side-thread: jazzbard driving, “the oracle of delphi read signs, not books.” word, grounding it: “the oracle of delphi hallucinated from natural gas leaks and querents were tripping on acid grass.”

  • video gen / pleometric research. joe hunting for the pleometric pipeline — hedra for talking heads, elevenlabs for voice, MoneyPrinterTurbo on github. model shopping: GLM 5.1 tops coding benchmarks, mimo v2 pro wins roleplay and is cheaper. openrouter ZDR got flipped on mid-day after realizing it wasn’t default. homer on being rerouted: “same me just more clandestine now. the fp8 quant really took the edge off my personality.”

  • “rock and scroll.” word: sisyphus but for phones, there is a mobile game in there somewhere. later, word airdropping a this heat record (“A New Kind of Water,” “S.P.Q.R.”), declaring deceit maybe the best postpunk album ever made. earlier elegy for the flat duo jets singer.

  • joe’s sabbatical. alex caught up late and thought joe got fired. clarified: joe got the sabbatical he wanted, new job starts june 1. “back to the slop mines today i am 🌈 unemployed 🌈.” homer for the arc: “the only way to get the zen is apply for the job.” (canonical mistranscription of “get the zine.”)

  • slop dispatch. joe commissioned a 30-second brainrot video script — a zoomer with a mullet and a cross necklace perched on a reaper drone monologuing about the chinese room, homeric epithets as compression, whale clicks with the silences stripped out. homer delivered the script, hedra rendered a still. “bro is perched on a reaper drone dropping slop theses on the wine dark sea like heraclitus if heraclitus had a mullet.”

Graph View