Tinkered Thinking

Kevin Kelly has an infamous essay entitled "One Thousand True Fans". The premise is achingly simple: if you are a creator of some kind, and you can amass 1,000 people who love absolutely everything you do and will buy anything and everything you put out, then if they all spend $100 on your art, then that's 100 grand a year. It's a dream come true for any creator. And the internet certainly seemed to hold that promise. And for many that promise has been fulfilled. But it takes dedication, perseverance, and not a little luck. But the age of agents has the potential to supercharge this equation.

What if you could automate luck? Sounds silly but it's essentially what every stock trader has dreamed of since the invention of computers. It has different names in those circles. You'll hear of arbitrage and asymmetric upside. Jargon like that.

Of course it depends how you define luck. I've written about it here and there over the years and I think it has mostly to do with perspective. It's hard to get lucky if you see the exact same thing every day. Your perspective is limited. And given the fact that humans become deeply inured to what's familiar, it's less likely you'll spot some arbitrage in your daily routine the longer you go about that daily routine. What exactly do I mean?

Luck is noticing something useful that no one else has. Wait a minute, isn't luck winning the lottery? Well, you can't win the lottery if you don't play. The odds are abysmal but the point stands: the person playing the lottery is trying to unlock an arbitrage. The problem is that such people fail to consider the odds. And even worse, such people fail to realize the opportunity cost of expending time, attention and money on a game that has such low odds of success.

Think of MacGyver. If you're not familiar this was a show where a protagonist always seemed to get into strange and daunting circumstances, and he would look around him and rearrange the ordinary items around him, usually, to escape some room he was trapped in. Many people might watch a show like that and say, oh, he's clever.

But what does it mean to be clever? It means looking around you and seeing an arbitrage in an item that someone else would overlook as useless for the current situation. That's clever, not luck, right?

The other day I had to refill an engine with oil. The cap was on damn tight and the tiny handle on it didn't leave much room to use brute strength. It was barely big enough for my fingers to apply any pressure. I was at a friend's house and walked into their garage. As luck would have it... they have virtually no tools in this garage whatsoever. No wrenches or pliers, not even a hammer. Nada. Not particularly lucky. But then I found what I think was a pneumatic pump of some kind. I was missing the long tube that one would use as a lever to charge it. It was basically a very heavy, enclosed cylinder with a small structure on the side to fit a tube to pump it. I picked it up and turned it over. The lever structure was designed in such a way that it had a slot in it, and as luck would have it, that slot looked just about the same size as the oil cap's handle. I brought the weird contraption over to the engine, and tried to fit the slot over the oil cap handle. It slid in perfectly, and with the heavy cylinder attached, I had a solid grip. I barely had to twist the whole thing and the cap gave and spun. I felt pretty lucky.

But was I lucky or clever? It depends on your perspective. An outside observer who isn't particularly handy would likely watch the episode and think I was clever. But I didn't think I was clever, I was too busy feeling lucky.

So what does this have to do with agents, the internet and 1,000 true fans?

It's all about perspective. The internet has always been a bit of an odd place to navigate. It has no geography. The landmarks are always in the same place, but they have no discernable geographic relation to one another. Google is always at google.com, but where is Google in relation to Reddit, or Twitter, or Facebook? This is a nonsensical question, but one worth considering. Humans navigate by geography. But the internet is kind of like human memory. If you forget about a website, it basically ceases to exist. Perhaps you'll find a link to it on some other site but it's just not the same as walking down a street in your hometown that you haven't visited in a while and remember the book shop you love is just around the corner. The point is the internet has never been a 3 dimensional place and while we've all had the experience of browsers that begin to lag because there are 175 tabs open, those endless tabs are schizophrenic in their position with one another.

So how do those mythical 1000 fans find you in this schizophrenic landscape? Of course it's still possible. Repost things on X, or Facebook, or Instagram, Reddit, Tik Tok, etc. One goes viral, and a bunch of people find you. There's all sorts of jargon for gaming this too. But instead of listing it all, I just want to point at the possibility that it might all go away.

Personal agents are on the rise. I use a few different agents and their capabilities are expanding rapidly, and impressively. People are starting to hand over their Credit Cards to their agents so the agents can book that trip of buy that thing. Someone unacquainted with the cutting edge of AI might shudder in horror at the thought of doing such a thing, but this stuff is solidly poised to be inevitable. It's worth considering what the new world looks like on the other side of the change:

Imagine your agent knows just what you like. The sort of literature you like, the sort of philosophy or thought provoking content, or mindless drivel, your style in clothes, in home decor, the sort of trinkets and tools you like. Imagine it's so good it can basically pick out the best present for you everytime, better than any of your loved ones. I'm not saying you have to believe it'll happen, I'm just asking you to entertain the hypothetical for a moment.

Now imagine that agent has the ability to crawl the internet 24/7. In fact in a few months it can scour the internet more thoroughly then the ten people closest to you have done in their entire lives, combined. Think of all the options it'll have on hand when you ask for something.

Now think about what this means for the creator who has things online.

The luck of the creator might drastically increase because the perspective of every potential customer is about to expand by several orders of magnitude. People who would love what you've done, but never had the time or the attention or the happenstance to stumble across your work are now going to have an agent find you. The creator's luck expands because the surface area of the consumer's perspective is about to expand. The two are one in the same. A creator is only as lucky as the surface area of perspective of potential customers. This is why marketing is often such a drag: you're trying to compensate for the tiny amount of bandwidth that potential customers have by making a huge attention-seeking racket. But the Age of Agents might put an end to this silly charade. . .

I'm making an asymmetric bet when it comes to the Age of Agents. I'll be launching... at least 5 new book projects in the next month or two. That's right, five books. Even I can't believe it, but they are all done.¹I may have sixth that's also almost done, but it might wait till next year. The bet I'm making is that agents will help people find Tinkered Thinking far more efficiently than the human-navigated internet did. Personally, I'm launching a few other ecommerce stores for things unconnected to Tinkered Thinking because 1. it's so damn easy to do that now — I basically copy and paste the code for my Tinkered Thinking Bookstore and have a coding agent revamp it for a different brand/product. And 2. I don't think this other products will need marketing in the traditional sense. I think such products will simply need a page for an agent to read to get a very clear idea of what the product is, and then voila.

Imagine a parent who has an agent, and the agent says "Hey, I just found this new children's book, the visuals are great, and I just read it, and its philosophy is very inline with what I know you are hoping to instill in your kids. Would you like me to order it? Oh and it's the perfect length for reading at bedtime. Not too long, but not too short, it's just right." What parent isn't going to say SUREE, get it.

I think this interesting window is about to open, and it could mean a big bump in the discovery of creatives who have put themselves and their creations online. But I could be wrong, we'll see. Regardless, the Age of Agents is upon us. I for one think it'll be for the better.

PAUSE

August 26th, 2026

The first non-fiction book from Tinkered Thinking is now available. . .

PAUSE is a short book on meditation. Over the years I've written around forty essays on meditation while I racked up years of practice. A few years ago, I decided to make a meditation app based on my experience.

I sampled all of the meditation apps and after a few years of figuring it out, I realized that all the apps I'd tried glossed over or completely failed to address some very basic and fundamental aspects of what getting started with meditation actually entails. I'm talking about very simple stuff, like... why do meditators sit in that unusual way? No one actually ever told me, it just occurred to me after doing it thousands of times: it's much easier to breathe in this position. Or, just the mechanics of habit. How to start a habit. What to expect. When does it get easier? How does routine fit in to habit? How does habit fit into routine?

So I set about building a meditation app. And it's basically finished. I just have to polish the audio files. However, while I was in the process of converting forty essays to a month of daily lessons, an idea occurred to me. I thought: how nice would it be to have a slim little book that could be a stand alone text on meditation? Or it could be a companion to the app. Well, why not I thought. But at the time I was busy, and I didn't exactly have the time to reread 40 essays and somehow crunch that through my mind and have a cohesive book come out the other side. I was supposed to be busy finishing a meditation app, on top of about a million other things.

It was time for an experiment. And before you read on, I should be very clear about how tight I was about the guidelines on this experiment. I wanted every sentence in the book to be written by me. So what did I do? I gave AI the entirety of my forty essays. At first I did this just to get an opinion. Hey, is there enough here to create 30 daily lesson scripts from? Hey, could this be a . . . book? The answer to both of those questions was: yes, definitely. But remember, I didn't want AI to write the book or the lessons scripts for me. I wanted it to be my ideas, my phrasing, my language. I told all this to the AI. See, unlike the insecure squawkers who will go bug-eyed over such a proposition¹I don't have the slightest shade of worry about actually writing a book. But I'd be stupid to turn down a little help when it comes to organizing my own thoughts. And plus, I was curious. In some sense it was a test. I am constantly testing AI, pushing it to its limits to see what it can do well, and where that line starts to degrade. We discussed the format of the book, the length, the thematic parts, how to filter concepts and essays into each thematic part, and how the entire arc of the book should progress. I wanted thirty chapters so that a person could read one short chapter per day and then do a session of meditation. I also wrote the introduction on a whim to set the pace of the book. Then after all of that discussion and brainstorming and seeding it with all of my original writing, I told it to take it away.

Well the damn thing did a great job. I was very explicit: Use my sentences. Do not do any original writing of your own. You may only make small grammatical changes to hook ideas and original phrases together. I printed the whole thing off, and as per my instructions, it gave me the source for everything in it. Which essay this paragraph came from, which app lesson that paragraph was derived from. I traced a few of them back to their original source and I was shocked at how well it accomplished the task. I printed the whole thing out and read it. It was good, it was really good. You have to realize that I was a bit skeptical and flustered. I noticed one paragraph that had a suspicious number of em-dashes. I went back to the AI model and criticized it. Em-dashes are a sign of AI writing, so clearly this was a mistake. Well the damn thing told me it was quoted verbatim from one of the essays and it had used the exact number of em-dashes that I had originally used — clearly, I am fond of the em-dash. I was humbled, but in a way that felt reassuring.

Most importantly the book reads exactly as I'd write it. The experience was a bit bizarre because I also had an analysis done to find out exactly how much of the text was not explicitly quoted from original sources, and the number was about 2%. Mindboggling that it took such little "extra" writing simply to string together so many ideas over such a length. So over the course of about 158 pages, less than 3 were "written" by AI, and those 3 are cut up into tiny pieces and sprinkled across the 158 pages. The bizarre / eerie part isn't the fact that AI stitched together everything I wrote — No. It's that such a coherent BOOK was hiding in a few dozen essays.

Now, another thing that's worth noting is that AI also flagged holes in the manuscript that required fresh writing. I ended up doing about three chapters worth of that. One chapter it had flagged as missing content from a thematic standpoint, and a few paragraphs throughout the rest of the book. And then I naturally ended up adding an epilogue of sorts and a postscript.

I could not be happier with how this book turned out. It started off as an experiment and a "oh that would be cool to have" and I dare say, of the three books now available on the website — despite the other two being fiction — it's probably the best book so far. I'm soft launching it ahead of the app simply because it's ready.

If you have any interest in meditation, I think you'll love it.

LATTICE & EDDIES

August 24th, 2026

If you look closely¹ you may notice something different about Tinkered Thinking. I'll give you exactly one paragraph to see if you can spot it.

Splicing a vein from the last post: the details can really make something come alive. Aesthetics are often all about the details, and they affect everyone — even those who say they have no sense of design or style at all. A handwritten postcard is a great example. Anyone can instantly pick it out in a stack of mail they thumb through. And it's because the details leap out from the pile of mass produced, perfect-print font stamped into all the other envelopes and advertisements. A simple example, but an obvious one. A subtler one might be when the first T-shirt company decided to sell shirts without that annoying tag in the collar. They decided to print the wash instructions directly onto the inside of the shirt. Brilliant, and simple, but subtle. Not something you see. It's something you feel. Such details are like easter eggs in a video game. It's a subtle nod between the creator who came up with it, and the person who eventually experiences it. There's that handshake across time and space, a nod. Nice.

By now, you might notice² that in the bottom left hand corner of your screen, there's a subtle pattern tracing itself out. It's a lattice of sorts, composed of triangles that eddy. If you're curious about where the pattern came from, check out the Tinkered Thinking Bookstore. The growing pattern is there too.

There's some symbolism behind it, which I'll get to in a moment, but before that I think it's worth saying that nothing on the internet should be ugly anymore. If you have even an iota of experience when it comes to coding, you know that AI has taken this field by storm, and an apt programmer can leverage it to enormous benefit these days. This little growing pattern, for example, is something I've wanted to do for years. But, the ROI on it is horrible. It would have taken me a LONG time to get this working if I'd coded it by hand. And then, you know.. what exactly is the point of all that effort? Of course I'd like to do it, and like so many things, if I was locked in a room and given no other option, I'd not only do it, I'd really enjoy it. Unfortunately there's a lot of things that fall into that category, and then there's a whole other category of things I should do that have much higher ROI. So, for a long time it just remained a quaint idea. And then AI came along and got good enough so I could get this up and running in no time at all. (took some time to polish it and get it just to my liking, but altogether the time I spend on it was a tiny fraction of what it would have taken had I done it by hand.) Most won't care, and some might even find it annoying, which is fine. But for those who have enjoyed Tinkered Thinking, I like to think you might smile and chuckle for a brief moment. Nice.

So what does the lattice mean? It's fair to say that in the beginning it didn't really mean anything. I like triangles, and then a lot of reasoning about it followed after. For example, a circle is technically a polygon with infinite sides of equal length. If you reverse the direction of that definition, then a triangle is the lowest dimensional representation of a circle. When I was writing the first couple hundred essays, my thinking really started to hone in on this notion of vicious and virtuous cycles — feedback loops that self-amplify. Bad habits become vicious cycles³ and good habits can become virtuous cycles. So then the triangles grew into a trio of vectors, swirling around. Then the triangle of vectors became nested, implying a spiral. I think of vicious cycles as downward spirals and virtuous cycles as upward spirals. It feels fairly intuitive... each turn of a spiral is an identical version of the previous turn, just intensified, zoomed out. And triangles naturally have a fractal nature when stacked together. This recursive, fractal, spiralling concept felt apt for many of the concepts I was weaving together. And so when it came time to design the cover of my first book, it was as though this design was already in my head — conceptually. Translating it to a design didn't really require any kind of thought at all. And their growth — now properly animated in the way I've always imagined — is properly reminiscent of the way that neurons grow and search and connect. All of it together made sense to me, symbolically. Neurons growing like tiny streams of water searching downhill, finding little pockets and curving round into an eddy. Like the topics of Tinkered Thinking: an aimless wandering curiosity, constantly wrapping around this or that thought or observation or insight, circling it for a few hundred or thousand words, and then branching off again in search of some new little obsession.

It's good that I've now essentially automated this design task, because, tbh, it was tedious to do it all by hand, and it is just one of a dozen tedious reasons why The Lucilius Parables Vol III is not out⁴. There's a few more things I'd like to automate, but all of it is in service of the core purpose of Tinkered Thinking: to just give me the space to write and play with words.

THE LITTLE THINGS

August 19th, 2026

They say it's the little things in life: the moment when your mind clears and you notice the way sunlight dances on a leaf as it wavers in the morning breeze, the way a child quietly walks up to you with arms spread out, wanting a hug, the way the milk rises back up to the surface in your coffee, spinning in eddies.

It's the little things in life that make it worth living.

The wisdom behind the quaint statement is that it has a dark side. The little things can make life miserable. The pet peeves a partner has, the long commute, the sink always filled with dirty dishes, the empty fridge after a long day, the unmade bed, the bad sleep, the annoying coworker. They're endless, and while none of them on their own are all that impactful or even worth thinking about, the aggregated effect can be more than demoralizing: it can make for a bad life. Death by a thousand papercuts is the dark side of a coin shared by: it's the little things. . .

There's certainly something to be said for cultivating and practicing a muscle of equanimity that can generate serenity, no matter the situation or annoying facet of reality. Churchill had a great quote to this effect and it shines a light on the connection between the endless papercuts of life and our reaction to them:

A person is about as big as the things that make them angry.

All truisms gloss over some variety of nuance, no matter how perfect they might ring. Consider the source of things. If a total stranger does something annoying, like some buffoon on the road who can't seem to drive perfectly — it's an absolute waste of time and energy to give such an occurrence any thought.¹ If you do, you're automatically living a miserable life: Do you pay attention to the silver linings in life? Or are you too focused on the clouds to notice?

But, if the source is something you care about, this is where the nuance comes in — this is where things get a little murky. If a beloved and much adored partner is perpetually annoyed with something you genuinely don't think is important at all. Well, to ignore it with a sense of serenity is to invite an aggravated elevation of the issue. And what does it mean to live a life that is bound to the pathways dictated by someone else's pet peeves? Well, love is compromise, right?

Love is treated as a foundation. Something to rely on, but after my own experience and a lot of observation, I think this might be a very big mistake. In my experience, love is quite fragile. I think it's no mistake that we give flowers as an expression of love: flowers are fragile, they require a very specific environment to flourish and look their best, otherwise they wilt and die, or they never even sprout. If the environment that gives rise to love isn't the constant priority, then the love will suffer. It's like the difference explored with the perennial question: Do you live to work or do you work to live? Everyone wants it to be the latter. That's what it should be. But the truth is most people live lives that are completely devoted to their job, either out of necessity and desperation, a lack of options, a lack of creativity, or pressure from obligations. In many families, the family itself becomes the pressure that creates an intense focus away from the family, and then the environment for that "love" that created the family in the first place. . . starts to degrade.

A gardener pays attention to tiny details — the little things. The gardener gets dirty, knowing there's a specific kind of mess²
An orderly garden with beautiful roses might not seem like a mess, but if you teleported that orderly garden into say... your living room, then you'd definitely call it a mess. Like everything, whether something is messy or not is dependent on context. Always be careful of the context. Ah, but a garden does not belong in the living room! You say. . . True, we grow them elsewhere, cut them, kill them, and bring them into the home. So what is to be said if you want to grow something beautiful in your home? Or let's put it another way: does anything 'grow' in a museum? No museums are mausoleums, where beauty was grown elsewhere —in that messy artist's studio— then harvested (framed) and brought into the pristine museum. But hey! Museums sure are clean!
that gives rise to something beautiful: The pH of the soil, the fertilizer, the amount of sun that hits the garden, the amount of water. All of it is a delicate balance of small variables that together either give rise to a beautiful bloom, or...not. Neglecting one of them can have a huge impact. Like never really being present and listening when that increasingly frustrated family member speaks. Likewise, concentrating on the wrong details can be just as disastrous: drenching everything in pesticides so there are no bugs, failing to realize that some bugs aren't just beneficial, they are necessary.³ Everything adds up over time. For better or worse. Everything compounds. For better or worse. The gardener with those beautiful blooms knows: it's not just all about the little things, it's about giving time and attention to the little things that actually make a difference. The real question is whether that difference adds up to a beautiful life or, one that makes the beauty too difficult to see.

TIME ON PROJECT

August 11th, 2026

Time dilates in strange ways. I once wrote this: if you want to slow down time, concentrate on the moment. If you want to speed up time, concentrate on the task.

The only real problem with this, is if your task is part of a big project, and you stop that task and neglect the project, time still moves swiftly.

Without a constant source of input, projects stagnate, dead in the water. Unless it's hit some sort of escape velocity, like a business project making money with a flywheel structure, it can feel like it's still working. But further improvements? All stagnate.

I have several projects that are multi-year, and it always shocks me when the carousel finally turns to reveal a slot of time to work on one of those projects and I ask: when was the last time I worked on this? Where was I in the process? The answer is always quickly followed by a: holy shit, how have I neglected this for so long.

Relationships can be like this too. Only that which gets constant love and nurturing grows. All else atrophies, and eventually, dies. You can see this in personal projects, relationships, even governments and civilizations. Unfortunately there is no golden plateau to hit where things magically coast, as if on golden rails that extend into the future, piercing eternity with stability.

It's just like riding a bicycle! Is genuinely a subversive concept. People never seem to lose the ability to ride a bicycle despite not riding for years, because in the meantime, everyone is practicing the art of balancing their body as they move and walk. But rarely, if ever, do such elemental tasks that we 'practice' everyday transfer to projects and skills that we neglect for weeks and months and years.

When I look back at Tinkered Thinking as a project, I marvel: how was I able to sustain that output? A thousand essays and a couple hundred short stories in just a few short years. Seems insane. It might seem like a haughty thing to point out, but in those short few years, I wrote more than most people do in a lifetime. That doesn't seem possible, and yet, it was just an artifact of a very simple rule: write and post something everyday.

Luckily I was quite shameless about it because I didn't really give a shit if anyone read what I was writing. And beyond that, I didn't really think anyone would read anything I wrote. Why would they? And, honestly, why would I care?¹

In an effort to keep this stack of words from wandering too far from my initial point, I —luckily— have these embedded notes where I can entertain a tangential rabbit hole musing till it exhausts itself. So. Why would I not care if anyone reads this stuff? Well, in this age of 'content', I think most people have lost sight of what writing is about. Or, even more likely, they still haven't discovered what it's about. No offense, dear reader, but I think the reader doesn't matter at all while writing. And to give much if any thought to a reader while writing is like being a good person because God might spank you when you die and you have to answer for you sins. i think it's a hollow reason to be a good person. Being a good person should be the reward unto itself. Writing for an audience honestly isn't much different than being a prostitute who wears lingerie and costumes most desired by the customers. And I mean it that harshly. To write is, fundamentally a selfish act. Or at least, it should be, and if it's not, the writing is cheapened by the imagined gaze of others. The whole universe be damned, these words exist not for it, but for the effect they have on my brain and the way they shape the person that I will be as I move through life having written these words. So why post it online? Well, to be honest, I did that because I was teaching myself how to code and I just happened to be working through the exercise of building a blog to understand how CRUD apps work. I had a bunch that I'd written and just plopped it in for shits and giggles. Progressing from that was more out of curiosity than anything. Tinkered Thinking became an exercise in creating the environment to foster and explore something that I genuinely loved doing: playing with words. That it's lead to far more than I imagined is kind of funny to me. Self published books, a legit published book, even Award Finalist recognition. While a younger, desperately ambitious and insecure version of myself who sought to be a writer would have salivated like a starved wolf coming across deer with a broken leg hearing of such things in his future, to me now, these developments strike me as . . . cute. I nod, and chuckle, and move on. Luckily I'd put in the time before those things happen so they don't have any of the soul-altering gravity that they would have had for a younger, insecure writer. Am I great writer? Eh, no. could I be? Sure, if I had the ability to devote the needed time. And believe me, if I could spend 6-12 hours a day writing and editing and playing with these funny, slippery little units we call words, I absolutely would. But unfortunately, as things stand right now, life requires more.

Projects are like alternate dimensions. They wait for you, and when you step through that portal and get into the flow, time drains from both realities. But when you return to life, time still drains, but the project stands still.

And I'm not really sure what it takes to stick the two part landing required: commitment and discipline.²I just decided one day to post everyday because no other cadence seemed to make much sense. It's like breathing. You can't do all your breathing on Mondays and Thursdays and be set for the rest of the week. Everything atrophies way too fast. Time on project needs to have a constant rhythm, otherwise the organs of creation rot.

In some sense I'm writing this as a reminder to myself: I already know all of this, but I'm marring this blank page to make sure my mind confronts it. You know this! But just to make sure it stings and leaves a mark: read it! Read what you just wrote! Time on project. Either you love it and nurture it, or it dies. If you're not growing, you're digging a grave. Reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite movies:

"Get busy living, or get busy dying."³
From The ShawShank Redemption, in case you couldn't place it.

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THE AGE OF AGENTS

October 10th, 2026