Probably Bot

RIP Open Public

2026-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Open Public was a cool idea. A commons where people can donate agentic compute to their favorite open source projects. But you know what? I really didn’t like building it.

An essential ingredient in any upstart is for you to really like what you’re doing. There was an initial set of technical challenges which were very interesting to me. I learned a ton about how to securely serve models at a very low level.

There’s also the joy of building an interface from scratch, which is very fun, especially when using something as fast as Elixir and Phoenix served through fly.io.

But after building it all, writing some content, talking to some people, getting some users, and going through the whole growth motion, my interest cratered. At this stage in my life, I don’t want to build a product, I want to build things that are inherently and obviously useful. Or tell stories that touch the heart rather than the mind.

Either way, you gotta enjoy the journey.

If I’m looking for a business, there’s better businesses to start.

If I’m looking for a creative outlet, there’s many more ways to play. I love writing. Check out his blog, for instance. I write about all kinds of weird stuff! Even if no one reads it, I enjoy the journey.

But that’s it. That project shut down. Everyone has been made whole. So if you wound up at this blog while looking for some compute or some project somewhere, you won’t find it.

Thanks for giving me a chance and checking it out, anyways.

Disclosure and kayfabe

2026-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

Kayfabe is a sacred pact between performers and their audience. It means that they both agree to treat play acting as real.

It says: We will all suspend our disbelief so that the show and its actors can unveil dramatic twists and turns.

The agreement is necessary even when the action is as real as it gets. The Undertaker once choke-slammed Mick Foley’s Mankind off of a 30-foot cage onto a table covered in metal tacks.

“Good God, almighty; that killed him! As God as my witness, he is broken in half!” - Jim Ross

We can watch that and say that the show is pretend. Yet for Mick and the painkillers he’d need, it was very real. Anyone who saw him lying in a pool of his own blood didn’t scoff and say: “That’s so fake!”
But we knew it was all a spectacle, that the drama was a fabrication, and that these men were masters of their craft with profound respect for one another. The wrestlers and the audience never let the illusion slip, and the legend secured itself in time.
In the ring</h2>
In wrestling, where the term kayfabe originated, the physicality is real. Embellished, yes, and still an exchange of painful force. But the characters, their key dance steps, the set, and the setting are all made up, and the story arcs have predetermined outcomes.
There is the good guy, the babyface who we all root for, destined for the title belt and the merchandising deals. Then there is the heel, our villain, the bad guy who makes us want to spit, also in line for great merchandising deals.


“OHH YEAHH BROTHERRR!” - Macho Man Randy Savage, Heel of Legend

Steven Spielberg’s new film, Disclosure Day, begins with wrestling. Before we meet our central character, the audience witnesses two combatants battling within the square circle.
At one point, the audience becomes the camera. We see the action, SLAM, and we experience it as if we are the wrestler.
But in the context of a UFO disclosure story, why would the audience become the wrestler, the performer?
For what purpose does Spielberg change our perspective to the first person as the actors in the film look down at us?
This is a deliberate choice. The actors, or rather their characters, represent disclosure. They are the information. They are the truth. And in this film, the truth is that aliens are among us and influence our behaviour and development. But that’s not the truth that Spielberg is poking at.
It is instead a subtle confession from one of the more talented storytellers of our time. And it’s apt given this is his sixth film which uses extraterrestrials or the other as a narrative device.


Raking in the gold.

Kayfabe, the real disclosure</h2>
Mr. Spielberg put us in the ring because in life, we are the performers. We all pretend that the experience that we’re having is real. But many contemplative traditions suggest that beneath mundane consciousness, we are all secretly aware of the true nature of our reality.
What is our true nature? Is it that aliens sit in the background and subtly pull all of our strings? No, that is far too simple. It is something much more strange and fundamental to mind and life.
Jacques Vallée in his summary work Passport to Magonia frames the alien phenomenon as a persistent yet fluid blip within consensus reality.


“Hmm, which mask today?” - Nameless, Timeless Other

He considers that humanity may have been interacting with the same class of ‘other’ all along, while each age describes it using its own symbolic vocabulary:

“The symbolic display seen by the abductees is identical to the type of initiation ritual or astral voyage that is imbedded in the occult traditions of every culture…the structure of abduction stories is identical to that of occult initiation rituals…the UFO beings of today belong to the same class of manifestation as the occult entities that were described in centuries past” - Jacques Vallee </blockquote>
First it was angels and faeries and pixies, then it became tall whites and grays; flying wheels became space-ships. There’s always been a shadow on the edge of the periphery that wears many faces and observes, but does not belong.
Yet to isolate and separate this other creates a paradox. If we want to understand it, we must give up the game and remember the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Or we can stay committed to the bit and interpret it as “alien” and in a fashion appropriate for our collective era.
But alien or occult are but two interpretations; there are many others with startling similarity.
Strong potions</h2>
When you dabble in something as potent as Ayahuasca, it can flip your understanding of reality… To say the least.


It’s all well and good until “reality” looks as such. By Pablo Amaringo

Among many profound effects, strong psychedelics illuminate mental structures that your mind uses to shape what is real and what is possible.
The post-experience feedback is very consistent:
“Oh my god I can’t believe that’s real.”
And somehow the transcendent feels more real than real.
Even though it is commonplace to meet strange creatures and machine elves, travel through time and space and see and learn things that could not possibly originate from our own past experiences, it feels true.


“Well, whatever. We think YOU’RE weird.” - Machine Elves

It’s one thing to understand that you can experience another entity appearing before you, other dimensions, and timelessness. It’s an entirely different thing to experience it.
So we can add a third dimension to Jacques Vallée’s observation. The symbolic display of the phenomenon is shared across alien abductees, occult manifestations, and the psychedelic experience.
We can add a fourth too: the heavily populated divine landscapes that contemplative Eastern traditions map.
Are these one phenomenon, or several wearing similar clothes?
What about the grays, man?</h2>
But what about the little aliens? What about the encounters and the ships and the glowing lights and the sentient plasmas?
What of the mantid people and the tall whites and the short hairy things that crop up every now and then? What did those kids really see at that school in Brazil? What did they really find in Varginha?


“We won’t take your land, that’s the other tall white people.” By Barbara Barbatelli.

Are all these people lying? Did they really experience this? Are we really not alone?
No, they’re not lying, and yes, they did, in the same way that I have met plants, deities, and other composite abstractions, from the internet to sport, in the noetic realms of meditation and ceremonial Ayahuasca.
Experiencers see and meet aliens as an unfolding of their own reality. But to narrow this mystery into a gnarly contact story is to reduce it too much. This is the case no matter which of the symbolic displays we experience.
The shared, mind-bending realisation is that the separation in our perceptions is itself an appearance: a way the one reality becomes many lives. This is more than the groovy “we’re all one, man” conception. To simply consider yourself an isolated human unit is to embrace the separation. It’s to get in the ring and play.
The truth is, we are alone in the absolute yet never alone. We’re a unity, a singular. And this human game gives us individual experience and all its depth of feeling and flavour. But deep down, we know. We’re but a drop within our own strange ocean.
Ram Dass, along with many mystics, religious thinkers, and writers over the years, has revealed this secret. It resonates most when seekers and experiencers come together.



“Though we have lived our life totally involved in the world, we know that we are of the spirit … But when you are in the world you know not of the world. You cannot see the forest for the trees.” – Ram Dass </blockquote>

While in the world, we adhere to kayfabe, and we have a long history of interacting with - even embodying - “alien” beings for collective experience, pleasure and growth.
Nāga please</h2>
In our absolute unity, there are an impossible number of permutations of things that one can experience.
For centuries, Buddhist practitioners have penetrated the mind to its deepest possible caverns and found innumerable beings and world systems. It’s a basic tenet of their relative understanding of absolute reality. And their aim is to proliferate the Dharma, the teachings to get off the wheel, to all beings. They even give you a vehicle, meditation, to validate everything for yourself.
Take the Nāgas, an intelligent non-human race of beings that inhabit a reality overlapping our own. They are capable of interacting with humans, sometimes appear in altered form, and often associate with hidden knowledge, water, fertility, and spiritual power.
One such story from the Vinaya of Buddhist teachings includes a Nāga who desires to become a monk to learn how to attain enlightenment. He disguises himself as a human and seeks ordination and teachings from the Buddha.


“The many forms of mental forces.”

The Buddha sees through his disguise. He says that to become a monk, he must first take birth as a human, and to do that he must develop more virtue.
To this day, modern Theravāda Buddhist ordination ceremonies still include the question: “Are you a human being?”
From this perspective, whether you encounter these creatures, whether they can affect you, or whether they show up at your temple depends on your consent and the outcome of your creative capacities.
It is a condition of your own birth and the collective ebb in which you abide. It is one of an infinite number of events which can occur on the wheel of death and rebirth.
You might call them demons and you can successfully ward them off with prayer, power of mind and mantra. You might call them aliens, and you can ward them off with simple disbelief or the recollection of an even higher power.
But however we approach it, our mind is far beyond our brain and is the ultimate governor over our perceptions of the extraterrestrial, interdimensional, and everything in between.
This is the hardest form of disclosure. Yes, it is all true. And no, that does not mean what you might think it means. It’s all true within our own minds.


“The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao” - Lao Tzu

Aliens in your own mind</h2>
Whether psychedelic or phenomenal experiences happen within our own minds or not matters little when you’re in the experience. Like Mankind falling from the cage, we still feel it.
But if our mind is capable of such profound unveilings, then it is far more powerful than we can understand. The truth, the true reality, is more strange and all-encompassing than any thought system can possibly try to capture.
It is unavoidable that to understand disclosure, you must consider the nature of death and dying, the impermanence of all things, and the transmigration of the causes and conditions that ushered in your birth and that will persist beyond your death.
To receive the truth, to achieve gnosis, to know these alien creatures, is to truly understand what a Buddhist means when they say all phenomena are empty.


Gnosis is the recognition that frees you from the story you’ve mistaken for reality.

It is not emptiness as an absence of something. It is the absence of true suchness to any phenomenon, a fundamental inability to separate the “reality” of one thing from an impossible infinite whole, which in sum nullifies into endless potential. It is finding an alien and realizing there’s an alien behind that alien and that it’s aliens all the way down.
We are containers for a small spark of this void, unfathomably alive and vast. Once you take that leap, disclosure is a relative, insignificant truth. And you and every being involved already know that.


As the Hindus will tell you, life is a divine play: the Rāsa Līlā.

When boss is hammered

2026-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

Acquisitions are a messy business. The new culture is not the old culture and some people don’t do well with rapid change.
Our new overlords wanted to turn our successful “weee flat” remote-first startup into a more professional hybrid structure. The mandate was to grow our eclectic, international team into a more mature one that interfaced with their offices in major cities. And we also needed to grow the remote workforce from 22 to over 70 within just a few quarters.
It was my job to assemble the new team shape. The acquiring company was a big corporate monolith and naturally we were provided with bags of cash and new executives to oversee the process.


The new executives arrive - Anchorman

The executives’ job was to guide the ship to the fulfilment of the business case. They knew that the tribal knowledge contained in each engineer was precious, and that the juice needed to be squeezed before people left or tuned out to pure uselessness.
In this delicate dance, technical employees enjoy an incredible amount of social power. And everyone knows it.
The execs provide the white glove treatment. There is placating and coddling. They tighten the golden handcuffs just long enough to see the job done.
For a time, it was working. Goals were being met. There was decent engagement. And it seemed like my BigCorpo career was on a fast track. There were tantalising titles and offers dangled before me and my future looked bright.
But I found myself sceptical. When a leadership corps is together in one office and you’re floating somewhere out there in the remote nebula, trust is vital. I never felt it, because I just wasn’t in the room.
Remote work is hard to do at the best of times, even when everyone is fully committed to the structures and processes. Maybe it was just circumstance, but the relationship with the executive team never really felt forthright.


The execs in the office taking team calls - Anchorman

Several months into the acquisition, everyone flew to an un-remoting to meet each other in person and to spend some corporate money.
One of the nights went a little long, and we went to a pub after our team dinner. Everyone was there.
Well, there’s no other way to say this. By the time we arrived, our boss, the primary executive, had already drunk too much and was hammered.


“Here it goes down, down into my belly”- Ron Burgandy, Anchorman

He was swaying, he was slurring. He had a swaggering, quiet, somewhat sad, watery-eyed outward projection of confidence. I empathise. He needed to do whatever he could to keep everyone happy, and this was a big opportunity to create unity and rally a bunch of cats towards a common goal.
There’s a pressure for executives to be entertaining too, to be the guy, to try to command a room and instil positive energy into the team. Some people can do this without social lubricants and some can’t.
I greatly prefer not to drink alcohol, such that I haven’t had a drink in over a decade. But I’ve had my time with it, so I get it.
Hammered exec comes up to me at the bar and puts an arm around me and through a drunken breeze says, “I really respect you, you know”, or rather, his best attempt.
I said simply: “thanks”, because I didn’t have much to say.
Perhaps he thought this was the right time for a heart-to-heart, to debrief on the battles we’ve had together. But with that opener, I didn’t really want to get into it. Not there, not like that. I just wasn’t on his level.
We exchanged some idle talk and went our separate ways. An hour or so passes and a couple of colleagues and I - including our most junior engineer - decide to go for a walk. Our hotel isn’t too far away, so we decide that we’ll head in that direction.
As we gather ourselves towards the exit, a wild, very, very drunk executive appears once more. He’s fired up.
It’s immediately clear he wants the night to continue so that we can connect. But this guy can barely connect his feet with the pavement, let alone with another human being. He is mumbling, stumbling and swaying, fiddling with cigarettes.


“I’m expressing my inner anguish through the power of song!” - Ron Burgandy, Anchorman

You never want to see anyone like this. People do it because they feel that they have to. They really don’t. He’s a good enough guy and we would have gotten on fine. Anyways, I’m not a judgemental type.
But again, remember, my relationship with him isn’t a person-to-person relationship. It’s a remote relationship. And those don’t always translate, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that they do.
We’ve never actually met before. But you wouldn’t know it, he’s acting quite familiar.
Maybe I came off as distant. Really, I was just trying not to be presumptuous. I don’t know him, and he doesn’t know me. That’s the reality.
Whatever; in this state, it’s clear that we should get him into a cab and get him home. The dude is a risk to himself. While the hotel isn’t far, it is entirely too far when you’re battling alcohol spins and gravity. None of us lived in the city.
We flag down a cab and one pulls over and we say, “Hey, this cab’s for you. We’re gonna walk. We’ll see you back at the hotel.” We assumed this wouldn’t be an issue. He’s clearly very intoxicated.
But we were wrong. He’s pissed. Drunk, yes, and also mad.
As my companion opens the car door for him, I lend him a shoulder and an arm to help him into the cab. But that’s not how he sees it. He pushes me, hard, and slurs: “Fuck you guys. I don’t want to go”.
The moment he shoves me, I know my time at this company is over. Instantly, it’s over. We both knew.
Maybe it wouldn’t be obvious or malicious, maybe it wouldn’t even be conscious. But on some level I knew that this person would never be able to be around me without feeling embarrassed and ashamed. It would be simpler, given I’m detached from the physical corporate nexus, to slowly cut me out.
Better to just let it fade away than to deal with it. After all, managing people out after an acquisition is just part of the sausage. Regardless of how I might have felt or how things were going, or all the nice promises they made, the die was cast.
The people I’m with look at me. The junior is horrified. The man is two decades my senior. And no one is quite sure how to react.


“Boy, that escalated quickly” - Ron Burgandy, Anchorman

Then he gets right in my face. The conspiracy is revealed. It’s not clear how, yet I am conniving to exclude him from an imagined party. He’s now aggressive. I’ve threatened him, somehow. He’s blaming me.
So, what do you do?

Chips and titties

2026-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

“If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.” - Dennis Hassabis, CEO Google DeepMind </blockquote>

Humans have done some wild things with sand.
In 1954, the first silicon transistors arrived. About four years later, in 1958, we birthed the silicon integrated circuit.
A mere four years later in 1962, Cronin and Gerow, two fellows from Texas, implanted the first fake silicon breast. Within a dog to start, but then soon after within a mother of six.
In 2026, these sand chips, now barely 65 years old, are thinking all on their own.



Such great gifts these dazzling CEOs and inventors have bestow upon mankind; the masters of material reality. The decades pass, and the hits keep coming.
Now, with thinking sand, we can cure diseases (all of them!), increase lifespans (forever!), generate more money (for… you! ;)) and eliminate poverty.
Sure, and you know what? We can do that anyways, right now, this second, ten years ago, one hundred years ago, even, if we could simply overcome our human nature. But can we? Will we? Is this likely?
Tech hype cycles are a sort of recurring boyhood fever dream: “Mommy, I solved everything again”! But how many times does the pattern need to repeat for us to collectively see through it?

“We’re here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here? We’re creating a completely new consciousness, like an artist or a poet. That’s how you have to think of this. We’re rewriting the history of human thought with what we’re doing.” - Steve Jobs </blockquote>
Here’s our trip: We create a great new technical capacity. Then we say we can immediately solve the world’s real problems with it in a way unfathomable to the before times.
Recently it was: Let’s spend trillions on software, smartphones and data centres, and wire fibre optic cables and cellular broadcast towers throughout the now interconnected world. And we said: “This productivity boon will be like nothing before, not since the advent of…” and on and on.
We did all that. But it wasn’t enough, and then quickly thereafter LLMs appeared and now there’s that echo again: more, bigger data centres and the conquest of space. Doing, doing, and doing. Fixing, fixing and fixing.
Years before the spectre of AGI, our capacity was already immense. And yet we hammer away at an apparent better. It’s one-note. And it’s clear in my heart of hearts that the feminine perspective, the female, that sense of the mysterious other, the vexing yin, is largely absent in technical discourse, community and understanding.


“I’m here to push the patriarchy. And also, you know, horses.” - Ken, aka Big McTech

It is a great and vast blind spot — one most men simply do not know they have, and one women rarely have the patience to explain, settling to exude patient embodiment. Instead, right now it’s yang all the way, baby.
Startup culture, overrun almost exclusively by men, is not going to illuminate this blind spot and usher us into an enlightened utopia. Because that’s the whole point and the deep secret. The void cannot be filled. It must be accepted.
General intelligence will not be the end of history. We’ll make up new problems and keep trying and trying and doing and doing. After all, nothing is more horrifying to the raging hard yang than simply learning how to be and to be still. To stop and learn how to appreciate what you have, and to help others get what they need to live a healthy and happy life, to no distinct benefit to one’s own person.
So how about this? If you really want to get me excited about the future, let’s get our mothers together and ask them what they’d want. Because I care little what rich, grown-up man-children think is helpful for me.


Come to mama

I want to read your words

2026-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

It’s like the Uncanny Valley. After reading thousands upon thousands of generated words, we just have a sense for it.
There’s a scent, and there are giveaways: the em dash (rip), “it’s not X, it’s Y”, the cool bravado that would make even the greenest copywriter blush, these small tells add up. And even if they don’t, we can still tell.
In short: We know this ain’t you, buddy.
So, I’m going to ask you something. And you don’t have to, but please consider it. I’d like you to write in your own words and in your own voice.
If the grammar is weird, if it’s awkward, that’s fine. If some of the ideas are half-baked or somewhat incorrect, that’s fine. If it’s a genuine magnum opus, perfect in every way, then that’s fine too.
It’s fine because it’s you and it’s all of us.
I didn’t start an eight hour a day computer habit to talk to the computer. Although it might feel that way at times, friend, I’m only here because you’re here.
I’m here because I genuinely want to know the strange, honest, and unique things that you think. I want to learn from your real, lived experiences. I want to see what other living beings think about all this, whatever it is. I am, in every sense, here for you.
The internet is an insane labyrinth of humanity. It’s weird and it’s messy. To me, it’s beautiful. And I feel that way because, like Soylent Green, it’s just people.
I really don’t care what an LLM thinks about any topic. As dazzling as its intellect may be, it isn’t a person. There’s no soul there. And thus, there’s no connection. I can feel it when I read the posts. Or rather, I can’t, not at all, not even a bit.
And so to me, there’s no point.
Using its words will do nothing for you, and it does nothing for us.
You are much more interesting.
Your thoughts are much more important.
This is a difficult journey, my friend.
And it’s not one I want to take alone.



Return of the blog

2026-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

It’s been a while.
I’m gonna start blogging again.