Hear me out. Two weeks ago we had a Google rep come to our workplace to demo some of Gemini’s agentic capabilities. She gave us links to some sales data, inventory stats, a code block, and a prompt.

Everything was precooked, and I entered it in the sequence she prescribed…and my results were completely different from hers.

I mean, the facts were the same. All the sales numbers, costs, and inventory figures were the same. But the sections were formatted differently, the tables were set up differently. They weren’t the same document.

This generation of variant texts is exactly what happens in Jorge Luis Borges story, the Library of Babel. The library is a vast network of honeycombed cells, filled with books containing all the world’s recorded knowledge, along with an infinite number of variations. In fact, every possible combination of every letter and word, exists somewhere within the library’s structure.

Borges never says how the infinite texts are generated, just that their nature causes deep problems for people who want answers.

For librarians searching for the “truth” on any topic, these variations soon cancel each other out.

Its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite)-that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language. All-the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.

When Borges published this in 1941, it was hyperbole. Yes the academic pursuit of knowledge seemed to be producing contradictory texts in approximately equal proportions. But it wasn’t until Google Gemini came along long that we could produce the lost books of Tacitus with the simple press of a button.

You should set goals beyond your reach so you always have something to live for. Ted Turner.

There’s a problem with “reaching for the stars” that self-help brokers won’t tell you. Beyond the star you’re reaching for, there’s always another star.

It’s not that goals are bad. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi noted that having a clear goal state is one of the essential components of Flow– the state of mind where you get caught up in an experience and lose track of time.

But applying goals to your life as a whole can backfire very fast. Having a goal for the year, or even for the fiscal quarter, can set you up for fear, hesitation, and failure. For instance, if your goal for the year is to sell 2x more widgets than last year, but the invention of the snarfblat dramatically undercuts demand for widgets, then you are headed for failure, no matter how hard you work on your goal.

According to neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff, large-scale personal goals require controlled, linear outcomes to succeed. But everyday life is anything but linear. In her book Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World Le Cunff argues that curiosity combined with a steady routine of small trial-and-error experiments will get you closer to satisfaction and accomplishment faster than any goal.

The repeated trials of your pact provide you with more reliable information to make decisions. Furthermore, each iteration is likely to be more successful, fueling growth in its own right regardless of whether you opt to extend your pact beyond its initial period.

In the end you might discover that you’re just not interested in stars after all. You’d rather nurture small plants and help things grow. Getting your hands dirty is where it’s at. And a series of tiny experiments will get you there faster than “setting goals beyond your reach.”

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The Garden and the Mind Anne-Laure Le Cunff and shaping your interior garden

This week I found something that put it all together for me.

Luke, a commenter on the GTD website writes:

It’s not a parking lot for unprocessed stuff; never take something from your IN basket and slap it on this list…If you do you’ll get allergic to this list really fast, then you’ll stop reviewing it, then the domino effect that ends with falling off the GTD wagon begins. Luke on gettingthingsdone.com.

In order for something to qualify as a “Someday/Maybe” it needs to be actionable. Just not today.

My own horrendous Someday/Maybe pile is a collection of links and bookmarks such as “this comic strip is funny” or “I like these songs.” It’s all stuff that feels resonant, that stirs something inside me. But it needs to be processed…either that or stuffed in a reference folder somewhere.

For example “I like this comic strip” could become “print this out and frame it,” or “send this comic strip to Steve.” This way, when you do the Someday/Maybe part of your weekly review, you can easily say, ah, I can do that on Monday.

Anything else, anything that’s just an idea and not an action, goes in a big DOOM pile called “Reference.”

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When you can’t decide, make a list

Are the two in any way connected? Is going head-to-head with a robot collaborator leaving me feeling weary and hopeless at the end of each day?

Possibly. A study titled “When AI Leads to Brain Fry” in the Harvard Business Review does seem to show that certain ways of using AI are driving employees into cognitive overload and decision fatigue.

A finance director wrote: “I had been back and forth with AI reframing ideas, synthesizing data, forming and organizing the flow of pillars and work…I couldn’t even comprehend…if what I had created even made sense…just couldn’t do anything else and had to revisit the next day when I could think.”

In my case I had a document that I wanted Claude to review for overlap with existing documents. The AI returned a two-page philosophical discourse on “the two spines problem.” It suggested I use option B. When I asked for clarification, it found new information and reversed its recommendation. Both bits had parts of the answer I needed, but it was exhausting teasing it out.

That alone doesn’t seem to explain the deep moral weariness that slams me at the end of each workday. Unless—it does.

In any social club, somebody’s got to pay to keep the lights on. With online platforms there is a process of growing a customer base, locking people in to the platform by making it hard to share content outside of the system, and then feeding the users an increasing stream of advertising. This is a process Cory Doctorow calls “enshitification.”

When you’re the product, it turns the interaction into a one-way stream, much like watching TV, where you may feel like you know a celebrity intimately, but they certainly don’t know you. Cornell professor danah boyd notes that “we now live in a world of parasocial media…where individuals keep tabs on the lives and movements of people – like celebrities – who do not know us and feel no pressure to reciprocate.”

This doesn’t mean we are at the mercy of the Zuckerbergs of the world. Glenn Fleishman suggests moving to the “Fediverse” where you “own” your own content and can, somewhat easily, move to a different platform if the one you’re on isn’t managed to your liking.

Another trick for making social media more sociable is to draw on an antique technology (27+ years old) and use RSS, (Real Simple Syndication) to thwart the algorithms and follow the people you care most about.

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ActivityPub Brings Back the Early Days of the Internet

Rewilding the Internet: Bring Back the World Wide Weird

The Social Jeep (2008) Forums promote serious conversations.

But there it is, emblazoned on the side of a concrete structure as you enter: “Respect Slab City.”

There’s a touch of kismet here, for me personally. At our church we have a New Year’s tradition where we pick a random card from a basket. The card is printed with a word to meditate on in the course of the coming year.

The word I picked was “respect.” It’s not a word I would have picked on my own. I think I do a pretty good job at respecting the law, respecting tradition, respecting my neighbors. But now, on a dried-up section of desert land east of the dying Salton Sea, where people live like hermit crabs in broken-down RVs, I’m asked to rethink the word “respect.”

I admit that I felt very mixed on this particular sightseeing trip. I came to ogle the weirdness of it all, but I also didn’t want to disturb people who most likely just want to be left alone.

And I was surprised to find quite a number of signs catering to tourists. “House of Dots,” “Ice Cream Floats,” “Public Library.” Granted, most of these signs are scrawled on splintered plywood, attached to crazy assemblies of fencing material that surround weird collections of campers and dead vehicles. But they suggest something of an economy, something of a civic life even here in the “last free place in America.”

If I’d been a little more comfortable in my own skin, a little less self-conscious about being such a looky-loo, I might have stopped and talked to some of the folks I saw riding a bicycle or scratching at the ground next to a creosote bush. How do you get water out here? Yes, some folks had large plastic reservoirs on their compounds, but still. What about electricity? I saw a couple of generators. One or two solar panels. It didn’t seem like enough to keep a root beer float frosty.

So in the end, I came away with more questions than answers. And more to ponder about the meaning of “respect.”

NEW (March 2026) Influencer Elivs Boy at Into the Sunset just visited Slab City and found big changes. For one thing, the House of Dots is no more.

To learn more about Slab City read Jonah Gercke’s excellent write up on Spin: A Bad Thing Haunts Slab City.

Also on Wild Rye

A Jesus Theme Park on the Way to Joshua Tree

My personal goal for the coming year is to spend a part of every day simply “writing to be writing.” Not writing for blog posts, not writing for publication, not writing to anyone in particular. Just putting my butt in the chair and putting words to paper…or whatever you call it.

For the past couple of years I wanted to increase my writing output. I blocked out time. I set up a writing station.

But instead of churning out the words, I spent most of my time Not-Writing. In fact, judging from my success you might think that I was the founder and CEO of Not-Writing Inc. If they gave a Nobel prize for Not-Wordsmithery, I’d surely be the top contender. My literary oeuvre, while massive in the scope of its poverty, doesn’t even have the Zen-like quality that “Not-Writing” hints at. It’s not procrastination or disinterest. It’s simply garden variety not-doing-the-thing, pursued with passive-aggressive fury.

So here I am at the start of 2026, butt in chair, tapping out words on the keyboard, that aren’t really aimed at you, or at anybody, or at anything in particular. Just tapping to be tapping.

And guess what?

I’m writing.

Happy New Year.

If you were online in the early 1990s you may remember wwwwww.jodi.org. The “home page” looks like a green-screen splash from The Matrix. Click randomly on the screen and you’ll come up with something different…a Nintendo-esque page of flaming samurai or maybe just an empty page with the cryptic message “v1.1 mWAR script” off to one side.

But there’s also the everyday weirdness that makes up our daily existence. Look at Meg Hourihan’s archival site Megnut.com. She posts about her kids, about her woes finding insurance, and about her pets.

There’s nothing earth-shattering here on Megnut. But it’s deeply human and relateable.

Of course there’s the really big question, how do we bring back this weirdness? Hultenius suggests that we need less algorithmic control on the sites we frequent.

That is going to require big systemic change on sites like Facebook and Tik-Tok. What can we do in the meantime? Maybe…bring back the blogroll

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Where Would We Even Start?

Why Social Media Isn’t Social

Just like a forest that has been clear-cut and replanted with a single species, the internet is quickly depleting itself of life and vitality. The walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter, and Google each act to isolate users, starving them of interaction across the global network.

What’s the solution? Farrell and Berjon look toward antitrust laws to break up these big, exclusive platforms. Cory Doctorow sees the answer in interoperability – let Facebook users share posts with Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky.

I’m not holding my breath for either of these solutions coming to pass any time soon. But we need to do something to build good, living, spaces online.

For my part, I’m just going to take one tiny step of getting this blog up and running again.

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For a really good study on how diverse ecosystems promote life and growth, read Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard.

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Bring Back the World Wide Weird

VISITOR: ‘Cause this century, the accomplishments of artists and scientists outshone the accomplishments of politicians and governments.

The rest of ensemble, including Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and a bartender named Freddy, have no idea what the visitor is talking about. The year is 1911 and they have no idea that Archduke Ferdinand is about to be assassinated, plunging the world into some 40 to 50 years of turmoil.

In her post A Lighthouse for Dark Times Maria Popova suggests that society is constantly prone to upheaval and turbulence as it changes from one state to another. These can be positive transformations in the end, but the period of time during the transformation is chaotic and unpleasant.

She sees art as the stabilizing force around which unstable fragments of society will crystalize into a new structure. She says:

This is the elemental speaking: It is during phase transition — when the temperature and pressure of a system go beyond what the system can withstand and matter changes from one state to another — that the system is most pliant, most possible. This chaos of particles that liquefies solids and vaporizes liquids is just the creative force by which the new order of a more stable structure finds itself. The world would not exist without these discomposing transitions, during which everything seems to be falling apart and entropy seems to have the last word. And yet here it is, solid beneath our living feet — feet that carry value systems, systems of sanity, just as vulnerable to the upheavals of phase transition yet just as resilient, saved too by the irrepressible creative force that makes order, makes beauty, makes a new and stronger structure of possibility out of the chaos of such times.

Popova cites Hermann Hesse, whose work was done during the upheaval of two World Wars:

Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.

E.M. Forster felt that a work of art was the only artifact that has true integrity and internal harmony because it is free of the practical demands that are put on other objects such as tools. I disagree with this somewhat, because nature faces its own constraints and practical limitations, yet it has perhaps the truest internal harmony.

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There are strong overtones of thermodynamics in Maria Popova’s observations, calling to mind Ilya Prigogine quote about the power of “small islands of coherence”.