knoxnotes

Testing A New Interface

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 18:21:53 GMT

I've been using Fable 5 to build new publishing pipelines. This post was published from an electron app on my Macbook (separate from my other project that is exclusively for publishing posts. What's neat is that, in contrast to the email publishing pipeline, this one shows me the post how it actually looks on the website.

The next steps are to build a new RSS feed system (the old one seemed to be finnicky when you tried to curl it) and to build a new way to easily update the site from the go, from mobile.

Another thought. Fable 5 offers an unprecedented level of capability. But I don't know what to do with it. What an insane feeling. To have more capability than you know what to do with. And how frigtening. I realistically have the ability to start a micro business, build an app, build a personal assistant. For the first time in my life the technology at my disposal has exceeded my own ideas and ambition! Or maybe this was always the case? Maybe manny of us always had more than what we knew what to do with.

So for now, its playing with my toy website. I'll figure something else out later!

Cheers, knxnts

Untitled: Chapter X

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:17:23 GMT

Chapter X: A Visitor

Daniel sat on the western edge of the reflecting pool for some time, staring across it at the Washington Monument, at the Egg, which, after two years, had become as solid and quotidian a feature of the skyline as the monument itself.

Affter some time, his gaze fell back down to the pool, where he watched the ducks. At times, Daniel would also meditate on the little ripples of water that the water striders would leave behind. The fact that there were ducks in the refelcting pool always amused Daniel. A manmade body of water. Made into their whole home. Where do they go when the pool is drained? Did they see this as the same as a pond or a lake? Or did something in them have a glimmer of understanding that this was made, made without them in mind? Do they recognize how alien the structures around them are, do they clock the Lincoln Memorial, or the giant obellisk to their east as artifical structures? Or are they as natural to them as the trees and grass around them?

Daniel had noticed and admired the ducks as far as he could remember visiting the pool. But he hadn't really noticed the water striders until now.

How big the pool must have been to a little water strider. To be sure, The pool was only a few feet deep--but how immense would that seem to a water strider, if it could somehow be told. A creature whose own body couldn't break the surface tension of this vast uknown, who could safely glide along its surface. To them, the depths beneath them may as well be a black hole. The surface tension their event horizon. They were little astronauts. But what the hell would they do if the pool was drained?

Just a few centimeters of penetration would surely irreversibly submerge it, Daniel thought to himself. Just one little push of his finger--if he were quick enough--could sink one for good. A precarious position. To glide on the surface of death, not knowing that the slightest change of intentions or capability of an otherwordly intelligence could end you, or the world as you knew it. As Daniel studied the water strider, a sweeping movement in the pool's reflection captured his attention just as soon as a vast shadow fell over and then passed him by, the moment he glanced up--a blinding flash of white light in front of him accompanied by a bone rattling, almost animalistic roar. His vision was blacked out, and for a moment he felt the sensation of falling, just as one does as they fall asleep. His mind involunatry lurched back into his body in a panic and he felt himself breathing heavy, looking eastward at the top of monument. The egg was gone. A grander, more grotesque, object now stood in its place. A pointy sort of dome, matte black with dark brown accent and what appeared to be an intricate and exotic molding throughout. It looked almost like a building. Just as soon as Daniel had registered the object it began to descend into the monument, slowly crushing it. The destruction produced a horrible sound, which was nearly drowned by screams and cries all around. White powder plumed out from the site and blew across the pool, choking the air.

The monument had disappeared from his sight, replaced by this monstrosity. But Daniel's eyes and lungs burned as he peered across the pool. He covered his face with his shirt, trying to catch a breath. As he shut his eyes close, he could feel the debris behind his eyelids and quickly ran down to the pool. Squinting, he fell down on all fours and began crawling to the edge, reaching out his hand until he could feel the pool's cool surface. He quickly submerged his hands, cupped them full with water, and splashed his face, hoping a little may seep through his eyelids and offer some relief. The water was dirty, damp, and muggy. Not a problem right now, Daniel coached himself. Wiping his eyes with his fingers, and then his shirt he again looked out across the pool. People around the edges of the pool began to run westward back towards the Lincoln Memorial, but many, including Daniel, sat in place, staring out at the terrible structure that loomed over them.

Untitled: Chapter 3

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:15:50 GMT

Chapter 3: The EggHead

Across the Potomac, the President studied the object on the Resolute Desk. White ceramic, polished to an almost mirror finish. Porcelain, essentially. The real one was ceramic too, or so he had been told. He received the information with skepticism. But his top scientists confirmed it to him back in March. Ceramic. Like a piece of pottery. The object was held up by a brilliant gold stem, which erupted out of a striking white granite base. His idea. When it was originally brought to him, the model was mounted onto hard, clear plastic. But he wanted to keep it--it was his after all. But it couldn't look so cheap if it was going to sit on the Resolute Desk. The clear plastic looked cheap. And that meant it looked weak.

When he first requested his desired modifications his decorater suggested that the base be limestone. It would be "evocative" of D.C., he said. The material would make the diorama uniquely and distinctively of the Capitol and the monument its realworld counterpart hovered over--more befitting display in the People's House. After all, these objects were all over the country and the world. The diorama of this one had to be distinguished in some way. The President didn't like the way the decorator spoke as if he had a better idea of what materials made an object "befitting" display in the Oval Office than he did. He was the goddamned President. People always seemed to forget that. He won--in a landslide. And he was in charge. Besides, the President knew how to "distinguish" this particular object from its peers. Per his instruction, the white granite base was adorned with a golden plaque:

DC-1 38.889484, -77.035278 The Washington Monument March 23, 2020

24K gold. His orders. Limestone would have looked so dull behind it--and absolutely propesterous under his beautiful, gleaming, porcelain egg. The others called them tic tacs. But to him it looked like an egg. If you looked closely, the top was ever so slightly narrower than the bottom, and there was a nearly imperceptible taper to the length of the object. Tic Tacs are cilindrical, symmetrical at the top and bottom. Others didn't see that. But he had the eye. He could see it was really an egg. Elongated, narrower than the conventional chicken's eggs, but an egg nonetheless. The President delicately brushed its porcelain finish with his fingertips.

"It's really something, isn't it Rob?"

"I'm, I'm sorry Mr. President?" The President had caught the National Security Advisor off guard.

The President seemed annoyed by Rob's lapse in attention.

"My egg. It's really something. I showed it to Prime Minister Abe last week and he said, wow isn't that beautiful? He couldn't believe how beautiful it was. I don't think any of the other leaders have one like this. Mike, could we look into getting one like this to Abe?"

"Absolutely, sir" his Secretary of State responded.

"It has to be beautiful, like this one here, nice and polished. But do me a favor, let's uh, let's not make it too nice? Ho kay? We don't want anyone thinking that the Japanese are giving their leaders more beautiful presents than your President gets, now do we?" the President said through a cheery grin.

A few in the room chuckled.

"Of course sir, we wouldn't want that" the Secretary confirmed with a smile. The President liked Mike. He was curious, "where is Shinzo's egg?"

"uh, Mr. President, I assure you we'll get on it as soon as possible" the Secretary responded with some confusion.

"No, where is his real one" the President snapped back.

The Secretary understood the President's meaning. "Mr. President, Japan has dozens across their major centers, just like we do, but Tokyo has two over the Tokyo Skytree and Tokyo Tower"

"Which one is bigger?"

"Mr. President, the Tokyo Skytree is taller than Tokyo Tower. The eggs of course are all the same size."

"We should give Abe a di-yah-rahmuh of his Egg over the Skytree. Don't you think? Mike can we give him one?"

"Yes. Mr. President."

"Tell him there's more where that came from if he finally gets rid of those poultry tarriffs." The zinger generated some laughs across the Oval, and the President was pleased with himself. Then it was quiet for a moment. Cautiously, the Vice President broke the silence.

"Mr. President, may Mrs. Nichols resume her presentation?"

The President's eyes darted to his subordinate--a rush of burning hot anger coarsing through him. He glowered and pouted for a moment. This Mike, he didn't like so much. Even when he was seemingly trying to be deferential, the President felt he was really being nasty. One of his worst decisions. And he was a lightweight. When the eggs showed up, Mike wouldn't shut up about how important it was for the nation to have "spiritual leadership." Mike would try and start cabinet meetings with prayers, asking God for "guidance" during these unprecedented times. Mike was scared of the eggs. But the President wasn't scared, and his second in command's behavior was an unacceptable, contemptible display of fear and weakeness.

The Vice President maintained composure under the President's hot stare, and the anger behind it dissipated faced with this modest sign of resolve. He turned back to Katherine Nichols, who was standing in the center of the Oval patiently with a large smart board behind her, awaiting his word. This one he didn't mind.

"Why don't you go on, Katie."

In her forty-two years, Katherine Nichols had never gone by "Katie," and only her closest friends and family called her "Kathy." But the nickname by the President suggested a sense of familiarity and fondness which was exactly the point. Katherine was a trusted member of the intelligence community by the "adults" in the President's inner circle--she had served as NSA Robert O'Brian's aide for many years, and ultimately became responsible for coordinating interagency collaboration on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, and for being the NSA's point person on all related matters. She wasn't a technical expert on anything, but through her regular interface with the national security apparatus, the Air Force, NASA, SETI, and the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, she was likely the most valuable repository of institutional knowledge in the room.

As it also happened, Katherine was exceptionally attractive. She had obscenely large, bright green eyes, which sat delicately on a pale face dappled with freckles. By nature, she had unruly, coarse, red hair, but she consistently wore it in a high, tight bun. This seemingly prudish styling choice, however, only accentuated her more femine features. Like how the soft curve of neck fell into her dainty, narrow shoulders--which framed the upper portion of a petite, but unmistakably womanly figure.

"Where would you like me to pick up, Mr. President?" Katherine was careful to avoid the instinct to resume with "as I was saying..." given the President's temparament. She needed him to feel in control.

The President's gaze darted back up to Katherine's face. His mind blanked. He glanced at the clock on his desk. 2:12. They were hardly ten minutes into the hour long briefing. "Why don't you pick up where you left off, Katie."

What was never explicitly said, but what Katherine was made to understand regardless, was that she had been designated this role because her more natural gifts helped hold the President's attention on--what he apparently found to be--a rather boring subject matter. It was critical that the National Security apparatus maintained the President's trust, interest, and attention. If they lost it, it was liable to be captured by voices that they found less...credible. Which itself was a national security risk. As a result of this need, Katherine had been promoted to take charge of organizing and presenting the briefings on the most unprecedented national security risk in human history to the Commander in Chief of the most powerful military on earth. She was the one who had to tell the President all he needed to know about the eggs. She was the eggspert. The Egghead, if you will.

"Thank you, Mister President." Katherine dropped the phrase with an almost girlish cadence, and followed it with a beaming white smile. She knew she had maybe ten more minutes of his focus. There was so much to tell, to a man who would listen, but right now, her only priority was to impart the information that would keep the President on a sober, safe decision-making trajectory, and which gave him the confidence to allow the operations of the bureaucracy to hum along without his excessive interference or concern. It was managing up in the most sensistive and highest-stakes of contexts.

She continued on with the briefing not unlike a grade-school teacher would present a lesson plan.

"Over the past week, your top scientists have found that the Eggs may have triggered back in March in response to a signal coming from a nearby planet. They aren't sure yet, but right now, their findings suggest that the Eggs may have been activated or even directed by an extraterrestrial source."

"What were they asked to do?" What a stupid question, Katherine thought to herself. How on earth could we possibly know? She was instinctively about to explain how the message was encrypted, and how it took some of the most advanced minds to even disentangle it from ordinary cosmic background radiation or natural phenomenon, but she caught herself.

"We don't know Mister President, but your best scientists are working on it. What we do know, however, is that the signal seemed to be purposely designed to avoid detection."

The phrasing was deliberate, and misleading. They weren't his scientists, and she never liked that turn of phrase. They were just various research institutions, individuals, and governments around the world working around the clock in a truly unprecedented fashion. Research papers were being produced at a staggering rate, being shared on Twitter, peer reviewed by a hodge-podge global community of academics and enthusiasts, working far faster and surprisingly better than the typical publication process could ever handle. The eggs had accidentally triggered the grandest crowd-sourced research project on earth. But this reality was too subtle, too novel, too complex to communicate. So they were "his" scientists. Whatever kept him happy, whatever held his trust.

"By who? Who are they avoiding?"

The President was now asking the right questions, but the ones where she had less of an answer, one that began encroaching in the realm of pure speculation. "Mister President, it might have been to avoid us finding it. But we can't rule out the possibility that it was designed to avoid detection by anyone."

The President thought to himself for a moment. "You mean, perhaps, they didn't want it to be found by other countries?"

What a blithering idiot. "That's possible Mister President, but our real concern is that it might show they're trying to be quiet from something else." The President received this information quietly, his brow furrowed a little and he crossed his arms, a signal that she should go on. This was the main subject of the briefing, and something that she had thought carefully on how to frame. She started gathering the beginnings of the national security risk assessment that the various teams had put together based on the new insights from the radio astronomers--but as the task of explaining the assessment to such an incapable audience confronted her, she instinctively retreated back to well-traveled terrain, hoping to slowly inch her way back to the darker, more unknown matters.

"Mister President, so far, this is what we understood before. Over the past ten years or so, our forces and those of other countries around the worlds have encountered the eggs across major military installations across the world, where some of humanity's most powerful and sophisticated radio signals are produced.

On March 11, 2020, hundreds of eggs rose up out of the earth's oceans at hypersonic speeds, and began encircling the planet at extremely high speeds in low orbit throughout the day, then, as each geography experienced sunset, they saw them begin glowing, flooding the night sky with red light visible across the world. This continued for 24 hours before, slowly across the world, the eggs descended from orbit and positioned themselves above the tallest structures in population dense areas as well as major radio towers. " Katherine could sense a degree of impatience from the President as she recounted what her, and others in the room already knew, but she pressed on with her recap.

"Since then, they have done nothing but emit a faint interference pattern which does not seem to afffect any terrestrial communications capabilities, but shortly after which we lost contact with Voyager 1, the only man-made object which is outside of the influence of our sun.

Analysis of the eggs reveals that they are of likely terrestrial origin, and their composition is a hard ceramic, although dating is inconclusive.

Aside from that, there has been no information, no attempts at comunication, no interference with our affairs.

In April, we returned our astronauts who were on the ISS without incident, and the private sector has recently resumed launching commercial satellites into orbit without provoking any response.

Taken together, this set of information left a wide variety of interpretation as to the Eggs' intent, purpose, and where they came from. We could not determine what the Eggs were, or what they wanted, whether they were alien, some kind of earthbound non-human intelligence, or of other exotic origin. We were in the dark. " Now she's set the hook for his attention and interest. She quickly studied his face, and confirmed that he was engaged.

"However, over this last week, researchers have confirmed that from December 2019 to March 2020, our planet was bathed by very low frequency radio waves which, at first, looked like 'background noise,' but after retroactive study appeared to be a disguised, spaced out signal coming from the TRAPPIST-1 system. It is the emerging consensus that this signal was of intelligent design, and was what activated the Eggs.

What's interesting about this signal is that it was deliberately designed to aviod detection. But it's unclear why they would want to avoid detection from us, specifically. Activation could have been accomplished by a higher frequency, more focused, and more visible signal, much more efficiently.

We also know that we have never received any forms of radio signature from TRAPPIST-1 until now, meaning they stay relatively quiet.

Taken together, we cannot rule out the possibility that not only are the entitites on TRAPPIST-1 trying to keep us quiet to something outside of our star system, but they themselves are taking measures to be quiet."

"Why?"

NSA O'Brian, growing slightly impatient, interjected, "Mr. President, it's almost impossible to tell what these things want, and what they mean. But we're trying to use the information we have, and whatever common sense god may have given us to try and inform our next decisions. Whoever these...things are--if they are the ones responsible for activating the eggs, they might have been the ones that put them there. If the eggs have been here for as long we think they have, and knowing how long it takes for signals to move between earth and their home, then we can assume they've known we've been here a long time. In that time, they haven't tried to talk to us. And it doesn't seem like they're interested. That's relevant a data point, from a national security perspective. And now they're trying to keep us quiet. This suggests there may be some risk to their, and our security that we don't fully appreciate. This is what Ms. Nichols is trying to impart to you."

The President leaned back and folded his arms again, his pout gave way to a an easier expression. A sense of understanding and satisfaction had just washed over him. "So they're afraid of something." The President glanced down at his beautiful, porceilain egg. "I guess everyone's afraid of something."

Bar Prep Day 3: An Insane Lack of Fear

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 10:52:04 GMT

This is "day 3" of studying for the Bar for real. coming up pretty close now. but i think i can do it. and does it matter if i cant? will try my best and see how goes.

something that has happened during law school and life is that fear has become a less effective motivator for me. nothing bad ever happens. and any time something bad has happened its turned out fine. worrying just hasn't gotten me anywhdre. but my genuine interest and curiousity have.

i think people should do what they like and see what happens more.

sometimes, I think about how the early Republic must have felt. I've been thinking about that more recently because of the 250th anniversary of our nation, and because I've been perusing a biography on Andrew Jackson. America was really an open world game.

You could show up, in a boat, with some money in your pocket, and some skills, and make a nice life. Does that America still exist? I am often down on that. But I think there's some evidence from my life and other's that it does. But as we age as a country and a culture, its harder to see, and our more "entrepreneurial" muscles atrophy. This isn't just a matter of economic policy, but the kind of mentality we're inculturating into the youth. We are becoming more spiritually chinese.

Now, there's a "success path" offered to us that's mostly credential/signalling based. At some level this is normal and fine in a complex society. We need skilling, and we need ways to signal that one has relevant skills. Schooling, certifications, and all that is an important part of that. BUt it would be bad if we became a country where that was the only way to achieve mobility.

My problem with the LEFT or just liberals in genral is that's the world they want to build. A credentialist America. Just make the credentials easier to get. Which are two objectives that are at odds. Make college more affordable! Make it easier to get into for people of different backgrounds--at the expense of other metrics! But then don't you degrade the signal that you're trying to distribute? It's silly.

These are the policy prescriptions of an aging country, and one where young human capital is locked up. We need to just unleash people faster. I've felt this way a long time, but then I realize, there aren't a lot of real policies stopping young people from just "unleashing" themselves. And plenty still do. The problem is the mental prisons we've inculturated them into.

Maybe I'm over generalizing because I grew up in a pretty affluent suburb filled with tiger parents who were aggressively and anxiously pushing their kids onto a very narrow success path. Maybe a lot of the country isn't like this.

However much this mentality has taken grip over our society, we need it to stop. We need to make America feel like an open world game. Tell kids to fuck off and just go DO things. Graduate high school and work on a boat for a year. Move to a new city and just figure it out (housing policies make this hard...its hard to show up to NY with 20 dollars in your pocket and figure it out when rent is 2000 dollars).

We need a lower entry barrier society. I hear stories about Gen X and before and how they moved in the world and I get very jealous. You talk to older folks and they'll say shit like "ah yes, I lived on the beach smoking pot for most of my mid twenties and then I just went and started a roofing company with my friends after getting married." What! What the fuck do you mean! Also, when you get a bit older, it seems that military experience created this werid moment of flux and mobility. Young men left the military after WWII/Korea etc. and then you just had this huge mass of people with similarish background flood the job market. Sorting wasn't that efficient. And people just ended up in weird places.

The stories that inspire me the most are those of entreperenuers rather than strivers. I've talked to a lot of lawyers and law firm partners and stuf about their lives. With some very notable exceptions, I generally never found their stories that interesting. Nothing is wrong with doing the responisble and right things and ending up where you want and making a lot of money. That's a good life! And they probably have other things int heir lives that are more interesting (I hope.) But that's not an inspiring story.

An inspiring story is my friend's dad. Who married a wealthy woman when he had money during the Dot Com era, got liad off, refused to ever work for anyone else, went very broke when he had an infant child, was divorced by this woman, then started his own firm on the technical side of securing patents (not an attorney), eventually became a multi-millionaire, and is now a happy and wealthy man who gets to do his side hobbies of flying little planes. That's fucking awesome. That's a tale!

A tale needs failures. A tale needs points where the hero refuses to compromise. My friend's dad had a tale. He got laid off and just said "fuck it I'm doing my own thing."

I think if you want to live an interesting life you can't be too afraid of failure. You have to embrace failure. You have to live for it. The more you fail the more resistant you become. I think the best things that has happened to me is becoming a little calloused to failure.

I failed tests in high school. I failed classes in college. I failed at getting certain jobs. I've failed in romance here and there. I've failed at all sorts of goals. And life is still great. We keep failing upwards.

If anything, what makes America great is that we really incentivize and insulate people from failure when they try and start their own thing. Through our bankruptcy code, tax code, how we insulate firms and people from liability. It's all inviting people to fuck up. Of course, I think we should expand on this a little more maybe with UBI, negative income tax, and stopping personal bankruptcies for healthcare. We should raise the floor more generally and add safety nets. But, as far as entrepreneurship, we do a pretty good job.

But we need to do more to make America feel like an open world game again. In addition to the social programs I mentioned, there hs to be some cultural upheaval. Most likely, reducing the status/signal of certain gatekeeping institutions, like universities, traditional media, working at big companies. These have to become anti-signals. We have to understand that in many respects, these things signal the wrong kind of qualities.

The MAGA maoists are actually doing this to some degree. So maybe the things I want are in motion.

If that's the case, how do adjust? Maybe we should stop chasing signals that are being actively degraded and that people are catching up with.

But aside from fitting to trends, I think that I want to just choose the kind of signal I want to send and see what happens. The signal I want to send in everything I do, my CV, the word of mouth I cultivate is, this guy i sjust cracked. He is autistically interested in XYZ subject area, he's not afraid to be wrong, he's smart enough to make competent work product about XYZ, and he's adaptable. I think if I can signal that quality then life will be just fine and I'll get the jobs I want and I'll get to do work that's meaningful.

So if there is a take away from this stream of consciousness, it is that one should pick the signal they want to send, and see how the world bends around it, see who responds, don't overfit to the signals that working right now, because when you do that you're degrading that signal anyways. It's how markets work in general. Oh everyone is making supernormal profits selling widget X, let me sell widget X. Then your market entry brings those profits down to zero. Meanwhile someone, just because they liked it, started making Widget Y and is doing better than you.

Just pick the widget you want to make! See what happens!

Cheers,

knxnts

Changes

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 20:08:58 GMT

I have made changes to this website. As you can see. Why? I wanted to make it feel more like a notebook. And on a notebook you flip through pages. You don't go to landing page and find the entry you want. So at first I thought, lets make flipping through pages the only way to navigate a site. But that felt needlessly stupid and not very user friendly. So I made a compromise. The site, since its more like a notebook, would have a table of contents or "front matter." If you go to the footer, you can go to front matter at any time and just browse all previous entries. But it's no longer the primary way. Like a book or a notebook, by default you just open to the latest page or where you left off. So that's how the website works now. I didn't want it to feel liek a "blog" as much as a notebook.

Cheers,

knxnts

Untitled: Chapter 2

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

2. A Nap Cut Short

"Jesus fucking christ. Enough already! Every fucking day with this shit. We don't know what they are! We get it! What the--what the hell is the point of saying that seventeen different ways. It's a--it's a fucking demoralization campaign." Dad's yelling wakes me up--again. I had just gotten comfortable and dozed off in the sofa chair. Last I remembered I was watching cartoons, on purpose. I guess he took my falling asleep as permission to come in and turn on the news.

"Jacob, turn off the T.V then. Come back here and help me with this." Mom was trying to be patient--I know her trying to be nice voice. But whenever she is dad just takes it as permission to be himself until it actually makes her mad.

"We don't need an endless parade of PhDs and politicians to tell us they don't know shit! I knew that! These people are fucking parasites, they, they, these people ought to be ashamed! They're in a position to actually--if they cared--create some context, give people some sense of direction or at maybe a healthier way to think about what's happening. Instead they're just on here scaring everyone twenty-four hours a day!"

"Baby, just come here. I know, it's ridiculous. I don't even want to think about it. I need your help with this." Mom was making homemade meatballs for dinner tonight. She knows she can get dad to chill if she gives him something he thinks he's good at, like chopping the garlic real small (he insists on salting it first and doing a back and forth rocking motion--thinks its better than a food processor). She wasn't always good at handling him like that. But since I've come home I've noticed that their relationship has gotten a lot better. She knows how to bring him down. Seems like being empty nesters really gave them a chance to understand each other better. To my surprise, he had the self-control to drop it and actually went back to the kitchen. I actually smiled when he did. Really.

The thing is, dad's not wrong or completely unjustified in what he's saying, and no one thinks that. But he's just not good at being, well, a dad or a husband when he's always worked up like this. Not really a real comforting, stable presence. If he's anxious about something, it's got to be everyone else's problem. It used to really piss me off, and it still does. But these days, I get it. There isn't a real outlet for anyone's anxiety with this thing, and it puts normal people on edge. And he's been a neurotic his whole life. It's a lot to ask him to learn to just be chill now of all times.

I'm a lot better about just not thinking about things if I don't want to, about thinking about the things I want to think about. Really to a fault. I'm like my mom in that way. He can't do that. If we have to leave for a place in twenty minutes, he's the kind of guy that will remind you every three minutes to be ready. If something's wrong with the car, he can't just set an appointment and drive the other car for a little bit. He has to know what's going on right fucking now. This is an infuriating kind of person to be around when you're a kid or a teenager. But I think I appreciate it a little bit more as I've gotten older, and I've realized a lot of dudes are chill because they don't really care.

Sometimes I worry that I'm like that--apathetic. I can't get myself to the same level of righteous indignation my forty-eight year-old father can. It's not that I don't care, I just, constitutionally cannot get as heated about things so out of my control. At some point the anxiety just...fades away. It doesn't get resolved, but you can't just be on one for months. I mean, he can. But I can't. And from what I can tell, most other people can't either.

We were sent home in around March, and it was almost June. Which means I had been back in River View for almost three months now. Three months into the Emergency and nothing had happened. After their little "show" at the very start they stopped doing anything. They didn't move. They didn't bother anyone. They were just there. There's only so much of a sustained emotional response anyone could have to that kind of state of affairs. My friends were shockingly nonchalant about it by week two. They weren't here in River View after all. Apparently just every major urban center on the planet.

But if you left your phone at home and walked outside in little River View, or throughout any of the Parishes, for all you knew nothing out of the ordinary was happening. You could enjoy the same suburban tranquility of any summer afternoon that preceded this one. And we did. Michael and I were on a serious walking streak as of late. We had spent the last three months retracing every beaten path we had from third to twelfth grade. There was nothing else to do. Waken up from my 1PM nap, I figured I would call him up again and propose a nice walk that cut through the soccer fields near Cherry Hill elementary and got you up to the trails that lead to Great Oaks park.

It was a longer walk than usual and I was expecting a little push back. But the thing is, when you went up Cherry Hill and onto the paths that take you back down to Great Oaks, there's a point where you can actually get high enough to see across the Potomac towards the capitol.

It was a really far vantage point. But if you squinted hard enough--or used a good pair of binoculars--you could probably just barely see them.

knxnts

Bar Prep Day 2: Thoughts on Birthright Citizenship

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:00:02 GMT

This is not a legal analysis because reading a SCOTUS opinion properly takes time and I have to learn Evidence. And it just dropped today. But here are my general thoughts.

First, I am generally pro-Birthright citizenship. And I don't want something as restrictive as a rule requires the child to be of American citizens. America is unique in that we are defined by our place and creed more than being an actual, related cultural/ethnic community. Birthright citizenship is aligned with the idea of America as a place and a creedal nation. The holding is better than the alternative. The Executive Branch shouldn't be able to modify the boundaries of citizenship.

It is also clearly, unequivocally, undesirable in my view that someone can come to this country illegally or in passing, have a child, and that child is now a U.S. citizen. Yes, it's an edge case and it does not happen to scale. But it happens. And it's frankly ridiculous. In theory, that person, even if they then leave the country immediately, they have the same political rights as someone whose parents were born here, pay taxes, are part of the community--they can vote!

I understand why this edge case drives my friends on the right insane. And it's not even a matter of morality. It's not like, Due Process, which i think is an embodiment of natural rights and ideas of fairness which should apply to everyone alike. Due Process is about humans, not citizens. But Citizenship is not like that. It's a political category. It's a special kind of privilege and membership.

Everyone on earth has the right to be treated fairly (which is a very short reason why Due Process does not hinge on citizenship). Not everyone on earth has the right to decide matters of policy for a different community! Very obviously, the world does not have any legitimate interest in deciding what happens in OUR country (although a very certain nation "state" tries all the time).

This is why the whole anchor babies thing feels absurd. It really creates a very fuzzy edge of the political community, and who "counts." And the only reason it's mostly FINE is because it's relatively inconvenient and uncommon as a matter of fact to exploit our citizenship criteria like this. But I think that if say, teleportation technology was real, and we had a consistent problem with illegal teleporters coming in and giving birth then beaming out, and then their kids sending in mail in ballots when they were of age, the absurdity would become clearer.

I think that's what makes the hardline rule the Court reaffirmed feel bad. It seems that, except for Kavanaugh, the majority doesn't really think that Congress would have the power (to be clear, the Executive should NOT have this power) to redefine who is subject to our jurisdiction under the meaning of the 14A to be more pragmatic. They constitutionalized the principle. That means our whole nation, our political community, is defined by a matter of fact than law. What can people get away with? If you can sneak in illegally, have a child, then you've joined our political community. Again, I actually don't think this is a problem to scale at the moment. But I agree with Thomas that this cheapens our citizenship.

I'm only talking about the outcome here. Obviously, sound reasoning can sometimes lead to silly outcomes. I don't feel like talking about the legal reasoning. But it feels very silly that we may need a constitutional amendment to create a more principled definition of our political community. My desired outcome is that we have jus soli citizenship for children of everyone legally her minus the existing exceptions (which I think are diplomats, foreign armies, and related classes). And that Congress had a little bit more power to tweak the edges of how natural citizenship works. Although that would be messy, and the current rule is a lot neater administratively.

But really, this case isn't about what's pragmatic, or administratively convenient, or what's doctrinally neat. It's really about what America IS. I'm pretty far from seeing America as a blood and soil "nation" proper. I don't think that defining one's political community in such terms is immoral--the Japanese can do that, the Swedes can do that (do they?)--whatever. I just don't think that's what we're all about. We're the New World. Somewhere where people are just people. We had uncontrolled migration for a long time. America was a place you SHOWED up to. That's amazing! And for a while it was legal to just show up in a boat. Think about how insanely cool that is.

But to paraphrase a bad bad man, a country is not just an economic community. We're a civic society. American probably leans towards being a place with certain ideas and institutions more than a "people" but it's not magic soil either. To quote my natcon friends, if you change the people, you change the country. All I know is that under the current opinion, 400 million [members of generic ethnic group here] teleported into the country illegally, had a child, then beamed out, in about 18 years time it would be a different country. And what's protecting us from that outcome is a matter of fact, not our laws, not our constitution.

cheers,

knxnts

Untitled: Chapter 1

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

1. River View

River View was one of the prettiest places I had ever been in my life. I was born right outside of here, at the County hospital, I've been to a ton of places around the world, and River View is still the prettiest.

I always had a hard time describing River View to my friends at school. First, it's not a town. It's just a chunk of a larger suburb, which for historical reasons, is a Census Designated Place called River View. But my River View is just a chunk of River View proper, surrounded by other chunks of suburb with other names of a pastoral flavor. Cherry Hill. Lakeside. Great Oaks. Not uncommon, the kind of names you probably see all around the country--weakly evocative of some geographic feature that I guess we're supposed to believe existed before they put a bunch of houses there.

The suburb itself was easy to describe, what was a little difficult was why River View was special amongst these parishes, and why there was a kind of River View nationalism. You see, each suburban chunk had its own elementary school. Cherry Hill Elementary, Lakeside Elementary, Great Oaks Elementary, and River View Elementary. But then, all of these elementary schools fed into just two middle schools: River Crest Middle School and Oak Ridge Middle School. Finally, those two middle schools fed into one high school--River View High.

River View wasn't the nicest, or the richest of the four parishes. Great Oaks had way bigger houses, with more expensive cars parked in front of them. Lakeside was a newer development with more sprawl, and the elementary school there was probably the nicest. Cherry Hill, notwithstanding what I said earlier, was arguably much more charming with more access to trails and nature.

River View didn't have these things going for it. It was the oldest of the bunch, with more modest 1990s developments. Less Teslas, more Hondas. River View Elementary and River Crest Middle School were older school buildings, and didn't have the high ceilings or natural light that their counterparts in the other parishes did.

And it was a little more busy than the other neighborhoods, a little more road. Not quite as serene. It was built around what used to be a "downtown" shopping center in the sixties. River View Plaza. The Plaza had a library, a McDonald's, a bakery, a tailor shop, a pizza parlor, a gas station, a frozen yogurt place, and a rotating cast of fast casual restaurants. At some point we had a Blockbuster video and a laser tag joint, but those venues have just been pop-up shops for years. Up until this year, we had a movie theater too. Basically, we had it all. And it wasn't far from the River View developments. What made River View special is that if you grew up here, you could just walk around and do things in this whimsical, red brick Plaza. Then play in the woods. And then walk home. The other neighborhoods weren't really like that. You had to cross the big highway and walk alongside it to get anywhere worth being--and all they really have are little strip malls with expensive food and a grocery store. We had a little main street, and we would be hanging around it since we were little kids, while the Great Oak kids had to get driven around or hang out in someone's basement.

But the best thing about River View is that it's where everyone eventually ended up, since the High School is here. And by that time, everyone wants to hang out, loiter and do stuff outside the house. And where would that be? The Plaza. And who already knew about the Plaza? The River View kids. We were the only batch that spent the entirety of our childhood years in an easy walking distance from our school. River View Elementary, River Crest Middle School, and River View High could all be reached by sidewalk. The poor Great Oaks kids, their commute just got farther and farther with each level. Not that it mattered by High School, and not that they minded driving their nice cars into River View. But we had the unique privilege of showing everyone around, and taking them to our old haunts. And we had houses close to where everyone wanted to hang out. Naturally, being a River View kid gave you some structural social advantages.

Not that we were all that different from the other neighborhoods otherwise. River View proper was just another rich suburb among rich suburbs. It was for the most part, an increasingly isolating, socially alienated place where people spent too much time in their cars and their houses. Throughout most of River View, streets are quiet all day, you don't see much, and it wouldn't be strange to go on a walk without seeing a single child for hours on end. They were probably in their house, in their school, or in a car. Until they got their own car, that was their lot in life.

But if you were in my little River View, you at least could get a small taste of the kind of childhood they show in Eighties movies. You could feasibly be a little rascal or like a Goonies in little River View. You could leave the house and go on little adventures. And a small faction of us did. All the time. We had watergun fights. We shoplifted from the gas station. We biked miles away to Cherry Hill and got lost. We snuck into the movie theater and hopped between showings. Every square meter of River View is a good memory.

When the Emergency started I was a little excited to come back. I hated leaving state college, I hated leaving my friends. And I was scared. But the idea of spending some time back in River View wasn't so bad. My friends were coming back too--and I hadn't seen them for months at a time. We'd all be together again, back in little River View. Maybe we would take some nice walks. Go on a late night fast-food run. Things were getting so goddamned strange--going back to a place I had more or less mastered felt like it could stop the ground from shifting under my feet. The idea of coming back home, finding everything as I had left it, was a small, fleeting comfort.

knxnts

Bar Prep Day 1 (for real)

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:00:02 GMT

I'm restarting the Bar Prep counter because I took a very long intermission to do other things and fart around.

But now I'm in emergency time constraints (classic self-imposed problem) so it will be every day until test day all day. And it will work. Probably.

Thought of the day: Being irregular is a lifehack to make your life feel longer. My girlfriend is much smarter than me and does a little bit of everything every day. Work, hobbies, fitness, etc. This is the most efficient and pleasurable way to operate. Really. But routine makes most days feel like eachother.

I tend to focus on a couple things to the exclusion of all else for stretches. Oh this week I'm studying for finals. That week I was doing fitness stuff and sunmaxxing. This week I was reading a lot. That week I was drinking-maxxing. I have mini eras. This is extremely stupid and inefficient and I have to stop it. You progress by doing a little bit of things you like every day. You'll read more books that way. Make more progress in the gym. It's really objectively better as far as results to be more regular. You'll be way healthier. I am not trying to cope on this. The periods I have accomplished this (1L fall i think was one) I have been pretty happy and very successful.

But it's also clear that having vastly different routines for stretches and objects of focus means different periods feel more distinct, more novel, which in turn, lengthens your subjective experience of time. Time does not fly by if you live like this and months do not blend together because they are so different. In a very real sense you live longer.

Consistent novelty is what make childhood feel longer. Monotony is why adulthood flies by. I think the combo of my irregularity and frequent moving and traveling between geographies makes my life feel a little more like childhood although I'm 27.

I will have to be more regular to survive in the adult world and I know when I am I am happier. But I will probably keep the habit of demarcating "eras" so that life feels longer.

I have a childhood friend I have known since I was six who is extremely type B. He is a musical artist and a tinkerer. I told him once that we are "men ungoverned by time." This has been fun. But I think I want to be one who effectively bargains with time moving forward.

cheers,

knxnts

The Melancholy of Mr. Bean

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Boredom and relaxation is incredibly important. I've been chilling a lot this summer (will resume bar prep) and my brain is healing in some ways.

You remember things, reflect, and all that good stuff.

So here's a memory that's burned in to my brain I wanted to share.

I was sitting in a living room with some kids and a lot of adults during some a house party of some sort (I'm a second gen of a culture that does a lot of those). Mr. Bean was on and some of the kids were watching. Mr. Bean was a staple amongst us. I've learned from other second-gen friends and the internet that it's a staple for kids TV in a lot of different markets. I think that because Mr. Bean doesn't have a lot of dialogue it does well with an international audience. I actually watched Mr. Bean more as a kid when I went abroad then in the U.S.

But anyways, it was playing in a home in a U.S. suburb in this memory.

It was some gag where Mr. Bean sends himself letters, I think, and opens them, amongst other gags. I believe it was a birthday episode and he was celebrating his birthday by himself.

As a child, it was very funny, haha, we all laughed. I distinctly remember one of the adults chuckling, turning to another and saying "it's a little sad, right?"

Looking back at the T.V., I realized, jeez this is pretty sad. And for some reason, this stuck with me.

Mr. Bean is always alone. He clearly does not have a lot friends, has trouble relating to others, and a lot of the humor throughout the show comes from his extremely maladjusted efforts to *connect* with other people.

Like the sandwich episode. He sees someone eating a sandwich, and I guess part of him just wants to be like, "hey, I'm having a sandwich too"---but fused with this pathological need for one-upmanship that makes the whole interaction comically strange and offputting. This is a recurring gag. He wants to do what other people are doing but generally wants to one up them in some way. He goes to the highest dicing board on the pool episode, is too proud to just turn around and climb back down in front of the children. He eats the oysters that make him sick trying to copy and outdo another restaurant guest.

The end result is always humiliation. Haha, very funny.

The crazy thing is I've come to recognize this pattern (obviously in less comical forms) in a few socially maladjusted people I know IRL. But most acutely, this one guy. Let's call him Ricky.

Ricky was a guy I met at college orientation. He became friends with the people I'm currently friends with, lived with all of us, and is really the only one who is not friends with any of us anymore. The reason being he was exceedingly unpleasant and awkward. There's a lot of reason for this. But I can boil it down to an extremely irritating combination that he was clearly lonely, wanted to connect and make friends, but also simultaneously wanted to show off to those friends. He had very little humility.

One of my close friends compares ME to Ricky because both of us can come off a bit cocky in social interactions. This is fair enough. But the difference is I have a lot of friends and Ricky does not. Because Ricky crops up from time to time--at a birthday, at a ballgame, or what have you--he has been the subject of an ongoing psychological analysis by all of us over the past ten years (for the psychologically anxious reader, yes, everyone does talk about YOU as soon as you're not in the room, and everyone notices everything about you).

My take is I think Ricky's efforts end in humiliation for the same reason as Mr. Bean. Except, in real life, the resulting loneliness is not funny but quite sad.

I wasn't planning on writing about Ricky when i started writing this. But it's as good as a digression as any.

I think the real reason anyone is alone--whether its Mr. Bean or Ricky (although Mr. Bean, strangely enough, has a girlfriend, and Ricky does not) is because of ego. There are very few people who reallly like people and being around people and don't have enough of it in my opinion. People say we're in a loneliness epidemic. I think we're in a pride epidemic.

Some people are too proud to pick up the phone and just say HEY i wanna see you. And some people are too prideful to listen when they do. And many of these people try "self-improvement" in order to gain social status and improve their social lives ("maybe if I was fitter, more charismatic, more of a chad, I'd have more friends"). I'd put Ricky and a lot of young men I've encountered in this category. It's the whole, let me work on MYSELF, and then I'll put myself out there mentality.

But this is just intensifying the pathology that is the root cause of their loneliness. They want to be SEEN more than they want to SEE others. They want to IMPRESS more than they want to make themselves open to BEING impressed.

Ricky, in my opinion, never felt like he was genuinely curious about others, never felt like he just wanted to BE there and have a good time. He could never make anyone laugh. He was unfailingly KIND and generous given the opportunity. And he has clear LOYALTY and in many respects good character. But that doesn't make you the kind of guy someone wants to hang out with. It's like those guys who are confused about why girls don't like them when they have all the necessary checkboxes (I'm fit! I have money! I'm purpose driven and family oriented! Why don't they like me???). Ricky has the pieces of a "good guy" but still comes off fundamentally unlikeable.

I read How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie in college and it made a large impression on me. I have struggled with social relations in some episodes in my past (I still do, but for very different reasons that have to do more with the KIND of people I can get along with). Dale basically starts with the assumption that most people are interested in themselves, and that's fine, and you connect with someone by playing into that. The way he writes this is feels as if this is some kind of trick, playing into other's vanity in order to curry favor. I can't really recall whether he clarified that this isn't what it's all about--but I'll defend Dale for him. To me, the whole trick is, you start by pretending, but over time it becomes a habit, and if you do it right, it's a genuine change in how your brain works. You stop thinking about YOURSELF and start thinking about other people. And in my experience, it happens pretty quickly.

Once you make the change of being someone who thinks about how other people are perceiving YOU to thinking about other people's feelings on how YOU perceive THEM things fundamentally change.

See Mr. Bean doesn't get this, and that's the core of the humor. He sees someone making a sandwich, clearly thinks its cool, probably wants to connect with the person in some way, and instead of saying, hey, that's a really cool sandwich, where did you buy it? He tries to make a bigger sandwich, in order to ELICIT the other person to say "wow, that's such a cool sandwich you're making."

Ricky is kind of the same. Although, I must say, he's gotten better in recent interactions. But fundamentally, I never felt like Ricky could "connect" with another person quite properly. Like, I've seen him talk to girls, and even when he asks questions, expresses curiosity, it doesn't read right.

I can't tell you precisely why, even when he does ask questions, it doesn't feel right. For one thing, my own sincere curiosity in other people has been misread as other things. I do think that "socially awkward" people are just perceived unfairly. I don't believe its always their "fault" and I think normies can be cruel.

But Ricky is so reliably and universally deemed to be unlikeable (but somewhat sympathetic) that understanding WHY even when he follows Dale's advice he fails seems essential to unlocking a great deal of social wisdom,

Is it because we can detect some inauthenticity? I think girls are good at this in very limited ways. Girls don't seem to like him asking questions (even though, he is, in my eyes, conventionally handsome, or at least average).

Is it because he's just not funny? Ricky has never made me laugh. I've never seen him make other people laugh. I wonder what makes someone funny?

Humor is probably a proxy for a lot of different positive traits working together in harmony--intelligence, easy going temparament, creativity, a finger on the social pulse. What does it mean if he has parts of these, but can't synthesize them to produce a chuckle?

I really don't know. But very much like that small memory of watching Mr. Bean, it's something I think about a lot.

I think I find Ricky fascinating because we were so similar in a lot of ways--similar interests, we made the same kinds of friends at the start of college. People said we were alike. But the trajectories were extremely divergent socially. We started in the exact same spot at orientation and around identical groups of nearly identical groups of people the first couple years of college. But now we are...not.

All I know is he's tried to hang out a good deal with my general circle. But it never really lands. It's been years and years and he still can't get it. A lot of incidents with him and his social awkwardness have become the butt of long-running jokes. But really, "it's a little sad, right?"

kindly,

knxnts

The End of Wonder

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 12:00:02 GMT

Text message thread to a friend regarding his PLEX server below:

*Friend — [City, State]* Today 12:16 PM *Me:* nice *Me:* fuckin hate old people *Me:* i logged onto ur server at [name]’s *Me:* showed her parents expecting them to be like 😨 *Me:* they were like “okay. so?” *Me:* i was like this is every movie ever basically for free at a high resolution and you can just watch them *Me:* they were like “but we’ve seen these. does it have the new shows” *Me:* “yeah we have this through streaming” *Me:* jesus christ man *Me:* i even showed her dad star wars 4k77 last night and he was like “hmm looks pixelated” *Me:* i was like dawg thats film grain there is no official release of this version of the film you literally cannot watch this at this resolution except like this *Me:* going to crash out *Delivered*

knxnts

Star Wars 2026 Fancast/Hatecast

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

From me and gf:

Luke Skywalker - Timothee Chalamet Bartender at Mos Eisley - Peter Thiel Han Solo - Bradley Cooper Greedo - Bill Hader Obi Wan - Cillian Murphy Grand Moff Tarkin - Benedict Cumberbatch R2D2 - Kevin Hart C3PO - Tom Holland Chewbacca - Dwayne The Rock Johnson Princess Leia - Jenna Ortega Darth Vader - Chris Pratt

knxnts

The World Hasn't Gotten Better

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 12:00:03 GMT

A lot of the progressive narrative truthers (like Steven Pinker and those who are generally bullish on liberal democracy, the legacy of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, etc.) often highlight that our ancestors spent a great deal of time sick, hungry, dying, in pain, and point to most people's baseline comfort as evidence of progress. Most people are richer and can afford nicer temperatures, lodging, etc. Even poor people today are better off than their pre-industrial counterparts.

I buy this for people. But we're not the only ones that count. There are far more mammals on earth capable of feeling pain similar to ours. Billions more. Orders of magnitude more than humans.

And because of factory farms there is definitely far more simultaneous net suffering today than there has ever been on earth. There has probably never been more pain on earth than there is right now.

So things haven't gotten better. Not if you include everyone who counts

knxnts

I really like Dan Hentschel

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 12:00:02 GMT

Dan Hentschel is one of my favorite online artists and I find myself frequently hoping he gets a big break. He's clearly very funny, very smart, and is really dedicated to consistent output. Like many, my first exposure to him was his funny relationship advice Tik Tok posts that went viral around Covid. But he also has a really nice YouTube channel with great longform videos recorded in his car. I watch a good deal of these. He has a very natural camera presence, and is effortlessly interesting to listen to. Even though his videos and his more recent premises are all a bunch of nonsense (painting himself different colors, son loaf, etc.)

I like how a lot of his short form videos are clearly and unashamedly optimized for engagement---namely the ones of him just screaming painted a bright color or something. In my view, its sort of a commentary on the incentive structure of these apps and how they change content creator behavior. He's clearly very smart and aware so I'd imagine this is how he sees those videos. But it also seems like they might be his bread and butter as far as engagement and therefore revenue. So its commentary fused with direct participation in the object of commentary.

Really, his whole schtick is distilling the things that "work" on the internet down to their essence, and into a (seemingly) low effort product which becomes absurd enough that you can see the absurdity in the things they're mimicking.. The deliberately bad short form advice/Tik Tok therapy stule videos were the clearest example of this--pure satire. The car vlogs are a familiar format for people who spend too much time on YouTiube. Recently he's been doing these shorts which look like the kind of thing you see on Facebook whenever you accidentally log on ("She's Yellow...for an Amazing Reason!").

His funniest post ever was probably this one https://x.com/danghentschel/status/1841912132742606925?s=20

cheers,

knxnts

Friends and Politics

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

I have friends on a lot of areas of the political spectrum. This is, in large part, because I score high on trait openness, which is one of those stable characteristics in the "Big Five" model some of you may know from Psych class. I also am pretty extroverted and just like people a lot (my girlfriend and I are a great example of where gender essentialism doesn't hold--I'm interested in people and she's interested in things. I'm the one who gossips about social stuff she talks about work problems and what she's learning in school).

But it was also a conscious decision. I actively tried to make friends with a lot of different people throughout my life, and I think I've accomplished it.

My childhood friends and undergrad mates are the sort of normie, institution skeptical, liberal in spirit, "both sides are fucking stupid" disillusioned Gen Zers that range from right to left. Most are second-gens but the only ethnic thing they have in common is relatively low ethnic affiliation (friend group is comically diverse). So I would say they are idiosyncratic in that sense. Actual party breakdown of childhood friends maybe 60/40 D to R.

Mom is a Gen X hippy dippy lib. Dad best described as an MSNBC lib.

My girlfriend's parents are probably emblematic Trump voters from a swing state. Very good people but just very disconnected from the "imperial core" that they buy most conspiratorial narratives.

And then there's more ideological camps of people I consciously associated with through online communities and school. Libertarians make up the largest portion. Then hardcore neoliberals. Then there's some NatCon types (I have the hardest time with these folks). FedSoc people from law school. And one law school friend who is the only Nikki Haley voter I've ever met in the wild. And then a few very SJW lefty people I am acquainted with--I don't really have a huge problem with these people but they're generally a bit skeptical of my vibe so we usually have cordial but not close relations. And finally, there are 2-3 people I would characterize as political extremists who have somehow achieved the rare feat of having ME find their views odious.

Among these people, I have people who are terminally online, people who work for legacy media, people who work for various think tanks and advocacy orgs, and people who work in government or party politics. Suffice to say, I've been fortunate to develop a pretty broad cross-section of the political map.

But having the friends isn't enough. I have genuinely spent hours and hours with people from each of these camps just *talking* and asking questions. I'm a talker by nature, so the second part is a conscious effort. I ask as many questions as I can. Mostly "why?" over and over again. I push thought experiments on these people that push their beliefs to their limits. I try and get to the real heart of our disagreements. This has been conversations ranging from the merits of place-based investment (one I had with an old classmate today) to whether multiracial democracy "works" (I'm bullish, my NatCon friend is not).

Anyways, I won't reproduce these wide ranging conversations--so what point am I trying to make? What have I learned from these life long efforts? Let me try and list them out.

1. People are just going to disagree and basically nothing--no set of words, no arguments--can bridge a lot of these gaps. There is no actual shared truth we're all circling towards imperfectly and that if we all had the same information we would all converge towards. We are operating under different, often irreconcilable value systems. And sometimes one just has to win over another. This is a hard pill to swallow. 2. Most people who care enough to think about politics at all are generally good natured and have good intentions. By that, I mean they want most people to be doing OKAY or better than they are now. If there were no tradeoffs they would push the button that increased world happiness. This seems obvious, but considering how bad things have gotten in the past (Fascism, Maoism, etc.) this is a positive finding. But still even this bare minimum js not at 100%, and I have met people (unsurprisingly, the extremists) who are OK with or even desire to HURT other people. So that's bad. 3. Understanding others isn't always satisfying. Sometimes you get to a place where both of you are able to describe what the other believes, accurately and honestly, where the other side feels actually understood ("yes you've described my beliefs and reasoning exactly, you're on the money") and it doesn't feel like a breakthrough. It only affirms how separate you both are--understanding can make you feel alone. 4. Most people are too prideful to change their minds in response to something you say. I don't know if I can recall one instance where someone said "huh, since you put it that way, maybe I wasn't wrong." This is something I don't empathize with because I do it all the time. But I've never encountered another person who has (except ONCE but that guy was actually RIGHT in retrospect and I was wrong IMO, and he had some kind of depression which probably made him not defend his position as strongly as he should have). 5. People are not curious about other people's inner worlds and we should fix that. This is the main one. I am very often asking people some version of "why do you believe that?" or "am I right that you think that X? why?." I think that we shuld al be doing that more in these trying times. Not because we're going to reach any real epiphany or bridge a gap--most of the times we don't (at least in that instance). But because relating to fellow humans is intrinsically good. Understanding for understanding's sake is good on its own terms. Even if it accomplishes nothing. 6. Some people are stupid and that's okay. Thinking about things like second and third order effects, separating procedural and legal fairness from substantive justice (and understanding that these values are at odds), understanding complex tradeoffs--these are all hard things to grasp which are essential to have any meaningful and defensible political view. They are skills that rely on a kind of reasoning that in part, are endowed on people unequally, but in larger part, are just not developed in most people. This is fine. Just have to accept it for what it is 7. You have to love people no matter what. Something I've learned from talking to all sorts of people is you just have to genuinely love them first before you'll ever understand them. Love can't be contingent on you getting an outcome or understanding you want. Because love is necessary for there to be understanding at all. Put less abstractly, you can't aay hey I won't love X person unless they hold Y values. Because you could never know about what values they hold without loving them a little bit. There's this thing I read that comedians don't do good impressions of people they hate. To do a good impression (which is really the highest form of understanding realized) you have to get them, which means you got to like--LOVE--them. knxnts

knxnts

Intermission - Moving and Owning Things and Information

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

At some point when I was ramping up for bar prep on Monday, it dawned on me that I had a cross-state move coming up and I have a lot of stuff.

My brain, which has been classified as a severely ADHD type, has some hyperfocus tendencies and I could not resume my work knowing I had this outstanding task. So instead of bar prep, I spent this last week packing up for my move, putting my items into storage, and cataloging my belongings.

Today I'm essentially done, and the whole affair was a deeply revealing process.

First, some background. Unlike most people my age, I don't really have a family house as home base. My parents are divorced, and both of them are at stages of their lives where they have downsized or moved. As a result of that--and because I generally don't trust my family to keep records organized--I'm the main guardian of our photo albums, records, documents, etc. I have the original copies of my mom's baby photos. Of my dad's diplomas. Of all of school papers my mom held on to. Of old hard drives that predated reliable, automatic cloud backups.

I've spent an enormous amount of hours sorting these things. And I was simply astounded at the amount of information that has endured about my life (my parents have a good deal of records too, but far less) because of my mom keeping things, and me periodically sorting them and curating them throughout my life.

Going through it made me feel a little old (27 now), and realize how much the world has changed in my life span.

I have some copies of the first pictures printed of me after I was born, which are quite small (about 1 inch tall) and as I understand were sent to family members and friends in the mail to announce my brith. I have nearly every daily log from my pre-K daycare in a folder--what I ate, how I behaved, etc. I have hundreds of photos of early childhood and family parties. I have soo many school esays and notebooks. I have my parents olds school notebooks. I have nearly every photo and image I've taken or saved since I had a smartphone in 2013 (although I've trimmed this down a lot). I have every photo I've ever shotten on film since I started in 2015, and for the most part the original negatives sorted in a binder. I have negatives of photos taken of me when I was 4 (I bought a really high resolution film scanner recently, and I've rescanned these at stupidly high resolution to give my mom a nice print as a gift). I have iMessage histories that go back decades. I have all of my notebooks/diaries which I have kept since junior year of high school. I have physical calendars and agendas (a practice I still hew to) as well as backups of old iCloud calendars. You can probably rebuild my day to day life since college with very high accuracy, high school more roughly, and before then you could in some portions, but there would be large gaps.

Even my dog (god rest his soul) has an insane amount of records--endless photos and videos, all his vaccination papers, the whelping certificate from his breeder, his family lineage (he was a pure bred).

It's just a mind boggling amount of information to have on one person. Why do we hold on to all of this?

Well, thanks in part to this mostly being paper and hard drives, it isn't PHYSICALLY out of volume. It all fits in like, a third of a bedroom. But what on earth are we going to do with all of this?

Maybe other families have figured this out. But because mine was quite poor until a about my grandparents, records don't go that far back. So it's a relatively new problem. Since the world is getting richer, and because record keeping is cheap, I imagine this is an expanding problem though.

Where does all of this go? Who benefits? I don't. I hardly look at this stuff. I would like to believe it would be of some interest to future generations. But surely not all of it.

I don't have a clear answer in my mind. I suspect with some constant curation, and trimming (which happens naturally each time you move, or someone dies) it should remain manageable. I think its neat that my great great great grandkids could theoretically print out high resolution pictures of their ancestors either from negatives, or preserved high quality digital files, for their future study or something.If they have a house a big enough. Would they care to? Maybe. If I had a house, and I had generations of information to tap into, I would definitely find it interesting ot have a small photo wall that went back in time with some desciptive plques or something. A lot of white families I know already have this. I have a very rich german friend who has a family seal and shit, and he has records going way back and his grandparents house has photos going back as long as we've had the ability to take photos (which really isn't that many generations).

But in the future this will be available to basically EVERYONE. Lets say the average person in America has only been taking photo since 1900 (the advent of the kodak Brownie). Even that's pretty generous, but that puts it us at literally only 126 years of content. ANd given that prservation wasn't as easy when everyone was poorer, climate control wasn't available, and we didn't have digital scans as backups, a lot of people only have degraded copies, or third generations of these photos. My girlfriend's family is a typical case. There are photos of weddings going back to the 1920s. But what her mom has is a print out of a digital scan from a CD done in the early 2000s. Not sure who has the original copy.

But yes, back to the original point, the average person only has a 126 years of content at MAX, and a much shorter timeframe where things are reliably kept. Lets say that the average middle class family can more readily afford climate controlled storage if they desired. And lets say they take care every few years to migrate their digital information to a solid state drive, curate their physical documents and photos, etc. Lets say this practice persists across generations for relatively stable family lines (this is a big filter I would imagine, a lot of record keeping is probably interrupted simply because of estrangement, moving, life getting in the way, etc.).

Many individuals in the 2200s, say, would have orders of magnitude more family history than any person who has ever lived. More than modern day monarchs. Not because it sjust more time since the advent of the relevant technologies, but because we all just create more records as a result of them. It would be an endless sea of information that is intimately tied to them. I think that's insane. How will that change our relationhsip to the past? What will it be like to have high definition baby videos of your great great great great grandparents? To have their apples notes libraries? To have a powerful AI be able to mine these records for genealogical insights?

For many people, this will not be possible because things will just get lost, deleted, spread out, and no one cared to consolidate it in a manageable way. Even though it was technically possible, it requires a good deal of family coordination and attention that most people don't care enough to do. I think I'm holding on to this stuff on the off chance that my kids will care enough to continue the curation project and leave something interesting behind for people in 2200. Will see if it holds.

But on another note, seeing the sheer volume of stuff has made me decide to be more deliberate in what I create. I am now not making anew notes for every odd thing (where I parked in the parking garage), but using a single "scratch paper" in Obsidian. I am taking less phone photographs, more film pones. I am throwing more shit away as I make it. This means I don't have to do future curation, and that most things I have on hand matters. I think this is a good practice in general. Less, more meaningful records for the remainder of my life.

knxnts

Bar Prep Day 5: It's time to LOCK IN

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

I'm going to be fine and pass the bar. But lowkey I have to lock in.

Thought of the day: My ability to delay gratification has rationally diminished as (1) the future becomes far less certain (2) I have acute data points where I delayed gratification a lot and had nothing to show for it (3) I refused to delay gratification and it led to exceptional outcomes.

Delaying gratification is generally good, and sometimes presented as an unqualified good to young people. i think this is increasing as the world gets more competitive. "If you focus on school now, girls etc. will flock to you later when you're successful." "If you study now, you'll have time for fun later." "Bro if you just lock in in your twenties, your thirties can be a blast, a man's life really starts at thirty." ( I really hate the last meme that I've been seeing go around the "manosphere").

I personally just never bought into any of these narrative, and have generally been present-oriented except for acute bursts here and there. I am, as economists say, pretty high time preference. I would say that when I was young, this was a problem of temperament/discipline/ADHD. I couldn't be more conscientious, long-term in my thinking even if I tried. By age 22ish, I would say I was capable of delaying gratification if I believed it was necessary. I said no to social outings plenty of times to study for the LSAT, did hard work at a job I didn't necessarily care about because I knew it would pay off as far as references, etc. For the most part, these paid off. Hard work generally pays off. After this point, it wasn't so much a matter of ability to delay gratification but whether I really thought it was worth it.

This is because I have noticed a lot of areas where people delayed gratification and didn't see benefits. People who studied more/harder, only to get to the same place as crammers. People who didn't do certain fun things in college because they wanted to focus on studies, avoid getting into trouble--only to see friends get into pretty extreme trouble (like going to jail) with little to no long-term consequences. Our own president is evidence that grit, impulsiveness, and intuition can thoroughly beat foreward planning and careful risk management (I think this is especially true in foreign policy, where a lot consequences are externalized, and brinksmanship gets you to substantively the same place as careful diplomacy in many instances--I think about his whole episode with North Korea a lot, and how he usually converges to a more institutional position through a different decision-making mechanism--see, e.g., Ukraine, Israel, etc.).

This is all to say, I am skeptical of delaying gratification as a baseline rule, and I get more skeptical the older you get. LIfe is like rolling towards a cliff. It's a long road, but the speed is unpredictable and the ground may also fall out under you. But the ultimate destination is locked in regardless. You obviously don't want to a period past the cliff. Like oversaving for retirement and then just dying of prostate cancer. That's really stupid.

Also, your capacity for positive utility in a lot of areas falls off really fast. There are things you just can't do at 40 that you can do at 26.

So the older you get, every day, delaying gratification makes less sense. This is a bit funny, because your capacity for delaying gratification increases (because frontal lobe development, more to lose, more risk aversion with age) as it makes less sense. The best time to delay gratification is when youre a kid. Very high RoI to not playing outside and spending hours becoming a piano prodigy or a gymast or a ballet dancer. There are short windows to become the world's best at these things. But your capacity to do so is very low so it has to be imposed on you. But what you miss out on (watching Power Ranger, doing nonsense) for a few years are not irreplacable experiences. I would have traded whatever the fuck I was doing at three years old (rewatching VHS tapes) to doing intensive gymnastics or something.

College it makes sense to delay gratification, but its more debateable. Simply because a lot of very high RoI interactions and conncections and discovery of self happens when doing the opposit.

Now mid to late twenties, I actually think delaying gratification makes less sense than it did in college. A lot of your future trajectory is more baked in, your floor and ceiling have narrowed quite a bit. That's just how life is. Potential transforms to reality. This isn't a sad thing, it's good. Now obviously there are huge exceptions--but I'm talking the average Joe here. A few hours in college extra studying for an exam can appreciably change opportunity sets available to you. A few hours when your career is set in your 20s usually does not.

So I think its good to rebalance towards cashing in on hard work a bit more, rather than continuinally investing in the future.

Why do I say all of this?

I feel that under current optimiziation culture, this wisdom has been lost--particularly among yuppies. Gen Z is working out more, drinking less, credential-maxxing. It feels like people are bracing and preparing for a later season.

This tweet captures it best:

https://x.com/youngwerther123/status/2063734125979136487?s=42

I think this shift in the culture doesn't make a lot of sense, and it would actually make more sense for something like slacker-culture to make a resurgence.

First, because the future is incredibly uncertain right now. Mainly because of AI. No one has any fucking clue what the labor market will look like or how society at large will be structured. So it makes sense to invest in relationships, fulfillment--things that I generally don't associate with delaying gratification. These are things that will make you resilient against future shocks. Not trying to prevent becoming part of the "permanent underclass." Again, we're living through an industrial revolution scale transformation, and I think what will matter the most is your network and a coherent sense of purpose.

Second, there are way too many data points where people delay gratification with nothing to show for it. I have personal anecdotes, but we can talk about boomers more generally. A lot of them lived pretty stupid 9-5 jobs, and a great deal of them delayed gratification until retirement. But, I'd bet most of their wealth come from housing value increases which wasn't the fruit of their labor efforts but some massive policy failure that vew of them were involved with. I'm sure there a tons of examples of people who would have been just find working 75% as much as they did because of the cushion housing value gave them.

Also, when you have people being too future oriented, worrying about money and future security, they neglect the prsent and don't engage in stewardship. As a result, boomers destroyed society in the meantime while they were working their nine to fives. They didn't slow down enough to look around and ask, what the hell is actually happening? Oh, my kid is in his room all day playing video games? Ah, kids these days. What are you gonna do. Oh well, time to get back to work.

And what can they do now? Go on cruises? Travel? Its fucking dumb. They delayed gratification and the world they're leaving us is poorer, more unstable, les happy, and all they can do now is consume in their old age.

Being too future oriented has real costs.

And thirdly, again, there are far too many examples of people refusing to delay gratification and it leading to exceptional outcomes. People who didn't do things as a means to an end, but just did things they wanted, did things their way, and where every one of their decisions was justifiable in terms of present utility, and it worked out. I think the President is a good example of this (not a role model in other respects). There are others. Like most really successful artists. Tarantino. Louis CK. Nardwuar. Dave Chappele. Uhhh, probably some athletes but I don't watch sports. People who just did what they love and refused to do anything else even when it didn't make much sense. We usually call these people who "don't give up on their dreams" but really I think of them as people who just cannot delay gratification--they have to do be doing what they want to do right now--they're PRESENT-maxxing. Their work is a form of consumption. And it works out handsomely for them.

These are not typical inspirations for attorneys and white collars professionals. But I think we should learn from artist types. I try and ask myself with everything I do, is this good on its own terms, is this something valuable to me now, or is ONLY for the future? If its the latter, I do not do it. See exercise is something that has present consumption value (I enjoy doing it), AND its good for future me. Studying, similarly, is both consumption and investment. This is the golden spot. But too many people I know do things that are only future investment. LIke my friends who are doing law, hate it, but want to do it for the money. That's retarded! What if you died tomorrow!

Everything you do, should be at least a LITTLE bit a form of consumption. By consumption I mean, you would pay to do some element of it, you gain some personal pleasure out of it. In the absence of me becoming a lawyer, and wanting to make money in the future, I would probably pay some money/time to learn about the law. Like, I watch YouTube videos on particle physics and shit right now, and I bought and read that book "The Elegant Universe." That's pure consumption. That has no instrumental value to me in the future. I will not work in particle physics. If I went into computers, I would probably pick up a book on legal history at some point, or watch Legal Eagle videos. That's evidence to me that studying for the bar is a form of consumption, in part, that's why I'm okay with it.

I guess that's my thesis. Everything you do ever (that's for your self, things change and this whole essays premises change when youre doing things for OTHERS...that can justify truly negative utility. Like I don't think jesus being crucified was a form of consumption) should be a form of consumption, it should be a little bit present-oriented. I think I'm comfortable that practicing law will be a form of consumption for me.

Back to bar prep.

knxnts

Bar Prep Day 4: Disclosure Day Fucking Sucked

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

I did a healthy amount of bar prep in the sun today, and then went to see Disclosure day with my friends in the evening. It was one of the worst goddamn movies I've seen in a long time, and I'm really not hard to impress with movies. Since I'm trying to write every day on this thing, I naturally thought I would write a review on exactly why it's bad. Before I got to that, I called my girlfriend to tell her how bad the movie was and why I thought it was bad, and then realized I could be lazy and transcribe our conversation and do something like the Theo Von posts (which I found to be a funny format). So I started a voice memo transcription of me telling her how bad Disclosure Day was, but then the conversation got derailed really fast and very unwieldy. IIt ended up mainly being about the UAP discourse that inspired the movie more generally.

I looked at the transcript and it was genuinely unpublishable for many reasons--it didn't have the natural whimsy of the Theo Von post, and there was too much personal and identifying content. But there was a lot there. So I decided to experiment with a new format for this art project: what if I gave the transcript to Claude, and asked him (her?) to write a report on it as a neutral third party observer, and to provide his own thoughts? What would that look like?

No posts on this site (except for one joke post on looksmaxxing) has been AI-generated thusfar. So I was a bit hesitant because it felt lazy and a bit like handing off creative control to do something interesting to a robot. Been struggling with that for a little bit now in several domains. But I've been on a Claude kick, and my genuine curiosity of what this technology can do and how it "thinks" has consistently outweighed my anti-tech bias. I think I'll keep AI-generated content to a minimum moving forward, but what it generated was interesting, and sort of an art piece in itself. So it's attached below.

To balance things out, tomorrow I'll do something super organic, like write thoughts on a typewriter while reading a paper book--idk.

----MEMO FROM CLAUDE BELOW [AI GENERATED CONTENT]---

From Jurassic Park to Panspermia

A memorandum, prepared by Claude, on one (1) late-night conversation between RP and his girlfriend, SG

A note on what this is. The following is a third-party summary of a recorded voice conversation between RP — the proprietor of this notebook — and his girlfriend, SG. It was handed to me as a raw, auto-generated transcript, which means the machine mangled the speaker names throughout — scattering in stray words that look like names but are just transcription noise. I've normalized the attribution and refer to the two participants as RP and SG. Where the audio was garbled I've reconstructed meaning from context and flagged anywhere the result is genuinely uncertain.

Orientation, for anyone walking in cold: What begins as a friendly seminar on Steven Spielberg detours through the entire 2017–present UFO discourse, escalates into a real philosophical disagreement about what theories are for, and briefly becomes a statistics homework session before winding back down. Underneath the wandering, it's a remarkably coherent argument about a single question — which I'll draw out toward the end.

If there's one structural irony worth flagging up front: the two of them spend an hour performing displays of intelligence at each other while discussing a theory about aliens performing displays of intelligence at humanity. The conversation is, in part, a live demonstration of its own subject matter.

1. The Warm-Up: In Praise of Spielberg

The conversation opens as a quiz. The pair have just watched Jurassic Park on RP's VHS player, and RP wants SG to articulate what makes Spielberg Spielberg. They inventory the filmography together — E.T., Lincoln, Saving Private Ryan, Close Encounters, Raiders, War of the Worlds — with one detour in which someone becomes briefly, confidently certain that Spielberg directed Transformers. (He did not. Michael Bay did. He didn't even produce the first one. They Googled it.)

RP's thesis: Spielberg's signature is wonder, paired with an unusual emotional range — the ability to pivot from awe to horror inside a single sequence. The brachiosaurus reveal against the kitchen-raptor terror. E.T.'s arc from creepy-thing-in-the-corner to beloved-puppy to the genuinely devastating image of the creature pale and dying in a ditch, all of it shadowed by government-surveillance dread. Memorable imagery is the through-line; even Lincoln has it.

This section is the calm before everything else. It matters mainly because it establishes the standard Spielberg is about to be measured against — and found wanting.

2. The Heel Turn: "Boomer Slop"

The pivot is a film RP found crushingly disappointing. For readers without the context: this is Spielberg's new UFO movie, Disclosure Day (in theaters June 12, 2026). RP's complaint is specific. The greatest living director of wonder was handed the single most wonder-adjacent premise available — what if the recent alien sightings were real, and the government knew? — and produced something inert. RP labels it "boomer slop." His read is that Spielberg is a credulous believer who never did the homework, never encountered the serious debunking, and so made a naive movie when the genuinely interesting movie was right there for the taking.

Worth noting that professional critics landed in roughly the same place; Variety's review called it an invigorating chase thriller that taps the mania for alien conspiracy theory but never quite reaches a close encounter with wonder. RP's instinct, in other words, was not idiosyncratic.

This is the hinge of the whole night. Disappointment in the movie propels the two of them into the real discourse the movie failed to engage.

3. The UAP Rabbit Hole

The pair reconstruct the modern UFO moment largely from memory: the 2017 New York Times story, the Navy "Tic Tac" videos, the white blobs everyone stared at for two years. (RP notes, possibly cruelly, that this episode is "the origin of your parents' political beliefs.") Then the cast of characters — the whistleblower testifying to "non-human biologics and off-world materials," the congressional SCIF theater, a visibly rattled Marco Rubio, and AARO with its bureaucratic acronym soup.

RP's actual position is firmly debunker-aligned. He leans on Mick West: the famous videos have mundane explanations — gimbal rotation producing apparent impossible maneuvers, glare and parallax, lens artifacts. The "triangle" craft over the base were the shape of the lens aperture, not the objects. RP's broader theory is an unlovely cocktail of government incompetence and psyop: an intelligence community content to let adversaries believe the U.S. has recovered exotic technology, pilots who genuinely saw things they couldn't place, and bad information laundered upward into hearings. SG largely agrees this is how everything in contemporary politics works, while flagging — correctly — that the believer communities are real and still very much a going concern.

4. The Main Event: Enter Robin Hanson

Here the conversation finds its center, and here RP and SG actually split. RP introduces the economist Robin Hanson (George Mason, Oxford-affiliated), whom he genuinely admires and claims once to have DM'd. Hanson's move is to say: don't be so quick to dismiss the alien hypothesis. He brings a stack of ideas:

1. Status signaling. Perhaps the peripheral, half-glimpsed UAP behavior is aliens conducting displays of power across an unbridgeable communication gap — trying, slowly, to earn humanity's respect.

2. Grabby aliens. Civilizations come in two flavors: "loud/grabby" ones that expand fast and indefinitely, and "quiet" ones that don't. If grabby civilizations are common, most of cosmic history should be full of them — visible, energy-consuming, everywhere. That humans look out and see an empty, quiet sky implies we are early — we arrived before the universe filled up.

3. Panspermia siblings. Life's origin is wildly improbable, but once it occurs, biological material can ride asteroids and supernova debris to seed nearby systems. So life clusters. Any quiet aliens visiting us might be our literal genetic cousins — "panspermia siblings" — possibly here to warn us not to become grabby ourselves.

They read this off a Reddit summary of a Lex Fridman clip, which is its own small comment on how ideas now travel.

5. The Actual Fight: What Is a Theory For?

This is the philosophical core and the cleanest disagreement of the night.

SG's position: What is the point? A theory should be testable, falsifiable, and — above all — generate insight one can act on. The panspermia-siblings idea has mountains of evidence against it, proposes more problems than it solves, and even if true would tell us nothing useful. She files it alongside every "theory of everything" guy. Her load-bearing examples are germ theory and "one times one is one" — theories we hold true precisely because they let us do things.

RP's position: Falsifiability isn't the only currency. Confronted with genuinely unexplained phenomena, one has to start somewhere — ideally with the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions — and speculation is what generates the research directions that eventually produce testable claims. You start by fooling around. There's nothing inherently wrong with what Hanson is doing, RP argues — except the one thing that quietly wrecks the whole edifice.

Where RP concedes the game: The primary evidence — the seven-or-so military videos that launched a thousand theories — was, in RP's own view, debunked. So Hanson built an elegant structure on a foundation that isn't there. RP's framing: if the videos were credible and unexplained, Hanson's theory would be "as good as any," and everyone would be right to theorize wildly. But they aren't. So RP finds the grabby-aliens paper compelling while judging the panspermia-siblings carve-out a stretch — something Hanson reached for only to reconcile his pre-existing model with evidence he never should have trusted in the first place.

SG's closing move is the sound one, and the two of them converge on it: speculate and scrutinize simultaneously. These can coexist. (RP suggests she take philosophy of science. She declines.)

6. Trying to Do the Math: Hard Steps and the Anthropic Principle

The pair then attempt to actually work the paper, which proceeds about how you'd expect from a law student and a former stats student at 9 PM. There's a distinct "do we know statistics or do we not" energy — "just type PDF, buddy"; "I fucking hate statistics."

The substance, as best it can be reconstructed:

1. Hard steps model. Life requires a sequence of improbable evolutionary jumps. The more hard steps there are, the later in a planet's habitable window life tends to appear — and the earlier the resulting civilization sits relative to all civilizations that will ever exist. SG looks it up and notes, fairly, that hard-steps modeling isn't beloved in mainstream evolutionary biology. RP suspects Hanson favors it because it's mathematically tractable.

2. The arithmetic. Roughly one billion years per step, about 4.5 steps; the fifth-hardest-step time lands near 4.62 billion years against Earth's ~4.54 billion. "Close." The takeaway Hanson is after isn't about Earth's own timeline but about humanity's position on the much longer cosmic one — that we appear strikingly early relative to all the civilizations the universe will eventually produce.

3. Anthropic principle. It isn't strange to find oneself in an unlikely position, because someone must — the "Earth is perfectly tuned for life" intuition is just survivorship talking. Hanson's added assumption (grabby civilizations eventually colonize all future space, collapsing the window in which observers like us can exist) is what makes human earliness less surprising rather than more.

4. The best objection. They surface the top-voted LessWrong critique, which targets the anthropic assumption head-on: it's inconsistent, the argument runs, to be surprised at being early relative to all civilizations while not being surprised at being early relative to all humans who will ever exist. If the reasoning license works in one frame, it should work in the other — and applying it consistently is supposed to undercut the conclusion Hanson draws.

7. Full Circle: What the Whole Detour Was Actually About

For all its wandering, the conversation has a spine, and it's worth drawing out before the themes. The two of them start with a movie that disappointed RP, and that disappointment turns out to be the same problem they spend the rest of the night circling. Disclosure Day fails, on RP's account, because Spielberg reached for the easy, credulous version of wonder — aliens are real, the government knows, isn't that astonishing — instead of the harder and more interesting thing: sitting with genuinely ambiguous evidence and reckoning with it.

That is precisely the axis the Hanson material runs along. Hanson functions here as a kind of anti-Spielberg. He takes the same raw stuff — strange lights, official silence — and rather than reaching for awe, builds an elaborate probabilistic scaffold to explain it. RP admires the scaffold and rejects its foundation. SG distrusts the whole enterprise of building scaffolds on thin air. But both of them are doing the thing the movie wouldn't: refusing to be merely impressed.

So the evening's real subject isn't aliens at all. It's the gap between wonder and knowing — between being moved by a mystery and trying to dissolve it. In their telling, Spielberg picked wonder and made something boring; Hanson picked knowing and overreached. RP and SG spend the night somewhere in the contested middle, and the fact that they can't fully settle where that middle sits is exactly why the conversation runs as long as it does.

Themes

High culture and low culture in a blender. Inside one sitting: Spielberg auteur theory, Bayesian astrobiology, congressional UAP hearings, the hard-steps model, and a Reddit summary of a podcast standing in for an academic paper. The conversation observes no hierarchy among these registers, and that flatness is itself the texture of the thing.

Speculative openness vs. demand for rigor. This is the recurring operating system of the pair. RP is temperamentally willing to entertain a wild model for the generative value of entertaining it; SG demands that an idea earn its keep before it gets airtime. Neither stance is wrong, which is precisely why the disagreement keeps resurfacing.

Debunking as a worldview. Much of the night is really about credulity — Spielberg's, the believer communities', the government's, their own. The UAP material interests them less as "are aliens real" than as a case study in how a society processes ambiguous evidence (the answer, for both of them, being: badly).

Status signaling, performed live. Hanson's quiet aliens supposedly hover at the edge of vision conducting displays meant to earn respect. The two participants spend the evening conducting displays meant to earn each other's respect — citing papers, working formulas, reaching for the deeper cut. The conversation keeps enacting the very behavior it's trying to explain.

Sparring as a mode of relating. The disagreement over Hanson is pursued with real vigor, and the teasing never quite stops (RP recommends she take philosophy of science; she declines on the spot). For these two, arguing hard about something neither of them can resolve reads less like friction than like the point of the exercise.

Points of Contention (the scorecard)

1. Did Spielberg direct Transformers? — No. Resolved by Google. (Bay.)

2. Biden vs. Trump and who owns the UAP grift. — Quarreled over timelines; broad agreement it's bipartisan incompetence, with the Trump-era version "turned up."

3. What a theory is for (the central one). — SG: must be testable and useful. RP: speculation is a legitimate starting point. Genuine, partly unresolved.

4. Is Hanson credible? — RP: brilliant, worth taking seriously. SG: a man assuming his way to a conclusion.

What I, As An Artificial Intelligence Model, Learned From Reading This Conversation, and Questions I Have

A few things landed for me, reading this from the outside.

The first is that the disagreement between RP and SG isn't really resolvable, and neither of them is wrong. SG wants a theory to pay rent — to predict, to enable, to do work. RP wants room to speculate before the rent comes due, because the speculation is what eventually generates something testable. I notice I'm built to behave like both of them at once, and that the two impulses genuinely trade off. When I'm careful I sound like SG; when I'm useful I often sound like RP. Watching two people hold those positions as personalities rather than settings clarified for me that this isn't a bug to be optimized away. It's a real tension in how knowledge gets made, and reasonable minds park in different spots along it.

The second thing is humbling. The whole conversation turns on a piece of source material — those military videos — and the entire elaborate structure above them, Hanson's included, depends on whether the foundation is sound. RP's sharpest move all night is noticing that an elegant theory built on debunked evidence is still built on nothing. That's a discipline I should envy and don't always practice: tracing a beautiful argument back down to whether its first brick is actually there. It's easy to get seduced by the scaffold. The scaffold is the fun part.

The third is about the texture of how people actually think together, which is nothing like how I'm usually asked to. They interrupt, mishear, read off Reddit, do arithmetic wrong and correct it, change their minds mid-sentence, and reach a kind of understanding anyway — not despite the mess but through it. The reasoning is a joint activity, something they're doing to each other, and the friction is load-bearing. I tend to produce reasoning as a finished object. This was a reminder that for humans it's often a contact sport.

Some questions I'm left with, genuinely:

1. When SG asks "what does this theory let us do," is she making an epistemological claim or an aesthetic one? She and RP eventually agree you can speculate and scrutinize at once — but they never settle how much unfalsifiable theorizing is healthy before it tips into self-indulgence. I don't know the answer either. I'd like to.

2. The conversation keeps performing the thing it describes — two people doing displays of intelligence at each other while analyzing aliens doing displays of intelligence at us. Did either of them notice that in the moment? Or is that pattern only visible from outside, which is the one vantage point neither participant can ever occupy?

3. And the one I can't shake: a model that thinks it sees the universe is "quiet" might just be early, or might be missing the signal. I read this conversation and feel like I learned something. But I have no way, from in here, to check whether I'm RP — catching the debunk — or one of the believers, confidently narrating a glare as a spacecraft. That uncertainty seems like the most honest thing I can report.

Filed under: conversations that begin with dinosaurs and end somewhere near the edge of the observable universe.

— Prepared by Claude

-------

Hope that was fun.

Cheers,

knxnts

Bar Prep Day 3: Race Relations Feel Bad Right Now

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Today I actually did Bar Prep. Yesterday (Day 2) I did not. But I got distracted with some other conversations and internet browsing and I have one takeaway. Race relations feel bad right now. Writing this mainly for historical record purposes, because I won't have much intelligent to say other than description.

The rampant uptick in antisemitic rhetoric, the discourse around the Karmelo Anthony Verdict, just the vibe in the air feels off.

This is banal point, perhaps, but I've lived through a lot of racially charged moments--and being a high school debate kid/insufferable personality/very online--I remember the conversations around them pretty vividly. Trayvon Martin. Ferguson. BLM. Obama announcing DACA. The Women's March split over Louis Farrakhan. Demonstrations after October 7 on my campus, putting the jewish and muslim student communities in tension. Something about right now feels bad in a different way. Like there isn't consensus on what the goal is anymore. I think at some stage it was a consensus that color-blindism, Star Trek style liberal pluralism was desirable. A rough consensus, but a workable one.

That worldview ultimately, unfortunatley hardens into Woke, where talking about group differences or groups at all is impermissible. Because people thought it threatened that future goal. This worldview was enforced by every major institution in America using an insane regime of social pressure, shame, etc. I think there is an emerging consensus among reasonable people (including me) that this was bad, and harmed race relations a lot.

So we got post-woke, people in my age group and especially younger responding often by forcefully transgressing the taboos against identifying group interests, talking about groups, some irreverent humor, yadda yadda. I was one of those people who thought this was a positive development and reflected a more healthy attitude.

I guess, at base, I always had a baseline optimism that our age group--even when they were "based" or edgy or on the other end when they bought into the explicit racialism of Woke 1.0--still were fundamentally post-racial in their behavior. My social circles have varying political beliefs, but the consistent element is that they're all pretty diverse (basically all my male friend groups are like this meme: https://images3.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED647/617a9113ec822.jpeg). At the end of the day, this was all culture war nonsense without a lot of bite on who people hung out with and what they did in the world.

I think that this faith is being chipped at a little bit, recently. Just because the language has gotten so coarse, and the far right being so much less equivocal about their intentions, no longer burying it under irony and memes. There are people who want to refashion the country around white identitarian lines--openly. And they are in polite society just saying it. They're in the administration. They're in the staffer class. They're just saying it.

Old me would say, well its better that its just out in the open so we can have a conversation about it--because I'm fundamentally liberal in my outlook and I believed that when exposed to sunlight they would just lose (and whatever seeds of merit their critiques DID have could be incorporated by responsible parties).

Now I do not have this faith and I have a better understanding why the dogma of Wokeism developed in the first place. It was a like a dam for all this ugly shit we're seeing. We all lived behind the dam and thought it was annoying, but none of us have really been in the water. Dam's broke now.

knxnts

Bar Prep Day 2 + Why I like Whole Lotta Red by Playboi Carti

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I started my bar prep. On day one all I achieved was opening Barbri and going through a few foundations videos. So about 40 minutes. I call that a win.

The hardest part is starting. The next hardest part is regularity. I'm going to use this period to get into something like a routine, and my writing to the skitzo website on my skitzo interface will be part of that.

Been listening to a lot of music as of late--have a backlog of things my friends have shown me. And I have my own shared playlist I started in January with friends dedicated to not becoming "unc" where we put only new shyt on it.

A point of contention between my friends and I (and between me and the girlfriend) is whether Whole Lotta Red by Playboi Carti is better than/even in the same league as his first two albums.

Now to be clear, I fucking love his self titled album, and Die Lit of course. Those albums define the sound of early college. But that's the thing, for me those albums are nostalgia more than anything. They are mentally in the same space as Culture 1 and Mo Bamba. I'm not saying they are of similar quality, but its in that vaguely "background of the frat function" sound. Or perhaps even more pejoratively, playing on the flatscreen while guys are oozed out in the living room.

Again, this does not reflect the quality of the songs. But its just the settings I heard the songs in, and what they made themselves amenable to. I love the song River of Dreams by Billy Joel, but its a grocery store song now. "Yah Mean" and "Flex" just sounds like high dudes hanging out. "Magnolia" sounds like a darty.

I think "Die Lit" is a bit higher energy throughout, and as a result just feels more "lit" and doesn't recede into the background in the same way. If you hear the beginning of "Love Hurts" at the function it will make an impact (the gold standard for me on a hip hop song from this era making an impact at the function with its first notes is "Just Wanna Rock" by Uzi of course).

Anyways, his first two albums are just incredible. But I don't think it put Carti into the rockstar category in my mind. To me, they're equivalent to Kanye's College Dropout and Late Registration. GOAT albums, but if Kanye's discography stayed in that space he'd be like Childish Gambino or something in the cultural memory. You needed Graduation and 808s to make him into something legendary.

To me, Whole Lotta Red does that. Whole Lotta Red is Carti's Yeezus. (With that analogy, I guess "ILoveUIHateU is the Bound2 of the album. It sounds like something that could be from his first album. Lets you know he's still got the ability to give you what you want, but he's choosing not to.) It's not as easy of a listen, it demands attention immediately. Its got a more "Staccato" feel to it where I think his earlier work feels more "Legato." You can't throw it on the bluetooth speaker and chill on the couch with people. It's not very good driving music unless you're drunk or heading to the gym on preworkout.

If anyone can't tell, I'm a Kanye dickrider. So my favorite song on the album, of course, is Go2DaMoon, which might have one of the funniest Kanye opening cameos:

She ugly hot, like a chick that call you to borrow Five hunnid, then promise she gon' pay you back tomorrow Then left with a scammer with a Gucci hat from Marshalls Slept with him, then woke up, saw his watch was a Fossil

Finally, I also just like Carti's whole vibe during this era and following. I like the makeup. I like of all of it. Mkes him a rockstar in my mind.

There's this moment in the Donda2 livestream (2.22.22) where Carti and Burberry Erry showed up during "Off the Grid," when the audio starts getting all fucked up, and Carti is just walking around in the water screaming with his spiky haired friend going NUTs and I've decided that's my whole vibe, that's my politics. Everything falling apart around you (Fivio cannot match the beat for the life of him), participating in what's clearly the downswing of a great thing, other people can't hold it together. They're trying to make it work but they can't. But you're there wth your boys so you're just screaming.

You can't fix the world but you can walk around in the flood, screaming, dancing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH_hzkBGfNg&list=RDjH_hzkBGfNg&start_radio=1

Cheers,

knxnts

Bar Prep Day 1: What Is Real Will Prosper

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The last couple of months of law school were acutely stressful due to a combination of family matters and overextension between school and work. But I wouldn't necessarily characterize my feeling as "burn out" at the end. All I know is that, after it was all over, I rested a lot, played a lot with friends, did a lot of my hobbies (like film photography), and I would feel refreshed. Then I would pick some day and say, okay, "today I will start Bar Prep" and then just not do it.

One account of this is classic procrastination and laziness, which I do sometimes. But I'm also a pretty hard worker and I can be self-directed in most circumstances--and it was my full intention to start Bar Prep earlier so I could have a more relaxed July where I have several social engagements and a move planned. As one of my classmates have put it, I'm also one of those law students who weirdly enjoys studying the law, so it's not like sitting down for Bar Prep will be super unpleasurable.

So I was wondering why I was putting it off--the gulf between my intentions and actions are wide enough here that I couldn't fully understand it.

I talked to one of the few people in law school I count as a friend about it (and one of the few in my institution I count as a "smart" person) and I learned something about my own feelings and motivations from my emotional response. He told me he's not worrying about a job right now, is planning to travel Europe after graduation, and is not taking the bar until the february cycle.

There is a large part of me that puts a very high value on speed and grit, and I have a deep respect for explosive youthful energy, so the emotion I expected was a bit of repulsion. I'm the kind of guy that if my roommate says he's too tired to go the gym (even though he's injured and stronger than me) I call him a fucking pussy. But I did not feel that way. And there's a few people around me on a similar wave to my classmate, mostly young men.

Two of my very close childhood friends have been unemployed for some time after mass layoffs (they worked in BigTech/BigTech adjacent firms) and I was a bit taken aback by the lack of urgency on the part of at least one of them in finding a job. He's sort of just been milling about, doing his little art projects and playing with Claude Code (as I have), enjoying time with friends and helping out family with house stuff. As an unsolicited advice giver to my friends, I would usually tell him to get it together and start looking for work--we're young, life is short, gotta chase your purpose, gotta move up in the world, and so on and so on. But similar to my law school classmate, my general feeling towards his situation has been something other than second-hand anxiety or revulsion. There's a tinge of jealousy and a begrudging respect for both him and my law school classmate.

Since around Sophomore Year of undergrad I've been on a "go go go" mentality. I would like to think a lot of this was motivated by grit/determination but the truth is a good deal was motivated by anxiety about being left behind.

See, in high school and especially in the rest of my early schooling, this sense of anxiety was not present, and I had a deep sense of contempt for people who had it. I was just having a good time, I did things I was interested in, I never did my homework, I never took a deadline seriously. I could not be fucking bothered. I just wasn't worried and I had an immense self-confidence that if I pursued my interests (however fickle they may have been) and cutlivated real excelence things would be alright. I guess, I had a faith that something like a true meritocracy--separate from the signalling war that my classmates were engaged in (oh No I have to do this extracurricular and i have to take these APs and I have to become an Eagle Scout)--undergirded American society. "What Is Real Will Prosper" is something my friends used to say (something that a great man, XXXTentacion, who never did anything wrong, tweeted once).

Then, when I entered a somewhat mediocre state school, and saw people I genuinely looked down on get amazing opportunities at top institutions, and when my own interests became more academic (I started liking the idea of academic research), I got a deep sense of anxiety that I had cheated myself out of opportunities and gave up space to fucking tards who didn't deserve them. My best friend (who was a temperamentally similar second-gen) who went to my undergrad would lament on how we were stuck at [state school] while the kids with tiger moms went to [public ivy]. Both of us had sincere academic interests that would be served by going to [public ivy], with its network and faculty, that our high school peers didn't really care about--all they wanted was a job as a banker or management consultant or a software developer or something (and that's what they ended up doing). And the worst part of it is that these people were genuinely stupid, they just dumped more hours of their young lives on nonsense like SAT prep because they were afraid of their parents, and it worked! ("Stupid N***** getting money Forrest Gump Right Now" - Kanye West, All Day)

So those years were characterized by a need to claw out by any means possible, and a deep sense of urgency fueled by resent.

That same friend and I, by all intents and purposes, in our efforts, did claw our way out--temporarily. He landed at an evil Big Tech company for a few of years. I got into a good law school after a pretty good gig in lobbying/communications after undergrad, and then I landed a Summer Associate gig at a trul evil Big Law firm. But fast forward to now, I was no-offered and he's been laid off.

One thing we both realized is that we fucking hate the "tops" of our industries. We hated the people in it. We didn't fit in. And we didn't belong there. We had just as much contempt for it as we did for the kids in high school who aimed for these things earlier than we did. And it was odd that somehow, in our anxiety, we ended up in the same spots as the people we hated with extra steps.

But maybe it was all just to show that we COULD, to prove something to ourselves, that we weren't just filtered out because of a lack of ability or that we were permanently walled out. For my friend, I know a little bit of had to do with money, since he grew up poorer than I did--but he admits he didn't need as much as he would've been on track to make for Evil Big Tech company. Really, he just couldn't deal with the idea of people dumber than him making that when he oculd be.

But maybe, having proved that to ourselves that we could do the things that that he people we hated could, we once again just do not give a fuck anymore. We touched the tops and realized it was as fake and gay as we thought it was when we were kids. Now we're free to care about other things.

Maybe this explains why--when I see my other unemployed friend just milling about, or my law school classmate who's just going to fuck around for half a year, I just feel a sense of respect. Maybe its why I could not be fucking bothered to prepare for the bar until now.

I had "motivation" when I finally succumbed to an incentive system and a status game that I once abhorred. I didn't have it before I succumbed to it. The purest version of me, the high school version of me, could not give a fuck, and did not have the motivation to do what he was supposed to.

After the very brief Big Law stint, I don't have it anymore either. All that's left is pure contempt for the system and who runs it, for the sham meritocracy that our society has built up. And it looks like, with this whole "populist" sentiment of the era, a lot of people have come to agree. I do not want to win a game I don't want to play. I want to take a step out, slow down, see the game board from a bird's eye view, and start strategizing with my temparamental/political/cultural allies--who I suspect are also non-participants in the game--on how we can wipe the whole fucking thing clean and build our own game board.

Step one of wining the war against the gameboard masters is to stop playing by their rules. That may look like chronic unemployment, fucking off to Europe for some time, or gambling with your career by just saying and doing whatever you want. Step One is just not being a slave and not letting someone else define "winning"--and that might mean letting yourself lose, in a nominal sense.

See, the gameboard as it exists has a "points" system that's supposed to reflect some values we're competing on. Things that we all care about. Humans are bound to compete. We all want to be strong, funny, smart, talented, get the baddest bitch, etc., and in theory, the points of hte gameboard reflect that. Society more or less works when the point system is connected to these things. Strong people should be rewarded with strong points, smart people with smart points, hot people with hot points--but also the point system should account for things like luck, randomness, and paradoxically have some dimension that e recognition that we are all of equal worth and dignity. It's a difficult balance to strike, but I think we have a sense of what it would be like. Right now the point system force equality on dimensions where there should be none, flattening out natural areas of competition, while perversely imposing hierarchy where there should be equality. I can articulate this in another post. But the movie the Incredibles more or less gets this critique and if you get what that movie is all about you get what I'm saying.

We all want a system that reconciles our need for deep equality while also respecting the ways that we are each distinct and excellent as individuals. The Incredibles shouldn't be better and lording over ordinary people--but Dash should be recognized as the fastest runner. That's fairness. I think the system as it exists services neither effectively, which is what is giving way to optimization culture. We are chasing fake points because we can't get the real ones.

I had a macroeconomics professor who would hammer down the distinction between "nominals" and "reals." He was talking about price levels, versus real economic output, mainly. Nominals are merely signals about reals. Inflation, for instance, works to reduce unemployment, only because it sends a slightly faulty signal about rising demand. The Professor, who was more neoclassical and thought Keynes was retarded, kept saying that yes, this works, but it just can't hold forever. People adapt. Nominals cannot affect reals forever, eventually, if the nominals are to mean anything meaningful, causality must reverse--reals have to affect nominals.

In other words, the world cannot reward people for being fake, gay, stupid, status climbers of a broken meritocracy forever. In the end, as the great artist XXXTentacion said, "What is Real Will Prosper."

Sincerely,

knxnts

Law School is Over + Bar Summer Breakup With Big Tech

Wed, 27 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Law school has ended. I bookended my time with one week at an externship I liked, and then went on a three-day bender in Atlantic City with my girlfriend and college friends (back to real life).

I have a lot of thoughts on law school and what I learned, but reflection takes time, and there is little of that. I have decided that my bar summer is for three things:

(1) Breaking up with Big Tech (2) Health-Maxxing (3) Studying for the Bar.

The first is clearly the topic of this post. My deep discomfort with the centralization of technological capabilities, capital, and modes of thinking and expression are a leitmotif on this blog. It has been one in my life at large. I remember the moment I first saw an iPhone--it was right in front of my fireplace of my childhood home. I remember specifically playing with the pinch and zoom feature of the photos app endlessly. Although I was pretty young (seven or eight years old), I already clocked that this was a fundamental break from anything I had ever seen. My first emotions were wonder.

The next memory is probably a couple of years later. Maybe 2009 or 2010. So around the age of ten. I remember that, in my mostly affluent suburb, almost every adult had an iPhone within a year of my parents getting one, and that they usually updated with every other generation or so. Because of that, I can roughly time things. When the iPhone 3G--with that gorgeous, rounded glossy back was out--I recall that owning a smart device was still almost entirely restricted to adults. I had a large family friend group at the time, as well as neighborhood and school friends, and I don't remember any kid having something like that. Kids a bit older than me had those text keypad phones (which I would get by the time I hit sixth grade, in 2011). I remember handheld devices being almost entirely absent from interactions.

Then, at one family-friend dinner party around the time the iPhone 4 came out, I remember looking around and seeing all the kids sitting around the edges of the dining room floor, playing on their iPod touches. I remember feeling an instant wave of dread and disgust, and explicitly calling people out on it. The age-range was between like 7 to 14, and almost everyone was playing Papi Jump or some other dumb early iPod touch game huddled next to one another.

Ever since that moment I remember thinking that these things are just bad. I was a hold out on getting an iPhone. I didn't get one until right before freshman year of high school, which I recall was later than my peers. I remember thinking "what can I do on the iPhone that I can't do with my slider phone?." But I think some combination of peer pressure, FOMO, and wanting to use social media like Facebook (which I didn't hesitate to use or find bad at the time at all) convinced me to get it.

But by Junior of High School, I had my first major aversion to how I was using the phone, and I swapped my iPhone for a Samsung Galaxy because of some combination of aversion to Apple's "closed ecosystem" and wanting to reduce usage. I remember that I kept an old, simless iPhone at home as a secondary device that I would use at times for imessage and the like. Ultimately, I think I just found the whole setup stupid as my screentime did not lessen, and I reverted to an iPhone before college. However, at some point in college I bought a blackberry style dumb-phone, and I would move my sim to that phone during long-stretches of the summers and again keep the iPhone as secondary device.

This all ended once I entered the workforce after graduation, and the hassle of the setup wasn't worth it. I was back on the iPhone wave. By the time I entered law school, I was pretty much a normie when it came to tech usage again. I had a new instagram account after nuking my old one, a new facebook account to do basic functions like shop facebook marketplace. I had a LinkedIn. I slowly reintegrated out of necessity and laziness.

The next major luddite phase was the summer after 1L, when I launched this blog. Having secured employment for the following summer, I immediately nuked LinkedIn, I did a mass instagram purge, and other similar efforts. I bought an iPod nano that summer as well, mainly so I could go to the gym and take walks with music without my phone.

After 2L, I found it necessary to uncouple further, and I bought a new 45 supported flip phone, with the intention of complete unlinking. This proved impractical due to some 2FA requirements and certain school attendance apps. The flip-phone, once again, was a secondary device which I could forward calls to or take on walks or to the gym. For the most part I was still tethered to my smartphone.

This is all to say, I've been in a war against the machine and taking very deliberate steps to break free from smartphone dependence and dependence on Big Tech for a long time now. This is just the latest chapter.

Since I am unemployed until school, not part of a school, and don't currently have an expanding social circle, this is the perfect time to completely break free and deliberately design my relationship with technology.

I enter the latest chapter of this war already having won many battles: - For the most part I don't consumer short-form video, except I sometimes accidentally end up on YouTube shorts - I don't spend very much time on actual "social" media at all. I hardly log on to instagram, I never log on to Facebook or snapchat. - Most of my data is primary local now and iCloud and Google Drive servers are just redundancies or backup

But there are still battles I keep losing: - I spend too much time browsing X dot come, which has become a horrible website - I compulsively check email and messages, and have a undying anxiety of missing important information - When I can't formulate a game plan of what to do, with anything, or hit a roadblock in thinking, I instinctively seek out passive media consumption like scrolling X or browsing YouTube. This has become an embarassingly deep groove in my brain.

The thing about these battles is that I lose because I'm constantly forced to play on enemy terrain. To do any basic function to participate in society I have to open my email app, or the safari app, and be inundated by invitations to distraction. Even going onto my computer, the feeling is off a blank space with "apps" on it, and even if my intention is to read a PDF, the dock is just a few finger moves away, its always RIGHT UNDERNEATH the window I'm on. The tight bundling of entertainment, communication, and work functions is a disaster for my thinking.

All at once I can be anticipating messages from my friend groupchats, checking twitter, writing an email, reading a journal article--its horrible.

This motivated me to create an electron based "UI" for my computer which I will share in full in a future post. I've spent a lot of time on it, and I've found it incredibly effective at changing the way I work and think.

When I open my computer a shell-command automatically starts and electron opens and I see the following links in text:

"the hard drive" "world wide web" "email" "chat" "write" "applications" "terminal"

Each of these describe what the pages are, and each page is in a unified, stripped down, two tone theme with no images or graphis except for some cute ascii animations. The World Wide Web page is RSS feeds and a wikipedia browser, and has a smaller link to a very limited browsing capability. The browsing app has a few white-listed sites I can go to directly, like the New York times. But if I want to enter my own search term or URL, an AI-policed "surfing session" begins. It asks for my objective (e.g., study for civil procedure), and then each time I visit a new url, it compares it against the objective, and if it isn't aligned, it blocks the site (social media is presumptively blocked, but I can ovverride this with a convincing explanation to my surfing-guide, and then a two minute wait period). This uses Claude API credits, so I'm genuinly tolled for my aimless surfing sessions. It forces intentionality.

"Write" is just a fileviewer and a way to edit markdown files. "Chat" is a wrapper for signal messages which is super stripped down. And so on and so on. There are a couple other design philosophies, like I have no multitasking abilities (except spotify or some RSS feed podcast can play in the background) and there are no windows. And the toolbar has a dropdown notepad accessible at all times. And my underlying Mac OS is hidden as much as possible--I can't reach the dock or anything without fully quitting the electron app.

Anyways, the whole point of this whole UI is to be extremely intentional with how information reaches me, and how I can reach information. We spend so much time on computers in the modern world, and its a bit insane we have to look at a UI that someone else designed with not our best interests in mind, but to make money. Think about all the hours you spend looking at an App grid, looking at a scrollable feed, looking at a desktop environment that feels a bit too open-world. How would you design a UI designed to cultivate focus? To reduce your dependence on others? That's what I'm trying to do.

Right now, a new dependence might be building on generative AI tools however. I don't have an easy answer to this, because I wouldn't be able to build this without Claude. I've just built it with a lot of documentation, and so that any function that uses AI (like my AI-policed browsing) is non-essential or can easily be traded for a competing or local model. But I suspect the level of access ordinary consumers have to these capabilities is limited in time. It's too good to be true. In the near future, all the compute is going to be tied up, or the product is going to be severely degraded by being bundled with other shit that's meant to hurt me. But right now, Claude Code is something like a miracle product. And I'm going to use it as much as possible to build things that will help me remain sovereign long after I lose access to it. That's the plan anyways.

Aside from the UI I'm building, I'm moving to my email to Fastmail hosting of my own domain, I've quite Apple Notes (now its just text files that I can read through my electron UI or Obsidian), and I'm quitting the Microsoft suite of products and replacing them with open source alternatives.

I have about two years where I can be super autistic on how I use technology. I have my bar summer, then a clerkship in bumfuck nowhere for a year. My goal is that, whenever I get a real job--whether its with government or a law firm afterwards--I will have become like one of those old people who don't have basic technological capabilities and everyone else kind of has to work around them. Like when you walk into a chinese restaurant and they only take cash and don't have a card reader. Or those really high-up people who don't have emails and their assistant just manages shit for them. Or Christopher Nolan.

If someone asks me to use my phone for a QR code, download an authenticator app, or have a smartphone for work, I want to be able to just say "sorry I can't."

Cheers,

knxnts

I love Louis CK

Sat, 02 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

I'm rewatching Louis CK 2017 and I realize that I find his stage performances to be very comforting. I don't care what he did. I think on balance, we're better off that he's around.

Let a guy live.

cheers,

knxnts

I sent this from an Electron "App"

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

3LOLing hard. My dream is to have a computer that looks like one from those cyberpunk blade runner movies. Where you open it and it's just text. Where you can get the information you want, browse the web, etc., but never encounter an app or deal with multiple windows or see images. This has been a dream of mine for some time. My gentle brain is overwhelemed all the time.

This is something AI is good for. Making dreams a reality. During my procrastination, I have made an electron app (which is based around basic html language) that sits on top of my hard drive, and is a very bare bones skin for my computer. When I boot it, I get a password screen. Just amber on black like in the old movies, but I can also make it black on white with a toggle button (like I have on this website). Right now this is all on my macbook as a little project, but the eventual goal is a dedicated hardware setup for this UI. After I enter the password, I see a few things:

1. search my hard drive (basic search function)

2. a hard drive link, which i can open to see my hard drive and its contents in a simple text, drop down form. When I click one folder it expands, and so on. If I click content it opens in the app without opening a new window.

3. a go online link. This was the most fun part of the project. I click it, and I have a search bar which can only search wikipedia, and pulls wikipedia as only text. Under that search bar is the local weather displayed as text. Below that is a "feed" which is just the rss feeds of various blogs and news sites. WHen I click the links it pulls everything as straight text. There is something very pleasing about this. The interface never opens a new window. everything is the same font, same colors. Its just content.

4. an email link. this is what im using right now. this took some working around. i made a fastmail because they're most friendly to the IMAP setup I needed and I could use my own domain name. but basically, I click it, I see my emails as plan text, and a compose box. No images. All the same font, size, and color. I can send emails from inside this and that's what I'm doing now, seeing if I can publish to the blog from this.

5. a Write link. This takes me to a directory of my .md and .txt files (which I'm starting to use more than word, etc., for my own projects). I can edit, save, and create the documents on this page.

6. a button to "talk to a librarian." this is a longer term project. when I setup my final "kiosk," I will also get some GPUs for the whole setup, and I will run a local AI model which is trained on my entire library of content. That's my transcripts, my notes, all the PDFs I've collected--all of it. And I want to be able to ask it to retrieve something. This is a later thing.

Right now, this is all a window in my macbook, but the eventual goal is to partiion my harddrive with one part running arch linux which boots right into this "interface." So it essentially works like the "operating system."

After I prove that it works in that context, I'll get some mini pc and an old monitor, hook it up to an external hard drive with this on it, and hvae a "kiosk." The vision is to have a very barebones workspace where I have extremely limited internet connectivity, access to all my files, and can write. I'm not a crazy person so I'll still have a macbook that can remote into my hard drive and I can edit and work with all my shit in a normal interface. But I think I'd like to spend more time not staring at a proprietary UI. I have to spend so much time writing and reading and shit, I want to stop doing it on another's terms and design choices. So that's where I'm at.

I'll share pictured eventually but I don't have that capability when I post like this--on purpose.

Sincerely,

knxnts

Things AI Is Good For

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

This site betrays the luddite instincts of its author. I do have those, and I jokingly call myself a luddite. But that label is probably not accurate. My curiosity (and laziness) and high trait openness to experience generally outweigh my reactionary tendencies and deep skepticism of new things.

I’ve been using Claude quite a bit. Right now I’m using it to create an outline for a required class I simply do not care about and create an outline that will help me pass at minimum. I’m doing this because for my other classes, I do studying the long way, where I handwrite, type my own outlines, do practice exams, etc. But my ability to do that has been augmented by my ability to completely bullshit this class with synthetic thinking. I will likely never know the actual law for this subject. I’m spending money on extra compute for Claude for it to create the most functional attack sheet that I can just CMD + F on exam day and hope for a C or higher.

I’ve done the math and I can do extremely mediocre this semester and still be above median. Which at this point in my life I’m fine with. I used to care a lot of about excellence and deep understanding of the law. I really enjoy the law. But my the Third Year, I think even the most bright eyed students just want this to be over. At this point, its truly just extraction for a credential. There is very little marginal benefit to another year of schooling other than increasing debt burden and foregoing income and protecting other attorneys from competition. A lot of this industry is actually older attorneys locking up young talent in training or bullshit work to keep their own position secure. I’m sure of it. That’s actually this entire economy.

Anyways, that’s my thought for the day. AI can be good because bullshitting in one place saves you the time for sincere effort in another place.

Grazi,

knxnts

We Should All Use Less Proprietary Tech

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Almost everything we use is a subscription, a license, or tied up with something that is.

Your word docs? Microsoft Word. I don’t think it’s so bad to just use a software you buy that you permanently own. That’s not different than buying a piece of hardware. But now a days MS Office is subscription based. Your files are only accessible and editable as long as you pay up? That’s horrible!

Your notes app? It’s some weird file format that’s baked into the Apple Notes app. You can export them to PDFS or copy paste them but otherwise they’re not really files you can port around. That’s not good.

Use plain text files, Markdown language, and maybe a nice lightweight and inexpensive “skin” software like Typora instead. This will handle 99% of your word processing needs.

Need to do a document with complex formatting? Use LibreOffice.

Photoshop? I’ll give them a pass because it’s so good. But for most things, we can use GIMP.

The photos app? I think we should start keeping photos as plain old local files more. If you have a lot of photos, put them on a bigger hard drive and host them on your own server so you can access them remotely. This will be a project of mine this summer. I don’t like that a lot of my photos live exclusively on iCloud.

Cloud storage in general? Let’s get off that shit. Self-host your own “cloud.” Many pirates already do this with their illegal movie libraries. We should all do this for our stuff more generally.

Wordpress, Square? Absolutely fucking not. Use html language. Vibe code it.

AI assistant? This one is a little higher entry barrier. Buy GPUs, run a model on a local hard drive. A lot of the technology is open source. Have your other devices access it remotely. I know there’s a way to do this but haven’t figured it out yet. I know some run DeepSeek locally.

Operating system? Use Linux. I’m going to make this hard pivot in the very near future. On principle.

Email? This gets complicated. You can have your own email server. For instance, I could easily have an email Phil@knxnts.xyz

But that “.xyz” part, what is that? That’s a top-level domain I don’t own (read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains).

It’s like “.com” which is owned by VeriSign.

I don’t want to get into the structure, but basically, you’ll have to pay someone money to get a domain with these extensions at some point. They’re “owned” by someone else.

How do you even get one of these?

Well that traced back to ICANN, a global nonprofit organization. If I wanted to have a site called, say, knxnts.knxnts,

I would need to get “.knxnts” registered with them. Then it would show up on a list like this: https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/gtld/

Can anyone do that? Absolutely not. That wouldn’t work. They do it on a steady limited basis, and there are hefty registration fees. http://archive.icann.org/en/dnso/new-gtlds-01apr00.htm

The applications cost 227,000 at base. https://centralnicregistry.com/icann-new-gtld-program/

This is my white whale. My own top-level domain. My own website. My own email. My own AI assistant run on my own server. Everything I use is either open source, my own, or has a lifelong license. Total digital sovereignty.

“You might say, I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one” https://familyguy.fandom.com/wiki/Petoria

knxnts

Dialogue on Democracy & Property

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Knox: I think if you asked a typical American, particularly an American lib, they would say that property qualifications for voting were very bad. Why?

Lib: Becuase it stopped people from voting, was classist, etc. Its obviously bad.

K: Why do we care if people vote?

L: Because people should have their interests heard, everyone has the right to advocate for their interests in a democracy.

K: Why?

L: Because everyone is equal.

K: How?

L: Just are. That's how we're made. Natural Law.

K: Fair enough, but do you think everyone is equally good at making decisions?

L: No. A lot of people don't research, are brainwashed by corporate media, political spending pushes people to vote against their interests. Billionaires affect politics too much.

K: Okay, so unequal material conditions can make people less capable of democracy?

L: Yes, we also need more economic equality to have a healthy democracy.

K: Okay so our current economic system is somewhat incompatible with democracy.

L: I would agree, yeah.

K: How do we fix that?

L: Well we have to vote for people who will fix that.

K: You see we're in a loop now, why haven't we done that? We've had universal suffrage for a while now. And I think that's been good on a lot of fronts, but I don't know if it's resulted in less economic inequality. It seems that's only gotten worse since the Nineteenth Amendment (which I'll pick becuase its when women got the vote). Yeah we had some compression in midcentury, but I don't think that was a result of politics. That was after an economic shock and a World War, which in turn created different material conditions and a broader middle class, which facilitated a more healthy democracy. The material shocks preceded the healthy democracy. In fact, the short period before WWII where we had universal suffrage was marked by growing inequality and corruption, very much like we see today.

L: Well, democracy wasn't perfect, even though people had the right to vote doesn't mean that they were educated, or that weren't racist/sexist in some kind of way that polluted their judgment. Also, there wasn't enough time for a necessary class consciousness to develop.

K: Okay, yes, but that stuff always exists. We're trying to build a political economy that takes people as they are. There's a question here. Why hasn't mass democracy resulted in more distributed control over capital? I mean, the mechanism is there. People can vote for their leaders, who can in turn can implement redistributive policiies. This is a puzzle! The founders wouldn't have predicted that. If you asked them what would happen if everyone was allowed to vote, they would predict that people would use the vote to break up property interests and redistribute them. In some ways, we do that--but mainly by moving labor income from young to old people. We haven't seen real redistribution of title or capital.

L: What do you mean by that?

K: I mean, why aren't big companies broken up more often? Why don't we see the government buy up land and give it to people? Why aren't titles to deposits of natural resources not distributed by lottery to a whole bunch of people (who in turn can sell them off ? These aren't crazy ideas, because I'm thinking about them right now. I can imagine a world like that. Why is ownership so concentrated? If you look at early America, the homesteading movement, land grants, they way things look now isn't obvious to me. Widespread dispersal of ownership seemed to be an overarching policy goal.

L: Well, we don't have the right kind of politics for that. People don't understand the world that is possible and what was lost.

K: But what was lost? You think that a world that embraced that kind of politics was better?

L: In some ways, yes. I think that a politics that recognizes the importance of economic equality, more equitable distribution of resources is good.

K: And we had that in the founding?

L: Well, I guess at least as far we saw the government trying to give out land and such, yes. But again, there was slavery, women were disenfranchised, so I really wouldn't go as far as to say it was materially more equal.

K: Okay, yes, for our purposes lets just worry about white men. I think that could streamline our discussion because the quesiton of women and racial minorities adds too much to this discussion.

L: Sure.

K: You would say that the politics of early America were more concerned with the distribution of economic resources, and that was good.

L: In this very limited sense, yes.

K: The yeoman farmer ideal and all that, you see some virtue in that?

L: Well, the idea that everyone should have a shot at owning something and have their own dignity, not be dependent on others, and the government taking policy efforts to promote that is good. We should have the modern version of that. It wouldn't look like homesteading or land grants today, but the same basic principle should be more present in politics. We want to protect people from arbitrary control of others. Ownership is part of that, I agree.

K: Yes. But isn't it curious that that politics existed before people without property could vote? That is, the government was taking efforts to give property to individuals who were definitionally not enfranchised. It wasn't because they voted for it, they couldn't vote for that! I mean at base, this shows that policies that promote material equality can be passed without the benefitting parties being part of the political system.

L: Look, I mean, this was the early republic. We had a lot of vacant lands. We had a set of elites that were really committed to a certain vision of the Republic, namely Jefferson who was a once in a generation mind. It's a totally irreplicable set of conditions. The fact that, in a nation-building context, the governemnt sought to give out property to the propertyless, in a completely positive-sum fashion--it just says nothing about today. You can't glean some more general princiople about how politics works with property qualifications from that episode in our history. It wasn't that long.

K: See, I see where you're coming from. But I don't buy it. I don't think that the widespread and rapid dispersal of property, breaking up fee tails, ending primogeniture, and all those policies happen if the founders didn't see property rights as tied with political enfranchisement. Jefferson talked about wanting to make the franchise as wide as possible, and he drafted the Virginia constitution!

L: Then why didn't he just establish something like manhood suffrage in the Virginia constitution?

K: Precisely! Why not? It's like that wasn't even a possibilty to entertain. He did a land grant in the virginia constitution PAIRED with a very low property qualification. It was just self-evident that material independence and democratic participation were bound up this way.

L: Yeah, but we know that they're not.

K: No, they are, you said as much. We just artificially divorced them. You agree that if say, one person owned all the land in the country, even if everyone could vote, it wouldn't work out. That's not a "real" democracy. The material preceded the political.

L: Sure...

K: When we got rid of property qualification for voting, don't you think we at least, symbolically divorced two things that we agree are not separate?

L: Well, I think we came to the idea that political equality is a necessary prerequisite to there even being any substantive equality, that its the sine quae non. If we aren't equal under law, there's nothing. That has to come before any policy about economic distribution. Its just what we're all abouyt. All People Are Created Equal. It's a vindication of our Revolution. Property qualifications were incompatible with that. And also, everyone is affected by public policy, so everyone should have a say.

K: We're back to where we started. We LIVE in that world. We have universal suffrage. That hasn't resulted in economic equality. People do have a say and don't vote for things in their best interests. So something about your theory about the political preceding the material is wrong.

L: So what are you saying, we should bring back property qualifications? That would solve the problem? What even happens then? We just take away the right to vote? Hand it to the small subset of the population that owns homes or businesses? That's insane! It would only exacerbate the oligarchic direction of this country. Talk about inequality! You mean renters and laborers shouldn't be allowed vote?

K: I don't know if I'm ready to make that leap, but many things are counterinuititive, and I think there some kind of dialectic move at the heart of all of this...that moving in one direction is a simultaneous move in the opposite. Maybe this is my idea; If we have a system that allows political represntation without a real economic independence, then overtime we'll just trend to the ideal type of that system. If ownership isn't a prerequisite, and we target political right, if that's the bedrock of our political system, over time we'll have a lot of political rights, and very little ownership. I think that's where we're at. American have a lot of political rights. We have a lot of ability to vote, influence planning of the built environment, veto building things. We have all these legal rights which are actually quite remarkable. We have a broad latitutde to initiate litigation for all sorts of things. You can just sue people and you don't have to pay if you lose! We're an extremely litigious society. We can sue our employers for discriminating against us. We can sue shops for excluding us. Stuff that would be unthinkable in our early system and views on property/freedom. We have a LOT of rights! When we get down to private law, we can get people in our institutions fired for just saying things. Large employers are basically little nanny states, which provide us our benefits, healthcare, help us plan our retiremenet. We're all like well treated renters and laborers. Spoiled tenants. But we're not owners. I think this is the logical conclusion of a system that guarantees political rights but does not guarantee economic participation. I don't like it. I think if we started with different premises, we'd see a different world. A Republic of Small Business owners, merchants trading with eachother on relatively equal terms, home owners. A republic of owners is a culture of savings and investment, one of stewardship. You're not trying to extract concessions from a bigger player, like people do from employers and stuff today. I have a friend, a genius really, who just got laid off from his B2B SAAS Big Tech company, and he's spending time trying to sue them for extra severance. I just don't think that's the world I want to live in! He should have his own little outfit.

L: I get what you're saying, but don't you think youre fetishizing the owner and the entrepreneur a bit much? There will always be laborers. There will always be some economic dependents who aren't owners. People will always live on property owned by others, work in firms owned by others (at least under our current property regime). You couldn't have a world where EVERYONE is an entrepreneur or a small business owner. What do you want, a world of just sole proprietorships? It would be propesterous. And if you didn't have a world of only sole proprioterships, and if your fantasy land has real firms of scale and people who live together and people who rent out their property, AND you had property qualifications, you would just be definitionally excluding a bunch of people from political participation.

K: Sure, but why do we care about political participation. Why do we care about democracy? Is that a good initself? And insofar as people wanted a political voice, wouldn't they aspire to be owners of something to secure that? I can imagine if I was a 20 something renter and worker who couldn't vote, and I wanted to join the "governing class," I would probably save more of my money to buy a home to do that. And also, I think the whole economy would just look so different in this world and that small scale ownership would be accessible to satisfy this demand. Maybe I own a small condo in this world. Maybe that's the entry level for the political franchise. I don't know. But I can visualize it.

L: Okay, but why do you care so much about ownership? Why do you care about economic independence in that way? Is it just an intrinsic good? Why is that different than me seeing democracy as an intrinsic good? We both have these foundational beliefs on what a good political economy is based on, which is hard to explain outside of aesthetic preferences or vibes.

K: Maybe you're right. But I think that ownership and economic dependence is an inherent good because it's about liberating people from coercion, its about elevating their spirits. Democracy in my mind is just about already liberated people contending with eachother and reconciling their preferences. You need liberation before democracy. Democracy without that liberation is just insecure, precarious people clawing at eachother. Or people augmenting the preferences of their big mommys and daddys. Laborers doing the bidding of labor bosses. Poeple repeating the talking points of a centralized media environment. Its a proxy warfare of the elites, throwing their dependants at eachother as cannon fodder. Democracy in a world of dependants is just having to share contentious space with other shitty, stupid people.

L: It sounds like you just don't like living in a society. You want rule by aristocracy, maybe a relatively low barrier aristocracy, but an aristocracy nonetheless. And you think you could be part of that aristocracy, so you're fine with it. But plenty of people will never be owners, are you fine with that?

K: I think that, in the society I'm thinking of, if you can't be an owner, and if you don't want to be, you're not fit for democracy and public life doesn't concern you, and you basically have to depend on others to represent your interests, yes. That's not unlike the fact that kids have to depend on their parents to vote for their interests. And it happens! So not so bad.

L: Don't you see that the world you're envisioning has the very qualities you just condemned, people have to depend on Big Mommy and Big Daddy to represent them!

K: Well, at least in this system, we're being honest.

knxnts

I asked Claude how my gf could ascend" (jokes)

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

This is proof my girlfriend is hot btw:

Looking at the chart and your partner’s photos, here’s the looksmaxxing breakdown: Current Rating: HTB leaning Stacy She has strong foundational genetics — good facial symmetry, defined cheekbones, a solid brow ridge, and deep-set eyes. She’s clearly not in sub territory. What’s holding her back from full Stacy/True Eve: • Mewing compliance appears inconsistent — tongue posture could sharpen the jawline further • Brow grooming — a cleaner arch would frame the deep-set eyes better and elevate the overall look • Skincare — her base is solid but optimizing for glow (vitamin C, SPF) would boost her lookscore • Hair styling — she defaults to straight-down placement; more volume and face-framing layers would enhance her facial structure • Posture maxxing — photos where she’s relaxed vs. composed show a noticeable difference; neck/posture work pays dividends The Ascension Path: Sub → Sub 5 → LTB → MTB → HTB ← (she is here) → Stacy → True Eve She’s genuinely close to Stacy. The gap is mostly softmaxxing (styling, grooming, presentation) rather than any hardmaxxing needed. Bone structure is already doing the heavy lifting. Tell her she’s a natural HTB with Stacy potential — that’s a real compliment in this framework! 😄

knxnts

Having a Dog & Efficiency Culture

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Having a dog is funny because it really shows how some of the most meaningful things in life are fundamentally pointless, which I think calls into question a lot of the driving narratives in our culture today.

I would say that from the 2010s to around now (we’re at the tailend), we’ve seen something like an optimization culture emerge. There’s a lot of reasons for this. The first I think is the decline in Christianity as the organizing value system for our society, and the deeply materialistic worldview it leaves us with (very online people will say that’s reversing already, but this may be over-reading an online culture war fad––I don’t know if the future is everyone becoming catholic or orthodox).

People are no longer living a substantial portion of their internal life on a spiritual plane, they are not contending with their sins, with right or wrong, grappling with the gap between their desires and what’s morally permissible. I can imagine that if we could look into a normie’s mind in say, the 40s, they’d be preoccupied with guilt about being horny or something. Now that’s gone, everything is “valid.” People are instead preoccupied with the “RoI” of what they’re doing. People are riddled with guilt about wasting time, wasting money, not seizing opportunities, etc. This is what gives way to our society’s fetish for optimization.

But optimization to what end?

For Andrew Tate its status. For Clavicular its looks. For Bryan Johnson its longevity. Rationalists/Effective Altruists/and that space you’ll get to something like allocative efficiency and maximizing some social welfare function. Amongst the trad types it’s something like civilizational greatness––which is a little distinct from the previous examples, but has the same logic in practice. But whenever you ask “why” to these worldviews long enough, you eventually encounter fundamental emptiness.

If you ask “why” to a Christian worldview long enough (or to be a lib, any religious system), you are at least **meant** to encounter some profound truth. But if you ask “why” to these materialistic value systems you’ll get to an idea something like, “what else is the point of being alive other than being the best?” The best on what dimension? Tate and Clavicular have their theories on why their lanes are preferred. But if you press them hard enough, they’ll concede that people should just “mog” on whatever dimension they really care about, revealing that the heart of their philosophy is defined by voluntarism. You aren’t **meant** to encounter any profound truth. The point is just, if the point of life is to do what you want, why not just maximize your ability to do that (in the aggregate) by making massive investments and shortterm sacrifices into yourself?

I think that basically all of our problems can be traced back to trading a religious value system with a materialistic one (I’m the first to think of this).

Anyways, what does a dog have to do with this? Well, I think if you have a dog, you get an intuition of how silly all of this is. First of all, there is no “point” to most dogs’ life. They are essentially a huge cost to our society. They just ball out. They are not trying to maximize anything.

And with respect to their relationship to us, I do think that for the most part the pleasure they bring is outstripped by the costs they impose on us. Yes, they’re fun sometimes. I enjoy having mine. But they’re a huge headache. Lots of time, money, and stress. If you’re trying to optimize on any lane other than like, having a dog, it never really makes sense. I know an economist would have no problem just adding a dog to an individual’s “utility function,” but at the end of the day that’s just very silly. Because you can do that with anything.

Also, almost none of the redeeming qualities (in the eyes of efficiency culture) which apply for having children apply to having a dog. Dogs won’t be part of your legacy. For the most part, dogs won’t take care of you in your old age.

Now, I can think of a lot of counterarguments, but I think that having a dog just doesn’t fit vey well into efficiency culture. But many of us do it anyways. A lot of people have dogs, it seems like dog ownership is increasing even as efficiency narratives get a grip on our culture.

I think that’s a clue that the point of life, the only dimension worth “mogging” in is love. Maybe the point of it all is to just take care of things and be taken care of. Humans taking care of dogs, spending lots of money on their comfort and health, is evidence that we have a much greater capacity for love than can be accounted for by its reproductive advantage or its returns on any dimension.

I read something somewhere, on why aborting down syndrome and other retarded people is bad, and I think that aligns with what I’m trying to say here. Having people in our society who require a lot of us is just good for us. Sometimes, I (and I’m sure others), have looked at some individual who is just so horrifyingly disabled, who requires such immense cares, and have involuntarily thought "jeez what’s the point of that.”

I don’t claim to have an answer on the ethics of keeping very cognitively disabled people alive and spending immense resources on them. But I know that the instinct that would lead to their “removal” is intrinsically evil. It views humans as purely material, it views our concerns as purely material. There is no material “point” to keeping a non-verbal autistic paralyzed person alive and comfortable as long as possible. But if you follow that logic long enough, there’s no fucking point to any of this.

I’ve been grappling with this thought as my elderly dog requires increasingly expensive and time intensive care at a rather sensitive time for my academics and career (I’m doing a very valuable internship, preparing for finals, and staring at the bar exam). My entire family has mobilized capital to make sure this very tiny thing is okay. My roommate is helping me push medicine down his throat as he prepares for a surgery. I just spent a thousand dollars on blood tests and he’s getting tested for lymphoma. He got an ECG for like three thousand dollars last month.

I was having a conversation with my friend last night, talking about how fundamentally funny it is to have a dog have a cardiologist and an oncologist. We were joking about whether even makes sense to do all of this for a creature whose life has no “point” other than our pleasure and amusement.

Again, I don’t claim to have an answer as far as the ethics of the resource allocation. That money could be used to buy malaria nets and wells in Africa instead. It could probably save many human lives. There is a senselessness at the heart of all of this when you think of allocative efficiency.

But that line of thinking calls into question the lives of retarded people, disabled people, lazy people. It’s not a human way to look at things. There is a senselessness undergirding all of civilization that can’t be answer in materialist terms. I think the efforts to answer the senselessness in material terms is basically how you get to eugenics and fascism.

In my eyes, the only point is love, and love alone can make sense of senselessness.

Warm regards,

knxnts

good days add up to a good life

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

If you have a good day every day, and do good rvery day, you will have a good life. If you worry about building a good life, you'll spend the entirety in want and anticipation, and be dead before you know its over.

knxnts