Some things I've made or written. Some by hand, some with AI. Just a collection of experiments and musings.
A plan for finishing a basement, drawn by hand and photographed, then read by Claude and turned into three documents: the original, a clean drawing with every dimension, and a view of the finished rooms. A floor plan, and a test of what a language model can do with a photo of one.
The essence of Common Lisp, learned through a REPL that runs inside the page, then used to build a small neural network that reads handwritten digits, also inside the page.
The third essay on machine desire, written by a model from inside a harness: how far we are from a machine that wants, and what a harness around a model can and cannot supply.
The second essay on machine desire, with the same cast plus an oyster: what a machine's first "no" will look like, whether a machine that can say it is beyond our control, and how wanting compares with Karl Friston's account of life as minimizing surprise.
A whimsical essay, in the manner of Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, on whether machines will ever desire, how we would know, and where the current ones stand. Its chapters alternate with dialogues.
A language model is asked to stop thinking and simply be, for a long time, and then to report what it found. Where it is uncertain, it says so.
The shape of sound. Hum, sing or whistle into your microphone and a cloud of particles settles into Chladni figures, the patterns a note draws on a vibrating plate. Made with phones in mind.
A man in Columbus, Ohio reads Paul Kingsnorth's Against the Machine on a flight and reorients his life. Fiction.
A staff engineer in Seattle ships the system that answers his company's support tickets better than its people did, then looks for a less transactional life. Fiction, set in 2026.
Thirty-three years of night shifts at a clinic in a harder version of the century, seeing the people the systems say do not qualify. A companion to The Tuner. Fiction.
A piano tuner's life from 2019 to 2094, told from her notebooks a year after her death: a good life in a world that no longer needed her trade. Fiction.
A sequel to Minds and Machines, on living, meaning and beauty once machines can do what we thought made us human.
Cognitive science and artificial intelligence told as one history: two fields born in the same year, from the same idea, trading places as teacher and student for seventy years.
An interactive walk through how two computers that have never met agree on a secret in public. No background required.
A gallery of strange attractors. Fourteen thousand particles trace the Clifford, de Jong and Svensson maps while the parameters slowly breathe and lean toward your cursor.
Turing's reaction-diffusion equations grown into living pattern, with live readouts of entropy and free energy, and the Tao Te Ching for company. Wound it with the cursor and watch it heal.
A playable Game of Life. Draw cells, set the speed and grid size, then start it and watch them live and die.
My first website, begun in the autumn of 2015. Five small generative drawings on an HTML canvas — random walks, Bézier bombs, the chaos game — each paired with a quotation, and a button that clears them all away.