I hate university. I hate absolutely every form of social mechanism that forces people to this degree of prisonment.
I must use LLMs to finally craft a code formatter for Kary Standard
When I started creating my tools to craft custom papers for my planners and other binders, I noticed how absurdly easy it is. Not because paper suddenly became easier, but because I had spent years inside computer graphics and programming. I could finally make sheets that are perfect down to the pixel, with rules so precise they feel less like stationery and more like geometry. If I tried to do this in the era when notebooks and binders were actually on top of the world, I would have been forced into the old bargain: draw by hand, or buy a printing setup expensive enough to injure my finances and slow enough to injure my days, only to end up with something rudimentary anyway.
So I used the magic of programmable printing machines. And here is the punchline: for these machines to print anything satisfactory, they must simulate the printed content beforehand. They must show you the result before the paper is sacrificed. Once you own that kind of preview-magic, why waste the paper at all? You stare at the print preview and voilà, the PDF is born.
And then the constraints start looking like comedy. Why should content be trapped in A4 when it no longer needs to pass through an A4 throat? Why must content be static when it can be responsive? Why print a menu when you can program a menu? You keep following this thread and you do not end up with better paper, you end up with the web.
Then it goes one step further. When software can record your to-dos, search them, notify you on time, share them, synchronize them, and remember them better than you ever could, why bother with the binder at all? This is the part that still makes me laugh: the computer can create perfect binders, and in the same movement it renders the binder useless for its original purpose.
But that “useless” is not the end. It is the beginning of the second life.
This pattern shows up everywhere if you look for it. The technologies that replace a medium tend to perfect the medium they replace, almost as a side effect, almost as a cruel gift.
Computers and print tools gave us a golden age of typography, but they removed the awe from calligraphy. When writing becomes infinitely editable, reproducible, and undoable, the hand loses its monopoly on beauty. And yet, once calligraphy is no longer needed to write, it becomes free to become calligraphy. It stops being the normal way to put language on a surface and becomes a deliberate act. The medium loses its job and gains its aura.
Print and books did something similar in the opposite direction. They made memorizing less necessary. They took the burden of storage away from the throat and the tribe and placed it on paper. And by removing poetry’s duty as a memory device and a communal hard drive, they made poems capable of becoming a sophisticated art form. The poem stopped being primarily a tool for passing content through a vocal community and became a machine for attention, rhythm, compression, and taste.
And now we have the next turn of the spiral.
The existence of LLMs will likely make software reach a kind of peak, only for much of what we currently call software to become unnecessary. Not computation, not systems, not rules, but the visible layer we have gotten used to: the maze of buttons and menus and forms that exist largely because machines could not previously understand intentions. When the interface becomes conversational and generative, when the machine can meet you at the level of “what I mean” rather than “what I clicked,” a lot of software starts to look like the binder: a beautifully engineered container for something the new medium can carry more fluidly.
The AI will remember itself, do it, coordinate with itself, and many of the rigid tools we built to force coordination will look quaint.
This is why people miss books in the age of computers. Not because books were objectively better, but because we are now in the strange window where (1) we finally have the means to perfect the old medium, and (2) we are daily exposed to a superior medium for the old medium’s original job. So the old medium becomes irrational as infrastructure and irresistible as ritual. You can make the cleanest, most perfect, most custom binder sheets in history, and at the same time you can feel, clearly, that the binder is no longer the best way to be organized.
And that is the real mechanism behind nostalgia that keeps renewing itself. Every generation inherits at least one medium that has recently been dethroned. It is no longer required, so it can be cherished. It can be collected, refined, aestheticized, slowed down, romanticized, and defended like a homeland.
A medium’s first life is utility. Its second life is meaning.
The “golden age” often begins not when the medium is born, but when it dies as a default. When it stops being oxygen and becomes perfume.
This is perhaps either obvious or a cliché. But our understanding of the world is what shapes us, and our central motives cannot be easily overlooked. If we take the concept of today’s school, the pockets of information that are pushed to the student make no sense. To the school, perhaps, but to a student that has no need and interest in knowing the area under a curve, what good does understanding integrals do? Nothing. They will take it as forced and never truly learn it. Those who learn such things are interested in the play itself. They take no need for the subject matter to even matter.
Once one is interested, however, if they are actually interested, they will accomplish greatness.
With such things. But all people who reached greatness had a motive that was there. Richard Hamming states:
One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it including great scientists, is that usually when they were young they had independent thoughts and had the courage to pursue them. For example, Einstein, somewhere around 12 or 14, asked himself the question: “What would a light wave look like if I went with the velocity of light to look at it?”
He also mentions something else that is amazing:
The great scientists, when an opportunity opens up, get after it and they pursue it. They drop all other things. They get rid of other things and they get after an idea because they had already thought the thing through.
This is again very fascinating to read and, to me, brings what has been life experience.
It is therefore hard to imagine the current state of affairs assumes no place for such thinking. If we are to fix this, I believe two parallel undertakings have to be happening. The first would be to excite people with new ideas. Surely there is something for anyone.
What we have nothing—and are not prepared for—is the means to discover the inner talents and callings and quests of people. How are we to inquire their lifelong questions? We may turn them to a science fair, with them to showcase their callings, and destroy them in a mindless competition. This simply is not an answer. But what is? Should we teach them the importance of knowing such things but keeping them, with care and security, a secret? What child is to be trusted with keeping these secrets? And only one bad actor is required to make the whole thing into a mess.
We started Dynamicland because we were convinced it was impossible to represent and communicate big ideas on a computer screen. If you are reading this on a computer screen, there’s some irony here.
In the same way that one can’t truly understand a foreign culture by reading about it — you actually have to go live there a while — we’ve found that people require real immersion in the Dynamicland culture before they start to get it.
We do not expect anyone to truly understand Realtalk and Dynamicland from looking at a website. But sometimes travelogues can be valuable.
As Fight Club says, “The things you own end up owning you.”
Stronger values make you spend more mindfully because they shift the axis of desire. When you know what you worship—what you actually stand for and who you want to become—everything gets tested against that vision. Values act like a sieve: they filter out the empty cravings that come from comparison and they let through only the things that genuinely serve your spirit. Without values, desires lead you astray by following ads and algorithms and the envy of friends—a state commonly known as “being distracted”.
The title Spirited Away in Japanese is Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, and kamikakushi means “hidden by the gods,” a folk belief where people mysteriously vanish into another realm. This film is about magical abduction and losing your identity. Chihiro loses her name and becomes “Sen”: to be spirited away is like being stolen from yourself, forgetting who you are under the influence of forces like greed, fear, anger—and who’s to say that emotions aren’t magical? That desires aren’t demonic possessions of the mind (“demonic” meaning “godlike divisive superfactor” in Greek)? Who’s to say that feeling horny isn’t its own kind of spell? We literally use “mania” and “craze” to describe the way people desire something: Beatlemania, the craze with Labubus, matcha being ‘all the rage’.
Lust is the deceiver. Lust wrenches our lives until nothing matters except the one we think we love, and under that deceptive spell we kill for them, give all for them, and then, when we have what we have wanted, we discover that it is all an illusion and nothing is there. Lust is a voyage to nowhere, to an empty land, but some men just love such voyages and never care about the destination.
In a sincerity- based society, the social persona of an individual is determined by available social roles. Once one is born into the role of daughter, it is expected that one will develop a persona in accordance with this gender role. Multiple personas are possible—daughter, mother, Christian, shopkeeper—but they all ought to correspond to patterned roles. In an authenticity-based society, everyone is expected to find or create their own original self. Again, multiple personas are possible, for instance, one may have an especially creative self and be capable of being original in different ways—as both landscaper and Olympic figure skater—but these personas are all supposed to be rooted in the same true self. In a highly differentiated society, such dedication to a supposedly unified underlying self is no longer functional or even credible. Instead, people are required to develop the flexibility to adapt to different “working environments.” One can be a postdoctoral fellow at a university during the day, a girl- friend in the evening, a DJ later that night, and a soccer player the following weekend. These identities are not expected to significantly overlap or remain stable in the long run. The postdoc contract will end in a year or two. The boyfriend may not be that committed and leave even sooner. The music scene will change, and new musical personas will have to be developed. A twenty- nine- year- old woman knows that she won’t be able to play soccer on the same level or with the same team in five or six years. And each of these changes happens more or less independently of the others. Little overlap between these roles is expected.