Previous week at Kary 30⟡103, I had this meeting with the great Ashkan. He offered we go to a coffee shop that is dear to the both of us and just sits a block or two away. It was an amazing day, we were partially celebrating the ████████ thing finally having been placed together after a year of constant chaos. I was also showing him the completion of my theories on the Mind Graph, Threshold of The Reverse Viewpoint, Sub-Graph Transfer, Toolbox Theory…

In trying to articulate my thoughts for him, I remembered the biggest rule of my life and thinking, what that has shaped me, my work, and my life bigger than anything that has ever happened to me. So much so, that I have forgotten it exists. The fish doesn’t think about water, as we don’t about the air, and I had inhibited this idea so much that I had forgotten all about it, and that I must explicitly write about it someday.

When I was a kid, I had this fixating question and wondering in my mind: “What is truly a new invention?” When I heard that airplanes are modeled after birds, and helicopters after grasshoppers, it made me think: “Then why have they invented? Its just copying.” I hated copying. Something had given me this belief that invention is about making something that is entirely different than anything that had ever existed before it and my ill understanding of history had made me blind to the lineages of thought.

In our high school, a teacher had told us “nature is the source of all creations, all the greatest inventions of history were copied from nature, it has an infinite source of wisdom in it, and if you copy nature you get the best results.” His words badly irritated me. “copying is the best way to invent?” “who said that nature has infinite wisdom in it? what would you copycats do once you run out of things to copy?” and I felt this is cheating and creating crappy things.

This was also the reason for me getting in love with programming languages. IDEs felt like one of the only things in the whole world that were original. You would open a page on your computer, there was the concept of lines, there was the cursor, there was the characters, their combination the words, and their combination the grammar. the whole concept of language and writing was something that never existed in the nature. Not only that but then it was the programming language, colored words, two dimensional grammar structures and notations, the fact that the words you wrote were control structures and actually perform physical things in the world, the amazing autocomplete that would show a menu on your screen, show you the possible things to write, the way it used to search through them, the way you were writing programs with elements of computing not the gossip roots of a natural language, they were all immensely original and artificial. I loved it, something truly novel.

But you see, novelty did not work as such. My exploration of computer science showed that it took millennials for the computer to be made and it was the combined effort of millions of people all around the world. And then once I had studied the history of industrial design (thanks to Matthew Bird’s YouTube series), I had realized the continuum is the whole history, all of the thought and creation were dependent on each other. Nothing ever came to be in a vacuum. This actually made me sad. I had this personal wish to become an inventor, and that meant fully creating something new. Before that course, I had the firm belief that there was a chance, but then, once you had seen the whole history as a continuum, what could you do? Years later, I read You and Your Profile (Hans-Georg Moeller & Paul J. D'Ambrosio), the idea extended to the identity as well:

This happened in many different instances. Many different places, Tarantino is famous for having watched so many movies to master how to make movies. They say to become a good writer you have to read a lot. There was this podcast about orchestral composition I was listening to moons ago that defined composition “not as inventing new things, but arranging existing known things together,” it would have shocked and broke me, but then I had so much of this shock by then that I was once again saddened by the universality of this.

In this I realized that collecting is walking with me in the same problem of novelty. I collect many things, most recent is the fountain pens. If I had ever arrived at the perfect pen, I would have stayed with that pen. But I have many, and let me shortly explain what collecting them means:

• You have different sizes of the nib (the metal heads of the pen), they either write much more smoothly or much more scratchy. If you write with the smooth ones it becomes so enjoyable, but then your handwriting will become horrible. If you use the scratchy pens, then the joy will vanish but you will write with precision.

• There are pocket sized pens, medium pens, and big pens. Big pens are the most comfortable to write with, but you can’t easily carry them with you, pocket sized pens are awesome for the pocket and will hurt your hand as soon as you reach the end of the page.

• There are cartridge, converter, piston-filler, eye-dropper, vacuum, swipe, and many other forms of filling mechanisms. If you chose cartridge you will have disposable ink that doesn’t make your hands dirty and are easy, piston-fillers are so cool and they house many times the cartridge, but then they require more maintenance and you must be using your pen or it will dry and hurt your pen, and so with each other system there are trade-offs

• The cap can be housed with a screw mechanism, or slide.

• The body can show the ink or it can hide it.

• The cap can have a clip or not.

• The body can be smooth or have edges that stops it from rolling of the table.

• It can be made of plastic, ABS, resin, different metal, and even wood or exotic matters.

• The colors

_ …

There is just so many parts and for each of them there are many different answers and elements you can use. Each pen is a different combination of these choices and therefore there is never a best. People who collect understand these elements and that is why they collect, they want to have all the variations, they want to experience the different compositions. That is why the whole music industry exists, they are pieces made to fit in a square artwork and an audio format, and with each of them there is whole different story.

And yet I had learned this very late, a few year ago actually. My whole neural network is trained on the pursuit of creating things that are so original no part of their existence resembles anything we find in our day to day lives. I couldn’t give up on this, trying to make everything that I could myself was to surgically remove myself from the continuum as much as I possibly could, to make my work more original (aware of all the paradoxes), this had me fixate on my ultimate rule, that is:

And so I treated everything as such: If I had a software to make and wrote it with the newest framework it did not felt right, I had to build the tools to make it so that it “could” be novel. If those tools were designed like the previous tools, they sabotaged the novelty and originality, and so my methods had to be mine for the tools not to be limiting, if the methods came from the previous paradigm, how could they allow for a novel creation? that meant you had to have new paradigms, and new paradigms meant thought coming from a whole new place, that is why I chose to think like this, not to be a part of any other bigger thing, it is the very simple mathematics of fighting against average and regression, and it is harder than any other endevour humanity has ever set to achieve, precisely because it is one, or a very few vs everyone. The statistics are against you.

There are things in the world that needs these kinds of attention and thinking. Computer programming is fundamentally broken at all levels, so of course it takes a Maestro Victor to defy everything, and every axiom, and every school of thought, to create a Dynamicland. This is how you push humanity, another study of the 5% improvement on scripting languages vs compiled ones goes nowhere. Fighting the specialization, organizations, cubicles, boring offices, the coming homogeneous mix of all cultures and personalities, the fully commodification of humanity, this giant ugly prison we live in, the only way one can fix it is to dismiss the whole of it.

This then brings me to the latent conclusion: If you are building LEGO and you cannot invent new bricks, how can you create really novel things? The first and most simple conclusion is to rearrange the bricks and create new things. But what I started doing in my playing with LEGO was to collect everything that I loved and mix them together. A gift of my childhood was the chance to lay on the floor and study LEGO catalogues for hours on end. LEGO back then was very abstract, and given the powerful tools Scott McCloud invented, I can now see that their level of abstractness made me be able to live in fantasy of LEGOs, and I could internalize their models, they ways of building, the bricks, and so I would have looked at the creations, and I would have created my own things.

This approach could also be applied to the rest of the world. In designing this Waihona Ike, I had LavaScroll and brought it to the web, then I had watched some Only Murders In The Building and my sense of art deco was elevated, that made me design the elevator scroll, Tintin’s opening patters gave me background of the archive, physical books of the Apple Books app made me write the book renderer, Maestro Knuth’s amazing work was the inspiration behind how I designed the Quotes & Excerpts, the physical paper I used in my typewriter was how I designed the essays to be their digital counterparts, the calendar page was created while I was watching the Severance series, and that 50’s minimalist/brutalist/rich graphics design is present, the way pictures are stacked and opened on hover is a direct Steve Jobs era Mac philosophy, the elliptical search on the homepage captures my feeling of the Men In Black movie when I was young, the way screens have transitions is from the old movies, and experiencing directly inside Smalltalk-96, there are arrows for references, that is my way of thinking, the quote borders, background patters, and some titles have medieval decorations, they come from my childhood fantasies of pirates, islands, castles, history, and medieval things, the decorations come from my love of ornaments that I developed in high school, and there is a victorian touch all over the place that I have connected to people like Maestro Rachmaninoff, Maestro Vavilov, Maestro Darwin, the romantics, the great age of science and philosophy, but it is also a smell that comes from the Gilmore Girls when you see it, the house of Lorelai, Emily & Richard, the whole Stars Hallow, they smell this abstract remains of Victorian era, and I also love the design and philosophy of Shakers, the Karion Calendar time is displayed in ordinal latin “ANNO·​TRICESIMO·​DIE·​CENTESIMO·​SEPTIMO·​VITÆ·​POVYA”, that comes from Da Vinci Code, it gives the page a whole funny look, there are many many many other small details here and there, but I hope it has given you a way to see the archive you are seeing: A mix of the elements I loved. And I guess that pushed to extremes will geniuenly result in finding whole different graphs. (Related to Understanding As An Act of Ecosystem Transfer and Synthesis)

This then brings me to what happened today. I was talking with an LLM, and looked for words that had a close meaning to “Maestro”. They had suggested the word “Farr” which is a Farsi word I had never had heard, I loved it. Then it suggested a whole array of words of many different languages, each time I saw a Farsi word, I hated it. Why? Then I remembered a whole different thing I had forgotten:

When I had started learning English, I realized that my language is at teh perfect moment of Shakespeare'e Clone. My Farsi had been reinforced by meany years of using it as others had shown me how, but my English? I could engineer it. I could shape the way I spoke, I could learn the origin of each word that I used and only collect the words and ways of talking that I enjoyed, and essentially creating my own LEGO set, which then brings me to this:

I liked the words the LLM showed me because they had absolutely no meaning to me. I have no idea what “Farr” is and therefore it is a whole new, fresh, node in my Mind Graph. There is nothing connected to it. It had also suggested “Afarinandeh” and that word connects to a gizillion things that I hate in my mind. It connects to the dirt of islam, it, it has with itself the air of Iran which I try to avoid. Constructing a different LEGO set was my primary idea for freeing myself from Iran, disconnecting myself from it, and so I realized the power of unconnected words today, although I have an idea, although I knew of why Guy Debord said “spectacle” must never be translated, I had never felt it quite as much as today.

The problem with this approach is that it falls completely into the collectionaire problem: The solution to fountain pens (if you don’t like them), is not to remix, but to invent the ballpaint, rollerball, and the gel pen. LEGO sets will always be the “medium”, and it doesn’t matter how much you remix, the message will always be limited. Yet, when a new medium is not visible or possible, the remix is the best we can do.

That is also exactly Maestro Victor is doing. He knows what his problems are, he knows that programming requires people to simulate everything in their heads, he knows math is abstract and we have to dismantle it, and he knows that the public simply says: To hell with thinking, lets just offload everything to the LLMs. But given that the next medium is not visible, the solution is bad, and he is left with what he has today, there was nothing else but to make Dynamicland by mixing the best of everything he could have found.

Until arriving at the graph theories, my approach to 1285 was the same: To just gather all the good things I know, and threw all the crap to the trash. Theories came later as a miracle that just might enable a new graph after a threshold. Which if we look at is how you navigate civilization towards a Threshold of The Reverse Viewpoint, you may not know where it is, but you may be able to smell it, just by removing the bad and maximizing the good.