From a Nest in the Tree

This is a heavily nested document, originally titled 2026-04-08-0200.`

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What if I start writing blog posts with the same unique timestamp system I use in my Obsidian? And what if I used this as a way of creating a small public literature of off-the-cuff writings which I then refactor into small nested pages?

What's more, I can use this space to aggregate links from Twitter / X, just like I usually do in private. Just today I was experimenting with Semble to make card-based connections between links. But why not just do it here, with each blog post or page being its own card?

This can be thought of as a true "public draft" of my writings, from which new articles might grow. (Fair warning, I might also put some LLM outputs in different places! Saying this in case there is anyone here who is utterly opposed to "clanker" materials.)

ChatGPT - Public Draft System

ChatGPT is your AI chatbot for everyday use. Chat with the most advanced AI to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster.

While adjusting the appearance of this blog, I thought about how I used to feel a little bad about writing on public blogs, like I am doing something wrong by leaving something on the page when it is not perfect. It is easy for me to write a lot and for a long time, but it always felt like maybe it was better to not say anything at all. Before a certain point in my life, most of my writing was put in private journals (often in an offline Word file or on an online service like Penzu ) rather than online. (Well, wait. That isn't quite true. I used to post a ton on Facebook, but that was mostly debating with people and getting them mad at me.)

You know, when I first heard about ChatGPT, it gave me a huge boost of creativity because I felt freed from the need to worry about writing anymore. Words were becoming cheaper and more plentiful, I already saw. This freed me up from fretting over the weight of my words, and got me to start improvising with my words the same way I improvised on the piano. I never would have done this kind of improvisation before, since what value was there in it? But now I can write off the top of my head, edit some things here and there, then ship it off.

Similarly, hearing about the new internal model at Anthropic, the one that found a ton of security vulnerabilities across systems and might result in all personal information no longer being secure, is freeing me from worrying about whether I write in public or in private. It may well be that even if I write something in my Obsidian instead of here, you would be able to read it in two years anyway. So, why not just get out ahead and write here with the knowledge that someone might read it?

I checked my BlogSpot again for the first time in a while, and it has been over a year and a half (nearly two years) since I last posted on there. Too much friction, in the end. Leaflet has a better interface and is also on the AT Protocol (open social, yay!), so for now I will pick this as my longform online journal. I have adopted the same Bing-generated background picture I used on that BlogSpot. Scrolling back in my image folder to my AI art generations from back in 2024 makes me remember once again how far we have come.

In the past few months, I experimented with taking my old AI art generations and running them through the latest image and video tools. It felt so weird, seeing the old creations (of the machine, improvising on a theme provided by me) come to life in new ways.

Playing around with AI tools is akin to growing a plant; our job as the gardener is to prune and guide. Really, in every space where we participate, we have to prune and guide. A painter is still a gardener, just that they are also in part the plant. The "plant" role and the "gardener" role might performed at the same time, or in quick alternations, or in separate blocks of time.

Making the above "aside" about a notebook I received for my paper anniversary showed me that refactoring a note in here might be quite difficult compared to using Obsidian, due to not being able to copy-paste multiple blocks at once from here, only into here; it is still almost certainly easier to first write in my personal vault and then copy things over.

In which case, I will treat this space more like a digital scrapbook. (And LLM outputs can be part of those trimmings! I can use them to add some dimensionality and texture, without taking away from the top level of human writing.) This might also mean that I stick in some AI-generated images, to spruce things up!

Generate an image
which encapsulates
the entire conversation
we have had so far,
as of
April 8, 2026 at 11:20am.

Which image do you like more?