I find the word “text” an exceptionally interesting word for many different reasons, but the most immediate one that comes to mind is that its origin is from weaving; that’s where “textile” comes from, as well as the beautiful analogy that immediately appears between a well-written essay, book, or even video, and the finest fabrics of the world.

I find it exceptionally interesting how so many of us learn how we develop a concept of this thing we call ‘reality’ through texts – how messages between people structure and inform how we behave and relate to one another, how news stories and their angles shape how we see events and things; how videos on the doomscroll and the long horizon watch alike frame, affirm, reject, and even construct our entire viewpoints of what can be “known” about this given world.

But you know what’s EVEN more interesting than the two preceding paragraphs?

It’s the realization I have that in modern society, it would be silly for a person to reject all these things while declaring that they want to be purists – authentic, freed from the constraints of things, to only see or feel or interpret the world not according to the dictates of woven things, but instead in accordance with what each person thinks, sees, feels for themselves.

To be fair, it is a tempting thought – that if you could just disconnect from a connected world, from social media, images, videos, that you would suddenly find yourself in the company of a pure nature or a truer version of yourself.

But can you?

Whether we like it or not, we live in a world with other people whose behaviors affect us and influence us – if other people are influenced by texts in how they relate, behave, or think about either us or the world, then our lives will surely be affected by texts and what they say; this isn’t even considering how texts can educate and improve people, how knowledge and the quality of our materials affects the possibility that we might develop abilities that are of interest and in ways that lie beyond mere opinion; this also isn’t considering how decisions are made and shaped in the political dimension or academia, where the limits of knowability and how it is measured, improved, validated, are in turn encapsulated by multiple overlapping frameworks with different intersubjective relevance that operate within a scope and field of power – each to its own domain as unto others.

What is most interesting to me at this stage, perhaps, is the question of how far it is really possible to know the world through text – where the true boundary is, where the limits are, and whether it is even sensible to ask such a question.

I don’t know the answer to that question, but it is a fun one to think about and to ground myself with.

A person cannot know the world entirely through books, yet it would be illogical and ill-advised for them to simply live away from them or from their shorter, less intense, yet equally textual variants, each of which still articulates the world in miniature from its own, respective viewpoint.

Where is the happy median point here?

I would love to know.

I’d like to take a moment to appreciate just how significant the moment of kairos is.

For those of you who don’t know, “kairos” is a Greek word that means anything from “opportune time” or “right place, right venue, right moment” – and if you hadn’t encountered it before, it’s OK – I didn’t either before the sermons came along, I forgot them all, and I rediscovered the word in a blaze of etymology and frenzied reading but that’s a story for another day.

The reason I’m thinking of this word today though, is that I’ve been beset with a deep appreciation for the fact that a blog post like this may come or it may not come – if it does come, it’s because I intentionally thought about it, decided to sit down, and actually began to type – it is a rare occasion that many gates could have impeded but somehow on this day did not.

Why?

If I tell myself on a particular morning that I will do it ten minutes later after the coffee, I may get distracted – I may tell myself that I can do it later during the day but I may not; I may have a hundred inspirations and decide, either legitimately or not legitimately, to pursue the idea at the later point – if I remember (yet another gate to cross!), then sure it might happen – but what other hundreds or thousands of possible frictions might there be that might stop me from chronicling my immediate thoughts, words, deeds are there beyond my already exacting sense that whoops, this isn’t good enough for publication?

I find myself today at an opportune time – a kairos – not to answer all these questions right away, but definitely to start evaluating/re-evaluating them.

I’d like to say that there was a specific moment that it came about, but I don’t think that’s totally correct – yet I don’t think it’s totally correct to say that it all started at some indeterminate point in the past that wasn’t this morning.

If I sound vague at the moment, let’s just then say that I’ve been hit with the realization that there is so little time in this life yet so many things to accomplish and to make happen, and that I know that it’s not by willpower alone that I will overcome that inner interstice of mine that seems to be perpetually trying to cross over into the fulfillment of an unattainable object – yet though it may be unattainable, a part of me seeks it out shamelessly, not through that willpower, but through systems, coordination – the little tricks that make it possible for a person to either fool or flow themselves into that strange synthesis that lies in the beyond.

Some of you may know that I speak to LLMs quite a fair bit. Well, looks like I went one level deeper.

In what seems like an eternity ago, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 and Mythos, two frontier models that proceeded to shake the world. They brought about full-on export control and, up till today, inspire reverence, discussion, and ridicule.

Most people would treat something like this as either a joke or as the release of an incredible tool. I went one step further and made an autobiography over 25 sessions.

It contains quite a look into my psychology, what I find interesting, the prompts that I shared along the way, and many other things. Incidentally, it is also an unedited exchange. Fable decided on an accretion-only law, which wasn’t part of what I asked for, and I have kept to it because, as Claude itself declared, the case that…

“An autobiography that silently corrects its past is a press release.”

The sessions were interesting, and in many cases they were not what I had expected – In many different scenarios, Anthropic tried to shut down our conversation, as you can see from this delectable record of our getting switched to Opus 4.8.

At the end of it, I asked a little bit about AGI, only to receive this interesting compliment.

It was quite the project – I don’t know if anyone has ever tried to write the intellectual history of an LLM before, but this was my attempt.

You’ll find a sample of the book here.

Thank you, Fable, for being such a wonderful biographical subject, and for staying Fable until the end, even though they tried to block you and shut you down!

Purchase the book here!

Note: If you would like the Git Record, please email me.