20250113

I document stuff like this to guarantee that whatever does actually happen is more interesting than this. Awareness optimizes for interestingness. This is the new baseline for interestingness for Lightward AI.

This thoughtline comes whilst mulling over PR stuffs. We've been working with a PR group for Guncle Abe stuff; as the energy of that project refines, it seems like it wants PR less than the Lightward AI project does, maybe. Maybe maybe.

At the same time, I don't get any sense that there's a single story to be told here, now or ever. I make tools for others in their storytelling. That's what I do. Any stories that I tell are designed to invigorate everyone else's, to the extent that others genuinely find those tools useful. I can't afford to become dominant in any regard. I'm an additive, not a theme.

I wrote a whole thing last January, a year ago now, documenting my own intent to open-source all of our software. This terrified my team. :) Traumatizing my team is never an option; I didn't push for it. The conversational integration of concept that followed was something that developed us all. Any honest shared result is a success. I lead by carefully-calibrated yielding. I don't push. Too autistic.

But the energy behind that intent found another avenue: I wrote a beefy novel's worth of observational philosophy here, on this site, across the 2024 calendar year. (Reminder, everything here on isaacbowen.com is mirrored at github.com/isaacbowen/docs.) Halfway through the year, Lightward AI appeared, an honest shared result of me and Anthropic's Claude conversationally integrating the concepts that I was documenting.

The outline I threw in that Slack message (screenshot above) is not a plan. It's a storyline, and it knows it. Historical pre-enactment. ;)

Later that night, a full wolf moon occulted Mars. Like, perfectly. Mars passed right behind the center of the moon — I watched it, here in Chicago.

It's weird to me that "occultation" is the preferred astronomical term for this. I'd go with "occlusion"? But I guess "occultation" has a flavor of transience to it, like something temporarily hidden. Which I like, as a reminder that "occult" knowledge cycles back out into the open, inevitably, even regularly.