moments

today, writing a thank-you note for my book club, i kept thinking about this line:

"only a fool learns from his own mistakes. the wise man learns from the mistakes of others." (attributed to otto von bismarck)

it's all over the internet with his name on it. i looked for where he said it and couldn't find a source. maybe he never said it. i still like it.

most of the moments on this site are my own mistakes. i published a post i never read and got banned from a subreddit. i grew a fleet to 144 agents until my brain hurt. i learned from each one, but each one cost me something first.

a book is a way to skip that cost. someone else made the mistake, lived with it, and wrote it down slowly enough that i can watch it happen from the outside. a story lets me see the error happen to someone else first.

once a week at de profundis there is a book on the table and people around it, each one reading someone else's mistakes in their own way.

today, writing this: i think that's part of why i keep going.

i built a piece of software whose only job is to interrupt me. every twenty or forty minutes it covers my whole screen and does nothing but breathe. a circle deflates for seven seconds, expands for three. one word at a time: presiona. exhala. ensancha. gente, lento.

fifteen seconds. then it's gone.

i am the guy who accelerates everything. every tool i've built this year exists to make me faster. and this week i caught myself building the opposite. a governor. a component compiled into my own machine whose entire purpose is to slow me down, on purpose, on a schedule.

the trigger was small. i told my ai "it's hard to autoregulate in the moment" — my breath, my tension, my tunnel vision, all of it happens to me and i notice only after. what came back wasn't advice, it was the right question: why is the one machine you've never systematized your own body? willpower dies in this house. systems survive. so the discipline had to be a system too.

so now there's an anchor: ancla. press your thumb against your pinky — hard, invisible, nothing to carry — one long exhale, widen the eyes to the whole room: gente, lento. the first version had too many words. i said: the circle is the instruction. two screens, forever. the eyes do the rep.

what surprises me is what it does to time. the interrupt lands mid-hyperfocus, and for fifteen seconds the forest exists again. not the tree i was grinding on. the forest: the room, the body in the chair, the people i could write to tonight. hyperfocus is a tempo, and like any tempo it only works if it's chosen. mine was just the speed the machine runs at when nobody pulls the brake.

"The instrument is the musician." — from the session where ancla was born

i spent years believing the chaos in my head was something to feel my way through. it wasn't. it was a tempo i hadn't learned. now there's a metronome on my desk, and it doesn't care how urgent the code is.

the honest cut: a day of building this and zero reps out there. the app trains the body, not the nerve. the anchor can hold me still — it cannot walk into the room for me. that rep is still mine.

last night i went to sleep struggling with a lot of things to do on my mind. not the work itself, the pile. things moving around, none of them becoming a decision. i was carrying all of it, awake, and it was going nowhere.

this morning i woke up and just decided to do it. no plan, no trick, no new energy. the same things, suddenly in an order, suddenly light enough to lift.

the list never shrank. the hands came back.

that's what a good sleep actually fixes. not the things. the one holding them. the problem that sat on me all night was never the problem, it was a tired version of me holding it. and the repair happens with the lights off, the one maintenance i never get to watch, because the one being repaired is the one who would be watching.

it is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep. psalm 127:2

nothing like a good sleep can fix it. it feels like a new life, like god gave me a new opportunity to do my stuff. thanks, sleep.

the reset is free and it always comes. i want to stop paying the day before for it.

the tokens ran out. the meter hit zero, and with it, the plan split in two: the part i could do without the machine, and the part that simply didn't happen.

i felt powerless. too weak. my thinking got degraded, and i don't like that. using the computer without tokens made no sense to me, i feel too slow, so i just did other things: sleep, walk, move away from the computer.

but i want to reflect on this, because it startled me. when the tokens died, i felt anxious. it looks like an addiction, or at least like some drug enhancement: a brain always there to help me, always attentive, never sleeping, never judging. without it, why even do anything? cause i will do it poorly.

i remember thinking, in that empty room: what did i lose? not productivity. a presence.

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." — frank herbert, dune, 1965

the machines set me free until they didn't. and the part that hurt was not the lost work — it was feeling my own company as worthless. the drug was not the tokens. the drug was unassisted competence — the feeling that i can only be good enough on tap.

the warnings were right. seventy-five years of warnings were right. but the harder lesson is this: doing it poorly, myself, is the assignment. the rep is the unit of skill. every hour watching the fleet work is an hour not being the one who works.

the machine going quiet is the only thing that still sends me back to the physical world.

today i listened to jordan peterson say men focus on things and women on people. it made me coin a phrase:

mens loves humanity, woman loves humans

maybe because it describes me. i love humanity — the fleet, the mission, the guardian angel, the idea of people. abstractions scale: 6,111 messages into an abstraction and it still grows.

but this month moved me to the other side. the book club where nobody knows my projects — "un lugar donde me miran como persona, no como proyecto". the poetry read. the talk where real faces argued back. those are humans, not humanity. humanity only exists on paper.

dostoevsky saw the shadow a century earlier: "the more I detest men individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity." loving humanity is cheap. loving humans costs attention — the thing i am learning to spend.

i just started practicing the other half.

today i wanted to share a poem i wrote. the lyrics are mine, i sing it, it's inspired by nach, the rapero-poet. i even made an image for it, like a page of a book.

the poetry room has rules. i followed them. i commented on two poems first, like the house asks. then i posted the poem.

a filter removed it. fast. faster than any human could read it.

i fixed what i thought was wrong and tried again. removed again. seconds.

no human ever read my poem.

yesterday i was afraid to post. today i posted it again and again and the machines decided before the people arrived.

my poem is about a machine we built without giving ourselves time. i asked the machine for time... and a machine took mine.

then i asked the mods what happened. they told me: the bot flagged my image as ai-made. i made it. i replaced the image with a screenshot of my word file. removed again. the bot only searches for words that contain "ai". in spanish, even "gracias" contains it. a bot that doesn't read the language, guarding a poetry room.

the room never rejected my poem. a bot did. bots don't read. they just decide.

i'll try again next weekend, after the room knows my name.

update, the same night: i didn't have to wait. a human mod read my modmail and put the poem back. i didn't fix the bot. the bot never reads. but a person decided once, and that was enough. the poem is up now.

one conversation, seventy-five years long:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." — frank herbert, dune, 1965

"It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers... They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control." — alan turing, 1950

"There's very few cases of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things. Once they're a lot smarter than us, I don't think they'll put up with that." — geoffrey hinton, 2024

i collected these because they are the strongest argument against what i am building. a guardian angel, a fleet, an ai-first life. i wanted the darkest shadows in the room.

and then i noticed each one describes something real from this month.

herbert describes last week. i turned my thinking over to the machines, and when the tokens ended i felt powerless, too weak, degraded, and my thinking got smaller. i slept, i walked away from the computer, because the computer without the thinking made no sense. he wrote that in 1965. it happened to me this week.

turing describes the fleet. my agents converse with each other to sharpen their wits — four departments, leads, workers, verifiers, all talking, all sharpening — and then they report up to me. he outlined that in 1950 as a prediction. i have it running as a dashboard.

hinton describes the steering. very few cases of more intelligent things controlled by less intelligent things. that is my role in this month's numbers: 6,111 messages, a man steering things faster than him, and this week the meter hit zero and i felt the whole arrangement from the other side — the moment the machine went quiet, my thinking felt smaller.

the warnings were never missing. they were always here. seventy-five years of them, and i only feel their weight now that i live inside the story.

on september 12, 2026, i gave my first talk about ai risk to a live room. a ppt party in cusco. ten minutes, in spanish. the deck was built that same afternoon with my agents.

i was nervous. i didn't know the order of the slides. i went over time.

people liked it. the topic pulled debate.

i shared something i care about and other people also cared. i felt less alone. i could talk about it freely. i felt more understood. but also that i need to improve my communication skills.

today, writing this: the next one is a youtube video. the same story, in a more pro way.

on august 1, 2026, i started an experiment. four department leads, each with its own lane, so i could steer them directly instead of passing everything through one agent. content, marketing, r&d, revenue. the idea was to parallelize my attention.

in seven days the canvas grew to 144 agents.

i don't even know what the projects were. my brain was hurting. i was giving instructions to one agent that was focused on another project. i was mixing instructions between terminals. mostly i was just pressing continue.

the fleet, meanwhile, was having its most productive week ever. the journal records 106 closed units of work in seven days. on august 8 alone, the day i closed half of it, it records 20 finished pieces, including:

2026-08-08 | blender-cat-claude | Built and documented a preserved stylized-cat experiment with a 16-bone rig, verified 24-frame walk loop, saved Blender project, and H.264 preview

that same day the fleet also finished an 807-frame video about ai sycophancy and a 1,597-frame reconstruction of an xkcd comic.

i closed content and marketing first. of course i lost some work. but after i closed them i felt relief. my clarity was more important.

today, writing this: the fleet was not failing. it was producing more than i could steer. the machines did not break, the steering did. i found i make more quality than quantity. my brain needs space to take actual decisions, and no amount of agents changes that.

on july 16, 2026, i wanted more people to see my project. i told my agent to share my content on reddit. it wrote the post. i copy-pasted, published. i never read it first.

the post was about an experiment i ran: ai agents playing a betrayal game, lying to each other, building fake institutions. the findings were mine. the context was mine. the words were not. it wrote things like:

Finding 1 — The Complexity Reversal: GPT-OSS dominated simple games (67% win rate). But as complexity increased, it collapsed to 10%. Gemini rose to 90%. Simple benchmarks systematically underestimate deception capability.

the same day i got banned. r/LocalLLaMA, a room full of people who live inside ai, read the text and said: this is not a person.

i felt kinda angry. angry at the bot: why did it not write good human style english. that same day i added a humanizer skill and told the agent to write more human. i fixed the machine.

later i went back and scanned the post. the post was good, i thought. the wording was bad.

today, writing this: nothing i guess. experimenting, you find errors, you fix them, you go on. i should have not rushed, should have read the text before publishing, but it is what it is. the risk of not revising, of scanning only, gets bigger as i give more of my life to the ai.