It’s early June!
I’ve been writing a lot, but the vast majority of it will never see the light of day: This is the personal sense-making shit, rough notes, synthesis, scraps, etc.
Today while waiting for water to boil in my kitchen, I was scrolling through some old tweets of mine to find a particular picture of a kindle embedded in sand.
I ended up stumbling on a tweet I wrote that stated:
“Anything can be a timer/clock”
This led me to a realization that there’s a pretty terrible issue at play with modern LLMs — they lack a (usable) sense of time, meaningful time-scale, and internal datekeeping, making them useless for a wide swath of ordinary human activity involving ongoing timekeeping.
I was reminded that the Animal Crossing series has always had a pretty tight gameplay loop around the time of day one interacts with villagers, or points of interest in the game. To my knowledge, most popular LLM chat interfaces that have been built maintain zero relationship with the flow of time — You might be messaging chatGPT 4o at 4am and it has no real idea, nor does it care why you’re messaging it so late.
Given the line of exploration I’ve been taking when it comes to flower computers, I was thinking it would be pretty interesting for all objects in the known universe to have a sense of time apart from the earth’s orbit around the sun, or the turn of the earth on its axis. What does a papaya’s calendar look like? What sort of timers might people share with one another embedded in ordinary objects?
A few months ago while first cracking into learning Swift, I thought a fun beginner project might be a simple one-function app for sharing timers with friends. I still think this is an idea worth prototyping.
Thinking about carbon dating, tree rings, carbon credits, orbits, tides, circle packing, etc.