In a recent post, I wrote the following:

[Without] the context of history, we're blind to the reality that we live in a world… deeply connected and familiar to the worlds of the past.

Perhaps it is just my brain seeing patterns where they don't exist, but this sentence really describes for me a truth about the world that helps me better understand our time and place. Take, for example, the questions of A.I. and the Longevity movement.

Finding Parallels

Ever since man emerged from his cave and first laid eyes on the lands beneath the sun he has willed to know the future and to be master of his own destiny.¹ This has been true in every age and every place. Mythology is chock full of tales of actual historical rulers and mythic heroes searching for the glory and wealth of this world and, once they've "got it all", they turn to the one thing they can never truly have: eternal life. Rulers funded sages and alchemists who promised to make them immortal. They were already rich, now they needed time.

Of course their time did eventually come, just not how they intended.

Today we see the modern Longevity movement echoing its ancient past and it's no surprise that it has resurged among the super wealthy most visibly. In my reading of the subject (which is admittedly light), every time there is a sizable concentration of wealth among an elite class in peace time, the members of that class tend to become enamored with ideas of eternal youth/life.

The Epic of Gilgamesh (Tablet V)
Photo credit: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg) - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Epic of Gilgamesh continues to be relevant and assigned reading, even in the modern day.

On the subject of A.I., consciousness, and the Singularity², there's important context in the historical record. Many medieval alchemists were obsessed with the creation of artificial life, some even going so far as to believe that they'd live to see the first attempts succeed (if it hadn't already somewhere in secret), an eerily-familiar discourse.

This, of course, isn't to say that we're not close to a foundational change in humanity's understanding of life and intelligence, however that is a distance that can only be measured in retrospect. The point I'm making is that these conversations have been going on for decades, centuries even, and we would do well to see ourselves not as singular figures in the current moment, but as characters in a larger tale. Today we ask questions about consciousness and the morality of keeping (eventually) sentient beings at our beck and call. The alchemists debated this too and their perspectives may be illuminating to us (even if only because the modern person would likely disagree).

In his book, Promethean Ambitions, Dr. William Newman investigates the myriad perspectives of the ancient and medieval scholars who took on these thorny questions. In particular to us here are the twin questions:

• Is the creation of artificial life (literally life made by art—or human skill) even possible? Is it possible to recreate perfectly what Nature does?
• If so, should we succeed in creating artificial life, is it human? And if so, is such a creature entitled to self-determination?

Most scholars denied that such a thing was possible, but many alchemists were sure it was and such a belief was deeply bound up with the alchemical quest to make gold (chrysopoeia). To this, the philosopher and scholar Ibn Sina famously wrote:

Quare sciant artifices alkimie species metallorum transmutare non posse.
Why, let the artificers of alchemy know that the transmutation of metals is not possible.
- Ibn Sina via William Newman, Promethean Ambitions, pg 37 (Translation mine).

Ibn Sina argued that art (i.e. human skill) could only imitate nature in the creation of gold because art was always based on something the artist perceives not on what actually is. To Sina there was something about gold that was beyond the reach of mankind to create. This however turned out to be wrong, but it took a few centuries to find out.

Yet this argument was repeated to refute the alchemical goal of creating artificial life. Alchemists long searched for the method of creating humans and various sub-human forms of life, including the homunculus (literally: tiny human) a sort of proto-human life form. The homunculus was supposed to be wise, knowing how to speak from birth, and possess great knowledge that the alchemist could exploit and later kill before it grew and attained full personhood. Scholars debated seriously the ethics of this dilemma. Was the creature, if it existed, a human being with a soul? If so, it was unethical to exploit, imprison, and kill it.

Sound familiar?

Of course, the medieval scholars held values quite different and frankly foreign to our own today, but that doesn't mean their discourse has no parallels nor that it's entirely different from our own.

Medieval Musings

Scholars of the Middle Ages understood life to exist on a three part scale where plants, animals, and humans each occupied different rungs on the ladder and so could be exploited by the beings above them on the ladder. To the medieval scholars, life was imbued with a tripartite soul. Thus plants, with their "vegetative soul" could grow and reproduce but not move about or think. Motion or animation was the property granted by the "animal soul", and rationality was due to the "rational soul". Only humans were imbued with the latter part and so were "a rung above" the other life within creation. Thus a homunculus, lacking a rational soul, was lacking in what it means to be human. This opinion comes to us via the medieval alchemist (known as pseudo-Thomas) by way of Newman when he writes:

How much simpler [the issue of classifying artificial life] was for pseudo-Thomas than it is for the President's Council on Bioethics. The absence of a rational soul imparted to the fetus by the Creator allowed the homunculus to be classified as subhuman and hence fit for research purposes.
- William Newman, Promethean Ambitions, pg 189

Now, obviously there is much to disagree with at the very foundation of all this, but that isn't the point. The point is that this historical context can be useful in our conversations today because, just like pseudo-Thomas and his contemporaries debated: if artificial life truly is different, there must be a reason why that difference exists. Pseudo-Thomas had a reason. Do we? And if we cannot find a reason, then we are on the side of the alchemists against whom pseudo-Thomas was writing who argued that mankind can do just as Nature can and create life through art alone.³

Reframing the Present

We've been grappling with these questions and seeking the same possibilities for as long as we've stared up at the stars and wondered at our place in this universe.

Today we've achieved what the alchemists dreamed of. We can make gold. However Nature, with her cruel sense of humor, made it prohibitively expensive to do so on any real scale. The alchemists had the same problem: the cost of the charcoal and starting materials alone made even the eventual success of making gold quite unprofitable.

And now we seem to be on a collision course with the second question of the alchemists and indeed many ancient and medieval philosophers: can we create artificial life and if so, what does that entail.

If we should fail at this, even if we make useful tools along the way, then we've but followed in the footsteps of the alchemists in their inspiring unsuccess. However, if we succeed then we might want to revisit their thoughts on this subject, leverage our collective memory, not because it is right, but because opening a broader dialogue with our collective humanity could very well illuminate answers to the oldest questions we have.

Something about hearing the phrase "Claude's Soul Document" got me thinking again about a problem I've long pondered. Software folks, like myself, have a long and proud history of taking words that exist and coopting them, manipulating the meaning of those words into feeble shadows of their former selfs. Tech people and tech companies do this on accident and on purpose, both because it can be useful to reduce a human concept to something simpler to quantify and because its easier to market and sell. Machine Learning, an academic term, becomes Artificial Intelligence and the word "Intelligence" is defined down in order to be achievable.

But before we get too far down the Current Events rabbit hole, let's take a step back.

What Trust Is

Personally, I love it when Computer Science research accidentally stumbles on human truths, like this gem from an IEEE paper in 1995:

[Trust] depends on the actual experience of users. Trust is hard to create but very easy to lose. Trust must be handled as a very precious good.

However, while the definition of Trust in Computer Science is metaphorically similar to that in human systems (and is indeed reliant on Human Trust) it isn't the same thing. Trust for a computer is a system which is verifiable with cryptography, it's a process by which one can be certain (or as certain as possible) that the server you're talking to is indeed who they say they are.

Consider a different example: When designing an application, it may be important to collect some information from a user (perhaps their name and email address). To do this, one might create a database table or a model class called User or Person. A Person may have a firstName and a lastName and an emailAddress, and that will be suitable for your purposes. But ask yourself: is that what a Person is? Is person-hood definable by its attributes like this?

In one particular example from my own project history, we needed to model how customers and their attorneys would interact with our system. For legacy reasons, the attorney data wasn't stored in the same structure or format as the customer data, and so when it came time to model the data, the team decided to create an abstract Person class, which was inherited by the Customer, but not by the Attorney. Hence, in that system (as we would often joke) Attorneys weren't People.¹

Yet as software becomes more and more the infrastructure of our modern world, and the hard-coded policy by which we make decisions about other people's lives, this nuance is important. It's entirely possible to live a human life with the name Null, but it's very difficult to do so in a world built on computers. Personhood is not definable by the criteria of software, not only because software defines objects by their attributes, but because software is written in words and words are a leaky abstraction over the nuanced realm of thought.

What Words Are

Words, at their core, are a communication protocol that allow two minds to exchange information. They're a particular form of communication, similar to body language or facial expressions, but with a complex and nuanced syntax that has to be learned by the communicating minds slowly over years and decades.

This makes words fundamentally distinct from a computerized communication protocol because while two computers might communicate by exchanging JSON messages, the knowledge of JSON itself was provided by the programmer and not learned by the computers doing the communicating.

Consider this common scenario:

You and your friend are discussing a contentious topic. For simplicity, let's say you're debating where to eat dinner. You suggest Indian Food, they dislike that option because it's too spicy and instead they suggest the Melt-Your-Face Wings place nearby. You're rightly confused because their stated reason for disliking your option seems to contradict their exact suggestion. Arguments erupt.

However, in this case, what has happened is that you both have discovered that you define the same words to mean different things. Spicy, to one of you, means capsaicin content, while to the other it means the intensity and complexity of the various spices in a dish. Same word, to different contextual meanings.

For a more impactful example of this debate in modern American culture, consider the meaning of the words Freedom, Liberty, or Equality.

High-Cohesion Discourse

Low-Cohesion Discourse

Thus there is some difference in the overlap of what a given word might mean at a given time. Two people may have a Highly-Cohesive definition of a word (that they share many of the same understandings) or a Low-Cohesive definition. This is because words ultimately are defined, not by a rigid protocol enforced from on-high, but by its users in real conversation and those definitions change over time.

Words As Compression Algorithm

[Old Entish] is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.
– Treebeard, The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers

Comedic aliens in sci-fi often communicate with stilted language or say things that sound just plain weird, yet rarely are the statements untrue. Instead they simply belie a lack of shared context. We don't specify everything with exactness in a conversation, instead we discuss only what is relevant and what has changed. No one greets a friend on the street by acknowledging that they still have their skin, because such a thing is required for the conversation to be occurring as it is. In this way, words are the result of a combined compression algorithm. You can't say everything that's on your mind (in my own experience, the brain moves much faster than words can manage), and so we have to strip away and compress our experience into a lossy format suitable for data exchange.

However, this means that language itself is lossy. It cannot communicate the full meaning of a thing. It's only suitable for communicating the difference in meanings between two human minds who have come to learn the same language in a similar time, place, and culture.

What is Expressible in Words

Ultimately, what a Person is cannot be defined by a software system, and neither can Trust, Intelligence, or even Spice Content. And even if it could be, those definitions rely on shared context. Words are human concepts with fundamentally fluid meanings based on fundamentally fluid understandings. I would argue that we don't really even know what Intelligence is, and so attempting to define it is like painting a mural of a landscape you've only seen in the dark.

Yet in software we need words to describe our creations, and so we co-opt words from everyday use and thus we have a User table and a Person class. We build computer systems based on Trust, and we create Artificial Intelligence. However we assume that these ideas (personhood, trust, or intelligence) are ultimately definable in words and that words can capture the immense and often conflicting nature of these concepts.

At last, let's return to the idea of Claude's Soul.

Souls Made of Words

I'll admit, the idea of a Soul.md is actually pretty funny to me, but it reveals a lack of understanding about the nature of how we can constrain our new and shiny AI agents as we give them more and more power over the world we've constructed.

A soul file presumes, by its very existence, that what makes a soul (or personality, worldview, whatever) is expressible in words because words are ultimately what gets written in text files. It's a fallacy to assume we understand even our own minds, let alone that we can construct language to communicate that lack of understanding to others. This is a fundamental flaw with using language to constrain behavior, and it's not really specific to AI. Like a lot of modern problems, they have ancient analogues. Consider the law.

Is it possible to construct laws which are impossible to adhere to in bad faith? It seems not. Laws are a behavioral code, written for humans by humans and laws are made of words. Ultra-literal readings of many laws yield horrible outcomes and so we often don't do that (until we suddenly do for political gain but that's a different issue)². Yet computers read everything with a hyper-literal lens and do not take into account the larger context of a situation or the depth and complexity of real life.

One of the primal issues with Large Language Models is built right into the very foundation of the technology: it depends on and produces language and language, in all its forms, is a simulacrum of true understanding.

I'm no stranger to depressive episodes, though thankfully mine are sparse and usually brief: sometimes a day or two, though on rare occasions perhaps a week or more. I'm thankful mine have never progressed into anything serious. That said, I'd like to discuss something that's become somewhat of a theme in my conversations lately about depression, and something I hope you, the reader, might find useful when combatting this Great and Terrible Beast yourself.

To begin, I'd like to draw a distinction between depression and melancholy. There's a beauty to melancholy¹ that there simply isn't with depression. One begets yearning, the other smothers everything in its path. I love melancholy, I really do, enough that sometimes I work to keep it going a little longer. Melancholy is a mourning wistfulness, the loss of something dearly loved, a cousin of grief and dour predilections.

Depression is a plastic bag, thrown over your head to choke off every breath of air until you succumb to its will. It's insidious, and it lies to you.

The Venomous Snake

Depression, however brief or fleeting, is the bedfellow of despair. They don't always arrive together, but they are never long apart. Both weave a web of thought that strangles fragile hope and sets to bury will and want beneath the mountain of excuse.

Despair works slowly, convincing—no, proving—to you that this is how the world is: that it's terrible, that it has always been terrible, and that it will always be terrible. Then Depression swoops in like a hero to stifle that pain with dullness.

Depression and Despair have all the rhetorical skill of Cicero: ethos, pathos, and lagos enough to destroy whatever justification you can weakly muster to your own defense. That's what makes Depression and Despair the monsters that they are. They pull the ultimate trick: not only to convince you of their lies, but to convince you that they—not hope—hold the truth about the world, that theirs is the only word you can trust, and that no amount of reason, logic, hope, or will can overcome their hold and free you from their grasp. They are fighters, brandishing their weapons of thought that cut you where it hurts the most.

And their trap is nearly perfect. Nearly.

In D&D a Fighter is extremely difficult to kill, but a Wizard is invincible if they're properly prepared. No swashbuckling swordsman will ever survive the onslaught of a Wizard's Tower properly fortified. Yet that invincibility requires time to set traps, lay wards, and summon reinforcements.

Gathering Reinforcements

I remember a time, about a year ago, when I was in the throws of a particularly bad depressive episode. Every day was the same: I was smothered, unmotivated, sad, dull. I had always felt this way. Weeks had passed since I'd felt anything but soul crushing despair or mind-numbing flatness.

It was right before bed.

Usually I keep a journal, but lately I hadn't kept it up. The depression was overwhelming. I had nothing to write about. Yet, I needed a win, any win. So I summoned the will to write a single sentence. Win complete. But then Despair told me to flip back a few pages, to read a few old entries, and to confirm my worst fears: that it had always been this way and therefore always would be.

That was its mistake, for in those prior pages lurked a trap that Past Me had unwittingly set. Not a page back, two days prior, it read: "Great day. Really great."

Cracks emerged in the edifice.

I blinked, confused. Had I written this? Was my memory failing me? How could I not remember just two days ago? Suddenly, I did remember. It had been a good day, a great day even! I flipped back further. Another, three days before that: great. Another: two days before that. One a night out, another: a dinner with family, a third: a truly excellent band practice.

How had I forgotten it all?

Stunned, I set the journal down. Memories of seeming-distant days flooded in and I saw the truth. It was as if I'd awoken from a sleep and now could see the nonsense of my dreams. It'd all been a lie, the perfect lie. Perfect because my depression knew exactly how to convince me, knew precisely how to ensure I'd never escape its grasp because it is me. It knows my strengths and weaknesses seemingly better than I do. Yet it had forgotten about my reinforcements—and nearly made me forget them too. But the cavalry had now been called and my past selves had arrived.

Thus it was the tide of battle turned.

Evidence of Prior Joy

I will not tell you that reading those prior journal entries "cured" my depression that day, nor has it ever in the times I've relied upon them since. One cannot vanquish such a beast in one blow. This is not a battle that can be won by your present self alone. However, we are not only our present self. We are the sums of all the people we have ever been and in our darkest hour we can lean on those prior selves for strength. Winning this battle, it takes time. It takes friends and it takes help—which comes in many forms.

Yet I will tell you that it helps. Every time, it helps. On good days and bad, I try to write something in that little book, to gather evidence of prior joy, because that is the best weapon I have found in my battle with this beast. I didn't start journalling years ago with this (or any) goal in mind and never did I imagine that journalling would do anything to help with depression, but it does, precisely because it breaks the illusion that we have perfect memories of anything, even of ourselves.

Such a thought is powerful, but even those are brittle in Depression's grasp. Nothing you say or do in that moment will do you any good, yet writing allows us to bring forth our past selves, through the Mists of Time, and let them speak, not in the words we imagine they had spoke, but in the words they wrote for themselves.

History as a subject is often viewed by students and the public at large as a domain without a use, a pedantic study of dates and names with some vague mission to remember the past—a memorial to ages past but neither a forward-looking or useful endeavor. The study of history produces teachers of history and nothing more. And while the study of history does not produce new widgets or novel computer advances, and nor does it deepen our understanding of materials science or physics.

The humanities, in which history and studies of language and culture are a part, are not there to improve our understanding of nature or develop technology, they exist to improve the minds (both cultural and individual) of the people we are.

History doesn't improve our world, it improves us. It gives us context for the world we live in and it helps us understand the reason why things are as they are and learn from the people before us.

History as Context

Imagine waking up every day with no memory of the day before, no idea who owned the house you slept in, no idea what country you're in, and no idea why everyone around you speaks the languages they do.

Photo Credit: Library of Congress

Living in such a world would be disorienting, confusing, non-sensical. Yet this is the world without history. The world without history just is. It isn't a work in progress, but a finished piece—one that lives and dies with you—and has no meaning beyond the present moment.

History doesn't let us predict the future, but it can be an enormous help in explaining the present. Current events are utterly indecipherable without the context of history and within that context, they feel less and less apart. Indeed our recent past of the Post-War Order is the oddity in history, and a real thing to be cherished and seen as something fleeting, fragile, and truly precious.

Yet without the context of history, we're blind to the reality that we live in a world truly set apart from everything that's come before and one that's deeply connected and familiar to the worlds of the past. That context is important because it gives us the vision to see the world that could be, both the paths of dark and of light that are set before us. It shows us who we are.

History as Memory

Living Memory is the collective memory of everyone alive in our society today. It is ever-changing and ever-fleeting. We remember the 2008 Financial Crisis quite well, but our memory of World War 2 is all but gone now. We read about it, sure, but our collective living memory of it has diminished and with that lapsing has gone all the memory of precisely why the world is ordered the way it is. This is not a value judgement, it is a statement of fact.

Photo Credit: DieBuche, CC BY-SA 3.0,

In a couple recent posts, I describe how I try to use writing by hand as a way to increase my understanding of myself and my own memory. This is a form of personal history, and I find it difficult to express how much doing so has helped me better understand myself and my own thoughts.

This is analogous to our collective history. Though it's important to remember that history is not the act of writing, but the act of looking back and analyzing what was written. We write so that we can remember. We cannot learn from our mistakes if we refuse to write them down, or worse, if we refuse to look back.

The context of history is terrible and it is beautiful. It is the greatest story ever told with myriad heroes and villans, tragedy and triumph, love and grief all endlessly shifting in and out of view. And it was made (and is being made) by people no different than ourselves. Most of them didn't have the luxury to place themselves within the broader historical narrative. We do. Let's not ignore so precious a gift.

Yesterday I stumbled on this quote from a blog post by JA Westenberg:

Michel de Montaigne arguably invented the essay in the 1570s, sitting in a tower in his French château, writing about whatever interested him: cannibals, thumbs, the education of children, how to talk to people who are dying. He called these writings essais, meaning "attempts" or "tries." The form was explicitly provisional. Montaigne was trying out ideas, seeing where they led, acknowledging uncertainty as a fundamental feature rather than a bug to be eliminated.

It's hard to convey the sense of both profound agreement and giddy joy I had reading that because, not only is the wider post about something I love (i.e. blogging), or because I learned something new about the history of writing (which is always fun), but because that quote describes something that I've been doing myself for the past two years and wanted an excuse to talk about!

What Writing Is

There's an old adage that says, "Writing is Thinking" and I've usually interpreted those words to mean that "writing helps you think", which is undoubtably true. However in recent years I've discovered an entirely new form of writing that I've taken to calling: musing, that I think takes this idea a step further, and it's precisely what Westenberg describes Montaigne doing in the 16^th century.

An example of the notebooks I use.

We have a lot of thoughts throughout the day, and yet we spend so little time indulging these idle curiosities. Writing, especially by hand, can be a great way to explore these ideas and to practice thinking. It's also really fun to do! Over time I started collecting these ideas into notebooks (one of which I almost always carry with me) in order to better organize these inherently random topics into a searchable system. Originally I scribbled on loose leaf pages or random legal pads (as I've mentioned before) and that became unruly very quickly.

Some of these musings are personal topics, most are not. Often they're just the exploration of a question I have. Here's an example:

Businesses keep offices cold because there's research saying that cooler temperatures help people think and stay focused. Given that's true, could the Little Ice Age have helped improve human cognition during the 17^th and 18^th centuries? If so, what does that mean?

I'm not sure, but it was something I thought about for a while and so I wrote it down. The entire musing, or essay as I guess it should be called, is less than a page, but was engaging and very fun to do. I've written short essays about dozens of topics over the years (including several that have been eventually published to this blog). It's a fun practice, and I encourage you to try it.

Explore your ideas honestly. Don't fear where your mind goes or the questions it will ask. These are personal, honest thoughts not social media posts. Writing like this is inherently introspective, it's a way to give your mind the space to awe and wonder

What Thinking Is

We often believe that thinking is a process which takes place entirely in the mind, but it's a process that is heavily influenced by the particulars of the body. Try thinking through a problem in a hot and smelly room or on a walk with a rock in your shoe.

However, the body can do more than hinder the thought process, it can catalyze it! This is what writing can be, a way to think through problems using your entire body.

Occasionally, I've sat down to write but without any particular topic in mind. So, I open my notebook and just start writing. Tons of my essays begin with something like, "I'm not sure what I'm thinking right now and I don't know what to write." From there, I let my thoughts move and course as they will and I just write down what comes to mind, stopping and starting as my thoughts shift and change and eventually I will find that something has come out of it. I might work through a tension or stress point, I could come to realize or discover something about a problem, or I could just get a few lackluster thoughts on a page. Not all thinking is productive but the mind is a muscle and it needs to be exercised to function properly. Sometimes just doing the workout is enough.

Thinking as a Skill

We usually think of cleverness or intelligence as an innate trait people have, and while that is certainly true in some regards, intelligence and wisdom are just as much a function of practice as of talent. To get good at solving puzzles, you have to practice solving puzzles. The mind is no different than a muscle in that regard. Thinking aloud on the page is one way to record and analyze your thought process and to practice the art of thinking itself.

As another example, I often revisit my prior writings and find many to be overly simplistic, uninspired, or just plain wrong. But that's good! It means I've learned something in the intervening time! In software there's an addage:

If you come back to old code and see nothing wrong with it, then you haven't learned anything since.

You are not a finished product, you're a process—always in motion—that evolves and changes over time. Your thinking can improve with practice as much as it can atrophy from inattention.

Think about thinking, write those thoughts down, then perhaps publish a few on a blog that you own. It's fun, and it can do wonders for the mind.

It took me by surprise to learn that this post was now a decade old:

Last week I decided to leave Spotify. I've been using the service for almost 2 years now, and overall I've really liked it... It's hard to explain why [I'm leaving], but I guess I feel apprehensive about Spotify being in control of how and where I listen to music in ways I haven't been before.

I remember the inciting incident so viscerally. I wanted to AirPlay a song to my TV, but that device wasn't "approved by Spotify". It's an MP3 and I couldn't jam out to it because of the policies of some company. I was so angry, so I left. Without a viable alternative, I started buying albums in the iTunes Store like it was 2007 all over again.

It's been ten years now, and I do not regret that choice for a minute.

Buying Music in 2025

There is a distinct freedom that comes with owning your own music library. The knowledge that your music isn't going to go away on you someday when you stop paying for access is nice, but even better is the feeling that you're free from the capricious whims of any corporate policy change. If Apple, or whomever, decides to be a jerk, you can take your ball and go home. Your library is yours and can be ported easily to any other app or service you want.

So much good music. So many local bands.

Of course there's the rather sizable downside to all of this, which is that music today is largely dominated by platforms like Spotify, etc.. When you buy music in 2025, you're going against the grain. Apple Music has seemingly forgot that people have personal libraries and links exclusively to Apple Music when it is searching for tracks and the iTunes Store is getting quite long in the teeth. Recently, albums have started appearing twice in my library at purchase-time and that mess has to be manually cleaned up.

Still, iTunes Match continues on and so my laptop and my phone continue to be in sync for only $24/yr. If this ever went away, I could always sync manually—but in reality I'd probably just switch to using Plex for music.

Buying your music is certainly a dying art in 2025, but for now at least, the apps and stores still exist and, largely, work just fine.

Oh, and nobody tell Apple that iTunes Match hasn't been adjusted for inflation, like ever.

Unspoken Advantages (and a few Disadvantages)

When I started curating my music again in 2015, I had a few random singles (from those old Starbucks song cards) and a few random anime soundtrack albums I'd gotten from somewhere, back in the day. But, since my musical tastes had changed drastically, I was basically starting from scratch. For the same price as Spotify, I was able to get one album per month until I built up a sizable library—then my investment started to pay off. I'd go months without buying an album, and I had the freedom to play them anywhere. It was glorious.

It was around 2017 that I started getting into listening to albums as standalone works, rather than listening to custom playlists of singles. From there it was a straight shot into the world of collecting vinyl records, a hobby I've really grown to love. Buying and listening to whole albums also really put me in tune with the entire feeling of a band. Sure, not all of the songs on an album are bangers, but as Colin Meloy of the Decemberists put it:

[For me, an] album was not just an analog to a short story collection, it was sometimes a novel — each song a different chapter, a different panel in the quilt.

I took artists at their word; the order of an album was as intentional as the lyrics inside the songs. A thread was there to follow; clues to unlock. Even if there was no literal connection between the songs, there was a pattern and a rhythm to the thing.

It's one, long song. That realization changed how I conceive of recorded music.

The main advantages, beyond the freedom I've already mentioned are primarily for people who are really into music and the music ecosystem. Buying music continues to be the best way for artists to make money off of their art. Artists continue to receive 70% of an album's sale price on iTunes compared with the $0.005/stream rate that Spotify charges. As well, maintaining your own music library is the easiest way (even today) to follow indie or local bands who may not have fronted the costs to put themselves on the big platforms.

Buy music on Bandcamp or download it from Soundcloud, stick it in the Music app, and you're off! No switching between a hundred apps, no platform lock in. Just music. It also helps immensely when you're recording your own music (as I do, frequently for my band).

That said, there are some distinct disadvantages to buying music. You miss out on the recommendation features and smart playlists (Genius does still exist but it does and has always sucked). Also, it's basically impossible to share playlists with others or import them for your own use.

You can still burn a CD though, if that's your thing.

Some Other Musical Thoughts

Recently I've gotten back into listening to internet radio. I go in an out with this particular interest, but one thing that's made this particular venture back into the depths much more enjoyable is the app Triode by Iconfactory. Music.app retains its predecessor iTunes' ability to stream internet radio (as well as burn the aforementioned CDs) but the integration was always half-assed. Triode is just so much better.

Even now, in 2025, I can't see myself switching away from this world any time soon. Buying music is a pain and it's a fading feature, but it's still the best way to actually own and control the music you listen to, and it's the best way to support the artists you love.

Like so many technologies of the early web that we've now nearly lost or forgotten, it's flaws are real. Like RSS and Podcasting, it takes a long time to curate and gather the blogs, shows, and music you want to enjoy and there's a lot of dependence on informal recommendation networks like those from friends or word-of-mouth via the messy world of meatspace (remember that term?). It's a very human, not algorithmic world, and I love it.

Mathematics and Science are inextricably linked. As the renowned twentieth-century physicist Eugene Wigner wrote, mathematics is "unreasonably successful" in the natural sciences. By this he meant that it seems our entire world is seemingly beholden to the workings of mathematical laws.

Our most fundamental theories are complex systems of dense mathematical formulations that predict the behavior of the world around us so precisely that we’re able to peer into the earliest moments, right after the Big Bang itself and understand the workings of even the most extreme bending of space and time around black holes. Students of physics and the related sciences study these formulations and the mathematics they rely on for years, relentlessly working to gain mastery—and if they’re lucky—some intuition for the behaviors of complex, dynamical systems.

Yet, perhaps this relationship between math and science goes even deeper. Perhaps modern science and the scientific method itself do more than rely on mathematics. Perhaps—in no metaphorical sense—they are mathematics made manifest.

The Magic of Curves on the Plane

When Isaac Newton discovered Calculus alongside Gottfried Leibniz in the late seventeenth century, they arguably ushered in the modern world. However on a technical level, what the study of calculus enabled was the ability for mathematics, as a discipline, to rigorously study change. Without wishing to dig up uncomfortable memories of math class, I will attempt to summarize in one sentence the purpose of the entire field of differential calculus. Simply put, rather than like the operations of arithmetic that describe what happens to a quantity when one combines or dissects it, a new kind of operation—the derivative—enables mathematicians to study how, and how quickly, a quantity changes over time (like the velocity of a ball rolling down a slope) or over space (like how weather patterns vary by region).

Now, even that one sentence was a lot to take in, so if you take nothing else from this section, let it be this: a derivative measures the rate of change. Often times however, a system is complex and can change in multiple ways at once. Consider a system far more complex than a ball on a hill: the human body. No matter how much we as a society might wish it to be true, healthy living is not a simple function of one variable. There are lots of factors that can affect a person’s health and each does so in a different way. Exercise is good for you, but so is maintaining a good diet and not smoking. A myriad of factors, both known and unknown, affect overall health—including sheer dumb luck. But how are we to make sense of this tangled knot of cause and effect?

Enter, the modern scientific method and the randomized controlled clinical trial.

Empirical Meets Theoretical

Researchers looking to tease apart the effects of a new diet plan on patient’s overall health could choose to assemble a group of people who all share the same socioeconomic background, are around the same age, the same height and weight, and who exercise around the same amount of time every week. Since these factors are held in common, they can be assumed to affect all of the participants equally and thus factors like height, weight, wealth, and exercise are held constant or controlled for during the time of the experiment. The researchers will then divide the group in two, giving one half the novel diet plan and the other a more traditional and well researched plan to act as a control. Thus, the only factor which is free to vary between the groups, their diet, is finally made available to study.

In effect, this method allows the researchers to—in principle—assume all other factors remain constant and our complex system of multiple variables has been simplified into a simple function of one. Measuring the ensuing rate of change is then an empirical derivative, allowing us to ascertain the nature of the change we’ve just caused.

This example is more than analogous to mathematics. Advanced students of mathematics study increasingly complex systems and to do so must learn to take something called a partial derivative—which sadly is not any simpler, despite how it may sound. These systems combine several interdependent variables and thus our math students employ the same process as our researchers above.

To take a partial derivative, one must arrange the given system of equations in such a way as to tease apart the influence of each variable and then assume that each can be held constant at the point under consideration with respect to the variable in question. Using different tools the mathematician performs the exact same process as our heath researchers. Where mathematicians deal with systems of abstract equations, our public health scientists do the same with the messy particulars of real life.

None of this is to suggest that economists, public health researchers, and other participants in the empirical sciences do not also use the mathematical techniques of calculus and derivatives in conjunction with their work—of course they do, and in spades. Instead, the point here is to examine how the theoretical methods of advanced math and the practical techniques of scientists today are both really one and the same. The technique of performing a randomized clinical trial works precisely because it is fundamentally an implementation of mathematical theory, a real-world implementation of the work of mathematics. Randomized controlled clinical trial are the act of taking a partial derivative in tangible form and in that way they are the physical incantation of those same discoveries made by Newton and Leibniz all those centuries ago.

In 1619, Daniel Sennert crouched over a low furnace in his cloistered laboratory at the University of Wittenberg. The air was still and stifling. Though the room was packed, no one said a word. Instead, the several dozen learned men who had crammed themselves into the small space stared at a little white crucible as Sennert removed it from the flames. He tipped out the contents and a delicate stream of molten silver ran from the crucible to collect in an earthenware bowl.

Gasps filled the air. Such a thing wasn't supposed to be possible. Chills ran down the spine of every man in that room, even Sennert himself. For he knew, in that moment, the world had changed forever.¹

The State of Sennert's Science

Photo credit: Google Books

In the days before Newton, Boyle, Kepler, and others remade the process of scientific inquiry, humanity's understanding of nature and our scientific methods were markedly different. The writings of Aristotle formed the foundations of natural knowledge and the workings of matter were explained by the qualities imparted by abstract Forms, rather than the formulation and arrangement of physical atoms.

From our vantage now, it might seem strange, but the Aristotelean scholars of the time were quite comfortable with their theory's ability to explain the natural world. While their understanding of nature was changing over time (as does ours), it had stood for centuries and they had little empirical evidence that anything was terribly awry.

That is, until the discovery of the mineral acids.

Nitric, hydrochloric, and sulfuric acid were discovered gradually during the middle ages with the first (known as aqua fortis) discovered around 1300 C.E.

Before the use and widespread adoption of the mineral acids in scientific inquiry, it was understood that all materials underwent the same general process: what Aristotle called Corruption and Generation.

Broadly speaking, nature itself generated all primary materials from the four Aristotelean Elements (sometimes five) and then either Nature (or God) imparted that matter with Forms, which determined the perceivable qualities of the matter. Trees were generated (grew) from the earth, then died or were cut down in the process of corruption that resulted in wood, corrupted further to rot and earth, or ash and smoke (depending on the method). The specifics aren't important here. What is important is that Scholastics understood this to be a one-way process. Nature could (re)generate matter from the elements, but after that it was all downhill. Matter underwent corruption after corruption until finally resulting in the four base elements where nature could begin her (re)generation process anew. Nothing humans could do would change that. As Aristotle said, water, once added to wine, cannot be removed again without destroying the wine.¹

Then, Everything Changed

The mineral acids had been used for centuries in various places, but rarely entered the domain of philosophical debate because of a distinctly medieval distain for "practicals" in the development of physical theory. This isn't so much a distaste for experimentation, as is often claimed, but a dislike of certain professions (like that of the tanners or chymists) who followed recipes instead of pursuing a connection to more philosophical ideas. Chymists, for example, were not thought of as practicing rigorous academic study. Their work wasn't connected to any pedigreed Aristotelean foundation, and so they were mere "empirics". Their study was without academic merit.

However in 1619, Daniel Sennert, a professor of medicine and an unusually practiced chymist, discovered a curious phenomenon. Sennert was investigating whether dissolving silver in aqua fortis resulted in a truly homogenous mixture (what Scholastics called a mixt). A true mixt would mean that the silver was irrecoverable because a genuine corruption had taken place.

When Sennert pours his liquid through a fine filter paper, he sees no particulates of silver— evidence of a true mixt.

He then adds salt of tartar (potassium carbonate) to his mixture and a white precipitate emerges. He filters and washes this new material and then puts it in a crucible and heats it. Eventually, what emerges is pure, molten silver. Sennert has performed a genuine corruption and then retrieved his starting materials, something which should not have been possible.

Sennert's experiment was notable for two reasons. First, the development of "corpuscular" or what we could call "atomic" theory is notable because it was considered to go against the commonly understood teachings of Aristotle and second because, as William Newman wrote:

In doing [this experiment], [Sennert] had simultaneously shown the inadequacy of the current scholastic theories of mixture while also providing a convincing demonstration of the reality of semipermanent atoms that experience no substantial modification.²

While Sennert himself was able to shoehorn enough traditional theory into the Scholastic framework to explain his results, this same experiment would later be used by Robert Boyle in his book The Skeptical Chymist to attack the foundations of Aristotelean matter theory and help to begin the reformation of chemical science into what we know today.

Chemical Telescopes Today

The story of Daniel Sennert is the story of science. Ages had come and gone where Aristotle's theory (with numerous additions and changes) had come to dominate Europe’s intellectual understanding of the world. The theory explained much about the world and several tweaks, additions, and modifications existed to fill the gaps where the base theory fell short.

It wasn't until a new technology came along, a new method of looking at the world and investigating its workings, that the old theories began to crumble. Like Galileo and his astronomical telescope, the mineral acids were a chemical telescope that allowed European scholars to probe nature in new ways and find new evidence that didn't fit their prior understanding. Then they had to come up with new theories to explain it all.

Today we may be in a somewhat analogous place, albeit with far better theories. We can explain nearly every classical physical phenomenon we encounter and we have supremely accurate theories for the behavior of even the most minute particles in all the universe. However there are still many gaps, places where our theories break down or contradict each other and can therefore have no explanatory power.

We've tried to solve this problem with additional theory development, however so long as contradictory experimental evidence is scant we will find ourselves akin to the scholastics of Sennert's time: philosophizing and debating increasingly complex theories that can be tuned any number of ways. The unobservable dimensions, fields, or forces of today are more akin to the abstract Forms of Scholastic thought than we may like to admit.

The Pendulum Swings

To paraphrase Dr. Asaf Karagila, science is primarily a social activity done by scientists.4 And that social activity has, for lack of a better term, fads. In the long course of science, there have been numerous swings back and forth between a focus on experimentalism and theory development. Theory development has seemingly always held the more prestigious position in the sciences, but it's experimentation that truly drives progress.

It was the failure of the Michelson–Morley experiment that inspired Lorentz and Einstein to remake relativity. It was the failure of classical theory to explain black-body spectra that inspired Max Plank to discover the foundations of quantum theory. And it was the failure of Aristotle's Generation and Corruption to explain Sennert's recovery of silver that helped Sennert and later Boyle and Lavoisier to reform chymistry into modern Chemistry. In each of these cases it was the discovery of contradictory, not complementary, evidence that spurred the greatest periods of theory development.

From all of this—astronomical or chemical telescopes alike—it seems that the wise words of History tell us that when our science gets stuck, it's best to look away from the blackboard and instead ask the Universe some hard questions.

This post has been a long time coming, but it's finally here now.

Where did Pine.blog Go?

Pine.blog has been officially deprecated and deactivated. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about this deprecation please send an email to support@skyrocket.software.

Can I Get My Data?

I believe that all active users were given appropriate notice and time to remove their data, but if you feel the need to contact me about your data (i.e. your feed subscriptions) please get in touch.

It's Been Fun

Pine.blog was developed in 2017 as a side project and continued to receive regular updates and even a native app (with a planned macOS app) in 2019. However, over time the situation with Pine.blog never improved to the point of achieving profitability or sustainability with its increasingly complex development. As well, over time my desire to build/maintain and the outlook for social media apps in general diminished and I didn't feel the fire burning in my heart to work on it any longer.

The app had at one point a decent userbase, and one that, if the fire still burned bright, perhaps I would have continued to develop for, however that was not the case.

I met a number of amazing people building this app and learned a ton about how the open web works both technically and socially.

So long Pine.blog, it was fun while it lasted.

For those of you out there who still use RSS, and in particular NetNewsWire, I've put together a workflow in Automator that can take the currently selected article and generate an audio file of the spoken text.

I never will wrap my head around AppleScript's peculiar syntax, but regardless I've made the workflow file available for download below.

I typically use this with Overcast which allows me to upload files to listen on the go.

Like most people, I want to read more articles than I actually do and this is little script will hopefully help with that.

It might take a while to complete, based on the length of the article, and it saves the final audio file to your desktop.

(warning you do need FFMpeg installed)

⬇️ Download Here