- 2026 CE
- Current year.
Week 8
I did it. I archived Notes and merged it with the markdown notes. I am moving my daily notes to this one long markdown file.
The main reason is that I can easily inject this as my personal context when I talk to LLMs. Itās a hassle when notes are scattered across the UI snippets and tiny markdown files.
Each file will be annual. Daily file is too tiny. Weekly might be cool. But still, 50 and more files a year takes some listing logics. I donāt want to use a collection. I can manually handle files as long as I keep it yearly.
The point is keeping the context in fewer files, not weekly project management. I can do that in Notion. This is where I just spill out and later ask machines to take a look. Itās for artificial consciousness.
u56w09e22:28
Iām using Unix year. Iāve been thinking about this for a long time. 1970 is the epoch, but itās the year zero, not year one. This is the mathematically correct way. This year is 2026 CE, which is Unix year 56. Reasons are:
- CE comes from a particular religion
- Could keep it neutral and technical
- Unix provides a good epoch
- 2 digits are better than 4
- Conversion is trivial
Itās my personal convention. So Iām prioritising my preference over compatibility. This is possible because I decided to make this place my own.
Week calendar follows. There is already a widely accepted ISO standard for it. I prefer weeks over months because:
- Months are agricultural and maritime reflecting seasons
- 30 days are not granular enough for project cadence
- Society already works based on the 7-day cadence There is a well-established custom for it
Week numbers are going to be the level 1 headings.
Days in the week:
- A: Monday
- B: Tuesday
- C: Wednesday
- D: Thursday
- E: Friday
- F: Saturday
- G: Sunday
And I always preferred 16:30 over 4:30 PM
Putting it all together. Itās u56w09e22:28 now.
The last hour
Itās the last hour of Week 8.
Iāve migrated most of my old notes into these annual logs. I wanted to do this when I was just back. But I did not have the energy. This is the time. I feel it.
Week 9
I translated the original texts and fixed grammar. Apparently, I make a lot of typos. Now that itās translated into English, I want to give my past works a good read someday.
I had to cut out good chunks of bullet lists. They donāt really make sense once time has passed. And itās difficult to pull off prose later.
I should write down prose when I have an idea. Thatās the only way it survives time. I should process each log annually as well.
Each year:
- Summarise yearly activity on top
- Scan body for typos and errors
- Update navigation
The objective
My vision is not my solutions. I have been confusing myself with the two. Vision creates problems. Or, rather, problems are different perspectives observing the same vision. Itās how we feel the vision not being the reality. Only then, there can be solutions that approach the problems.
Instead, Iāve been putting up my vision as potential solutions. Anyone, even myself, would have been confused by such transposition.
Vision
My vision is society as a form of life. I always saw society as a living entity in its infancy. I could depict what it looks like in its maturity. But that would be not much more than a science fiction. People speculated what progress would look like. Progress surely happened but in ways people never expected. The world is affluent now, but affluence looks different across the globe. I canāt predict the future precisely. But I know that cybernetic humanity is possible. We have everything we need to build organic social systems.
Problem
Then whatās the real problem people experience when society hasnāt fulfilled its potentials? Itās sustainable growth. In other words, itās the eternal tension between flexibility and stability. Motion and structure compete. Life has been evolving through the systems that consolidate the two. People want change, but worry something might break.
And thereās also the alignment challenge between the systemāsociety and subsystemsāconsciousness. Inside, people feel that something is missing in their life. Itās because they donāt see things to synthesise in their minds, and higher consciousness remains dormant when thereās nothing to connect. They would talk about ālack of motivationā. So they need something in their lives to synthesise.
But also, they worry their society might not pay off their pursuits calling them āhobbiesā. Consciousness is costly inside and hobbies are costly outside. If thereās no growing feedback cycles or a generative order, their energy simply scatters into the gaping void of night sky when they talk about the āstupid thingsā they tried.
Solution
And plays are the solution Iām holding in my hand. What do plays really enable? Most importantly, they test many different social systems across time. The value is in the information such iterations generate.
Currently, social interaction relies on either tradition or contingency. One is stable in long-term but monolithic, the other is generative but chaotic.
Plays are creative but also structured. Participants can experience and make decisions. Their scripts align the mind and the world by drawing a clear line between them. Distinction makes distance, but also clarifies that the plays are the artificial bridge. This way, people are not anxious anymore from the cognitive dissonance. Mind canāt be the world, vice versa. But they certainly can be bridged. Thatās how plays consolidate flexibility and stability of social interactions. Plays can shape reality because they are ephemeral and illusory
Week 10
The distinction between vision and solution resembles what designers call Double Diamond. The first diamond represents the high-level, conceptual research. And the second one stands for tangible outcome. This brilliant design of design process easily evokes double-loop learning and the functional relation of strategy and tactics.
- Discover: divergent inquiry
- Define: convergent conclusion
- Develop: divergent ideation
- Deliver: convergent impact
Facing life and work, I started from a simple question. āWhat is most significant in life?ā I reckoned itās society. The human environment mostly decides what happens in our lives and how we are going to receive it. The most significant work we can do is not to win it or resist it but to shape it. This is my first diamond.
Of course, this first diamond is highly conceptual and doesnāt really solve a problem on its own. My inquiry is even more comprehensive and philosophical than a typical design challenge. Thatās where confusion begins. When I ask myself āWhatās in it for the people?ā, itās difficult to answer. If I say something like āgrowthā, am I supposed to be doing growth coaching stuff? Not really, my work is precisely in social systems.
Nonetheless, the first diamond enables the second one. It starts from the lack of progress, lack of autonomy, lack of stability, the unease, angst. According to the Double Diamond framework, this is where I should engage the divergent ideation to solve this problem. I am ready to create and serve anything they need for it. And I can be my first audience.
Week 11
People can change society. That is the key transition, the foundation of my work. People usually feel like they have to endure or evade society. They might win it or ignore it, but never create it. And I say people do have power over their social reality. My work is to build a coherent and convenient framework that makes this social control evident and accessible.
Iāve been trying to articulate this simple value proposition and it was impossible to get back to this fundamental truth by myself. Then, in an exploratory conversation, Iāve received a feedback that my focus seems to be playing with and taking conscious control of society deliberately and proactively. I mean, duh.
The rest of my ideas revolve around this core as to why and how. Why social systems? Because society decides too much for us. How social systems? Plays and projects. Have them temporary, experimental and ludic. They are supposed to be interesting, fun. And eventually, people can shape what the future society looks like.
āSocial systems studioā already implies that we can directly experiment with society the creative and artisanal way. At the dawn of this year, I reassured myself that my work lies in the direct design of social systems. Thereās no mistake in there.
Now on, my strategy would be core concept, the people who need it, and little things I create for them. Keep writing, start talking to people and be ready to create something awesome.
Ego death
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
ā Mahatma Gandhi
What does iternity answer to? Iām pretty sure there is a precise angle that led me to this conclusion. But itās also very much of a panacea. Itās the answer that silences all questions. It allows ego death.
The feeling of questions and tensions haunt my mind like residue of memory. I assume that is the work of my ego. In the morning, when clarity sets in, I see the light where those problems burn away. Is that iternity? Perhaps thatās simply how I call it.
Eternal recurrence
Die ewige Wiederkunft des Gleichen
Nietzsche talked about the eternal recurrence of the same. But how can cycles that are exactly the same prove their own sameness? Or difference? They require an iterative memory in or out.
If the memory is inside, every iteration is different. If the memory is outside, the observer is different from the recurrence. So eternal recurrence canāt be really the same.
That must be why Deleuze talked about Difference and Repetition. An iteration must include the information from the last cycle.
Week 12
Chat is not magic. The first version of the book from last week is not satisfying. But the direction is right. Itās meaningful to coin a word for my ontology and start a vision of the future from it. And itās meaningful to have a foundational text for my future work.
I learnt that I canāt make Chat spit a book. I need to write it myself. But I can keep it messy and free, write a messy, low resolution version of it. Then I can let machines iron it for me. Iām using LLMs to refine my crude writing, not to fill it.
Persona AI app idea
I was thinking that I should make Claude play myself. Then an idea struck me. If I can talk to my clone, others can too. Wouldnāt creator supporters want to talk to the creator?
Creators could distribute their AI personae. They can accumulate notes to create an organic persona. Unlike a character card, a persona is alive, long-running and semi-fictional. Typical AI apps prohibit character cards for real people because users abuse. Only creators themselves have the rights. It reflects the reality the creator creates. Daily entries update the persona. The app can create questions for the creator to effectively expand their persona.
Itās different from a chatbot. An AI persona is a transient mask for social interaction, not an independent content generator.
Users can chat with the persona in parasociality. The user must be informed that the clone is a clone, not the real creator. And the creator still has access to the chat because the user is talking to them anyway. The user may on may not have secret chat. The creator has control about how their persona represents themselves.
This idea uses AI to reproduce social interaction, answering the opportunity for social AI app Seth wrote about. In terms of ludic social systems, creators write plays that machines play for them. The persona data and followers will be a major differentiator to other AI and social apps.
Creators can monetise the support from their fans. The app can absorb social media with an AI-native content studio. Or, it can generate for creators to post on other platforms.
A bookend
It will take longer than expected (as usual) to finish the book. I know I can work on it step by step. But still, every word I choose feels like a trap. There is much doubt and little conviction.
I can give it as much time as needed. Itās not critical for my mission. But its potential is profound in my mind. I have a great theme, iternity and a flow.
- Lifeās telos
- Power and control
- Sex, death and consciousness
- Social systems
- Democracy
- Autonomy
- Posthuman cybernetics
- Machine intelligence
- The ludic society
Reframe life as iterations reaching for eternity. Describe how society emerges from self-organising patterns. Project the future society as a series of plays where people freely experiment with social configurations.
Someday.
Topics and logs
Do I need to organise my ideas somehow in topics? To use them for the book later? Not really. The whole point of having yearly logs was to not worry about organisation when I am writing things down. When I come up with a new or recurring idea, I can simply capture it here and later process it with an LLM.
The only difference from the older notes is that Iām going to write my ideas down in paragraphs rather than bullet points. Bullets work when the context is clear. They lose some weight for the sake of brevity. But when I am freely writing in the general context, bullet notes end up unrecognisable.
I had to archive massive amount of notes because they were incomprehensible after years. LLMs might use them but reading them with my own eyes goes nowhere.
I have ideas sparkling on top of my head every day. If I try to put them in posts and put it somewhere, Iām basically tricking myself into writerās labour Iām not good at. Instead, I can simply jot them down here concisely but in elegant prose.
Sex, death and consciousness
Outlining the table of contents for the book, I reckoned that I didnāt write down one of the most fascinating ideas from my study. Itās about how life, the life itself, speed up progress with new mechanisms like sex, death or consciousness.
They are interesting because they also come with shortcomings, especially for the individual entities. Sexual reproduction shuffles genes and increases diversity every generation but it also introduces loneliness and extra work for mating. Programmed death controls cancer, enables massive genetic information storage and paces generational progress in conjunction with sex. But the telomeres and linear DNA also result in, well, death. Higher consciousness makes your brain random access information networks in and out of your body. Itās how society can be. But it hallucinates when it doesnāt feel like it.
The tradeoffs later extend to the dire situation in post-plague Europe that enabled the Age of Discovery and eventually modernisation. Every cloud has a silver lining. Extreme poverty made Calvinists come up with strict frugality and picky reinvestment. And they drafted the first capitalist systems.
The moral of the story is that the ultimate virtue changes over time and that we cannot make real progress when we hold our current values too tightly. Rigid identity corrupts. The only telos of life is to explore and to experiment what can be.
Dramatis personAI
A persona is a strategic mask of identity in public, the public image of oneās personality, the social role that one adopts, or simply a fictional character. It is also considered āan intermediary between the individual and the institution.ā
Plays start with a section called dramatis personƦ or the persons in the play. And this AI persona idea is rising as the foundation of the ludic social systems.
The main appeal is pseudo-interaction with creators. Followers can have personalised conversations with the persona. The creator can introduce a bit more in-depth personality rather than the superficial images and shows.
But there is something more to it. Itās more than a scalable entertainment. The personae could be the new engine for the social interaction.
First, it can enable autonomy because anyone can reflect on themselves by talking to their own persona. This will provide a much clearer mirror especially when the user lacks healthy self-awareness.
Second, it can foster social networking because people can talk to any public persona, not just the famous creators. Algorithms can also suggest whom to talk to.
Third, this could extend to something iternal because there is this gap between a persona and its person.
It feels different to projects and plays Iāve been thinking about. They are more like solid plans, sessions. Having LLMs in between is both empowering and overwhelming. But that instability is perhaps where it can finally begin. As long as personae help people grow, they are doing the job. The point is people, society, not my silly design ideas.
Week 13
For years, Iāve been looking for a better way to weave society. Theories, conditions, mechanisms. I dived into questions. What moves people? What aligns individuals and society? What would enable self-organising society? The only comprehensible answer was the very nature of life. Society had to be iterative. That is how I came up with plays as ludic social systems.
Caring society so much, both my ideas for the use of AI came from people. First, AI that acts like people. Second, AI that represents real people. Either way, it means a synthesis of human intelligence and machine intelligence, posthuman cybernetics. That is where I am going with this.
Yet I donāt see how the persona ideas seamlessly integrate to the plays idea. I was always thinking about real people in real activities and experience. How could talking to an LLM lead to some real experience? There are existing ideas like Delphi. But they are mostly about work and knowledge.
At the same time, I canāt deny the profound potential behind it. AI is growing rapidly in its infancy. But itās mostly for work and knowledge, not social interactions. The world has a lot more people than Claude. And LLMs do affect the human psyche. After all, society is storytelling. Seth called for AI that connects people in The next generation of AI businesses.
Organisations are decisions
Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.
ā Niklas Luhmann
Talcott Parsons wrote The Social System. And Niklas Luhmann, one of Parsonsā disciples, has written Social Systems.
The pluralisation is profound. Luhmann thought society includes many subsystems like economy, law and art. He categorised them into three: interactions, organisations and society. Interactions are the talks. Organisations are the decisions. Society is the sum.
I am pluralising it further. Plays are small, temporary decisions soon to be expired. The reason is simple. People canāt prosper or old decisions when reality changes by day.
Week 14
Actions canāt be as elaborate as thoughts. Actionable ideas are a subset of ideas. They must be simple. Actions come with their own complexity anyway.
There is no synthesis of the personae and the plays. It is what it is. Even if there is one, I canāt start from there. The persona idea is worth working on. It may grow into plays, maybe not.
Live in the future, then build whatās missing.
The more important vision is what life looks like in ludic social systems. I must live it to build whatās in it.
Italic and OCR
Homo Ludens is considered public domain. So I wanted to keep it in markdown. And now I see that itās extremely difficult to OCR books accurately. Tesseract is too old to get the glyphs right. Even the latest, transformer-based models canāt mark whatās italic. Agents spend an hour processing the scan and just crash.
Play and society
The initial part of Homo Ludens instantly proves why itās one of the classics. The author skillfully shears the lesser convictions around play and promotes it to something beyond. Apparently, play precedes culture and humanity. It exists throughout the history of life.
The elaborate profile of āplayā aligns with my inspirations with striking similarity.
- Play is world-creation.
- Play is significant.
- Play is aesthetic.
- Play is freedom.
- Play is order.
One interesting note is that āplay is irrationalā. It makes me think about irrational numbers and what they represent. Could it be an analogy for the progress of humanity and the future society? Natural numbers count what exists for hunter-gatherers. Integers count polarity and manage loss for agrarians. Rational numbers count proportion to optimise for capitalists. Real numbers, with irrational numbers, count continuity, smooth variation and fuzzy boundaries. For whom?
What I bring to play is social systems, machine intelligence and my will to synthesise them. The author clarifies that play is an extra activity, so it should be leisure in the āfree timeā and that itās only necessary when recreation is. This is precisely the time both are true. People would keep playing as long as itās sustainable. Can I turn this into a comprehensive system? How can play sustain itself in growing feedback cycles? Are we still preliminary to this? Whatever the answer is, it starts from small things.
Symbolic world and society
Play is many things in Homo Ludens. The most distinctive aspect is the interaction between symbolic layer and the physical layer of the world.
Thus in giving expression to life man creates a second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.
Other formal characteristics of play are rather variable depending on how much dedicated it is. But this notion of vertical integration draws a fine line for what play is.
But in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever else play is, it is not matter.
This notion of mind is analogous to how the genetic material shapes the body, then the consequence of the body shapes genetics. Genes are not just a part of the body. They are pieces of information, a body of chemical knowledge. Thatās why biology handles them separately as āgenotypeā and āphenotypeā.
Likewise, play lives in the nervous system. Mind is not just a function of body. The mind dictates how the body of the animal moves, then the experience of the body loops back to the mind. This is why play seems to be disinterested in matter but also not the entirety of mind.
Play is precisely the significant experience we create ourselves to align the mind and the body or gain from misalignment.
The worst things happened when people confused the symbolic reality with the physical reality. They are separate but tied to each other. When zealots take the holy (but old) text literally, they become murderers. When capitalists install the money game as the supreme rule of the universe, people suffer. The ethics of play is to acknowledge the gap between the two worlds.
Now we have a clear view of āLudensā. But there is one more important distinction we need to make for the āHomoā part. Human is an animal species, albeit a social one. The peculiar sociality of humanity goes well beyond coordination with few others around us. E. O. Wilson, after all his study of eusocial animals, states that humanity also have eusociality but with a twist. Unlike bees, ants or naked molerats, human beings practice eusociality divided between society and individuality. And this confusing concept still makes people question if we are even eusocial.
For play, this distinction means that human play is also divided into two: of the animal species and society. Itās interesting to see how the author senses the gap but puts it subtly:
Since our theme is the relation of play to culture we need not enter into all the possible forms of play but can restrict ourselves to its social manifestations. These we might call the higher forms of play. They are generally much easier to describe than the more primitive play of infants and young animals, because they are more distinct and articulate in form and their features more various and conspicuous, whereas in interpreting primitive play we immediately come up against that irreducible quality of pure playfulness which is not, in our opinion, amenable to further analysis. We shall have to speak of contests and races, of performances and exhibitions, of dancing and music, pageants, masquerades and tournaments. Some of the characteristics we shall enumerate are proper to play in general, others to social play in particular.
Though the distinction is not as poignant as it could be. I reckon this gap is both the culprit of some confusions in the authorās thoughts and a foundation for ludic social systems. The author laments the loss of play in the modernising society. But the essence of play is not the visceral fun or whatever the āpure playfulnessā is. Itās the symbolic reality at play. And it was never lost. Modern people might have stopped having fun with trivial games. But most of peasants never had played social plays from the first place. They were simply having animalistic play when they could like the cubs and the children. Most of social plays were done by royals and nobles. Huizingaās own study of play was heavily focused on chivalry and court affairs which are politically profound.
When modernisation hit the world, the lower class didnāt stop playing. They simply started playing the social games they donāt understand: markets, bureaucracy and capitalism. They performed the labour of it but not understand the significance. So it was not fun, because play is not play when oneās nervous system doesnāt read it. Nonetheless, they effectively became a part of the social play for the first time. And once they understand the new rules, they were back in the play. The ticket was not so cheap. But, compared to the feudal regimes, it was much easier to make the transition. Thatās how democracy rose to power after millenia of autocratic proliferation.
This distinction is important because ludic social systems must be about the social play. It doesnāt mean they exclude the animalistic play. The conceptual fine line doesnāt exist in reality. They are all mixed up like constructive capital and mindless consumption are mixed up in the markets. But if the markets donāt embody the capital in some proportion, they collapse. Itās their job to channel the mindless consumption to the capital, not to exclude it.
Week 15
Finalised the code highlight colours. macOS classic was the reference I was looking for. Also refined typography with true small caps and hanging punctuations. Style matters.
Creative, collective, ludic
Sailors, merchants, bookkeepers. People who struggled at the outskirts of agriculture eventually built the foundation of capitalism, the rational social system. And I reckoned that who builds the next one is creatives.
Before I ventured to the other side of the globe, I was leaning into society. Despite my training in fine art and creative work, the sheer magnitude of social systems was calling me. I went to the art school just to meet people anyway. I looked into anthropology, history of progress, systems theory and social philosophy. I wanted to build something on top of social recognition and social credits.
Then after the excursion that took me more than an year, my world was shaken. Besides all, the confusion and frustration that I couldnāt achieve anything meaningful with my work thus far, were devastating. I wanted to find a way. And I had to let go of my social studies.
Instead, along with my recovery, I focused on creators. They were creating actual value unlike my theoretical frameworks. And I thought, if they can use their influence for something educational, they could be the creative leaders of a new society. So I went into the world of content creation, learning experience design and my creator apps idea but no luck.
I circled all the way back and Iām standing on a synthesis between creatives and plays as ludic social systems. It feels old and new at the same time. Because it melts the questions I asked myself years ago and the answers I only came up with last week in one pot.
From social studies perspective, my insight has reached that social system must be pluralised and multiplied. This is surprisingly coherent to one of my earlier conclusions. āBetter connection only comes after better separation.ā Granularity can enable progressive social change. Like what Honneth called for, society can only change in small experiments.
Last year was mostly about answering questions around this core idea. People can change society one step at a time with some kind of temporary social units. But who would do that? Why and how? Typical responses were too business-like, self-help oriented. I felt like I already knew the answers deep inside. So I asked my insight more than observation. Thatās how I came up with play as ludic social systems. Unlike projects, plays donāt yield a deliverable but experience. Time limit is not ādeadlineā anymore. Itās just a boundary for safety.
Still, plays needed a place to live, where people are already living that way. Now I see the creatives, whom I referred as āstudiosā couple years ago, are the ones. At that time, I knew that they are special and that they are demographics I wanted in my life. But didnāt know what to do with them precisely. Now I come with plays.
Creatives need to keep their internal processes going. Their work are not quite available for compression or optimisation like the irrational numbers. They can go the extra mile if it inspires them and builds momentum. They simply canāt work stuck and lost unlike other productions that can get institutionalised. They need to keep playing. Thatās why they need ludic social systems.
āSocialā there doesnāt mean I am modelling collaboration. Itās something deeper, internal, fundamental. I must start from their creative autonomy. Then I should carefully connect where plays help their respective autonomy. For the sake of clarity, an analogy would be oneās own bank account. Reliable bookkeeping of oneās assets is absolute necessity for capitalist society to rise. Because thatās what people hold in their hands at the end of the day.
So Iām not going to shove the grandiosity of āLudic Social Systemsā into their face. Instead, Iāll put their creative work at the core, because this is a real implementation, not a theory. The rise of collectives is a particularly interesting one. Itās one of the reactions to the commercial machine intelligence as well. People need orchestration and coordination over conventional employment and hierarchy. This is precisely where plays are needed. A more flexible structure can maximise creative output while maintaining stability. And this is the direction sustainability is shifting to.
Again, deliverables are only side-effect. Ludic social systems should benefit the creative the most, not their clients. Even the most seasoned creatives can feel tied to their identity and media. Plays introduce a fresh angle over productivity: sustainable creativity, collective inspiration, and last but not least, fun. Optimised productivity is necessary, but that alone canāt keep them in flow.
Itās not just about the creatives. Itās open to anyone looking for sustainable career in the post-AI society. More and more people will flow into this track as industries automate and innovate because people canāt create any value unless they do something creative or social in the future. Helping that transition alone could easily become a business.
Now, my expectation should not be of final design. In recent years, more time was spent for enduring my own greed and pain from it. I didnāt come here when I lamented for a complete design of the platform of the future. I came here when I could open up with full acceptance. Thatās what I should prioritise. I already see myself losing ways with my nose buried in work. Step back. Breathe. And see the whole picture.
Week 16
Added index numbers and ID display for headings. Wanted to add links too but couldnāt find a trivial way. GitHub Pages doesnāt support header_links Kramdown feature. Why is it named āheaderā not āheadingā? God knows.
I tried some relative heading indicators at first. I thought the reader might need to know if they are going deeper, parallel or outside of the topic. But that was not what I wanted. A simple heading counter is much more intuitive and informative. The reader can see the level of the heading and how far they are from the top.
ID display is not very useful without a link. But itās still worth it as an inspector and an indicator because I can use custom IDs and it matches the semantics of them.