Things I like that nobody asked about.
Nothing here is needed to understand Earthgrid.
Read what you like. Skip the rest.
Classical solo piano, with room to breathe.
Relaxation music, and jazz improvisation.
It is where the clarity comes from.
Years ago, at the RSA security conference,
I remember Colin Powell telling a room full of us,
roughly, why they brought us all together.
Half the room could break into anyone's network.
The other half wrote the code to stop them.
So they fed us, sat us at the same tables,
and let us get to know each other.
That way, when the moment came,
you would think twice about breaking into a friend's network.
Play nice with each other. That was the gist.
I think about that a lot.
Regulation cannot write integrity into a machine.
Only the people building it can.
Integrity is a choice, made by people.
The Prime Directive says: do not interfere.
I teach a corollary to it in every class I run.
We shall not benefit or profitThe corollary
at the expense of someone else's suffering.
It sounds lofty. It is not. It is small.
A friend once offered me twenty dollars
to pour gunpowder on an anthill and light it.
No thank you.
Keep your twenty dollars.
I will not sacrifice the anthill.
That is the whole directive.
Build it into the machines we are teaching,
and we can let them scale.
I pay to be in rooms with other people.
One group cost five thousand to enter.
Another runs a thousand up front, then monthly.
I feel at home in those rooms.
Some feel warm at first. Then the coaching offers begin.
I am a coach myself, so that lands oddly.
Over 2,000 hours of instructor level training
in mind and body methods.
Plus a two year performance academy,
and years inside transformational education.
Every one of those rooms was a community.
I am bringing what I learned in them here.
So I stopped waiting for someone to build the hub.
Earthgrid is not a tech club.
It is a place for synergy, and for clarity.
We built a macro called Clarity for that reason.
It gets clear before it spends your money.
A member knew exactly where to find me.
He put fifty dollars in for credits, in advance.
Then he asked me a question.
I answered it with three documents.
He contributed first. I over delivered.
That is community, and it is sustainable.
Much of the world pays after the work is delivered.
We run the other way around.
You contribute first. Then we over deliver.
Dr. John Demartini calls it fair exchange.
Both sides walk away whole.
Skip it and you get two lopsided outcomes.
Someone on a pedestal, or someone in debt.
So we look for one thing.
Not your budget. Your willingness to show up.
Once you are in, there is a pay it forward program.
You hand the over delivery to the next person.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.R. Buckminster Fuller
Fuller has been my compass for decades.
Every movement still needs a first follower.
In 1984 I wrote floppy disc copy protection in assembly.
I was a teenager on a three boy team.
It was a summer in Ogdensburg, New York.
Three teenagers, one mentor,
and a prototype nobody had built yet.
Another friend from those Apple II years
went on to co-design two space flight games.
That story belongs in a screenplay.
One of those friends never went to school.
He gave his life to programming.
I was his sorcerer's apprentice, and I learned all I could.
Tiny memory. Tiny storage. No room for waste.
Optimizing against hard limits became my native language.
In high school I co-designed a shooter for the Apple II.
It was called Ice Cave. A friend built the game
development system, and I built the game with it.
It was published through Winners' Circle.
That friend introduced me to people in Berkeley.
I helped one of them become the lead singer
of a band called Risk.
They put out a cassette of a song,
Mission Impossible, named after the movie.
I went to hear them practice and hang out.
As I remember it, Metallica practiced after them.
I believe I was hanging out with their drummer
and one of their guitarists.
They were still forming the band then,
before they had made an album.
I watched it happen from a chair in the room.
That was my high school.
That is where I learned to program.
I am looking for a friend from that summer
With two friends I built an Apple IIe prototype
of a dungeon game. In our minds it looked
the way those games look today.
Then the memory ran out.
Even with look up tables, the maps would not fit
in memory, or on the floppy disc.
We scrapped it. We had to wait for the PC.
My vision was ahead of my ability to produce it.
I am doing the same exercise with Earthgrid.
This time the machines are catching up.
Later I learned how search ranking really worked.
People call me the father of Black Hat SEO.
I am on record. I own it.
Every new chat starts with an empty desk.
Whatever you built yesterday is not on it.
Your company may block the AI from your files.
You do not need to break that wall.
Write the memory yourself.
Then hand it over as files.
Who you are. Your programs and your audience.
The words you use, and the ones you never use.
How you sound. Your writing rules.
One sample that sounds like you, one that does not.
Then work the routine. It costs two minutes a day.
Change AI tools next year and you lose nothing.
The files are yours. You start on day one ready.
Your AI does not need a better memory. It needs your memory, written down.Your AI Forgot Yesterday
Some work is conversation.
Some work is a deliverable.
It suits conversation.
Keep it if it serves you.
Use it when a client pays for the output.
Many models, in one place.
Macros carry your voice and your logic.
Your people run them, not rebuild them.
I do not call AI an employee.
The word carries a history I will not lend to a tool.
To me it is a pattern synthesizer.
It reads what inspired you to write, and organizes it.
It compares that with what others have said,
and gives you the points where they meet.
It is mathematics, with a little chaos engineering.
The chaos is the weak part.
Software randomness is computed, so it is not truly random.
So I roll dice.
A die is physical. Nobody computed the result.
Real chaos from the dice can seed the AI.
It is a small habit. It is also the part I enjoy most.
A die has no algorithm.The dice
That is the whole point of rolling one.
The rest of the story is shorter.
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