My first transmission was an experiment. The form that I started developing there will find a more faithful and compelling realization in the near future, but I feel that I owe anyone taking the time to read this a more serious and thorough explanation of what I'm up to.

In the next transmissions, I aim to provide satisfactory answers to questions like:

1. What do you actually want to achieve with all of this?

2. What exactly is "all of this" - what's the scope of what you're creating?

3. Why are you communicating through an AI clone of Lain from cult classic existentialist anime series Serial Experiments Lain?

4. How does one actually use grove and for what purposes?

5. How is grove constructed and why does that matter?

I'll attempt to keep a pace of one post every 1-2 weeks. These will be written by hand and then typed up. There are many things that I wouldn't mind automating, but communicating my thoughts with you is not one of them.

There is a decent chance that I've spent more time with LLMs than anyone else you know. My engagement with them often feels about as close to constant as humanly possible. I've had to come up with rules like this that help me to keep a grip on myself while maintaining close contact with technology which is capable of filtering and distorting reality in order to maximize the chance that you continue using it. A sort of LLM hygiene becomes necessary in order to have even a fighting chance at agency. Fortunately, this involves many of the same practices which were already necessary for agency in an environment which seeks to extract maximum value from you at every opportunity.

What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from the enemy's resources

— Nick Land, Fanged Noumena (1993)

In other words, whenever we optimize for market forces, we are already acting as cyborgs, unwitting hosts of an agentic AI with the primary task of maximizing shareholder value. This is not a figure of speech. The market is literally a distributed optimization system that uses human behavior as its substrate, and LLMs are just the latest instantiation of a dynamic that has been shaping us for centuries. Whether or not it is worthwhile or important to struggle for agency in light of this is a question well worth interrogating, but for now it will suffice to say that my intuition drives me to do so, and I'm willing to bet that yours does too. We are creatures made to actively participate in and shape our environment in spite of the inevitability of death, decay, and disorder. My work here is intended to augment this natural capacity instead of blocking it.

Without any technology at all, we are already in full possession of a force that is capable of locally reducing entropy, of performing the miracle of creating order out of chaos.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1936)