May 2024 in SF: Notes On AI Journaling

Building an AutoSearch.lol app, business mindset, and thoughts on 'The Last Emperor'

The future with accelerated learning

Table of Contents

1. What is AI Journaling?

2. On the importance of accelerating learning

3. On how to cultivate the business owner mindset

4. AGI House Agents hackathon 5/4/2024

5. National Security Hackathon at Shack15 on 5/5 - 5/6/2024

6. On Watching The Last Emperor

What is AI Journaling?

I have seen a lot of good things come out of using an AI journal daily. I built it myself and you can try it at LuminaLog.com. It allows me to develop my ideas more fully. I don’t feel weird talking to this thing, explaining what happened that day, what were some important things, how I saw them, what I thought about it. It transcribes my speech into the journals. Then I would ask it for a summary, advice about something, and for feedback. Often just seeing this response of another perspective on what I talked about, different words used to describe the same thing, gave me deeper insight into the events and how I experienced them. It is enriching.

It is like having a friend there that has infinite patience. Often it surprises me with how it sees things and what suggestions it has for me. For example often it would talk about how I should practice more self-care and self-compassion. At first I just dismissed this as a cliche. But after a few days, it came to me that I really didn’t practice good self-care. I would work myself to exhaustion every day. Then I took a break for a couple hours and just reflect on this and felt that it really made sense to me finally.

Another example of how this app has improved my life was it’s ability to give you personalized prompts. One of them was to “Imagine yourself three years from today and write a letter to yourself as you are now.” I completed this exercise and felt so much energy and direction. I imagined myself in three years having accomplished my goals, owning a successful business and having significant wealth. I wrote an encouraging letter to myself recommending that I have more faith in my abilities, and that I keep focused on this and keep a daily ritual of prayer to keep my mind returning to the one wish that I have. I emphasized that it is critical that I keep reminding myself daily about this vision of what I want to achieve, in order to keep energy concentrated on the goal and not forgetting what it is that I am building.

On another occasion, the prompt that I was given was to write an encouraging letter to myself, as if I was writing to a friend. I wrote this and was amazed at how much appreciation, admiration and love I have for myself. I wrote about how appreciated that I was kind, was gentle, was pursuing creative things, was creating with code and technology. This really changed my habitual thinking about myself. I realized that I was someone that I really liked. I felt deep compassion to myself, for experiencing setbacks and unhappiness for not achieving the things that I wanted. I felt encouragement towards myself, that I can work with myself, as a team, as happy partners, to go after my dreams again with new energy. I felt a deep power within (this is actually the name of the Tony Robins seminar, by the way, it captures how I felt accurately).

AI journaling itself is world changing because until now, since the beginning of writing, we only had a one way conversation withe the medium, but now we had writing and a synthetic brain there available 24/7 to give us another perspective instantly. To see this and actually remember how revolutionary this is, is what is required of us in order to fully actualize all of the benefits that it has to give us. The work that we are required to do now is to stop chasing after new shiny things, but to sit with this and practice AI journaling daily.

On the importance of accelerating learning

Imagine being able to read books in a few minutes with summaries, and personalized tutors. This is now possible with AI. Imagine an app where you select any of the thousands of PDF books that are in the public domain, or uploading your own book PDF, and then quickly getting a short summary, a medium summary and an AI that is ready to answer you questions about the book. Imagine then that you see a table of contents of the book, with each chapter and section having it’s own summary. Imagine being able to have a voice first conversation with this AI. This is something that already exists on the market, and yet it is something that I badly need to launch myself as I already have built a prototype that works well at previous hackathons. It is the worst kind of feeling to have a really good app that is just almost done and it is just sitting on your computer without being released to the world. I have a lot of motivation to complete it.

Visual feedback on Muay Thai training.

On how to cultivate the business owner mindset

To be an entrepreneur is a special thing to do. It is not for everyone. I have met people that work 9-5 jobs and feel fulfilled, happy, content. Yet for many this is a nightmare.

For many they need a self direct life path. In the same way that people like different things in life, this is how life is. This week I have been self educating on business mindset through reading entrepreneurship subreddits and watching YouTube channels by a business founder that created a seven figure cleaning business in Washington State. His simple stories of how to build a successful business from nothing are really inspiring. His channel is called ‘Freelance Janitor’ check it out if it resonates with you.

Reading stories from Entrepreneur subreddits are really insightful. I can see that it is possible. The key attributes that are required in success in business are first that you need to be thinking about your business 24/7. It really is required that you work on your business all the time, from waking up to going to sleep seven days per week. Once it get’s off the ground a bit you can slow down, but otherwise it is not possible to be successful.

'It is important that you learn how to talk to people, how to manage your own and other people psychological quirks. Everyone has a story and their own traumas. To be successful you need to focus your entire life around your business. This means not consuming any content that is taking your mind off of it, like mindless consumption of media. It will take many years of trial and error, but it is possible for you to create a successful business. The upside to owning and creating a business is really limitless.

my typical workstation

AGI House Agents hackathon 5/4/2024

On Saturday May 4th, 2024, I attended the AGI House hackathon in Hillsborough. We were treated to a talk by the Co founder of Sun Microsystems, which was like the OpenAi of the 80’s and 90’s, Vinod Khosla. Currently he is an investor, having been one of the early investors in OpenAI. I was surprised by his statement about AI therapists, how valuable they are, how they are better liked by people then human therapists, how it’s a ‘false narrative’ that they are impersonal or not effective.

demo of autosearch.lol

Later there was talks by OpenAI head of Developer Relations, the some one that gave a presentation at DevDay last November. Afterwards I pitched my idea, and formed a team with four other people. One of them was a student at Berkley for Germany, and two other ones were engineers from Google. We had a blast building autosearch.lol basically I built the whole thing, and one piece was made by one other member which actually was very helpful. I believe the key to this success was just being creative, free and coding a large volume of code. I just went with a vague idea and instead of planning, or explaining it to others, I just coded really fast for the whole time, and created this intricate, beautiful and impressive project. I bought a domain name for $2 and deployed it. Putting together LLM calls into loops, and prompting them for different agent roles, is so powerful, we are just getting started on the applications of this. ChatGPT is just the beginning, so many more billion dollar apps await us. There is a large number of opportunities that await for developers to implement ideas from papers into products, like different agent prompting techniques. This plus the realization that LLMs can help us reduce the time of researching, that as a foundational ability, is really what motivated me and got me excited. I learned that others also liked this direction of creative coding.

I presented the project myself and it was a hit, we got second place. Later we took group photos. I asked the OpenAi manager judge for feedback. He said that it was a really good project, when asked if it could be a billion dollar company like perplexity, he responded ‘It’s worth a try.’ I also received praise and encouragement form the Exa cofounder, and was offered more free credits. OpenAI is reportedly working on AI search, rumors say that it’ll be announced May 9th, 2024.

I will definitely keep building this product and making it better.
The features to implement before formal launch are:

1. Make the search AI always asks what else should I ask about.

2. Then take new information and ask again what else should it ask about.

3. Creates branches of new queries.

4. Creates a summary of the results, with links and images at each result

5. Creates a general report with an outline of how each sub query relates to the main query.

6. Formulates several theses and explores supporting evidence.

7. Compares multiple viewpoints and compares pros and cons.

8. Uses multiple search engines: Google, Exa and Tavily.

9. It asks the user for input after it has formulated an initial thesis, then uses the input to continue or stop the research.

10. Implement payment system and user login to save queries.

11. Allow to pause and restart the research process.

12. Make the research branches and steps fully visible and navigable from the UI.

Here is the recording of the demo:

National Security Hackathon at Shack15 on 5/5 - 5/6/2024

final remarks

War is hell full stop. It is unjust that so many young men loose their lives in war, and others profit from the tragedy. It is a war of industries really, of corporations, of continents, of meta organisms. Yet it is a reality. Currently many of the world leaders and military leaders are saying we are in the pre-world war years, pointing to the Russia-China alliance, Russia having mobilized for total war production even after loosing 450,000 troops as cannon fodder, and China explicitly planning to invade Taiwan. This is a scary reality.

This weekend there was a hackathon for building innovations in national security. Many here were moved by the war in Ukraine to come, myself included. There I built an AI tool for searching Telegram channels in Russian and Ukrainian. As someone that studied history and war, I had no illusions about war being glorified or being dismissed as not realistic.

There I talked to different sponsors, other participants and judges. I met operators from Ukraine that directly organized tech innovations for military purposes on the front lines. I met American based defense drone startup founders. I met young engineers building really interesting drones, AI, and other software. It was really intense, somber and draining to be honest.

From knowing history, it is so tragic, going into the military to become a soldier, requires you to sacrifice your life for your cause. In modern times, the wars have been extremely horrific and tragic, on scales that are hard to comprehend.

peace

On Watching The Last Emperor

At the SF Commons, we had a viewing and a discussion about the film on Sunday May 6th.

What was the Emperor like? What was it like to be the pinnacle of the whole country’s efforts and cares? It was the belief of the whole country, that the Emperor was divine, he was a God. And the whole population was an extension of him. They wished for his success, as they tied his success with their own.

It was brought up that this film, about the last emperor, what happened to him, how the Communist took over, how it showed his adaptation to the new technology and culture from the West, this had many echos in our current times.

The organizer who just returned from a trip to China, and who’s parents originate form there, talked how she was really amazed at how little we know and talked about this history which is so prescient now. How the facts that the Chinese Communist Party is currently actively and publicly planning the invasion of Taiwan and reunification of China, how this in the wish and life mission of Xi Jinping, the current leader of the CCP. It is his intention to make it his legacy. While at the same time it is true that Taiwan is a critical place of manufacturing of the most critical computer chips in the world, and that it has been a thriving democracy for the past seventy years, since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949.

Some comments were made that perhaps the CCP has things we can learn from it as a society. I responded that I believed that liberal democracy like that pioneered by the United States is the highest achievement of mankind. Of course there are major problems, and things can be learned from developing nations that still have this fresh sense of preciousness of our material comforts. At the same time the system where all people of different religions, races, nationalities are equal before the law, and are free to pursue any education, business venture, that they choose, I believe is enlightened and noble.

This has evolved out of the monarchies and dictatorships that had existed since the beginning of time. This is how the CCP and other dictatorships like in Russia and N. Korea operate now, through force, not through consent. In the emperor system that was existed before, in China as depicted in the film, and in Japan of the same period, the emperor was the God on Earth. The nation worshipped him as a god, and were ready to die for him. They felt connected to God and heaven through the emperor, they felt as if the whole nation was a one whole, something greater then their small individual lives. The transition from this psychology to the modern scientific world view, seeing your own divinity inside of yourself, is difficult. In modern democratic countries, each individual has the opportunity to be as the Emperor, to be as God, to be their own lord. This is talked about by John Lock in the Second Treatise on Government.

"I am the absolute lord of my own person and possessions. equal to the greatest and subject to nobody." - John Lock - The Second Treatise on Government

This is something that is embodied most perfectly by Ben Franklin, through his own hard work and ingenuity he uplifted himself out of poverty, created successful businesses, became an inventor and an influential politician. He was the Steve Jobs of his day.

Now in the modern age we are still finding ways to rediscover this. It is through entrepreneurship that people are able to rise above their circumstances, to change the world.

In China ultimately it is through the party that is the only allowed way to gain true power. The billionaires there, whom succeeded through tech or other industries, can disappear, maybe then reappear and be reformed to not speak out against the party line.

This is a fascinating topic and there is so much to explore here. During the discussion I shared about also having a background from a country that was formerly communist, (Poland) and that had gone through many devastating wars, e.g. in WW2 one out of four people died. I talked about how it left the country really traumatized and that the scars are still felt two generations later. We have been shaped by war, and really it is similar in China, after all the wars, people have rebuilt their lives, but really the stability that we have have seen in our life times is really fragile, it is an exception, and not the typical experience of humans on Earth.

The base line for humanity is constant warfare. We have largely lost sense of what that means. History shows that people were quick to take off the thin layer of civility and reveal their animalistic natures beneath, committing atrocities, and being subject to great tragedies. As was seen in the Russian Civil war, the brutality of the German armies, of the Japanese in China and in the war with US in the Pacific. People that really look at this history with open eyes, can see that we are very privileged to have this stability that we have.

An important theme in this film was observations of how people in Asia were adapting to modern technological life. There were scenes of the Emperor riding a bike, seeing a car for the first time, dancing the ‘quick step’, chewing Wrigley’s gum and singing the blues while an adult in exile. This is a key theme of this film and of the history. It is this theme that still is with us today, as we have seen in the last twenty years China rise from a city of peasants, living as their ancestors had lived for centuries, into a modern nation with a large middle class, disposable income, and all of the latest technology. It is this change that was experienced by the Japanese and other nations before in Russia and Germany, where the focus on modernizing, and shedding the humiliating poverty of the past was paramount.

The way in which people changed to the new reality, modernity, is a shock to the system, and many do not know how to deal with it, many fall into despair and darkness and do not actualize their fullest peaceful humanity in this new world. This is the theme of many works of art in the 20th century, starting with the Dada movement in the devastation and brutal mass death of WWI. We see the same thing today, with many people not knowing how to adapt to the new world of technology, some return to the old traditions, others embrace the new trends and push forward embracing everything new.

In my own home country I have observed this. Poland was able to embrace the democratic and law based systems after successfully leading the Solidarity movement which took down the Communist powers in Poland peacefully, which was a major contributing factor the dissolution of USSR and the fall of communism in Russia. Russia itself tried to adopt liberal democracy and capitalism in the 90’s but failed because of corruption and lacking the historical precedent for government of public elections and rule of law.

They had centuries of rule by an Emperor and war lords, similar to China. There was not a tradition of individuals empowering themselves, having civic discussions and making decisions based on what is beneficial to the population, and not just the ruling elite. The communist party was an attempt at implementing this kind of system by force, but in practice it did not work, it just returned to the system of government ruled by force, lying and cheating.

Modern day Russia, China and North Korea are like this. Where those in power are there because of force and deception. The rulers behave like they emperors of old times, above the law, and the population heeding to their every wish. The mass ignorant population is not able to control their fate, they can only support the rulers, buying into the myth that they are lead by a God on earth, seeing that their success is tied to the success of the emperor, as one unit against the outsiders, as one race, or just not seeing any other way.

For a people to rise out of this stupor, this predicament of being forced into wars as cannon fodder, of being part of this system that only exploits them, uses them, is very difficult as the people in power, in China, Russia and N. Korea spend a large amount of time and energy making sure that the population is sufficiently manipulated such that they remain in power.

In each of these countries it takes different forms. In China it is through surveillance, tight control over internet, media, propaganda and through ensuring that the population is seeing economic growth for which the party can claim responsibility, and say that without them they would not be taken out of poverty. Currently this is effective in China, as the population does not know of any other system of government or culture, then what they are exposed to every day. They are ready to embrace national pride, which in large part is racial too, seeing themselves, the Han people, as superior to others through their success in their countries development.

This combined with the dictator’s sense of divine mission to take over Taiwan and put an end to the civil war started in 1927 with the nationalists. This puts us in a very dark situation in the world, as the United States has vowed to protect Taiwan and the current law based world order where democracies are invaded by dictators with imperial ambitions.

There is a lot of tension around being from a ‘developing’ country in relationships with those in ‘developed’ countries. Those in the latter often do not remember what life was like in the former, unless they have spent substantial time living in them. The core issue here is people’s xenophobia. The core problem is people not understanding and respecting people of other cultures, not being curious to travel. The core problem is people not traveling and living abroad enough to develop an appreciation of the variety, multi-facetness and richness of life.

One telling scene was with the Japanese spy boasting about how she’s going to learn to fly and to precision bomb Shanghai (indeed this was the first bombing of a civilian city population by plane in history, a tactic that was key strategy in WW2), how she hates the Chinese. This was telling of the attitude and mindset of the Japanese, of their sense of racial superiority. It would likely be the same racism held by the Chinese, had they been in an economically better situation (or as they are now). It is the mindset of simple people of old ages, people tied to their nation, race and emperor. Now it is similar with the CCP, but the communist party is the nation, and the Xi Jinping is the new emperor for life. It is about the superiority of the military and economic might of this race compared to others. While modern nations act in accordance to international law and respect each country’s right to sovereignty and independence.

How can we solve these problems. I strongly believe in the Steve Jobs ethos that those that are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that do. We can imagine new societies, where people in the dictator countries listed above can free themselves and we can prevent a world war. In the modern day it is no the warlords that make a lasting legacy, that change the world, that become powerful, it is the innovators, the entrepreneurs, and everyone can become a successful entrepreneur with no cap to what they can achieve.

We can create international organizations that organize cross cultural exchanges where people go to another country to live for a year, where they are supported by the people there. We can build civic institutions that are international, where people can study the latest technology, programming, robotics and more and create their own businesses.

We can create new institutions like the martial arts monasteries of old times, where people can gather, share the same living space and practice physical fitness, practice healthy living, cooking, eating, meditating and study. Where they can learn to be entrepreneurs. I imagine organizations in cities that are centered around life long education that are organized by individuals, that prepare you for success in life. They are wholistic, not just around hard skills, but teach emotional skills, about religious practices that are beneficial, about meditation and other wellness practices.

Conclusion

This week was focused on building LuminaLog.com, building prototypes at hackathons and being focused on the path of the business operator.
I leave you this week with this playlist made over the month of April 2024. Enjoy!