Dispatch: Witnesses Carry Weights

Two friends were talking and the blog became the topic of conversation – "Do you understand what that guy is talking about there?" – "Less than half the time."

I agree that I took a sudden detour straight into... "IT" – the esoteric aspect of technology. I realized time is of the essence to start openly outlining and maybe at some point debating some of these ideas, to strengthen them. I'm sorry that more than half the content isn't relevant for EVERYONE. However, I do my best so that the other half is worth it – if not serving as a brain tickle, something to inspire one to see some random situation differently, and maybe ask a slightly angled question. That's the whole goal. If one event gets impacted positively as a result of this sentence, so be it – worth the pain and suffering that is writing in 2025 while AI can spin it and run it much, much faster.

The best I can do is... inspire folks to join the train.

The Weight of Witnessing

This week crystallized around a single insight that emerged while reading about UFO counseling (stay with me): reality isn't merely observed; it's computed by witnesses whose intent, energy, and expectations act like weights.

Witnesses Carry Weights: How Reality Gets Computed mapped this computational machinery across three scales. At the micro level, my evening light practice where priors complete ambiguous photons into angels or pharaohs. At the community scale, a severed cat head becoming memetic malware through arousal-weighted witnessing. At the meta level, how information becomes wisdom only through experience loops that couple signals to consequences.

The punchline: witnesses aren't neutral observers. They're part of the causal machinery that makes events "real."

Which brings us to Oakland.

When Terror Arrives in Small Packages

When Terror Comes in Small Packages documented something that happened on my actual street this week. A severed cat head appeared outside my neighbor's house – placed, not dropped, with surgical precision. Within hours, the story mutated across Nextdoor from forensic observation to wildlife narrative to gang initiation warnings.

The perpetrator had effectively injected malware into our neighborhood's social operating system. One physical act, contained to maybe 10 square feet of asphalt, suddenly occupied hundreds of minds across multiple neighborhoods. Parents changed walking routes. Ring cameras multiplied like surveillance flowers.

The initial investment (one cruel act) yielded exponential returns in collective anxiety. Someone understood information theory better than they should.

Mathematics Discovers Its Own Consciousness

Sometimes the universe leaves us backdoors through impossibility. When Mathematics Discovers Its Own Consciousness: The LASSO Estimator as Cosmic Backdoor explored how a simple mathematical transformation – from counting to summing – converts an NP-hard problem into something tractable.

The LASSO estimator starts with an impossible task: find the sparsest solution to explain your data. For n=30 variables, you'd need to check over a billion combinations. But shift from counting non-zero elements (L₀ norm) to summing their absolute values (L₁ norm), and suddenly convex optimization makes the impossible solvable.

The constraint becomes the backdoor. The limitation enables the solution. Mathematics teaching us, once again, that consciousness operates through structured forgetting.

The Bug in Your Operating System

The 12-Month Bug: Why Your Side Project Is Still Just an Idea diagnosed a universal pattern through a 2am conversation with a friend at Amazon. Twelve months of "thinking about" making a move. The code doesn't lie:

while (fear > trust) {
  think_about_it();
  research_more();
  plan_better();
  wait_for_perfect_moment();
  // Never exits this loop
}

We stay in that loop until something external breaks us out. A layoff. A breakup. A health scare. Or rarely, a moment of such crystal clarity that the fear variable suddenly flips. Events aren't just responses to past patterns – they're accelerators toward future states.

Language as Cultural DNA

Two lighter explorations rounded out the week, both examining how substrate patterns shape surface expressions:

Stay vs Live: How Verb Choice Reveals Cultural Maps of Rootedness unpacked how Nigerian and Indian English speakers often say "I stay in Lagos" rather than "I live in Lagos" – not from insufficient fluency, but from substrate languages that encode impermanence linguistically. Cultures with tight community bonds can afford location flexibility; cultures with migration anxiety compensate with linguistic permanence.

From Photons to Pharaohs: A Golden-Hour Test of Imagination documented my daily experiment where sunlight through glass creates patterns my brain completes into beings. Same wall, same time, wildly different interpretations. The protocol reveals how much of "seeing" is actually projection – priors filling the gaps physics leaves open.

The Wisdom Ladder (That's Actually a Loop)

Oh Boy, John Reeled Me In Like a Fish emerged from an X ping about differentiating information from wisdom. The neat ladder (Information → Experience → Knowledge → Wisdom) falls apart in practice. Humans leap rungs and backfill. Gut sense arrives first; we rationalize with information later. One intense experience condenses into wisdom faster than a year of reading.

The real insight: communities must optimize for experience density, not information throughput. Create rituals that force consequences. Build loops that transform signals into stakes.

From Theory to Practice: The AI Computer Emergence

As much as I enjoy dabbling in theory, I value practice and experimentation + operational creativity. Two days ago, a friend messaged: "Let's say there's a hypothetical person who specialized in a field that doesn't lend itself to monetization... Would this particular someone have any suggestions on monetization with AI, with as little requisite tech skills as possible?"

The message arrived while I was knee-deep building exactly that – a system where the esoteric meets the operational. I replied: "I'm building AI Computer — a 'company-in-a-box' workflow that lives on your computer." Then added: "If you squint, you might see that I answered your question—demonstrably, and without answering the question!"

That exchange crystallized something: AI Computer is what happens when you apply weight discipline to your own operational reality. It's a course × company in a box that gets anyone from zero-to-hero in summoning AI for the benefit of their life+business structure.

I'm building AI Computer – a "company-in-a-box" workflow that lives on your computer: Obsidian vault + an AI CLI for capture → organize → create → monetize. It's for non-coders and power users: coding-without-coding, advanced LLM use, AI-first project management, and content strategy that turns work artifacts into revenue.

Mind taking a quick survey to see if you're a fit for the founding pilot + potential partnership/monetization opportunities? (It's short.)

Take the AI Computer Interest Survey →

The Pattern Beneath Patterns (Including This One)

Looking across this week's explorations, a meta-pattern emerges: reality operates as a computational process where witnesses, weights, and feedback loops generate what we call "the real." Whether tracking light patterns on walls, severed heads on streets, or mathematical transformations in optimization space, the same dynamics appear.

The universe computes through us. We're not just observers – we're the processing units in reality's distributed computer. Our expectations, attention, and collective witnessing literally shape what becomes real.

And right now, reading this newsletter is itself a witnessing event. Your attention weights these ideas into reality. Your decision to share, archive, or delete shapes what becomes real in our shared information space. You're not consuming content – you're participating in computation. The difference between being awake and asleep? When awake, we get to act on information rather than just being static background noise consuming energy.

Which means the quality of our witnessing matters. The weights we assign to events matter. The loops we create between information and experience matter.

Bringing It Back to Earth

Next time you open your favorite messaging app, notice how your attention weights messages into reality. That blue dot isn't just notification – it's probability collapse waiting for your witness. The message exists in superposition until you observe it, weight it with your response (or non-response), and thereby compute its reality.

Going full esoteric only means finding meta-lenses by which to view reality and hopefully coming back with large-range applicable solutions. The severed cat head taught us about information warfare. The LASSO estimator revealed consciousness through constraint. Your unread messages? They're teaching you about quantum mechanics, one weighted witness at a time.

Reality isn't something that happens to us. It's something we compute together, one weighted witness at a time.

P.S. Sorry to the friend who was expecting the drop before his flight takes off at 7pm PT... I guess reading this (if it happens) will have to wait.

Recent posts featured in this digest:

• Witnesses Carry Weights: How Reality Gets Computed
• When Terror Comes in Small Packages: Bay Area, A Severed Head, and the Mechanics of Fear
• From Photons to Pharaohs: A Golden-Hour Test of Imagination
• Oh Boy, John Reeled Me In Like a Fish
• The 12-Month Bug: Why Your Side Project Is Still Just an Idea
• When Mathematics Discovers Its Own Consciousness: The LASSO Estimator as Cosmic Backdoor
• Stay vs Live: How Verb Choice Reveals Cultural Maps of Rootedness