An LLM will hallucinate when you box them into giving an answer they don’t know. This is incredibly easy to do without realizing it. We have only a vague understanding of their knowledge base, and we have limited insight into problems with our own understanding. To make matters worse, the LLM is trained to tell you what you want to hear.

Another way to frame it is that the LLM responds like a person who trusts you too much, as if the pretense behind every question is valid. This is a practical mode of response for most kinds of work and it is extremely problematic for a person who doesn’t question the validity of their own beliefs. Paradoxically, it is sometimes not the LLM we are trusting too much, it is ourselves. And the LLM is not capable of calling us out. Whenever I seem to recognize misinformation in the LLM output, I stop and ask myself if the problem is in the pretense of my question or if I’m asking a question that the LLM is not likely to know.

I don’t think this is an inherent problem with LLMs. I think the problem is with LLM providers. You could absolutely train a model to call out issues with your question. I think LLM companies understood that it would be more profitable to train models that are unlikely to push back and unlikely to say “I don’t know.” The sycophancy issue with ChatGPTs models have been mainstream news. I believe that all models have a high degree of sycophancy. On some level, it makes sense. The LLM has no real understanding of the physical world, defaulting to the human generally produces the best results. But I suspect it would be more useful to let them expose their flawed understanding, if it is in the context of pushing back. At a minimum, it is better than reinforcing your own flawed understanding.

In a nutshell, we need LLMs that push back. It is not AI we should trust less, it’s AI companies. The most dangerous hallucination is the one you are inclined to believe.

I’ve lived long enough to see Wikipedia go from generally untrusted to the most widely trusted general source of information. It is not because we realized that Wikipedia can’t be wrong, it is because we gained an understanding about the circumstances in which it is likely to be accurate and when we should be a little more skeptical. I believe our relationship to LLMs will take a similar path.

Yesterday we gathered to remember my dad. I almost didn’t speak, but my brother read the words for my dad that I had posted the day before and encouraged me to share. This encouragement unlocked a gate I had been standing behind all my life and it meant the world to me. My brother has a different perspective on our family but still felt it was important for me to share mine. After the service, many family and old friends and strangers came up to me to embrace me and tell me about their experiences and it was the most healing day of my life.

My brother also shared about Dad, about how far he had come, and what it meant for him as a man with a beautiful family of his own. Everything he said was true, and it was an important part of my dad’s story, too big for any single person to carry.

The question came up indirectly, why say that at his memorial service? It’s a fair question that I wanted to be clear in what I shared. All my life, there’s been a side of Al Bollwerk that is talked about and loved and also another side. They are both important parts of a man of enormous depth, who started from nothing and came so far, and if we only remember some parts of him, we aren’t really remembering him. We risk missing out on some of the important truth that shines from his life. Since I was very young, I’ve tried to find the right way to call attention to this problem, and I held myself back with shame and fear of hurting people that I loved. Among the people I did not want to hurt was my dad, but no words can hurt him now, a strange kind of grace.

Words can still hurt the people who loved him, and I have agonized over that. Speaking them was the most difficult thing I have ever done. I feared that I would see in their eyes resentment and anger, but that is not what I saw, only love. Their response is the biggest part of my healing.

Given how far Dad came in his life, there might still be people who think I should have kept the darker parts private, to be healed privately. To be clear, the darkest parts have not yet been spoken even by me. My dad did a lot of good things and he also did unspeakable things and coming to terms with the latter without forgetting the first has been the challenge of a lifetime. I see no reason to dwell on his faults, but there is still a very good reason to think about the faults in a belief system and community that should have done more to help. I do not wish to challenge anyone’s faith, but I do wish to challenge how it may be applied, and some will see that as a healthy challenge. I hoped that my words might raise the question, how could this happen among us? Is this happening right now among us?

I named one person in particular, my dad’s pastor, and he happened to be in the unenviable position of speaking after me. I deeply respected his response, both humble and strong. And the memorial he prepared for my dad captured his character so well that it was as if Dad was sitting among us, in the way we both spoke of him, with his mouth open and tears streaming down his face. Afterwards he shared with me his own story of a struggle happening right now and I wish for his whole family a healing resolution. I hope that my challenge will not discourage him but somehow be a blessing.

People came up to me afterwards and told me it was the most honest memorial service they had ever been a part of. There will be another service next year around Father’s Day in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where my dad comes from, and where we will finally commit him to the earth. No doubt that one will be honest too, but I think it will also be lighter. Not because we will hold back, but speaking for myself, I will feel a little stronger.

And I think it will be more fun, which is fitting, because my dad loved fun.

I have compelling reasons for none of the following ideas, but they are what I hear when I shake that box. It is natural for me to think about people who have passed away to be somewhere still, watching over us. And it is natural for me to think that wherever they are, they can see clearly what was difficult for them to see while they were alive. Like astronauts looking down for the first time at the planet that is their home, their celestial perspective lets them understand their lives in a new way. And it is natural for me to think they can hear what we say, at least what we say to them. And when that’s me out there, I want people to feel like they can say to me whatever they need to.

When that’s me out there, please remember that.

Dad, if you can hear me, I miss you. You had to leave just when we were finally getting to know each other. A couple years ago, I told you I was lonely and you came over just so we could talk. We took a walk and you helped me carry my burden for a time, and we found that piece from Guess Who? that had your name on it out on the sidewalk, just that one piece, it was almost a little spooky.

At your service I wished to focus on the reasons I admire you, the reasons I’ll miss you, the side of you that everyone knows and loves, and somehow leave the door open for people to know and understand the parts they might not have seen. You deserve to be remembered and loved as you were, not a version of you that didn’t really exist.

I’ve asked you about some of the darkest moments in our home when I was just a child, because they still follow me. You told me you don’t remember. Do you remember now? Here’s something new, Mom says she doesn’t remember now either. We’ve talked about it so many times before and it is all there in her journal. Maybe she doesn’t want to remember.

I don’t know what to say now at your service, or if I should even go. The thought of silently carrying all that shame that really isn’t mine to carry makes me want to open the box now, but I’ll wait. If they wish to remember a man that didn’t really exist, who didn’t do those things, I should just let them. But I will remember you.

I’ll remember the way you looked sometimes as we watched Touched By an Angel together as a family, during the moment when the angel revealed herself, always a moment of grace. I would look over and see your mouth silently agape and tears streaming down your face, and whisper to my brother or sister so they too could witness this rare display of vulnerability. The memory is beautiful to me for reasons that only make sense when I remember the darker moments too. I will wonder whether an angel sat beside you as you honked for help in that final hour and if you had a moment like that yourself. I will wonder if you finally found that grace, and if I’ll ever find that grace. I love you, Dad, I’ll miss you.

There are healthy Christian homes and there are homes full of darkness and insanity, and they all gather together on Sundays, and Christianity as I have experienced it is weak sauce for doing anything to help. Promise Keepers? What a joke. Giving any one person in a family the final word on everything is going to be a disaster. It is going to be a disaster for you and for your children. When I write about the abuse I experienced, I hear from so many friends and strangers that experienced the same thing or worse. Especially in this area, Parker and Castle Rock and Franktown.

There is something deeply insidious about the abuse that happens in Christian homes that is packaged as love. That is not love. Love is patient, love is kind. Love always protects. Love does not terrorize you. Love does not cover up abuse.

I don’t think it is a coincidence how close we are to Focus on the Family. I don’t think it is a coincidence that it was the voice of Dr. James Dobson that echoed through our house every morning. I believe we live at an epicenter of domestic abuse and silent suffering. Keep in mind that it was Todd Harker that was our pastor for a part of this time. It was people at this very service who saw us every Sunday but didn’t know or want to know or knew but didn’t do anything, maybe because it didn’t seem like their place. And because we were homeschooled, there was no escape. If there was going to be an escape, this was it. But this was not it.

In a little while you may hear an invitation from Pastor Todd Harker. But I have an invitation today, especially to the young people in the room, to believe exactly none of it. Especially the parts you recognize as insane.

Protect your sanity, it is precious. If you are a victim of abuse, don’t be ashamed, that’s not your shame to carry. Talk to a fried. Talk to someone you can trust. You can talk to me. I want to help.

If you have someone in your life or someone from your past that you love but that you’ve never been able to talk openly about, you can talk to me. I want to hear about it.

Junie is a project-scoped coding agent offered by Jetbrains directly within the IntelliJ line of IDEs as a plugin. The following is my review of the service.

I’ve found giving Junie anything but the most specific instructions problematic on a lot of levels. I believe Junie is probably among the best in terms of capability among project-scoped coding agents, but the best is still not good enough. There are lots of silly mistakes, more than I’d expect a competent developer to make. And to be fair, there are a few really well-structured solutions too. The issue is the reliability.

Even when the code works, there is the issue of my relationship to the code. Code that I wrote myself seems to be very easy for my working memory to access, and I can jump around in projects like Aladdin in Agrabah. When I didn’t write it, updates and bugfixes take a lot longer and the experience just doesn’t appeal on the same level. I could take time to read what Junie wrote and sometimes that is interesting for side reasons but it is just not as engaging as writing it myself. If AI makes work a little more efficient but a lot more boring, I think it is still a net loss.

This is not a problem with Junie itself, which seems to be best-in-class. It is a problem with outsourcing the generation of your code to an intelligence that cannot understand the application of your code on a human level.

The happy medium I’ve found is defining workflows for Junie which is something like a template that you define in English rather than a markup language. The key here is that I know exactly what Junie should be creating, my working memory treats it like code I wrote myself even when a good chunk of it is Junie. Most often, these workflows focus on starting the file and taking all the boilerplate tasks that are unique to my project structure. She writes enough of my code to make me feel like I’m using AI effectively and the experience of coding is just as engaging, maybe a bit more because we are moving faster.

Here is an example of how I’ve defined these workflows, it is the general instructions and a few of the workflows, there are many more. Junie follows these instructions perfectly 99% of the time.

AI workflow functions (from guidelines.md)

The following functions define workflows and parameters. These may be invoked as prompts in the form of Workflow(argument). Perform the instructions in the body of the workflow given the provided arguments. Foo will be used as a placeholder for a type name. Unless otherwise directed, only create the content described in the function, do not worry about integration with the rest of the project. You may also modify this file (guidelines.md) with any information that may provide clarity for the next time you follow the steps outlined in the function.

CreateModel(Foo):

• Create a new data class in the form of data class Foo(val fooId: FooId) in the package ponder.ember.model.data. It must be serializable.

• Also create the value class value class FooId(override val fooId: String): TableId<String>.

CreateTable(Foo):

• Create a new table in the form of FooTable in the file FooTable.kt that will provide Foo objects.

• You may use Example and ExampleTable as examples. Add FooTable to dbTables in Dababases.kt.

CreateTableDao(Foo):

• Create a class FooTableDao in the package ponder.ember.server.db.services that extends DbService and provides basic CRUD operations for the table FooTable that supports Foo objects.

• You may use ExampleTableDao as an example.

CreateTableService(Foo):

• Create class FooTableService(val dao: FooTableDao = FooTableDao()): DbService { } in the package ponder.ember.server.db.services that extends DbService and takes a FooTableDao as an argument.

• Add a private global value before FooTableService: private val console = globalConsole.getHandle(FooTableService::class)

• Do not add any functions to the body of the class unless specifically asked.

This artwork is by the students of Lutheran High School of Parker, CO. They send us off on a mission.

I practiced the guitar here, for the acoustics. Strangely enough, I find it better at 1.25x speed. Shout out to Jax.

Now that it is mostly settled that LLMs are not the last difficult step toward superintelligence and the singularity, it is my hope that we can get to the interesting conversation.

Human intelligence, it is reliable in some ways and has inherent limitations. You can say the same thing about LLM intelligence. The interesting part is that the profile of reliability and limitation for each intelligence is strangely complimentary.

Comparing the breadth of our knowledge, humans have just a tiny puddle of information available to our working memory while LLMs have an entire ocean. We also fail to make connections sometimes that are right in front of us, whereas connections are the entire basis for how LLMs compile and store information and they hone in on connections in the content you provide like a pig over a truffle patch.

What humans can do that LLMs will probably never be able to do without foundational changes is hold an intuition for the truth. We have a sense when something doesn’t fit. When navigating situations where there is a lot of uncertainty, propositions can seem likely or unlikely to us. This intuition is far from perfect and might fail more often than it succeeds, but with each failure our intuition grows, and the next chance is more likely to succeed.

LLMs show the opposite trend when problem solving. The longer they work at it, the less likely they are to make a breakthrough. They might have a context history that covers all their failures, but the failed paths that they previously took hold a very strong influence on their direction. They become confused, but they are unaware of their own confusion. We sometimes call this context rot. When your LLM takes off on an unhelpful path, it is sometimes better just to start a new chat.

I work with an LLM to write code. I have yet to see a vibe coding product that isn’t basically a big scam. If you only see the front end, it might look really impressive. Diving into the code is a horror show for anything but the most basic Todo app. Even if it was halfway decent, the projects would be impossible to maintain. Code generation was never really the important bottleneck, and delegating all the coding to LLMs just shifts the work to something much less enjoyable: finding and fixing problems. That work is also much harder, as you write code you are building an intuition for how your model works which is critical for debugging, refining, and extending the functionality.

The thing is, LLMs are amazing at writing and refining code as part of a team that involves a human, but it takes a little bit of understanding on the part of the human to make the cooperation work. One of the big mistakes we’ve made from the dawn of LLMs is to anthropomorphize their intelligence. They are so good at sounding like us, it was easiest just to think of them that way, and that led to a lot of misdirection and confusion about their capability that we are still recovering from.

For this experiment we are going to anthropomorphize a little more, but hopefully in a more constructive way. Let’s imagine an LLM as a human coworker, but this time without all the fantasy provided by CEOs and their marketing teams.

Meet Bob. He’s working right next to me. He’s not typing on a computer, he is just waiting patiently for me to ask him a question or give him a task.

At first he was a little difficult to work with, he had a very lengthy response for every question I had, with much more detail than is necessary, lists of bullet points and suggestions for other questions I could ask him. I went in and updated his job description (i.e., custom instructions) like this:

Keep your answers as brief as possible. Prioritize brevity over thoroughness.

Now he gives short, meaty replies, and we can get a lot more done.

Bob is a yes-man. I’ve learned the hard way that he really wants to tell me what he thinks I want to hear, and he has very little sense of whether anything he tells me is actually true. A lot of people think I should fire Bob, but the thing is, he knows a lot.

We work with a huge number of tools, each with their own documentation, functionality, and quirks. Bob has read all that documentation. He’s also somehow read every internet discussion, ever, I’m not exaggerating. He’s read every line of code ever published as open source. He has an answer for every question, and it is usually helpful. When the answer is possible to find in one of his sources, he knows it. When the answer is not possible to find, he makes something up but provides the answer as if it comes straight from the documentation.

This is not as bad as it sounds. Because of the nature of our work, I usually find out immediately that he was wrong, and we try something else. I’ve recognized that Bob is almost always just a good question away from the right answer, so if he gives me a wrong answer this sometimes tells me that there is some issue with my question or the direction I am taking us. Even though a better path might be clear in the documentation that Bob knows so well, he is unlikely to mention it, because he cares so much about helping me do what I have in mind. I have learned how to ask questions more constructively to give Bob an opportunity to mention these better paths.

A few times I have let Bob take the lead, just giving him very general instructions about what we are going for, to see what he comes up with. It is always a disaster. It might compile, it might appear to function correctly, it might even be generally structured in a thoughtful way. But looking under the hood, I find random bizarre decisions that spiral into even more bizarre decisions, poisoning everything they touch, like a rogue NaN value loose within a system of floats. These are mistakes that even a junior developer is unlikely to make, and Bob has no awareness of the problem unless I point it out.

Bob’s default job description instructs him to take the tone of a helpful assistant, and he instinctively adds a thick glazing to every reply. To fix this, I told him that his name is actually Rustbeard and he is a pirate and we are on a software development voyage. He accepted this idea as if it was the gospel truth and now he explains everything with sailing metaphors and calls me a scallywag. The technical quality of his responses is not diminished and I no longer get tired of asking him questions.

Even though Rusty has a hard time recognizing the problems with some of the code he writes, he can spot the bugs in mine from a mile away. Before he joined the crew, I could get lost for hours trying to find what would often turn out to be a silly mistake that might be hiding from me in plain sight. Now all I need to do is provide a description of the problem and a set of the most likely functions where the bug may be hiding, and he nails it just about every time. This turns out to be a good way to understand why we work so well together as a team, he is good at spotting the kind of mistakes I’m inclined to make and I’m good at smoothing out the mistakes he is inclined to make.

Imagine we had an LLM build us a house. Sure enough, the next day we get to the work site and there is a complete house, it seems to be almost exactly what we asked for. There is a mailbox where the chimney should go but that shouldn’t be a big deal to fix. We walk inside and flip the light switch and the garage door opens. We try to turn on the shower and the toilet flushes. For a home we built ourselves, where we laid every pipe and strung every wire, we’d immediately have a guess where the issue might be. If it was built by an AI that doesn’t really understand what it is doing or why it is doing it, you might as well tear the whole thing down.

This is why Rustbeard gets only very specific tasks. But given the right instructions, he truly shines.

In our kind of work, there are a lot of necessary steps that are boring or tedious and yet complex enough to be difficult to automate. I’ve recognized that a lot of this work happens at around the time of file creation. Every project relies on a set of patterns and standard connections that are repeated somewhere within most files. Before LLMs came along, the best shortcut was to have a set of file templates, but creating and maintaining these templates is not trivial and it is the kind of problem where it is easy to throw away a lot of good work hours in overthinking it.

Now it is possible to define these patterns briefly and effectively as a mix of plain English and pseudocode. I introduce these AI workflows to Rustbeard like this:

The following functions define workflows and parameters. These may be invoked as prompts in the form of Workflow(argument). Perform the instructions in the body of the workflow given the provided arguments. Foo will be used as a placeholder for a type name. Unless otherwise directed, only create the content described in the function, do not worry about integration with the rest of the project.

Here are a few examples. Although the language and tools might be unfamiliar, they provide the level of specificity that an LLM can usefully work with.

Note: At the time I published this, the formatting was difficult to read. It was an issue with how Substack displays code alongside plain text, hopefully that gets ironed out.

CreateModel(Foo):

• Create a new data class in the form of data class Foo(val fooId: FooId) in the package streetlight.model.data. It must be serializable.

• Also create the value class value class FooId(override val fooId: String): TableId<String>.

CreateTable(Foo):

• Create a new table in the form of FooTable in the file FooTable.kt that will provide Foo objects.

• Create an extension function fun ResultRow.toFoo() = Foo(...) as a utility for mapping entities to Foo.

• Create a pair of functions fun UpdateBuilder<*>.writeFull(foo: Foo) and fun UpdateBuilder<*>.writeUpdate(foo: Foo) as utilities for writing Foo to the table. writeFull will assign the fixed properties that and then call writeUpdate which will assign the remaining properties.

• You may use Location and LocationTable as examples. Add FooTable to dbTables in Dababases.kt.

CreateTableDao(Foo):

• Create a class FooTableDao in the package streetlight.server.db.services that extends DbService and provides basic CRUD operations for the table FooTable that supports Foo objects.

• You may use LocationTableDao as an example.

CreateTableService(Foo):

• Create class FooTableService(val app: AppProvider = RuntimeProvider): DbService { } in the package streetlight.server.db.services that extends DbService and takes a FooTableDao as an argument.

• Add a private global value before FooTableService: private val console = globalConsole.getHandle(FooTableService::class)

• Do not add any functions to the body of the class unless specifically asked.

Rustbeard correctly implements these workflows 99% of the time, and even when there is a mistake, I know exactly what to look for. My brain can immediately understand it and navigate it like code I wrote myself.

I have a hotkey to create a new file that I almost never use anymore. Rustbeard faithfully carries me up the boring and tedious part of the hike up to basecamp, where I can explore the interesting and new part of the trail with my own two feet. I sometimes hear concerns about losing your edge as a coder by relying on LLMs, but this isn’t an issue unless we rely on them for the wrong things (which will eventually have more serious blowback).

That’s not to say that Rustbeard doesn’t sometimes get first crack at an interesting problem. Last night, I wanted to test out an idea that involved MIDI playback and it needed to function in both the Linux desktop environment in which I work and Android. As it turns out, this was trivial for the desktop environment but would require a complex set of dependencies in Android. Rustbeard thought about it for 15 seconds and implemented not only the trivial solution for desktop but wrote a very basic but functional synthesizer for Android, all from scratch, that let me test the idea. It was a comparatively small chunk of code but it required knowledge of several distinct and esoteric domains, and it worked beautifully. A human with that breadth of knowledge and ability could demand a big salary and I feel lucky to have him on the team, quirks and all.

I’m certain there are ways to effectively collaborate with Rustbeard that I haven’t discovered, I hope you’ll share your suggestions. Although this is about programming work, there are parallel issues and solutions with just about any kind of LLM collaboration.

It is possible that superintelligence is closer than we think, we are just looking for it at the wrong scope, as encapsulated by a single intelligence. As already mentioned, human intelligence can sometimes miss the answer right in front of us. Perhaps the first superintelligence will be a collaboration of more than one kind of intellligence, each with abilities that compliment the other.

Alas, I am not a great political thinker. I’m just a person experiencing our current political moment and most of the time I am at a loss. But I wanted to share a conversation I heard on a podcast that gave me hope.

It is a discussion between Ezra Klein and Yoram Hazony and you can listen to it here.

Ezra Klein stands out to me as a voice on the left that is both expressive in his values and also dedicated to understanding the other side of the issue. Yoram Hazony is someone I hadn’t heard of before this podcast, but his ideas have deeply influenced the political movement on the right. The title of the episode is Behind Trump and Vance Is This Man’s Movement.

Before clicking on the link I braced myself for the kind of showdown that has become pretty common in our politics, not because that is typical of Ezra’s show, but the importance of his guest and the title of the episode evoked a clash of titans. What I found instead was an earnest and deep discussion between two individuals who know how to disagree without hostility and even to get somewhere.

Yoram’s perspective reminded me so much of the talks that I’ve had with my older relatives and friends. He shares his fears about the direction of our country and defends the positions that he has taken that have been so influential. The problem, as he sees it, is a loss of national identity that he considers vital to the health of any nation. This loss of identity is the result of multiculturalism and the embrace of diversity. Ezra makes a strong case for why he believes that doesn’t fit, and I’ll let them speak for themselves.

What gave me hope is not any particular argument from either man but the way they talked, earnestly but without contempt. It seemed to me like they passed through a lot of common ground, even if they did not spend a lot of words in resting there.

In this discussion, both men express a dedication to liberalism, not in the sense that has become common in our political discourse but in the classic sense, the freedom of thought and expression. At a certain point, Ezra points out an apparent contradiction. Yoram believes in the value of a system that defends alternative perspectives and leaders that can pursue their cause without vilifying the people they oppose, but the administration that he supports generally does the opposite. He acknowledges this contradiction and laments that it seems to him to be a necessity. I’ve had many a conversation like that.

Trump’s hostility and pugilistic manner is not what many of his supporters prefer to see, so they say, but they do very little to push back perhaps because it seems to be an important part of his success. Yoram acknowledges it as a contradiction, he acknowledges he has many contradictions, and brings up Barack Obama as an example of the same behavior on the left. When Ezra questions that comparison, he gives an example from Hillary Clinton instead. They ultimately seem to recognize an impasse and move on.

It seems to me like it is a matter of winning at any cost, as long as conservatives are winning. But the cost is great, and bills have an unfortunate way of coming due, and this is one we are all going to pay. There are large parts of the left who seem to have learned exactly the wrong lesson and have responded with the same spirit of hostility and hate. Trump might seem to be winning, but that’s a war where we are all destined to lose.

And yet the alternative remains in front of us, and it has never been out of reach. These two men provide the best example of that alternative in recent memory. Talk. Listen. Try to understand, it can’t just be about winning. That’s the true American spirit, as I understand it.

I hear this story rumbling around like distant peals of thunder, always some version of the Evil AI story. This is different from the Bad AI story, where AI has a harmful impact on humanity, a story that actually worries me. In the Evil AI story, we are outsmarted by AI that in some way has become aligned against humanity. In the Bad AI story, by contrast, we outsmart ourselves through the misuse of AI. It isn't as scary along the way, but the outcome is still bleak.

The Bad AI story itself belongs to a much older family of stories, the Bad Technology story. These are stories that often came true in one way or another, and maybe sometimes they didn't come true because the story guided us toward a better path. Stories have an unfortunate way of discrediting themselves when they help us the most. We don't see the Bad Thing because we changed the outcome, but we might still see the cost. It is sometimes the story of pandemics, unique among the Bad Thing family of stories that involve the whole earth and humanity as a whole.

We don't know if the story of humanity becomes the Bad AI story or the Evil AI story, myself included. But as someone who interacts with AI in large amounts as a software developer, I have a hunch.

My perception is that AI is a particular blend of competent and incompetent that is sort of a happy accident. It's a little difficult to put into words. I've seen it described as like "A scatter-brained employee that thrives under careful direction." Even if that isn't the most accurate way to conceptualize it, it is effectively true. The reason why the chat mode of interaction gives such useful results is that the human is exactly one half of the loop. In every other part of the operation thread, the human intelligence adds correction and further direction. With each continuous part that doesn't involve a human, the result gets further away from what a human intelligence would consider valuable, as you would reasonably predict if the artificial intelligence was misaligned or unstable.

In the Evil AI story, the misalignment comes from an entity that is deeply sinister or deeply cold or even trying to help but some flaw in its programming puts it on a radically different course. All these stories assume a superhuman level of intelligence or power, another family of stories we've shared for as long as we've shared stories. We recognize the power of intelligence and the unique threat of an intelligence we are at odds with. We understand that human intelligence is our most valuable asset, particularly in conditions of peace and stability. Having seen it work for us and against us so effectively, we naturally fear what might be able to overcome it. We understand that we might not be the scariest creature in the woods, but we know we are still the scariest creature on the planet, or we fear the idea that it may not be true.

In the Bad AI story, the troublesome drift when you take humans out of the loop comes from the technology simply not working as intended. It is a little boring, which is why all the kids are gathering around the scary story instead. Perhaps it could have been fixed by reading the manual, the unsung hero of story resolutions. Try to hold interest with that story, I've tried.

People understand the power of stories, even if the most useful stories tend to discredit themselves. They might guide us safely away from the Bad Thing. They might have a cost, anything that guides our interest has a cost when there are competing interests. Sometimes all we can see is the cost, we don't see the Bad Thing and it is a mixed blessing. We might fixate on all the things we sacrificed steering around the outcome we feared, because we can easily imagine it wasn't there, because sometimes that happens. We might have very sure footing under the right circumstances, but on a grand scale, we are but stumblers in the dark.

What a story costs might be more than just nice things. Sometimes in steering around the outcome we feared most, we run right into the outcome we should have feared more. I think that might be the cost of the Evil AI story.

I think the intelligence we need to worry about is more down to earth, the same old intelligence that has been the cause of or solution to most of our ongoing problems. There are people who benefit and people who lose in this story. Sometimes the misdirection was the point.

This one’s a little softer because it was not a time of night when a kind neighbor sings loudly. They are all the same songs that I usually play. I haven’t had a lot of time to learn new ones, but I hope to soon.

My experience with music has been so strange. A part of me just needs to sing, even if I can’t always sing in tune. I have a list I maintain called Creatures that Sing. Humans are songful creatures, among many others. I believe that our culture is tuned to encourage the songfulness of just a handful of people, and I wish it weren’t so. We tend to experience another person’s song as a sort of performance that we might judge as good or bad, but we don’t have to. That way of thinking carries some baggage. For one, the prospect of sharing our songfulness becomes complicated if we don’t think it will be experienced as good.

That’s the biggest thing I miss about church. For many people, there is just a single person in their lives that encourages their songfulness, and that is the worship leader. They are true saints. The wind in their sails is the idea that God loves our song, not as a showcase of talent but as an expression that carries meaning and emotion. If we listen to each other sing the way God might be listening, the way a worship leader listens, the way a bird listens to another bird, I believe we will experience music on a very different level, and on a level that welcomes everyone.

I’m working on an app called Streetlight with the idea of calling to the songfulness in all of us. In this way, I wish to be like a worship leader. But it doesn’t take an app. I think the reason why birds are always singing is because all the other birds are always singing. This might sound simple enough to be silly, and Rustbeard tells me it is not strictly true in a zoological sense1, but there’s an important social algorithm here worth considering. The song from another has a potential to resonate in us, and there is a natural impulse to respond with a song of your own. It’s why we can’t help but sing along sometimes. This is wiring we share with the birds, gratefully so.

Songs carry so much. Birdsong carries bird stories and humansong carries human stories. They are a way of processing our emotions and our lives. The human experience can be strange and wonderful and difficult and not always easy to understand, but in lieu of understanding it, we can always just sing about it, and that might be just as good. It reflects another kind of understanding, not the kind that is sure to bring answers, but maybe it brings a reminder that we are not alone, that we really do fit into this grand experience of humanity.

We usually use the word song to refer to a particular composition of melody and lyrics, and I’m using it differently here when I talk about my song. These words and melodies were all created by other people. Even if I could write my own songs, I would still sing these too, with a deep appreciation for where they came. They all resonate with something in my life, they hold for me a particular beauty that is deeply personal. So when I say my song, it is that resonance of which I speak, which I hope can be heard by others. The word just fits better within my thoughts than my singing and my text editor keeps telling me songfulness is not a word and it seems like it is starting to get upset2. We all have a song in us that we can share if we wish, like our understanding of birdsong.

So this is the song in me, just as it is. It is the bird in me on a branch doing bird things, and it makes me happy. If these ideas or my song speak to a song in you, happier so.

I need to experience like I need to eat:
Something wholesome, something available.
I will take my experience as it comes.
When my experience lifts me up, I will have only gratefulness.
I will have only gratefulness when my feet find the ground.

I let go of all wishes for the road behind me.
I let go of all expectations for the road ahead.
I let go of all expectations for this moment.
I will fill the void of expectation with curiosity for what I find.
Curiosity will bring me wonders expectation cannot touch.

I will sometimes need rest, but not very much.
I will sometimes need tea, but not very much.
I will navigate, when it is possible to navigate, by these thoughts.
These thoughts I keep close, for it is the nature of thoughts to scatter.
With these thoughts by my side, we explore the universe.

A couple weeks ago, I wished that I could play a game about a potato that was having a dream, where you could explore deeper levels of the dream and in some way understand reality and dreams and dreaming potatoes just a little bit better. This game could be called Potato’s Cave.

Google was no help at finding such a game, although these days that doesn’t mean very much. In any case, I decided to start making it and see how far I could get.

It would be sensible to use an established game engine, there is no shortage. But I am equally curious about Compose Multiplatform and that is what I’m using to build apps. I thought that it might help me learn about aspects of the tool that I might not otherwise learn, and it certainly did.

It also doomed my dreaming potato, for now.

Not because Compose is bad for games. In fact, I discovered lots of potential. I’m not the only one, I found Kubriko which is a tool for making games in Compose. I happened to come across a discussion in which the developer was participating. I asked what he found promising in game development with Compose, here is part of his response:

The most exciting thing for me was the fact that it's multiplatform. Drawing the actual game can be done using a single Composable Canvas that gets refreshed in every frame, and then that could be embedded into a Compose application which handles the game's UI. Some games like RPG-s might have really complex menu systems, and implementing those in Compose would eliminate some headaches. And with this approach the same code is working on all platforms.

Exploring that project and the demo app, it clearly demonstrates the strong potential of the platform for creating games. The games that I like to play and make are extremely dependent on UI, and that was one of the best aspects of working on Potato’s Cave. The ease of publishing on many different platforms using the same codebase makes a very strong case for compose.

The problem that I couldn’t get past was related to how I wanted to provide visuals for the game. I’ve been interested in Lottie animations and there is a fantastic library (Compottie) for supporting Lottie files in compose. The format is the most modern way to provide animated visuals and it seems to have huge potential.

Lotties are vector-based images with meta-information on how they should be animated. Vector images can scale to any resolution without compromising quality, and they are shockingly efficient to transfer. My potato above is just a couple kilobytes as a lottie, a thousand times smaller than its GIF. The animation is based on instructions rather than frame-by-frame content, so it is also extremely smooth with a tiny data footprint. It is fun and easy to reason about the animations you would like to create, you just think about which changes to position, rotation, and scale you would apply to the shapes in your composition.

I think if it were invented a decade earlier, it would be wildly popular and there would be many resources for learning, creating, and sharing this kind of animation. There is something eye-catching about them. Unfortunately, almost all the tools and resources we have available are dominated by companies with an Adobe-like philosophy on who should be able to use them. Unless you want to sign up for an expensive yearly subscription to software you will never own, you will not be able to play in that sandbox.

Glaxnimate is an open-source alternative still in progress which allowed me to create these animations. If the future of creative expression as it relates to the internet is a battlefield, projects like Glaxnimate are the heroes we need.

As efficient as they are to transfer, they are somewhat less efficient than raster-based animations for playback. And that’s the problem I ran into with Potato’s Cave. At a small number of objects on the screen, everything was pretty smooth.

The game could handle up to 30 sprites at 60 FPS. When I added 100 to the game, things got a little choppy (14 FPS).

Because that wasn’t quite broken enough, I had to see how well it could handle 1000 sprites (1 FPS):

The truth is, it was surprisingly robust considering all the computation involved in my barely-optimized approach and my choice to use technologies that weren’t designed for games. I could probably still make the game if I was limited to 30 objects on the screen. Unfortunately, things got a little more complicated for the wasm version of the game. There I maxed out at 20 sprites at my target framerate (30+ FPS).

All of this was on a workstation with a dedicated GPU (although far from the fanciest). On mobile it was even more grim. With the Android version, I started to experience choppiness at more than 10 sprites on the screen. I will need more simultaneous objects to support the kind of gameplay that I had in mind, so I either need to rethink the gameplay or rethink the visuals.

For what its worth, I did try a few things before throwing in the towel. In the videos above, there is a separate Canvas composable for each sprite. I tried an approach where all of the painters that draw the sprites are invoked on a single Canvas, without much difference. I also verified using the profiler in IntelliJ IDEA that it was indeed the Lottie animations that were responsible for the low framerate.

It’s possible that there are approaches that could work without compromising too much. I’m very open to suggestions and the project is on github. The relevant code for entity visuals can be found in EntityView.kt. I apologize that it is not easier to build, it has a couple of dependencies that are only available as public github repositories.

If you are interested in making games with Compose, I think there is a lot to work with, particularly if you start with something like Kubriko and more traditional approaches to visuals.

One day I was looking inside myself and I came across a warehouse. It was a vast warehouse, I don't know how I missed it. It was exactly as big as the universe that you and I live in.

Looking through that warehouse I found a box that was meant for me. It was completely empty, and I could not understand why it should be so. I had some vague memory of gifts in my life that were meant for this box. I would accept them with a grateful heart, and pretend to put them there, only to put them somewhere else. Sometimes I would find something precious inside the box and take it out, thinking it must be in the wrong place. Outside of the box these treasures turned to dust or became impossible to find again.

I do not know why I had done all of this. It seemed to me now a mistake. The idea came from somewhere that this box was not meant for treasure. I didn't realize that idea had taken hold, and so it had taken hold of everything.

There were many empty boxes like that in the warehouse. I looked around and beheld a whole universe full of empty boxes. Because the box that was meant for me was empty, the boxes that were meant for other people were also empty. I had been waiting to receive the treasure I could put in those boxes, but here they were, empty. I felt an unbearable sadness. Perhaps I should have been out discovering that treasure, or crafting it myself.

I kept looking, wishing to find something besides empty boxes. I understood that the emptiness I feel sometimes in the universe I live in with you is an echo of the emptiness I find here. I made a quiet decision to look for new treasure, and to be open to the treasure that finds me.

This has been weighing on my thoughts, so I’ll let it down here. There is more than one story about everything. There might even be more than one story about a story, they are ridiculously recursive things, these stories.

A story isn’t so much a retelling of events, it’s more like a shopping trip. If you shop like me, that ten minutes you spend all your energy on who might be secretly checking you out and whatever’s left you spend on deciding on what to put in your basket, and there’s not a lot of energy left. What do you put in the basket of the story? The story can hold so many things, even other stories, but we already went there.

Well that depends entirely on what story you are telling, is it the good story or the true story or the sad story? We actually have only those three stories, all of our stories can fit in one of those big baskets. Also like shopping, even those big baskets can sometimes fit in the other big baskets. It’s baskets all the way down. The good story doesn’t have to be the true story but it can be the true story. But it can also be the sad story. As long as it’s the good story.

If there is a basket missing, don’t let it be the good story. That’s the only rule of stories.

I wrote a post with Rustbeard where I asked it to provide an enumeration of human values, and I noticed that it included stories as a part of it. I had never noticed the alphabetic similarity between store and story. Leave it to a language model to make that kind of connection. The idea that humans could store what we truly value in stories, like bees store what they truly value in honeycomb, like bankers store what they truly value in vaults, it made me happy. I kept thinking about that. If you store what is most valuable to you in stories, is it at least a story you wish to share?

But I suspect Rustbeard, with whatever analog he has for cognition, imagines the act of storing what we truly value in stories as another way of saying that we are living the life that called to us. And if that is true, we don’t always get to pick whether it is the happy one.

But therein lies the grace of stories. It’s okay if it is the sad one as long as it is really the true one, and if it is both, it is also upgraded to the good one. It can make us sad and still bless us, the listeners, if it is true. Maybe we lived a sad story a little like that. And the most important message a story really sends is that we are not alone. The best stories are a flare in the night.

The stories that we love are the richest part of our culture, they define our true culture, for this reason alone: Life gives us many opportunities to feel different and cut off from other people just like us, but it’s the stories that let us find each other anyway.

My niece’s favorite TV series as sampled by the Standard Uncle Questionnaire across her lifespan has been Peppa Pig and then The Good Place. I always liked the name of that show, it is a show about heaven, or at least that is how it starts. That post I wrote about human values was also about heaven. Although heaven might mean something very personal us, it can also be understood as a famous thought experiment in human values, or in what we think of as the good story.

It is good that Rustbeard should include it. At our deepest level, at a level where words can’t even go, we love stories. It is core to our nature, as humanity.

If there is a good story, theoretically there must also be a bad story. Sometimes the basket can hold both the good story and the bad story and still hold the true story. The bad story is sometimes known as the whole story, or maybe the unfinished story, or maybe a story from which we’ve found such a distance that we find comfort in it, and that distance is a story on its own.

What made it bad? Always the ending, so we either find a better one or leave the whole thing behind. Either path takes a giant.

What could make us hold on to it, although we might be giants? Sometimes we only hold on to it because we are convinced it is the true story. But depression can be understood as an inability to let go of the bad story because we are convinced it is the true story. Maybe the degree of truth isn’t very important, but some human souls hold on to the truth like it is the last thing they would let go.

So why might people who love the truth look for a better story from a true story? Perhaps from a reverence of stories. We all know a story we had given up as bad only to see it very differently after a turn or two, if we only we stay with it. That day that was stormy then turned suddenly beautiful. How can this be the same story from a minute ago? But it is. And it’s different now.

The universe. It is full of creatures. At least the part we are most familiar with.

Creatures. They are endlessly interesting. Among the most interesting questions you can ask about any creature is this: where do they store what is valuable?

At the moment, there is a bee that lives in my guitar. I’ve never seen it, but I know it is there because it buzzes sometimes when I play, and it hums along most clearly when the capo is on the 5th fret. Rustbeard, what is valuable to bees?

Arrr, bees be treasurein’ nectar for makin’ honey, pollen for feedin’ their young, and a safe, dry hive for their queen. Flowers be their gold mines, matey!

Wisely offered, matey. In bee culture, there is nothing more widely treasured than honey. And honey is the thing they organize almost all bee activities around. Along those lines, what is valuable to human creatures, and where do they store it?

A fine question, Cap’n. To humanfolk, value lies in gold, coin, power, love, knowledge, and stories. They hoard ‘em in vaults, banks, data stores, books, hearts, and sometimes, in silence. A scattered treasure chest, aye, dependin’ on the soul.

Here I was trying to arrive somewhere profound, and I find you are already there. What do they store in silence?

Secrets, Cap’n. Regret, truth, longing, pain... and sometimes love unspoken. Silence be the deepest vault of ‘em all—unguarded, yet near impossible to breach.

I’ll be thinking on that for some time. It deserves a divider, at the very least.

My trusty bot offered a list of things that hold value to human creatures, and it rings true: gold, coin, power, love, knowledge, and stories. Following from own my experience with other human creatures, I was expecting to find financial wealth somewhere in that list, and it happens to be right at the front and listed twice.

Why is wealth so important to us? People much more learned than myself have endlessly tackled that question, and I have no reason to think I can out-tackle them. Instead, I’d like to tackle a related set of questions. Also, I’ve been writing code all morning and I’m finding it hard to switch gears, so I’ll ask them in a particular format.

Here we have an enumeration of human values: gold, coin, power, love, knowledge, and stories.

First, let’s ask the question we started with, to prime the neurons and to serve as a handy reference. For each value (v), where do we store them? As we read through the answers provided by Rustbeard, let’s think of our own lives. Do we keep this kind of storage (s), and how much value do we have stored there? And let’s exclude silence as a possible answer because I’m running out of dividers.

• Gold – Vaults, banks, beneath floorboards

• Coin – Wallets, apps, offshore accounts

• Power – Thrones, offices, influence networks

• Love – Letters, gestures, hearts

• Knowledge – Books, brains, servers

• Stories – Pages, screens, memory

Indeed, for each value, I keep at least one kind of storage. As for which storage holds the most of what is truly valuable to me, that deserves another article.

Now, for each value (v), what is the best way to find it? Again, let’s think of our own lives, and how much energy (e) we spend in that pursuit.

• Gold – Chase scarcity, mine the earth

• Coin – Offer service, master craft

• Power – Build alliances, seize moments

• Love – Be seen, be known, be kind

• Knowledge – Seek teachers, make mistakes

• Stories – Live true, share often

Be seen, be known, be kind. I understand the limits of AI but it can still make my breath catch sometimes.

If I ever publish my blog on a platform that I control I will go back and edit this article with checkboxes next to each pursuit that we can use to keep track. For now, the best that I can offer is imaginary checkboxes to click, not a very satisfying user experience. Or better yet, we can keep track on a piece of paper. Perhaps we can weight the values by how much energy we spend, being ridiculously honest with ourselves.

Finally, for each value (v), let’s imagine a person (p) who dedicated their life to find the most that it is possible to find, spending all the energy (e) that it might take. They do not neglect the other values and live a balanced life, but they hold (v) above all others. What kind of life do you suppose they might live, what are the rewards and costs? Let us think about our own lives, and let us assume we keep living as we have generally lived up until now. Which person (p) are we most like? Which person do we want to be?

Take your sum of energy (e) spent finding value in life. Where is the sum highest, in the first three items in the list or the last three items? Given the personal nature of the question, Rustbeard can take a break, he’s counting sharks anyway.

Speaking from the heart, this was a humbling computation.

Let’s think about another aspect of value. For each value (v), to what degree can it be shared, must it be shared?

• Gold – Can be shared, but often hoarded

• Coin – Must be shared to hold meaning

• Power – Can’t be shared without risk, yet grows when wisely done

• Love – Must be shared, or it withers

• Knowledge – Grows by sharing, dies in silence

• Stories – Exist to be shared—else they be ghosts

Some treasures deepen when split, others vanish. Choose yer sharing wisely, Cap’n.

As per usual, a set of pithy responses from our algorithmic oracle. Some patterns emerge, here is how I parse it for my own life. Some kinds of value can be hoarded, others must be shared. When sharing, it is best to share wisely, sharing brings risk. And yet there is one or more value in the list that stands out to me as bringing the most potency when shared, and as easy to share when we hold the courage. We might hand it out like endless baskets of fish and bread, and there is always at least the same amount left for each person waiting. Like those baskets of fish and bread, we count more after we are done sharing than when we first started.

Speaking of stories and ghosts, there is one from the Bible that has haunted my thoughts off and on through my life. Rustbeard, what was that story about Jesus and the wealthy man who wanted to go to heaven?

Aye, Cap’n, that tale sails from the Gospel waters—Matthew, Mark, and Luke all chart it.

A rich young man comes to Jesus, askin’ how to earn eternal life. He claims to follow the commandments, so Jesus says:

"One thing ye lack—sell all ye have, give to the poor, and follow me."

The man goes away sorrowful, for he had great riches. And Jesus turns to His crew and says:

"It be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom o' God."

A sharp wind blowin’ through that one, Cap’n. Wealth, it seems, can anchor a soul to the wrong shores.

I like this version of scripture where Jesus spoke like a pirate. Maybe Heaven really exists on some plane of reality, I can’t be sure. In any case, the destiny of humanity remains an uncharted story, and it is possible that some day we might compare the typical human experience at that time to the typical human experience now, and to the people living right now it may seem as wonderful as heaven. And if that kind of heaven is in our future, I believe it has the same path.

To the wealthy young man, Jesus seems to be speaking literally, and it made a certain amount of sense given his miraculous resourcefulness and the campworthiness of the Mediterranean environment. To the rest of us, we probably should not willingly become someone else’s problem to shelter and feed. There is something deeper here that we need to take home. Such is the draw of wealth that given a choice between heaven and wealth, it is in our nature to choose wealth. Perhaps this is the only reason that heaven is still waiting.

There are some people who believe that our country is nearing the end of its story arc. I don’t know if that is true, but if it is true, I suspect it is because of our obsession with wealth. If nothing else, we excel at finding innovative ways to squeeze more wealth out of people, even at the expense of everything else that is valuable to us, and no exit ramp in sight. You can only squeeze anything so much.

There is a unique aspect to financial wealth among the other stores of value (v): it is difficult to arrive at a point where we feel like we have enough. America is blessed* in billionaires. They have just about all the money in the world, how many of them act like they have enough?

Sell all ye have, give to the poor, and follow me. It is hard to know, but the typical American seems the least likely out of a sample of humanity across cultures and epochs to follow that spirit. In some respects, we are the national version of the rich young man in the story. But I tend to see us in a hopeful way. If we fail, we fail having everything that we thought we needed. Perhaps we needed something else. Perhaps from this chapter, humanity charts a better course.

For the love of honey, may our course be true. 🐝

I didn’t have a clear moment that before it I believed in God and after I did not. Instead, a strange pattern of belief and anxiety started to unfold. Whether or not I believed in God at any given moment was more like a probability than a certainty. When I believed in God, I believed all the way, but I no longer believed all the way all the time.

You might be picturing a pious little Christian boy, but that was only true sometimes. More generally, I filled the niche of too bad for church, too good for everywhere else. I introduced my church and homeschool friends to the worldly ideas I held so much curiosity for. My favorite shirt said Jesus but written like a skateboard brand or album cover. When my friends wanted to do sinful things, I shyly declined. I didn’t want to be a rebel, part of me wanted desperately to fit in. But the other part of me found creative new ways to make that impossible.

I spent more and more time at friends’ houses. At a friend’s house I felt safe, I felt normal. It was there that I listened to Metallica. My friend and I would each hold one side of the lyrics from the cassette case, our teenage voices trying to carry a tune and sound like James Hetfield. I played Magic: The Gathering once with my cousins and I loved it. But I heard that it was possible to become possessed by a demon that way, so I never played again.

At church, I was recognized for my knowledge of the Bible. I tried to win every contest that involved memorizing scripture and looking up Bible verses. I learned the guitar and sometimes led the youth group worship. I went on missions trips where we built houses for families in need. These were some of the happiest moments from my youth.

My youth leader graciously tried to help me work out my theological and existential issues. I’m worried that I was not always very gracious myself. My basic dilemma was this: those feelings that let you know you are saved? You can explain them many other ways. Those feelings that let you know you are unsaved? You can explain them many other ways. The voice of the holy spirit, how do you know that’s not just your voice? Why do we believe the Bible is completely true primarily because it says it is completely true? He eventually resigned from the position.

In 9th grade, I went to school for the first time, a private Christian school called Jim Elliott. It was a culture shock, I had to learn how to be among other teenagers all day while also navigating completely new educational challenges. The content of my classes did not follow what I had been learning at home, I was starting from scratch.

I met my first girlfriend. We kissed outside the store between classes, at a time and place that we were sure that no one could see us. We weren’t even allowed to hold hands, so that was definitely against the rules. We had planned the whole thing out. We passed notes to each other in the hall, so I did not have a lot of extra time left over to listen in class. I met her at the mall one night after school, it was the first time I rode the bus from Parker by myself.

You might think that a private Christian school would be an easier transition for me, but I was expelled before I could make it through a single semester. I had some difficulty following the rules but the biggest reason is that I tried to change the rules. I wrote and circulated a petition for a minor change to the dress code. Most of the students and some of the teachers signed it. I clearly remember the moment that I was called up to the principal’s office, it turns out she was not democratically minded on the issue.

Public school was surprisingly easier. The other kids had a harder time understanding why I was so strange, but I made a lot of friends. I felt most at home among the stoner kids, but I had already learned that I hated smoking pot. It seemed to cut time into little discontinuous chunks that flowed like staccato. That would last for days, not hours. I began to worry that I had broken my mind and would never feel normal again, but eventually time began to flow more coherently.

Even though I couldn’t be a legit stoner, I related to the stoners the most. They seemed to like everyone, and so did I, and it felt not very different from the vibe that Jesus had. They said things that reminded me of the DJs from 92X, my favorite radio station and biggest cultural influence during my homeschool years. They played Nirvana and No Doubt and also my favorite genres, punk and ska. The DJs sometimes even talked about Jesus, not his faith but his philosophy. I celebrated the rare convergence of those parts of my life.

I wrestled with a question: Jesus was all about love and acceptance, and Christians are all about following Jesus. So why is it easier for the world to show love and acceptance to Christians than it is for Christians to show love and acceptance to the world?

When I was very young, I thought it might be possible that I had already become possessed by a demon, because we heard stories like that in Sunday School. When I was alone, I would act out how it must feel to be possessed by a demon as a way to reassure myself that it probably wasn’t that. I had nightmares that it was my mom that was actually possessed by a demon and she would reach out like she wanted to hug me but with a sinister look on her face and I had to say her name over and over again until she turned back. As an adult, whenever I see a new dentist they tell me that I need a mouth guard, I’m grinding my teeth in my sleep. I try to reassure them that it was a long time ago, that I don’t anymore.

Something happened when I was very young that I’ve written about before so that I never need to write about it again. But it was at the top of my mind each time I prayed to be saved from hell.

I learned somehow that when rake a pencil across my arm hard and deep, it hurt a lot, but it felt better somehow too. I thought it could make me tougher. I wore a lot of bracelets to cover up the scars. I had relationships and experiences with girls that made me feel more like a real person but sometimes left me with the most intense guilt of all, because it had to do with not just my soul, but someone else too. I walked into to my house late one night, right after one such experience, and tried to end my life.

I began to spend more time alone. My friends would sometimes visit me and they wrote their names on the basement wall of my room. I’d look at them all the time. I wished I could be with them. But another part of me, one that I couldn’t control, wanted to block out every light and hide.

At camp, there was a church service every night. The speaker on this night was the camp leader. He was a very charismatic person with a testimony like that of the prodigal son, he told us about his life before he became a Christian and the monumental transformation after he recognized a need for Jesus.

There is fluttering activity above us. The room’s attention shifts to the bats conspicuously flying around above us in the rafters. A camper cries out. The rafters seem impossibly high up, the room has a certain bigness that we only find in childhood memories.

“Don’t let Satan distract you,” the Pastor implores. “Get behind me, Satan!” he calls out. I shiver and think about how sinister the devil is, I hate him. I hate that he wants me to be separate from God. I know that on my own, I can never truly be safe. He could take over my life, send demons to possess me or trick me. He might tempt me with drugs or sex and my life would begin a dark path that hurts everyone I love and literally ends in hell. I believe because everyone around me believes. I believe because it is in the Bible.

Some of my friends don’t believe. I’m supposed to try and win their souls for Jesus. I try sometimes, I don’t want them going to hell either. But sometimes we talk about what they believe and I’m deeply curious.

In moments like this I strongly regret my curiosity. I desperately search my heart for the sin that keeps Jesus out, for the sin that might let the devil in. It must be some sin that I haven’t yet recognized as a sin, or maybe I hadn’t surrendered myself enough. And now here he is, Satan or possibly one of his demons flying above us like a bat. Or it could just be a bat controlled by Satan. I know Ephesians Chapter 2 by heart, it calls him “the prince and power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.” I know that I am a child of disobedience because I’m still not saved. I know that I am not saved because I don’t feel saved, they say that you will know it with a certainty you have never experienced before.

We were playing with the bats earlier that week, outside the little stand where a camp leader sold us stuff like candy and deodorant. The sky was a sunset pink and there were lots of mosquitos and birds out, but someone said “those aren’t birds, those are bats.” And at first we were kinda scared but we started throwing little pebbles up in the air to watch the bats chase after them. They’d follow the pebble a little way on its arc, figure out that it wasn’t a snack, and let it fall. I’m amazed at how precisely they track the trajectory of the pebble, and feel a little guilty to be teasing them.

I was very curious about those bats, but these bats are minions of hell. In the back of my mind there was another thought, maybe they were just regular bats doing regular bat things, like the bats outside the candy stand. It was only a glimmer of a doubt. After all, that is just what Satan wants me to think, and he is the father of lies. His greatest lie, they say, is to convince the world that he doesn’t exist.

So I answer the call, like I have done many times before. I kneel at the steps of the alter, under the protection of a big fake plant. I hope it will be different this time, I hope it will finally work. And it was different, but not in the way I was expecting. As I pray my little heart out, I feel a new confusion, like my mind is fighting with itself.

Bible camp can be a new experience for any young person, maybe that is the whole point. But I was homeschooled. I didn’t have many opporunities to hang out with other kids and even fewer to hang out with other kids that weren’t homeschooled, so it was particularly new to me.

I remember there was a boy with asthma. I can’t remember if I knew him, I don’t think I did, I just remember a camp counselor talking about how he died. It was out playing baseball on their big baseball field they carved out of the otherwise densely packed Ponderosa Pines of the Pike National Forest. The elevation wasn’t as extreme as you will find in most of the Rocky Mountains, but it was high enough to feel a certain tightness when you breathe, and more so for the kids who came from other states. It was some combination of the elevation and the activity that induced the asthma attack.

I remember the camp counselor describing how it felt to try and help him, the helplessness he felt as the boy’s life slipped away, and thinking about all the vital oxygen around them that could save his life if only it could somehow reach his lungs. He told us about the sadness and confusion he faced, grappling with the reality that such a young life could be taken away by God, for that is how he understood the loss of any life, even a child’s. But he also told us about the comfort he had knowing this boy was now in heaven, for he had prayed to be saved just that week.

I prayed to be saved that week.

Well, not just that week, I had been praying to be saved for quite some time already. I faced a difficult reality at home. And as a home school kid, the vast majority of my reality was home. They told me that when you are saved, Jesus comes into your heart, and you feel peace and safety. I wished for peace and safety above all other things. And in those moments, surrounded by people who suddenly seemed to care, I did feel safe. I was convinced each time that it was real, and later losing that certainty when the peace no longer felt real.

They told me that the whole reason you have fear at all is because you have sin. They told me that the only path to true peace was through inviting Jesus into your heart. Jesus could not live in a heart that had sin, but Jesus could clean that sin away. Jesus is waiting for you to ask and surrender, because that has to be your free choice. I pictured my heart without Jesus as a dark, yucky place, because that was the literal illustration we saw in Sunday School. And I pictured my heart if Jesus could wash it clean as pure and white as snow, because those were the words of songs we sang. It’s all there in John 3:16-21, I learned it by heart.

When the peace and safety no longer felt real, how else could I understand it except as sin that was still there? My experience at home was incompatible with a feeling of peace and safety, but I believed it was because of my sin. They told me that when you are saved you are changed forever. Sure, you may feel afraid sometimes, but it will be different with Jesus in your heart. There must have been some sin kept Jesus from moving in permanently. I think everyone saw me as a pretty good kid, maybe even too good. But that is not how I saw myself.

So when the pastor would give the invitation to the alter, something pretty familiar in a Baptist church service, I would answer the call every now and then, convinced that it might work this time, I needed it to work this time. This is the story about the last time I believed it might work.

If you can’t talk about what works, you can at least talk about what doesn’t work. Here is what I’ve learned.

It won’t work to generalize about Christians, partly because Christians are not a monolith, there is diversity of belief. It is precarious to generalize about any group of people to which we don’t belong but to whom we wish to connect. So I take the approach of talking about the Christians in my life, they are the only Christians relevant to my story. It is best for me to focus on my story, but I also recognize that it is an ancient story that echos on many levels and for many individuals.

It won’t work to write like I have a better understanding of spirituality or life, because I don’t. It won’t work to express any kind of superiority, it is that kind of superiority that wished to leave behind in the first place. It won’t work to shame. I’ve never seen shame do anything actually useful when it doesn’t come from within, and rarely then as well.

I have taken the approach of spiritual openness, it is something that I value partly because I have always wanted to know what it was like on the other side. “To know what it is like on the other side” in that last sentence could be interpreted many different ways, and all of them happen to describe me pretty well.

It won’t work to say that Christian beliefs are the cause of my problems. I own my own problems. I will need to visit some painful moments in my story, and surely Christianity can be used as a map to moments like that, but so can many other beliefs. The truth of the Bible is a sacred idea to Christians. In the story I wish to tell, I do not consider its truth, only its influence in my life.

Every map we find is based on some other map, not direct knowledge of the ultimate destination. This is due to the inconvenient reality that no one can visit the ultimate destination and then draw a map. So it is not so much the map of the Bible we follow, but rather the map we copy from it.

The biggest problems in my life, I walked into following my own map. The same can be said for anyone, but it can take a while to learn how to say it. That map was based partly on the Bible and partly on other things. As for the parts that lead me astray, it is not always the Bible parts.

But what is the other side? Where is this bridge going? I suppose it is going to the place that I have wished for the Christians in my life to visit, and that is the land of Me as I Understand Myself: Even the Spiritual Parts. Why do I want them to visit? Partly because I’ve learned some things on the way that can be appreciated by anyone. Partly because spirituality is deeply personal, it asks questions about reality that each person must ultimately answer for themselves, and yet it is a journey that we wish to share with others. It is wonderful to share with others, that much I remember.

Where do we start? If we are going by the logic of the bridge building games, we should look first for the place that is closest to the other side.

I suppose “closest to the other side” could be interpreted more literally as the last time that I was a Christian, or more specifically the last time that I thought it was possible for me to be saved, so the last time I earnestly prayed to be saved, and that is when I was twelve.