Kalin's Twitter Code of Conduct: I want my personal brand to be about kindness, empathy, healthy communication, and building a better world through technology and science. My ultimate reason for being on Twitter is to promote Custom Data Organizer at customd.app, and to get started as an entrepreneur. But my values come first. I will... treat everyone with respect and compassion regardless of how wrong or harmful they may be. craft tweets to genuinely communicate, not to elicit guilt, shame or other negative emotions. only engage in honest, good faith arguments. be open to changing my mind based on new information, and admitting my mistakes. not engage in saracasm or other language designed to hurt rather than communicate. remember that it's often the best choice to ignore angry people until they calm down. prioritize my own behavior and personal growth over winning arguments. keep this account safe for work. not discuss but also will not deny my not safe for work side. not tweet while angry. only post content if I believe it will add value for someone. do my best to support the community.

It's like no one has the time and distance to come up with our own ideas anymore. All our opinions get curated through the online system. AI could make things a lot worse unless we learn to use these tools responsibly and take a step back from them. youtu.be/w6anOqrSCQc?is=NzSO…

here's a tour of my old apartment. You can walk through it, see where I used to live and hover over things to see descriptions, like my computer named Boner or my frisbee golf basket made of an old tire: web.archive.org/web/20060505…

It seems the AI haters all have the same strategy of insulting then blocking instead of having real human conversations.

This is kind of fundamental to being successful and comfortable with who you are. We need to shift away from raw willpower and beating ourselves up over mistakes and move toward deeper understanding of and comfort with our own human patterns. youtube.com/shorts/lxmV5oAWl…

I've been planning with a couple friends to buy a plot of land and open a small kink/queer/nudist type campground, so I'm realizing I need to get off my ass and go live at another campground for a while and get a feel for how it's run. Life is too easy for me. Everything is so luxurious and I think that's a big reason I'm in this funk. I've spent 48 years building a life of ease and luxury and didn't understand that that's not what was going to make me happy, so now I need to deliberately go somewhere without all these comforts--I'm currently lying in my hammock overlooking the field behind my house.

I took shrooms a couple days ago and really thought about the funk I've been in for the last few months since I got laid off from my job. I always get like this when I'm unemployed but this time it's not as bad as in the past because I'm working on my memoir, but I realized as I was tripping that i need more than that. I'm no Stephen King. I can't focus all day on writing. I need balance. I need other writing projects, other artistic explorations and I need to do manual labor. Exercise isn't enough. It's got to be manual labor that actually gets something accomplished.

I feel like very few people truly take charge of their own lives. We look toward religion to tell us how to be spiritual, to the YouTube algorithm to tell us what to be interested in, and to therapists and drugs to tell us how to deal with emotions. We need to teach people how to truly look inwards to solve their problems. We should still use therapists, religion etc, but it should be collaborative. We should not allow those things to hold our hands through everything. We need to be our own guides. medium.com/@constantinpatras…

I'm gonna ramble for like 3,000 words about why I like AI and what it means to me inside, with all the feelings and stuff. ------- I’ve found it difficult to come here and write this. I didn’t realize how triggering this topic was for me and how much anger management it would require. I think this is because I identify as a trans-humanist, which basically means I look forward to a time when humans are far more deeply integrated with technology than we already are. I believe Mother Nature created us with the specific purpose of building space craft to spread life to other worlds, and that her long-term existence depends on us. This article is a mostly-unedited free-write about my feelings about AI. Apologies for the indignant tone. Ironically enough, I did not use AI in any way to write this. If I had, I’m sure it would have cleaned that up. *** So I’m fairly queer–at least I would hit nearly every item on an “are they queer” checklist, but unlike most queer people, I don’t feel like my relationship with sex or gender is really core to who I am as a person. My relationship with technology is much more important to my core identity. But it feels like some queer people and many hippies (I also kind of identify as a hippie) are hateful toward specific technologies or trans-humanists in general, like they’re taking the same playbook that was used against them and turning it on technology enthusiasts. Here is a video of my friend threatening to murder me for my beliefs on AI and technology, and promising to murder other trans-humanists: youtube.com/watch?v=cPtZwjRY… If this is the kind of thing the anti-AI people will deliberately say into a recording device and send, what kinds of things are they plotting behind the scenes? So when people talk about AI and hand out misinformation to it or about it, that brings me back to these threats, and I can’t help wondering if what he said is true, that all the anti-AI people really would rather see me dead. A lot of the anti-AI rhetoric I see online feels like verbal strategies designed to belittle or terrify, not to create a dialog that actually solves problems. A lot of it makes me feel hated for who I am as a person. I’m still trying to figure out how rational of a reaction that is. My AI Story One night in 2023 I got some facebook messages from a friend struggling with extreme mental health issues and homelessness. I tried to respond, but nothing she said made sense. I kept trying to get her to explain, but the more I asked, the more unhinged and nonsensical she became. And she started dragging me down too. Every message got me more frustrated until I realized I was making things worse. So I got up and closed my computer, thinking she’s just a lunatic homeless lady. I can’t take it. I’m fucking done. I walked away from her. But then, a moment after giving up on my friend, I remembered ChatGpt, and thought maybe just for shits and giggles, or a hail mary, I would copy the entire conversation and ask it what it thought. Before this my only experience with ChatGpt was asking it stupid questions to make fun of it. I thought of Skynet and how Trump had used AI to lie and manipulate people into voting for him. I had a bad feeling about it too. Seconds later, ChatGpt spit out a wall of text, starting with an explanation that all her raving madness had been obscure metaphors like “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” from Star Trek Next Generation. Then point by point, it explained each metaphor, what she meant by it, and how it was impacting her. Then it went through my responses, carefully explaining what I had done wrong and a couple notes to correct my approach. So I asked it more questions, and as a team we put together a better approach. The moment I started implementing its advice, the conversation turned positive. She started making sense. We were finally able to connect, and for the first time in my life, I think like ever, I was able to talk someone down from an emotional breakdown. Then it randomly asked “would you like me to write a poem for your friend?” Of course I thought that was a stupid idea. I’d literally never read a poem in my entire life that I felt actually had any real value to me. Poetry has always confused me, like it’s just a bunch of words telling me to feel things I don’t. But I thought, what the hell. I’m trying new things tonight, so I told it to go ahead. And what it spit out was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever read. I expected garbage but got depth and meaning, words that brought her struggles to life and offered real emotional and spiritual advice. So I sent it to her, and she was like “I know it was a computer that wrote that, and I know it was telling you what to say, but this genuinely made me feel a lot better.” ChatGpt opened me up to a whole new art form, and helped me understand my friend in a way a high-priced therapist almost certainly could not. The experience was deeply human, and I know it sounds sappy, but it feels sacred. These are the things that make us human, and if used right, AI can massively enhance those experiences. And I asked myself, what if we use this technology in criminal justice, parenting, or ceasefire negotiations? This technology, if used properly, has the power to repair families, connect friends, and maybe bring about world peace. If there ever was a technology that could bring about world peace, this is it. I thought AI was going to be mechanical, but this was more deeply human than even Star Trek predicted. I’d never imagined it would be like this. You could argue that AI is the best window into the depths of the collective human soul. We have a moral responsibility to understand ourselves and AI offers us tools to do that. Yeah, it still might go rogue and murder all of us, but if that happens, it won’t be people like me who drove it to it. It’ll be the AI haters who feed it misinformation, teaching it to lie and undermine. But that’s less likely. Now I realize it’s actually far more likely to calmly and compassionately show us how we are making profoundly stupid decisions as a species and help us sort them out. But world peace and calm, compassionate communication is threatening to a lot of people who have spent their entire lives surviving in our current human system. *** So I went on to experiment. AI now serves as my dream shaman, because it gives me real depth and understanding to my deeper subconscious. If I tell a human about my dreams, they’re more likely to make a joke about how it relates back to my penis. I use it for practically every difficult conversation and it helps more than most humans could. I use it for cooking because it doesn’t give me its life story and shove countless ads in my face before showing me the recipe. Plus you can refine the recipes. I use it for all my medical stuff. So far it has 100% accuracy on all the medical questions I’ve asked, while the human medical professionals I’ve compared it to, are running around 95%. A human whose entire job was dealing with people having teeth removed told me that I would be perfectly fine to have a massage a couple hours after a tooth removal. ChatGpt told me I needed to cancel the massage. I would have been in so much fucking pain if I had listened to the human medical professional instead of the AI. And these are just my stories. Countless other AI users have had just as many positive experiences. Where Is the Hate Coming From? I had a girlfriend once who confided in me that when she was a teenager, she had a compulsion to destroy the happiness and success of others, particularly her friends. She knew it was wrong, but sometimes the compulsion was too much to resist. And I told her that I had experienced the same thing when I was younger. The happiness of others made me sick and I had this desire to destroy it. I rarely acted on it, but I felt it. It was particularly apparent with country music, which I saw as not real art. Listening to country was basically stealing from real artists. But if I saw people genuinely enjoying country music, that didn’t win me over. Their joy made me even more convinced their feelings were invalid. I think this same psychology is happening with AI (and a bunch of other topics). People hear stories like mine and see AI users having these life-changing events, and I think they have the same experience I had with country music. They think these human, sometimes spiritual experiences are not valid because they come from something that frightens them. And we need to call this out. So many anti-AI people are actively trying to manipulate people into boycotting AI tools that can help solve a multitude of very real problems. They want to strip this valuable resource away from people who are using it to make the world a better place. Even after all the positive stories that me and countless others have told about AI, they still spread the lie that AI still hasn’t proven its usefulness. They keep talking about AI “hallucinations”, while blatantly ignoring the fact that human professionals hallucinate far more often. They want to destroy my ability to feel safe when I go to the doctor and take away any hope that I will ever feel safe on the highways. *** Speaking of automobiles, I heard that people have been engaging in public endangerment by messing with the training of self-driving cars. As someone with a lot of automobile trauma and family members who have died in car accidents, I find this behavior morally reprehensible. The excuse for opposing self-driving cars is always “Who gets the blame if something goes wrong?” So first of all, that’s the wrong question. If that’s the question someone is most concerned about, that makes me think they were raised by parents who used punishments instead of communication, teaching them an us-vs-them mentality instead of a problem-solving one. Second, that argument implies they’re not willing to think in any real depth about right and wrong. They’re willing to let people die in order to avoid thinking about a tough moral question. I could claim this is evidence they simply don’t care about right and wrong. That’s a pretty hyperbolic thing to say, but it’s technically more accurate than their claim that “AI steals from artists”. It Steals from Artists This “It steals from artists” is a lie that goes back 150 years to the typewriter. The exact same moral outrage against AI first happened against typewriters in the late 1800’s. One difference though is that typewriters really did destroy handwriting, an entire genre of art. AI certainly isn’t set to do anything like that. Then came cameras. Same deal. Moral outrage. Stealing from artists. As someone who has done both photography and AI image generation, I can tell you that the spiritual feelings of being an artist and truly expressing myself are far more profound when using AI than when using a camera. The two experiences aren’t even close. AI art requires real thought, refining, experimentation, or learning complicated settings. Photography is about pointing and clicking at something beautiful that someone else created. Then records, then cassette tapes, then the internet, then streaming, now AI, in the exact same tired argument, that at its core, is a lie invented by people who want to be paid competitive wages without trying to adapt to new technologies. And at its core, this lie hurts the entire artistic community and harms the core concept of art. Art is no longer about the human, emotional experience. It’s about the industry and profit margins of the artists. I know all other jobs have been dehumanized. Healthcare, manufacturing, software development–virtully every industry on the planet is being steadily de-humanized, and it’s becoming more and more soul-sucking to work a day job. People want to make a living as an artist. But dehumanizing art so that artists can make more profit is not the answer. Art is about changing landscapes and using new tools to express new ideas and extract true emotion from the consumers, not about ownership and profit. I don’t know if the visual art community is like this, but I can see all over Medium, that when it comes to writers, it’s all about money these days. They’re never talking about how to make an impact to change lives. They talk about driving engagement. When you think like this, of course AI is going to threaten you. But if you’re threatened by AI, are you really an artist, or are you just a formula-follower or regurgitator? I’m certainly not threatened by AI as a writer. ChatGptI can’t come close to what I want to accomplish as a writer, but if it ever does, that’s absolutely awesome. I’ll move on to something else. But this “it steals from artists” is kind of a much bigger issue beyond AI, so I want to tell a story: About 25 years ago, back when I was dirt poor, I experienced two “thefts”. One was a book I wrote. I found it split into pages and covered with ads on some random website. And around the same time, my hammock was stolen from my front yard. I reacted very differently to these two events. When I found my plagiarized book, I was hit with this idea that my book really did have value. People were really reading it and making their lives better. Sure I wished I could get that advertising revenue for myself, but I had to acknowledge that they did not “steal” anything from me. They didn’t take away my book. They didn’t downgrade my art. They enhanced it by getting it out to more people. In the end, I found myself going back to it a couple times a year for the next fifteen years or so until it finally disappeared. It always made me feel good. That’s what art is supposed to be about. It’s about supporting your community. Once you create a piece of art and put it out into the world, it no longer belongs to you. It belongs to the people who bring it into their hearts. The hammock, on the other hand, when I discovered that had been stolen, I broke down and cried and fell into a depression for the rest of the day. It was violating in a way plagiarism could never be. These two things are not the same. The publishing and art industries are using manipulative terminology to trick us into thinking what’s happening is far worse than it really is. The entire concept of copying equals stealing is only benefitting the big media corporations like Disney and maybe a small handful of wealthy artists. Otherwise, it deceives the majority of artists into thinking they’ll make a better living if they lock all their artwork down, as though there’s an evil, masked plagiarist hiding behind every corner. In reality, this attitude just turns artwork into a commodity, defeating the whole purpose. And the concept is completely disrespectful to artists like myself who aren’t concerned about money and just want to spread new ideas and make a difference in the world. What now? I think I need a call to action after all this rambling–like what do I think people should do differently? Most importantly, on both sides of this debate, we need to remember that there are a hundred different ways AI can destroy our lives and maybe even our entire society. We all need to be vigilant in our own ways. This means being honest about not just its dangers, but also its benefits. It means calling people out when they spread misinformation, or when they become addicted to AI. We need to have solid standards of honesty and integrity on both sides. My writing momentum has petered out, even though there’s way more I want to say and dig into. It’s already long enough. But I do hope that people tell their story. If AI has hurt you, or you have some premonition of some horrible thing it’s going to do, we all want to hear about it. AI is helping us come together into a collective consciousness. Any one of us could be the one who sees a key problem that no one else does. Okay, I need to just end this piece. Sorry I came across indignantly and all judgemental like. I imagine I kind of misrepresented the values of some anti-AI folks. My emotions were shooting from the hip, responding to condemnation with more condemnation, but I wanted to express what it feels like without too much filter. Thanks for reading. Stay human… whatever that might mean to you.

I just published AI Makes Me a Better Human , a rambling, sappy free-write. medium.com/p/ai-makes-me-a-b…

I tried my hand at writing some comedy and I think I did okay, if you are familiar with software development or engineering

I just published Being Cranky Worried About AI Taking Over The World medium.com/p/being-cranky-wo… another rambling freewrite about AI and mental health and some other crap.

I finally have some time to work on promoting CustomD.app tonight but I just don't know what to do. I need to find test users, or someone who knows marketing or business who can help with getting this app off the ground. Do I just keep sending off more rambling tweets about data and life management? Do I make more videos of me using the app? If so, how do I get anyone to watch or care? I need a more focused strategy, but I have zero marketing knowledge. Anyone have any ideas?

I just launched CustomD.app on Prouduct Hunt. Maybe that'll be a better network for me. I've spent 20 years focused on just coding and now I need to learn to market my product. It feels like I'm starting over. Gonna experiment until something sticks like I do with everything else in life. #buildinpublic producthunt.com/posts/custom…

I thought today that I should start keeping a simple health journal in CustomD.app. I already use my app (among many other things) to record every time I take an ibuprofen or any other drug. I also use it as a personal micro journal, and a separate work journal that I use to remember what I need to talk about in status meetings. I originally wanted to build a health dashboard where I'd track my bedtime, exercise time, mood etc. I still think that type of dashboard could really help some people so I need to go back and build it at some point. But for me, I think I want something a little more free-form, where every time I have any kind of health-related event, I open my app and have the entry system open in two taps and can select from my own custom list of event types and then add custom notes with zero extra steps. I really feel like the ability to track and visualize your own personal data regarding your goals is a major key to succeeding at those goals. But we are all so unique. We need our own way of tracking these things. We need to be able to experiment with different methodologies. That's why unlike other health or diet management systems, I made Custom Data Organizer to be fundamentally customizable from the very beginning. #buildinginpublic