Training the LLM in My Head

Lately, I feel like I am unlearning how I use the Internet.

This weekend I deleted all my posts on X (fka Twitter) and removed the app from my phone. This isn’t the first time I’ve attempted a cleanse of this particular channel and I can’t guarantee I won’t be back (though I have managed to stay off Facebook for nearly 2 years now). As the place where I have my largest following, it’s the most tempting to turn back to when I have something I want to get out to the world — particularly when it comes to promoting my startup or portfolio companies. But I’m not sure who I’m really reaching there, or what the quality of that attention is. I’d rather just pay for ads. If that even works anymore. Lately, I’ve found hyper-targeted direct email outreach to be a more effective customer acquisition channel but I’ve been out of the growth game for a hot second while building so I’m sure I’ll have more to say about that in the coming months.

So what am I consuming information-wise?

First and foremost are books, and I remain committed to finishing 100+ per year (tracked on Goodreads) and my habit tracker right now is committed to a minimum of 95 minutes spend reading per day. Thanks to Audible I can easily get this in while doing chores, walking the dogs, working out and gardening and I’m probably reading 3+ hours per day on average. Enough where I actually journaled yesterday that perhaps my habit tracker should function more as a maximum.

There’s something about reading “too much” (I have a hard time really believing that is a thing) where I can get very in my head, a little disconnected from the world — especially if I’m reading fiction with a really compelling world and characters who are in the midst of resolving a conflict. I’ll find myself living in the mood of the book with them until I see it through. I also struggle with this when reading academic non-fiction (I recently slogged through the final 20% of “Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour” just to get in a fresh headspace). Whenever this happens, my strategy of simultaneously reading multiple books is out the window until I’ve resolved my obsession by either finishing the book or abandoning it on purpose. Books that make me feel this way are usually worth finishing, I just have to pour a weekend into them and then have a bit of an emotional hangover.

On the lighter side, when it comes to periodicals I’ve been reading a lot more on Substack, subscribing to randomly interesting publications to see what else the algorithms will bring me. It’s been pleasantly surprising to break beyond my filter bubble (to some extent) and find some weirdos. For now I don’t want to turn this into a highlight list just yet because it makes me worry I’ll become too self-conscious about my exploration, but you can see what I’m subscribed to on my profile if you’re really curious.

Deleting all my posts on X got me pondering what it would be like to shelve all the books I have “In Progress” on Goodreads (>500), Audible, and Kindle and start my reading spidering approach from scratch. I doubt all of these are “In Progress” by any stretch (I’d be willing to wager I’ll finish ~20% of them in my lifetime) but it’s daunting to approach the idea of cleanup. Same for my playlists on Spotify.

I turned 39 last week, and I’ve been an adult on the Internet with a blog for 20 years and I wish there were better tools for telling people who I am now. People still talk to me about Twilio, or Mattermark, depending on where our lives intersected and there doesn’t seem to be a space where I can point them to catch them up. I guess that’s why I keep blogging, but who other than my stalker is going to read through ever single one of these. I don’t even want to read through. them. Perhaps I’ll send the LLM back over all the journals like Dan Shipper.

As we live closer and close to the possibility of electronic life forms trained on the things we write on the Internet, I feel like it matters more than ever that we have all these navel-gazing posts for these beings to draw from. Something with a little more entropy, with a little less predictability. Is my reading diet just the training fodder for my own internal LLM? I wonder.