the new 70's slideshow
Moontower Munchies #146
Friends,
More digital home-brewing
A few neat ideas I’ve seen the past few days…
URBANKAOBERG: The Market Terminal for Everyone (Michael Kao)
GladI signed up for the free beta. Besides being a useful project, stepping through every tab has been educational. I unleashed the Claude browser tool on the site to extract all the tooltips then automatically generate a learning document explaining all the measures in more detail.
Moontower Mind Mapper
A long-time reader, Akhilesh, sent me a mind map of my website he vibe-coded. You can refresh it to keep it up-to-date, generate learning paths, chat with it, and even have it quiz you.
With permission, I forked it and deployed it here:
https://mind-map.moontowermeta.com/
He only asked that it’s kept open-source which I think is a great idea because someone should totally make a site that uses the same mechanism to catalog more important writers than me. Matt Levine or Paul Graham bots anyone?
Git: https://github.com/Kris-SF/mind-map-explorer
Gamma-Theta Race
This is a project from fellow option and boardgame enthusiast Jay Soloff.
Jay sent me the project with his blessing to deploy it however I wanted. I modified it a bit which is to say I own any errors.
It’s a fun way to explore the path of a delta-hedged straddle strategy.
https://www.moontower.ai/tools-and-games/gamma-theta-race
Archival Selves | 9 min read
I saved Venkatesh’s banger post for after the above projects for reasons that will reveal themselves naturally.
It starts here…
Showing off your portfolio of bespoke Claude Code projects and looking at others’ portfolios is a new social activity that has already acquired the quality of campy tedium we associate with people in the 70s subjecting each other to slide shows of unremarkable vacations.
I love the analogy. Especially because the Mad Men Kodak “wheel” scene is still fresh.
The post then cuts deeper…
What should be an unruly wilderness bursting with diversity is turning out to be a landscape of Ballardian neoliberal mimetic life-script banality. I’m no exception. My portfolio is as home-movie-banal as any other.
The current banality goes deeper than most people simply being poor narrators of their personal journeys. Most people don’t have storyworthy life journeys to work with. So personal projects born of such lives reflect the poverty of the source material.
There’s a much deeper poverty and banality to people’s lives being revealed, as they pave their life paths with AI-bespokification... The very potential for bespokification reveals the stark uniformity of people’s lives.
…before turning up:
Our collective challenge now is to get past this almost monocultural stage to the explosive wilderness and divergence stage that has clearly been unlocked. But it will take some work to get to that starting line. We’re all busy with backlogs at the moment.
I’m not alone here. I see a bunch of people racing towards their own debt-freedom horizons. Byung-Chul Han is going to hate it, but we’re all treating life as a project and actually starting to finish it.
Extend that logic to all our slates of Claude Code projects, I think we’re all creating archival selves.
Venkat knows how to name a feeling. “Creating archival selves”. It’s the feeling I clumsily allude to in i can’t wait to replace myself. It’s not erasing the self, it’s to free the self. Clearing the backlog so you can get to “next”.
From here, Rao expands the meaning:
That’s a four-layer stack emerging under your random acts of Crazy Claude Coding... your archival self is emerging whether or not you consciously intend it to or not, simply as a function of Claude Code being better at paying off the debts of your past than at scaffolding the possibilities of your future.
The entire manifest of projects constituting my Claude Code flywheel, I have come to realize, has to do with paying off intention debt, processing psychological baggage and incompletions I’ve been carrying around for years to decades, and dealing with a great deal that was only blocked by lack of grinder energy and raw execution leverage.
And it looks like it will all get done. To the point where I no longer have any intention debt left. I have 3-4 technical research projects (in control theory and robotics) based on unfinished ideas I couldn’t pursue during my postdoc 20 years ago because I had reached the limits of my own knowledge and skills.
Amazingly, I don’t feel stuck with any of these projects. I know what needs to be done, and roughly how it should be done... This is a new experience for me, as I’m sure it is for most of you. I’ve spent most of my life feeling mostly stuck on most fronts. I simply did not have the knowledge, skills, and financial resources required to feel generally unstuck by default rather than stuck.
This is a radical new human condition. Only a tiny minority have experienced it so far, but it will soon become much more widespread. Claude Code unblocks everything at dirt cheap prices.
Of course, a giant question remains… once you have paid off all your “intention debts”, what are you going to do?
Exciting? Terrifying? Abstract?
Yes!
Stay groovy
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Thanks Kris!
Amazing content!
I took a different approach paying off my "intention debts" – to extend the financial metaphor, I declared "intention bankruptcy" by deciding I wasn't going to do them ever. That allowed me to get laser focused at going after the things that light me up.