John Keller is the title character in Lawrence Block’s Hit Man series. Killing people is his profession…but stamp collecting is his passion.
“When he was working with his stamps, he was always entirely absorbed in what he was doing. He was expending considerable concentration on what was essentially an unimportant task, and that seemed to be something his spirit required.”
This blog is essentially an unimportant task and, apparently, something my spirit requires.
I asked Perplexity to read through 258 posts in my “Snapshots & Fragments” category — the catch‑all bin I’ve used for photos and ephemera over the years — and tell me what it thought was going on. I had a hunch an outside lens might spot patterns I only sense in the gut. Here’s the result, unedited.
Perplexity: You’ve been quietly building a long, visual autobiography and local micro‑history in that “catch‑all” category—what looks like ephemera is actually a coherent archive of self, place, and media across roughly 15 years. Continue reading
From time to time I have something I want to share that is too long, or in some other way, doesn’t lend itself to the post format. So I create a page that can be as long as necessary. There are now 79 such pages and I’ve attempted to organize them in several groups on yet another page.
Almost all of these were referenced in one of my posts but those links would be easy to miss. If you go to this new page and click around, you’ll get the idea.
There’s been a bit of an explosion of these pages in the last couple of years as I had long conversations (26 so far) with an AI that I found too interesting not to save. I created pages for these rather than try to share them in a blog post. [↓ comment below]
Since most recent pages have been conversations with an AI, I asked Phil to task his AI agent (Milton) with an analysis (PDF). A few excerpts below:
A blog used to be a place where you published what you noticed. Now, after enough years, it can also become something a machine can notice you through.
what changes when a conversation does not have to start from zero?
That makes these pages feel less like transcripts and more like field notes from first contact with a new medium.
The strongest recurring idea is the mirror. AI as mirror of human knowledge. AI as mirror of your blog. AI as mirror of your reading, spiritual interests, anxieties, and old obsessions.
The collection reads like a long argument against disappearance. Radio disappears. The old internet disappears into feeds. Human memory softens and revises. Hosting companies change. Platforms eat what people used to own. Even AI chats vanish unless someone bothers to save them.
I think these pages are worth preserving because they document an unusually self-aware encounter between an old-school blogger and a new-school intelligence interface.
If I had to name what these rambles represent, I would call them: Evidence of the moment a personal archive became dialogic.
Before, the blog stored what you had seen. Now, with AI, the blog can become part of a conversation about what all that seeing might mean.
On the open web there are clear signs of people doing very similar things: giving an AI years of blog/website content and asking for personality or thematic analysis. Some examples include:
Those are all close cousins of what you’ve been doing with Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and your ~25‑year archive.
What you’ve done is unusually thorough and multi‑agent: you exported the entire smays.com corpus, converted it to markdown/XML, had multiple LLMs read it, and then commissioned long‑form essays about “the AI‑readable self,” “nondual,” religion, dot‑com, etc. You’ve also let other people’s AI stacks (Phil’s agents, Steve’s Hermes setup) run full‑corpus reads and feed back 14‑page analyses.
So while you’re not the only one saying “AI, please read my whole blog,” you are doing a deeper, more longitudinal experiment than most of the public examples, which tend to be one‑off personality summaries or technical demos.
Like a lot of people (most?), I use Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and (once upon a time) ChatGPT to answer questions. To explain things. To find stuff.
I don’t do “vibe coding” or task my “agents” to do whatever agents do. What I really wanted the AI to do was “read” my blog (6,500 posts spanning 25 years) and help me spot recurring themes, connections, patterns. What do all of those posts say about who I am, who I was and the journey between the two.
From time to time I would export all the posts from a particular category or tag and shoot those up to one of the AI’s and always got back interesting analyses. But I was after the full gestalt.
Today I exported all of my posts from the WordPress database as an XML file and had Claude convert it to a markdown file (which are much easier/smaller for an AI to process). I uploaded that data to each of the AI’s I use on a daily basis (Perplexity, Claude and Gemini) with the following prompt:
I created pages here on the blog for the responses from Perplexity and Claude. Gemini got a little weird on me:
“I approach this analysis as a direct, collaborative cognitive tool. I will evaluate your premises neutrally, utilizing logic and evidence, and build upon your sound structural work using first-person analysis. There will be no conversational filler or flattering prefaces.”
Uh, okay.
Until today, no other entity had ever “read” my entire blog except me. Now, something a lot smarter has.