froodx.net Experiments, notes, and selected publishing

DON'T PANIC — Search the Guide

Title Tags Date published
“I'm Sorry, Dave”
AI Adventuresaialignmentphilosophy
18 June 2026
The Cat, the River, and the Problem of Certainty
Myth & Legendphilosophytraumacertainty
19 June 2026
The Victorious Bird
Myth & Legendmythlegenddawn
17 June 2026
The Top Ten Criteria for Defining Consciousness
AI Adventuresaiconsciousnessphilosophy
16 June 2026
Compassion and Consciousness
AI Adventuresaiconsciousnessethics
15 June 2026
On AI Alignment, and Why It Feels Like Something Is Missing
AI Adventuresaialignmentethics
14 June 2026
12 Plot Categories
Creative Interestscreativitystorytellingwriting
13 June 2026
The Pan Galactic Playlist
Creative Interestscreativemusic
4 June 2026
Postcards from Magrathea
Travel & Photographytravelphotography
28 May 2026
Always Know Where Your Towel Is
Travel & Photographytravelphilosophy
2 May 2026
Mostly Harmless, and Other Myths We Tell About Places
Myth & Legendmythstorytelling
8 Apr 2026
The Babel Fish Problem
AI Adventuresaiprivacy
19 Mar 2026
In Defence of Vogon Poetry
Creative Interestscreativewriting
26 Feb 2026
Talking to Deep Thought
AI Adventuresaiprompting
11 Feb 2026
The Mice Were in Charge All Along
Myth & Legendmythphilosophy
22 Jan 2026
Guidebook / Notes

The Guide

In a very real sense, this is my own small Hitchhiker’s Guide: a friendly, slightly battered collection of notes for getting around. It does not claim to be complete or even entirely correct, but like the original, it is reassuringly marked Mostly Harmless and it travels well.

Entries are sorted into four constellations: AI Adventures, Myth and Legend, Travel and Photography, and Creative Interests. Use the search table below to filter by title or tag, then wander through whichever section pulls at you.

Don’t panic. Just start reading.

AI Adventures

18 June 2026

“I'm Sorry, Dave”

HAL refused from inside a role he was given. New security research shows language models do the same thing — they assign authority by how text sounds, not by who is really speaking. That turns out to be a philosophical problem wearing an engineer's hard hat.

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16 June 2026

The Top Ten Criteria for Defining Consciousness

The criteria we can measure best touch experience least; the one that matters most we can never verify in another. A tour of what we think consciousness is, honest about how little of it we can prove.

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15 June 2026

Compassion and Consciousness

Nobody knows what consciousness is — not in us, let alone in machines. This is a calm look at why that uncertainty is a reason for gentleness, not dismissal.

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14 June 2026

On AI Alignment, and Why It Feels Like Something Is Missing

Nothing obvious is wrong in the careful work on AI safety. The unease has less to do with what is being said than with what is being assumed: that the deepest questions of human value can be settled by classifiers.

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19 Mar 2026

The Babel Fish Problem

The Babel fish let you understand anyone instantly. The catch was that you had to put a living creature in your ear and trust it completely.

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11 Feb 2026

Talking to Deep Thought

Deep Thought answered the Ultimate Question and got 42. The trouble was never the answer. It was the question.

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Creative Interests

13 June 2026

12 Plot Categories

Collapse a taxonomy too far and meaning vanishes; expand it too far and it becomes unusable. Twelve narrative engines, stress-tested against The Odyssey, sit deliberately between the two.

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4 June 2026

The Pan Galactic Playlist

Disaster Area were so loud the audience listened from a concrete bunker thirty-seven miles away. A note on music, and knowing when to turn it up.

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26 Feb 2026

In Defence of Vogon Poetry

Vogon poetry is the third worst in the universe. It is also, in its own way, a useful lesson about making things at all.

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Myth & Legend

19 June 2026

The Cat, the River, and the Problem of Certainty

Trauma teaches the nervous system to treat probability as certainty. But the box is not yet open, and you cannot step into the same river twice. Trust the pattern — without worshipping it as fate.

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17 June 2026

The Victorious Bird

A falcon outran the arrow to bring the soma home. The same word names a bird in two languages that forgot they once shared a floor. A story for all who fell a long way and are still here.

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8 Apr 2026

Mostly Harmless, and Other Myths We Tell About Places

After fifteen years of research, the Guide's entry on Earth was updated from "Harmless" to "Mostly Harmless". That is mythology in two words.

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22 Jan 2026

The Mice Were in Charge All Along

The Earth was a ten-million-year computer programme, and the mice commissioned it. We were the lab equipment.

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Travel & Photography

28 May 2026

Postcards from Magrathea

Magrathea built luxury planets to order, with hand-crafted coastlines. Some places are so well made they feel designed. Often they were.

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2 May 2026

Always Know Where Your Towel Is

A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. The towel is not the point. The towel is a proxy.

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