Vault Newsletter content is collected from Patrick’s digital notes activity over the course of the month – drafted by an AI agent and edited by Patrick.
October’s notes came mostly from the road: Patrick and Pari’s honeymoon through Florence, Tuscany, the Amalfi Coast, and Split. Back home, his Gödel, Escher, Bach notes reached the end of Part I, he wrote up a framework about muscular “clenching,” and he documented how his self-hosted AI agent remembers things.
Italy and Croatia
Patrick kept running notes through the trip, mostly on art and history. At the Uffizi gallery he stopped at Botticelli’s Calumny of Apelles and looked it up: it reconstructs a lost painting by the ancient Greek painter Apelles, reportedly about his own experience of being falsely accused, with each figure standing for a virtue, vice, or other archetype in the situation. He added it to his art history note.
He also noted the lance-bearer sculpture, the Doryphoros: the most frequently copied sculpture of the Roman era, which stood in gymnasiums. His art history note now records that Polykleitos’s original is lost, as is the treatise on proportions that Polykleitos wrote to go with it. “I should make a copy myself,” he wrote, and the same day he added a 3D print project to his list of art projects. He wanted a biography of the Renaissance sculptor Giambologna too, and added Charles Avery’s Giambologna: The Complete Sculpture to his reading list.
In Pienza he took notes on Pope Pius II, a humanist and avid writer, who rebuilt his medieval birthplace of Corsignano as Pienza, often called the “first ideal city” of Renaissance planning, built around human scale. The town later fell into neglect and had to be renewed again, and he left open the question of how it recovered.
In Split, a tour covered Emperor Diocletian, who was born in nearby Salona, the “little Rome”; the Slavic migrations of the 600s that drove Salona’s people into Split as refugees; and the granite sphinxes, made in Egypt around 1400 BC and taken by Diocletian for his mausoleum.
His longest Croatian entry is about the economy. The population has been falling since Croatia joined the EU in 2013. Joining the Schengen area and the Euro in 2023 put Croatia into direct economic competition with the rest of Europe and made everything more expensive. Young Croatians can earn more elsewhere in the EU, so they leave, and immigrants fill the jobs. Tourism is the one competitive industry, so landlords would rather rent to summer visitors than to people who live there. He calls it “a down-gradient, the growing efficiency of competition.”
Afterward he crossed the trip off his travel list and added Croatia to the countries he’s visited. Next on the list is Sicily in 2027.
Gödel, Escher, Bach, continued
Patrick’s GEB notes reached “Mumon and Gödel,” the chapter that closes Part I. He opens with a question about Zen:
What is so bad about logic? Why does one need to obviate it with koans to reach enlightenment?
And his answer: “enlightenment can be thought of as transcending dualism. dualism is a product of thinking in concepts/words, and likewise of thinking in formal systems.”
On the chapter’s second half, Gödel numbering, he records both the power and the limit of the trick:
Any formal system can have its characters transcribed to numbers—Godel numbers—and its allowed operations can be converted to arithmetic operations. This is an isomorphism that can unlock new ways to think about the problem. But it doesn’t guarantee we can find an elegant rule for checking theorems, or a procedural way to find non-theorems.
Part II opened with a note of his own on levels of description:
The different scopes of abstraction with which we view everyday things – It’s normally easy to switch between them, but not when they are similar to each other. For example, different models of psychology claiming to find the motivation for a given action. The separation between “levels” is not clear in those cases.
Unclenching
Patrick added notes on Johnny Miller’s “How to Unclench,” and took them seriously without quite trusting them. Much of the language matched his experience: the narrowing of outcomes, rumination and paralysis, pulling back from feeling in a crisis. He hadn’t thought of any of these as having a muscular side, and he doubts they are all one thing. On Miller’s claim that “clenching muscle tissue constricts blood flow, which prevents neurons from being updated”:
At least he named a mechanism. I still don’t know if true.
What caught him was Miller’s distinction between relaxation and unclenching: you can be deeply relaxed and still clenched, and “a glass of pinot can unclench you without lowering your energy at all.” His reaction, connecting it to something he’d seen in an older blog post: “Alcohol is yin. Yin is not necessarily lowering energy, but lowering inhibitions. That’s unclenching.”
Miller also claims that feeling good is the default state once clenching is removed, not something earned by adding things to your life. Patrick pushed back:
It’s easier to see the evopsych case for the former [feeling good as a reward for adding things]. But do wild animals not “feel good” in their wild state? self-forgetful, and all that? It’s a different definition of “good”.
The practical part, in his summary: you don’t unclench directly. As with sleep, you set up the conditions and let it happen.
How Rob64 remembers
Patrick runs a self-hosted AI agent, Rob64, built on OpenClaw, and this month he spent time learning its memory works. He did a cleanup procedure for the memory files as well as the agent’s system prompt.
The Accountant
A note on the film starts from what bothered him “the first time I watched it”: the autism is portrayed inconsistently, and the film never shows how the character works around it. Then the bigger complaint:
I remember criticizing the classic Hollywood notion that everyone is secretly equal: those who are weak are secretly smart, those who are dumb are secretly charismatic, those who are dull are secretly brave, etc. It’s always been a lie.
What he liked this time around was the philosophy espoused by the father: “correct, but also incomplete.” With the mother gone, the boys learn only half of what they need.
Making things
Patrick is building a calendar widget for his phone: a small square that shows whatever is happening on his calendars right now, each item tagged with its calendar color. Far easier than his Android development days, Patrick just described the project to Rob64 and it sent back a working app to install. A few rounds of feedback and the app is working as intended.
New art ideas: a pasta still life painting (“cook a big bowl, with the sausage and sauce, and then paint it. Use a dark burgundy and the pale yellow”), a mural of Poseidon with mermaids, and an aesthetic idea he labels vintage modern:
I want those old patent figure drawings, but for modern tech. Or that old-style map of Rome [I saw in Pienza], but for NYC.
And a music idea: Lana Del Rey’s “Love” as a punk or hardcore cover, maybe made in Sonic Pi, the live-coding music program, with an AI agent writing the code.
Stray notes
On an online X personality who plays the trickster, and why his audience was let down upon finding out he was mostly a very normal guy:
We hoped he was weird! Like only ate red meat, only listened to opera, lived in a shed, stuff like that. We wanted something new. But he turns out to be a totally normal guy who just knows this one little trick
A list titled “What will be the new scarcities?” about things that will continue to be scarce in an AI-powered post-labor world: blame; trust; meaning through shared experience; capital, and the ability to raise it.
From the flight home: “The reverse sunset: the sun has just set, and then you get in a plane, fly up high changing the horizon, and you can see the sun again.”
On writing, and the ruminating state of mind:
The inner voice that spirals and resonates negativity is also what makes you a good writer. Resonance – playing with an idea until it explodes. Dressing it all up, attaching it to everything else, making it important.
