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.
Patrick’s vault only started keeping history on June 14th, so this issue covers about two weeks.
Digitizing old coursework
Over about a week Patrick pushed a stack of old college notebooks through OCR: quantum mechanics, classical mechanics, optics, particle physics and cosmology, electricity and magnetism, thermal physics, chemistry, electronics, microeconomics, and comparative politics. He took photos of the notebook pages and fed them to the AI agent to smartly digitize. The added notes were more volume than everything else he wrote that month.
The content is transcription. Every file reads as faithful lecture notes — bra-ket notation, cost curves, Lewis structures — with no commentary layered on top.
What the archive is for remains open, including to him. Nothing in the record shows him using any of it since. The charitable reading is preservation, getting the material off paper before the paper goes.
Why buildings stopped having ornament
The one place in June’s writing where he builds an argument. The standard account of why twentieth-century architecture abandoned ornament is Baumol’s cost disease: skilled carving labor got expensive, decoration priced itself out, and buildings went flat. Patrick doesn’t think the dates cooperate.
In fact the opposite seems more plausible: elites moved on from it because it got cheap; it was no longer as much of a wealth signal.
Ornament stopped being fashionable at roughly the moment it stopped being expensive. Mass production made moldings available to everyone, and the founders of the International Style were not shy about their disgust with bourgeois taste. Cost disease doesn’t need that motive and can’t account for the timing. A tidy economic cause got retrofitted onto a change that was mostly about status.
Films and theology
Patrick watched Lucky Number Slevin, 12 Monkeys, The Devil’s Advocate, and The Godfather Part II.
The Devil’s Advocate got the most out of him, with its seamless integration between Christian themes and the challenges of modern life.
Patrick reflected on the devil’s claim to be a humanist, as his actions go against not only Christian morality but also the broader Western tradition of morality that includes secular humanism:
The devil calls himself a humanist, but he doesn’t want Kevin to start a family… he wants a family of his own half-humans.
Different interpretations of “God” and of the devil’s role in the world yield different answers to the questions the devil poses:
Is God a prankster for creating man with instincts and setting the rules in opposition? If God is a person, then yes. But if “God” is a process and an orientation… “God” the idea is what pulls us forward.
Making things
Patrick made progress on his sculpture project this month: a custom designed ornament to display at their upcoming wedding.
On the music side, Patrick rewrote his drum chart for a large cover set, roughly twenty-five songs broken into verse, chorus and fill notation, with a kit checklist alongside it. This was to prepare for an upcoming gig.
Living
Microsoft Build took three days at the start of the month, the one multi-day work commitment in it, with a demos block and prep for New York Tech Week around it.
Later came a Fractal Tech meetup where Patrick gave a lightning talk on light-related physics, and an “AI After Five” session on AI search optimization at a company office in Flatiron.
Early in the month, a jam session, and a pool party in Queens followed that evening by Muay Thai fights. In the middle of the month, the three-year anniversary of how he and his wife met.
Wedding logistics were mostly the dress and the dance: fittings, lessons, and a ring shopping errand.
Stray notes
On anti-natalism, a one-line argument that deserves a longer treatment:
You cannot coherently be an anti-natalist, since your own existence was contingent on the thing you oppose; you can only ever be speaking against it.
An unresolved self-argument about labor and dignity: whether it is undignified to have to do work you don’t want to do, in a world where some people never labor at all and are treated, in effect, like gods. He argued both sides.
From a private Muay Thai striking lesson, a coaching note:
strong tight lower body allows you to be loose in your upper body / relax your traps
Another line in this month’s journal:
I need my actions to match my ideas, or else I can’t faithfully express my ideas.. I think once you start having to lie about what you value and believe, you start rotting inside, and you become irritable to everyone who comes close to you.
