Ftrain, by Paul Ford

It's bedtime. I'm very tired because I was cleaning today and I dropped a synthesizer on my head, leading to a lot of blood. But before I go, I'll share something totally broken.

About fifteen years ago I had this idea: Timelines on the World Wide Web! Hardly an original idea. But I got super into it. I thought I could somehow fix the world a little by making a great website that organized things chronologically. I had all kinds of pipe dreams along these lines. Laugh away at me, I deserve it. But also it's worth noting that we used to believe that making things on the Internet could make the world better. I even registered a URL, Unscroll.com.

As happens with my big ideas I kept aiming too high and never getting anything done. I kept approaching the problem from different angles, rather than taking small steps. For example, I decided that the only way I would finish my book about the web was to write a content management system that let you organize everything...in timelines. Now I had three problems!

The idea was you'd be scrolling timelines and you'd add little notes, and you'd transform the notes into a finished document with citations intact. Every paragraph would link to an event or fact. It would be amazing for students!

Unsurprisingly I managed to finish neither the book nor the CMS. People offered to help for both but I was way, way too inside the vortex. I built a lot of prototypes, and even presented them to large groups of people. I'll dig up videos at some point. I presented in Portland, Oregon, and I presented it at Lincoln Center for a creative software company conference, but mostly what I remember from that event was that, before I spoke, in the green room, I sat down and broke a plastic chair and fell with my legs in the air like a cartoon character, and it was, for a fat person, not the look for which I was going.

I did a ton of thinking about time. I learned a lot about how, for example, the Postgres database handles dates. I learned about different dating systems and calendars, and how various disciplines date things back to the beginning of the universe, and how the Library of Congress dates things. Chronology is hard. Time doesn't lend itself to becoming data, no matter what the stock market tells you. And parsing dates out of things is a nightmare. Wikipedia has a lot of chronological content—one page per year—but every year is formatted a tiny bit differently than all the others. I learned all of this and I was very happy to learn it. Nothing is more satisfying than learning about calendrical systems or the calculation of Easter. You feel how much people were stumbling in the dark, timewise. And it was all a further journey into procrastination.

A few months ago I grabbed all the old code and threw it into Claude. Goodness did it have some things to say about my programming. It's very flattering but you could tell it didn't mean it. Since then I've been poking at Unscroll, working on it “in production” on a server somewhere far from home—I don't want to give Claude domain over my local machine, you see.

Work is very busy and I'm suspicious of this project's ability to ruin my life so I try to have lots of little tasks for the bots over the weekend. Sometimes I work on it while on bike rides. Type, bike, type. It's in a very, very rough state. It's sub-alpha. But I thought it would be useful to resurrect it and talk about how things are changing. I'll noodle on it over time. Sort of like resurrecting Ftrain.

It took a while to just accept that we live in a sit-and-scroll world. The version in my head had multiple horizontal rows of spatialized data. But that's not how people read or learn now. We learn with one finger.

Things that used to be hard—parsing Wikipedia, extracting events from narrative content, aligning things by subject without a formal taxonomy (or with), and showing related stuff from the Internet Archive—are conceptually still very difficult but practically much easier. For example, not only is LLM-based coding good at writing custom parsers for Wikipedia, then QAing the results to improve the edge cases, but it was also instrumental in helping me download Kiwix, which gives me an offline Wikipedia, with images, so that I can “read” thousands of Wikipedia pages to look for relevant chronological content, then assemble that, then feed that into further queries for Archive.org and other platforms. This way I don't hammer Wikipedia. It also helped me convert the entire Wikiquote database, and found 90,000 quotes with dates.

What does it actually do? Well in the background it makes events, basically—little data blobs. Then it assembles them. Here's a timeline of Bach. If the system is not broken at the moment, you'll see that it includes many of the BWVs (his catalog) with Archive.org recordings, plus lots of related stuff from his life and parsed out of the big early biographies too. Learn about the Amiga Computer by reading old magazines! Learn the history of consciousness and AI or check out 200,000 years of human migration. Or just scroll. Some of it is very, very clunky. Lots just breaks.

It's not a good product yet and may never be. But it sure does keep me off social media. And it's something to talk about. I'd rather talk about work in particular than vibecoding in general.

I think some things to discuss are:

• The basic architecture of things like this: Prototyping the CMS parts, creating user registration systems, and so forth.

• How hard it is to get a system to be coherent when it has different ways of looking at data. LLMs excel at “view of the database” programming but when you go too far astray you need to think hard.

• Refining and targeting a data model, and what that means for skills.

• What's cheap to LLM, what's expensive.

• Filtering for accuracy.

• What an LLM should be allowed to reformat/rewrite, how it should rewrite, and how to document that and alert the user.

• Automating the collection of research and source materials from large public corpora with humanist intent.

• Getting access to tools that were previously pretty hard to pull off, like embeddings and vector search across events.

• What “product” means in this context.

• How to make it accessible—it's not right now.

• What it means when platforms can be little hobbies.

And so forth. I'm noting this because I feel obligated to narrate the moment, especially since Simon Willison is putting in so much work, I should talk about this stuff too if it's helpful. Also I want to talk about the interaction between LLMs and content and computers—there's a lot to think through around pipelines that involve this new technology and how to be credible and transparent.

I'll open source it eventually if anyone cares and the data is all public/commons-ey stuff. I don't want to own time. I just want to experience it.

A strange thing my brain does now: I get onto a train or walk down a street and I'm slightly perplexed that I don't know the people I'm seeing. They all look familiar. But then I realize: I've lived here 30 years, I take this route every day, and so that makes sense: Everyone, statistically, remains a stranger. But nonetheless I keep looking around. Who's that? Do I know them? Did I work for them? Or did they work for me?

In the immediate neighborhood of my house, or right outside the office, I might see a familiar face—but each location is a tiny puddle of light in the great shadowy map. It's a world full of strangers.

For a while I thought my brain was slowing down but I think instead it's just compressing things, putting them together in its strange brain way. You meet thousands of people over years. It's just normal and accretive when you live and work in a giant city. They come through your house for parties or through your office for work events. And you multiply that by years. All those faces and names get stored away. Eventually your brain fills up and needs to compress the database. And as a result individual examples collapse into archetypes: Pudgy dads in sweaters, middle-aged moms in cool overalls, sons and daughters in their pajama-style clothing. Then I look around in the city, and I see those archetypes everywhere, and they feel so familiar. I don't know who anyone is, but they all look like people I've met.

I wonder if this is normal. My guess is it is. It's probably why some dads—the non-angry dads, with normal regrets—end up getting quite sweet starting in their 50s, glad to talk to everyone, asking a kid about his Pokémon or listening to someone explain what it's like to work at the bank, or letting someone tell them about pilates. It's not because we're becoming more gentle, it's just that we're no longer as good at seeing the edges of people and a lot of the time we don't have any idea who's talking to us. We stop seeing what's different about the individual and instead start seeing what unifies them. And we like it.

What a mess. It had been two weeks. I'd practiced but not steadily. Hands like spiral-cut hams. Fingers like hard-boiled eggs. Not playing, flapping. I forgot one of my lesson books. I wanted to cancel so bad. I wanted a good excuse, a terrible illness, a broken limb, plague. I have bad excuses. I keep having that strong-pour evening cocktail. Just one but still. I've stopped getting downstairs to say goodbye to my son as he goes off to school, so I don't have the 20 minutes of morning quiet. I went to do a blood draw in the morning, right before the lesson. I didn't have my coffee as a result, since I'd been fasting. So I was extra groggy. These all went through my head and I mumbled them. But the truth is I just didn't practice very well. I half-practiced and I felt like a dipshit. I had this tiny little fantasy it would all come together. But it didn't. There's only one way to fix it. I hate piano. I chose this.

New York is buried under snow, the State of the Union is going on, I'm rattling with anxiety as emails pile up, and I need to practice piano.

I have, in the manner of the true dilettante, secreted keyboards about the house. I'm a huge nerd, I needed something to fill my brain, I did well in life, and so I have a genuinely glorious little studio, bundles of wires running thick as a large man's wrist, modules, keyboards. It requires constant configuration. I would trade the kingdom of heaven for that one perfect knob. Anyway. One day I will have a small hut in the woods with no Internet and a decrepit piano that I will watch YouTube videos to learn to tune, and spend two years really learning, truly intuiting, probably with psilocybin assistance, the deep and Pythagorean complexities inherent in the equal temperament tones of the C major scale, or as I prefer to call them, the big naturals.

So I turn from this computer to the heavy, glorified MIDI controller to my right, made by a really kind of wonderful French brand, and I go through my pieces.

A miracle this week—I played the first part of the first Bach Minuet for the five or six thousandth time, and my left hand was in steady communication with my right hand. And there I was in the middle. Guys! I said. I didn't know you'd ever met! They said nothing.

All progress feels like a miracle. The State of the Union is probably still going as I type this. But over here a tiny, infinitesimal bit of progress. Something getting better. Don't knock it.

Across the hall my wife prints whistles on a 3D printer. Different music.

My left hand is normally a lumbering, grumbling donkey clambering up a mountain path, dragged along by my bouncy, energetic right hand. Piano teachers call this the Onan conundrum. But tonight they were dancing together like witches around a fire. Eventually I ran out of measures and reverted to failure mode, but now I know how it should feel. My teacher likes to say that your hands are in a band, which—I've never been in a band, he's been in so many, it's a normal thing for him. I wish I understood.

I bought, in Philadelphia, at this huge bookstore with a cat that I can't remember the name of (store/cat), the Norton Anthology of Western Music or whatever, in two volumes, and I gotta tell you, now that I can read music (both clefs!) the idea of picking up some song from 1250 and just plinking it out, it's a delight. So tonight I learned “Robins m'aime,” a French song by the 13th-century composer Adam de la Halle. I need to work on my sight reading and why not be medieval? But also it's magical. Over time language becomes inscrutable. Accents fade. Countries come and go. But a dude writes a song for Marion to sing about her guy Robin, and I can just pick that up, read the notes, and it's back in the world, the same song.

Robin bought me a surcote grand
Of scarlet cloth fine and bonny
Gown and kirtle gay as any.
I will have it!

A song about a man treating you right. Like a million such today. Do I despair that consciousness doesn't evolve? Yes! See the psilocybin meditations on tone. Éliane Radigue just passed, and my god. Imagine hearing Trilogie de Mort in your head, having that there, in your brain, then making it real. What a freaking consciousness that was. If you don't know it book three hours of your life, because you are about to learn what communicating with aliens will be like. I'm going to listen to it right now.

Like I said: Imagine having that in your head, but not yet recording it. I really do love that moment when an idea is just your own. You know you have to share it. It might die upon release. But the joy of it, of just containing something that feels new, before it must become actualized. The little inner motions of thought.

Anyway. You can, if you work at it for a few years, sit down and play haltingly a medieval song, just with your own eyes and fingers. No one can stop you. You can wear headphones and sing the song of Marion in 1250, and to hell with that interloping knight, because Robin is the man for me, he got me a kirtle.

And my hands are friends now. The world can be out there, pissing all over itself, and you can log off. You don't even have to put a picture on the top of the blog post. Because the real ones will get to the end of the post even knowing there won't be toy surprise. Just because it's good to be alive together. Boring each other to death. We can suck as bad as we need to, to get through this bullshit, and maybe one day we'll play Christmas Carols together, or murmur along with Ava Maria at the funeral mass, or pick up the bass in the nursing home Nation of Ulysses cover band. It's good to talk about love in an age of fear and death.