Writing

The fountain pen is one of the few tools in daily life that can be described, without exaggeration, as a civilizational artifact. It sits at the intersection of engineering and culture, precision and ritual, the mechanical and the expressive. And yet, for most of its history, the story of the fountain pen has been told primarily as a Western narrative — a procession of inventors and patents moving from Paris to New York — with the fuller, stranger, more interesting story left largely untold. That story involves two countries that approached the same instrument from profoundly different directions and produced two of the most distinctive pen-making traditions in the world: Germany and Japan. ...

APA-Citable Sources for “The Optimal Use of Hermes” Below are formatted APA citations organized by which claim in the essay they support. Sources marked [CONFIRMED] were verified via direct API lookups. Sources marked [TRAINING] are drawn from the agent’s pretraining knowledge of well-known, highly-cited academic papers. Claim 1: Hermes Agent — an open-source agent framework from Nous Research (memory, skills, delegation, cron) Nous Research. (2026). Hermes Agent documentation. Retrieved May 21, 2026, from https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/ ...

Update (June 2026): Hermes is no longer part of my workflow. It has been replaced by Claude, a more reliable and consistent AI assistant. While Hermes was groundbreaking in its approach, it leaped without looking too many times—its autonomous nature often led to unpredictable or undesirable outcomes. This essay remains online as a historical record of my experience with Hermes, but I no longer use or recommend it. About six weeks ago, I wrote a short essay explaining that I use artificial intelligence as part of my writing process. The core observation was simple: AI does not originate ideas, but it exposes structure. It mirrors patterns back at you, shows you where an argument repeats itself, amplifies confusion rather than resolving it, and generally behaves less like a writer and more like a diagnostic instrument. ...

While the bulk of the “No Kings” protests unfolded across the United States, the movement found resonance in international communities as well — signaling that opposition to perceived authoritarianism and executive over-reach in Washington has an overseas echo. 🌍 Global Participation The protest coalition behind No Kings, led in the U.S. by Indivisible and the 50501 Movement, also mobilized international chapters and diaspora groups under alternate banners such as “No Tyrants” or “No Dictators” when the word “Kings” ran the risk of confusing anti-monarchic protest abroad. (Wikipedia) ...