Tom McMillan

I want my computer to be a commercial kitchen. I am the server and I write little tickets for orders, and they go on that stainless steel thingy and the computer cooks em up and rings a bell when the app is done.

More ideas, more compute, ephemeral software. Ongoing thinking, ongoing ideas, past connected to present.

Up to this point, I had worked at the problem from many angles. I wrote a programming language called Nondeterministic Expression Language (NDEL). I wrote an Oracle to recursively read my database. I wrote a simulator to imagine hundreds of alternate states of consulting projects I had worked on. I scraped and embedded 50,000 Wall Street Journal articles and built my own UI to read them so I could float across knowledge on my own. I built an app called Conduct, applying Richard Strauss’s 10 Golden Rules for orchestral conducting (1949) with Binny Miller’s essay on client narrative in case theory (1994), which could reorient the relationship between a user and her computer (then Claude Cowork came out and further work on Conduct seemed pointless). And these ideas sat idle for a while, while I took consulting jobs and got obsessed with women’s soccer data. Then GPT Astra and a recent research paper, “Dream-RSI: Recursive Self-Improvement through Evolving Worlds” (2026) got me thinking again.

I have not solved anything, really, but it seems more pertinent today than it was when i began it in 2024.

In 2024 I wrote 70,000 word document called “Writing to Computers.” I imagined it would be a book or paper. Turns out, it’s useless.

I wrote about what happens when language becomes a way to direct computation, and how that changes writing and our intersubjective relationship with machines.

I coined a phase called “computational intersubjectivity” and borrowed another term, “Socratic computing,” from a friend.

I thought I had really cracked things open. That a guidebook to writing would contribute to better computing. But my noting of what writing is, and who its for, was too narrow. I took many too many things for granted, and those things have changed.

I don’t know what a document is anymore. Everything seems to be provisional, or a disclaimer, or something I’m not allowed to read, but I need to move it around to make money. That’s a weird place for a literate society to be.