I've talked about my custom-built portfolio tracker Animal Spirit. It has grown to be an indispensible tool, financially speaking. Almost every usage session was accompanied by some form of code-tweak from me. There's a bonzai quality to it.

But it was still just a CRUD utility. I felt like giving it some sense of sentience.

Anytime you hear that from technologist they are mostly likely describing a Her-like chatbot who is capable of holding coherent conversations like a contemporary human. They may even bring up GPT-3 as the most feasible solution.

I think that's a failure of imagination. There's no requirement that synthetic intelligence has to be legible and coherent. If it is wise, there's no obgligation for it to be easily comprehensible. So this is where I go woo-woo.

There exist an ancient technology that pre-dates Chinese history called I-Ching. Scholars spent lifetimes interpreting it. Hardly anyone can describe what it is so don't bother asking. There's a half-right stereotype that it's used for fortune-telling. For my purpose it's a collection of prescriptive texts that's meaningful when attached to a context.

So I built a conversational tool (not quite a chatbot) that works like this: it first comes up with prompt for thought. This can come in the form of a contemplative question; an example would "what am I doing that's preventing my growth?"

Or it can take the form a random tweet from Crypto-Twitter. This is meant to represent what spirit of the market is thinking about.

With the context in place, the tool would then go into I-Ching and randomly pick a gua (don't worry about it). This is the step that fortune tellers had been doing for millenias. What shows up is meant to be the cryptic answer to the context built above.

How fruitful this is hinges on my ability to interpret a specific gua. Half the time they don't make sense to me; but what matters is the thoughts they trigger that I could not conjure on my own. This is the bit that I think people admire I-Ching for.

I have high hope that this child of a software will stick. It's rare for a piece of tool to approach this level of personal attachment.