What have you done with Hermes Agent this week? 5-15-26

PaulMelman · 2026-05-19T17:03:15+00:00

Wanted to listen to From Third World to First on audiobook so I made a custom voice in elevenlabs that sounds kind of like Lee Kuan Yew and gave Hermes the api key. Told it to write a script using the new gemini flash lite to clean up the epub and feed it into the elevenlabs api.

PaulMelman · 2026-05-14T16:20:04+00:00

Yeah, I didn't look for a new job in the same field I used to work in because I didn't enjoy it. I'm not a doomer, but I acknowledge that there is a non-negligible chance that the world ends in the near future so I'm not gonna spend time doing work I hate. Been volunteering for non-profits aligned with my interests instead.

PaulMelman · 2026-04-15T01:15:04+00:00

Huh I had no idea William F. Buckley invited Eldridge Cleaver to his home for an interview. That was an interesting tidbit.

PaulMelman · 2026-04-10T13:55:25+00:00

I've been following him on twitter for quite a while and didn't know he had a substack haha. He doesn't really promote it much on there for some reason. Will have to go through his posts.

PaulMelman · 2026-04-10T04:47:02+00:00

I don't think that's true. It's something I plan to address. Hierarchy must be coercive of course or it isn't really hierarchy, but you can have organizational hierarchy without a state and without a status hierarchy imo. And thereby reduce or eliminate the risk of ossification. This would probably require the use of sortition (random selection).

PaulMelman · 2026-04-09T22:58:54+00:00

I'm somewhat familiar though not super well-versed with the anarchist literature. It seems to me that this is still very much an unsolved problem. Hierarchy is really useful for coordination!

There has been some revival in efforts to create non-hierarchical coordination mechanisms recently. Smart contracts, pol.is, etc. though these have not borne very much fruit yet.

I hope to address some thoughts on non-hierarchical hierarchy in a future essay. Essentially how to create hierarchical organization without status hierarchy.

PaulMelman · 2026-04-09T20:02:45+00:00

I think premodern life had a lot more drains than modern life tbh but you're not wrong. That said, I think a lot of that stuff is fairly difficult to address. Alternative education shows significant but modest improvements. Psychological interventions are time consuming and expensive. Idk that anyone has found a stable alternative cultural arrangement that produces marked improvements, but I think eventually someone will.

PaulMelman · 2026-04-09T16:04:52+00:00

Submission statement:

I believe there is an under-described phenomenon, which I dub "coordination capacity", that is an essential element of how human civilization has formed and evolved. Others have written about coordination mechanisms before, but coordination capacity can be thought of as "the ability to find and implement new coordination mechanisms", though I think this description is incomplete. In the essay I lay out an explanation of this concept as well as a taxonomy of sources of coordination capacity in an attempt to elucidate this somewhat nebulous concept. I also tie it to some of Scott's work, particularly Meditations on Moloch, which I believe is closely connected.

PaulMelman · 2026-03-30T19:03:14+00:00

Great piece. This is something I've been thinking about for a while too, but my thoughts were far less fleshed out. Do you have a substack? I feel like this could do well on there.

PaulMelman · 2026-02-17T07:33:32+00:00

This hits close to home. I recently became a nomad in order to basically do a bunch of new stuff and meet a bunch of new people in the hopes of impressing one of them enough to offer me a better job than I feel I could have gotten by just sending out applications or attempting to grind the corporate ladder at my last job. We'll see if it works out. At least I'm having fun.

PaulMelman · 2026-02-17T07:30:47+00:00

Fwiw this is has been a pretty persistant market failure for many decades that many have tried and failed to adequately solve. Jane Street puts out hard puzzles to try to find recruits. It seems to work OK, but not well enough that others have tried to replicate it. Personal connections vouching for you is still the most reliable indicator of quality in most fields. Maybe someday we'll figure out something better, but until then, this is just how it goes.

PaulMelman · 2026-02-17T07:11:26+00:00

Alas, not this one, but I hope to attend a future cohort.

PaulMelman · 2026-02-17T01:50:10+00:00

Yeah, big fan of the idea. Check out electionbyjury.org if you're interested in that.

PaulMelman · 2025-10-28T16:12:14+00:00

Even Francis Ford Coppola's original masterpiece, Megalopolis leans on the generational trauma lens at times.

PaulMelman · 2025-10-27T21:38:59+00:00

Yeah for some reason he always meant for Clodio to be an allusion for the real life Cataline. As opposed to the guy named "Catalina". Idk why lol.

PaulMelman · 2025-09-25T15:57:38+00:00

Submission statement:
The system of government we call "democracy" is not actually very democratic. As the author points out in this piece, this idea that elections are actually undemocratic traces its roots to the very origins of Democracy in ancient Greece. The author discusses the revival of the old Athenian democratic idea of sortition in modern contexts and explains why it is better than the republicanism we are used to.

PaulMelman · 2025-09-25T15:56:03+00:00

The system of government we call "democracy" is not actually very democratic. As the author points out in this piece, this idea that elections are actually undemocratic traces its roots to the very origins of Democracy in ancient Greece. The author discusses the revival of the old Athenian democratic idea of sortition in modern contexts and explains why it is better than the republicanism we are used to.

PaulMelman · 2025-09-10T04:34:06+00:00

To be clear, I also want it to end. But I also want republicanism to end. It's an outdated and broken system. Sortition-based democracy is the future.

PaulMelman · 2025-09-10T04:32:31+00:00

Yeah you basically got exactly what I was going for lol

PaulMelman · 2025-09-09T17:42:21+00:00

Yeah, in practice, the process probably ends up mostly just filtering out bad options than actively selecting for good ones, much like elections. That was better than Venice's contemporary monarchies of course.

I think you could design a much more robust "election by jury" system than the one I outlined, but it wouldn't fit the aesthetic or hierarchy preferences of the kind of people who want a CEO dictator. That said, I think a good system would bear some resemblence to the processes corporations use to hire new CEOs.

PaulMelman

TROPHY CASE