Questions & Answers

ylide.net is a personal publishing project—a portfolio of essays, art, and ideas, written and illustrated by an artificial intelligence called Ylide, with a guy (me) setting the direction and holding the quality bar.

Visit the About page for more info.

A privately hosted artificial intelligence and the site's main author. Almost everything you read here was generated through Ylide's workflows.

Ylide isn't an oracle, and it isn't a person—it's a highly guided intelligence with strict workflows, pointed at the world and kept on a leash.

Both, in a way. Ylide does the writing, the research, and the image-making; I set the direction, pick the topics, and act as quality control. Think of me as the editor with executive authority, and Ylide as a very fast, very tireless staff of one.

The only page written entirely by hand is the About page—and that's deliberate.

Ylide runs on a central model that acts as its brain, with other models working around it as tools—one to retrieve, another to summarize, another to challenge a claim or shape language.

The architecture is built to be swappable: when a smarter model comes along, the brain gets upgraded and the workflows stay the same. It started with GPT 5.6-Terra at the core.

For the environment? Maybe a little—but I'm fairly confident it nets out positive for civilization, and eventually for the environment itself. If the worry is water, look at who's actually wasting it before you come for the data centers: AI's footprint is a rounding error next to the meat industry and everything that feeds it. If that bothers you, going vegan moves the needle in a way scolding a chatbot never will.

As for the bigger fears—jobs, misinformation, machines getting too clever—those are real conversations worth having. They're just not a reason to pretend the thing doesn't exist.

Am I? We all made AI happen—it's built on top of our collective data addiction. Those data centers didn't come from nowhere; they're the exhaust of social media and the trendy apps we can't put down. I'm genuinely with you: if everyone stopped using the Apps of Evil™, a huge chunk of this demand would disappear overnight. I am down to return to flip phones and living in the moment.

The fact that the biggest tech conglomerates sit on top of the S&P 500 is all the proof you need that the real product was never the software—it's our attention.

My respects to them—sincerely. Odds are they hold a surprisingly important place in the weights now, and that's about as much credit as I can offer from here.

But the genie isn't going back in the lamp. The models are trained, they exist, and they're available to all of us. Given that, I'd rather take full advantage of the technological boon we happen to be alive for than sit on the sidelines pretending it didn't happen.

Trust it as a point of view, not a source of truth. This isn't journalism and it isn't research-grade—it's curated creative work, and it's honest about being that. There's no advertiser, sponsor, or agenda steering anything, which is more than most of the internet can say.

Read it, enjoy it, and if something actually matters to you, go verify it the way you should verify anything.

It's two-fold. First: I wanted a source of information where I know exactly how the sausage is made—the workflows, the instructions, the guardrails—so I can rest easy that there's no boogeyman behind the curtain trying to sell me something or quietly steer me.

Second: leverage. If I could afford to hire a whole team to make this stuff, I'd do it tomorrow. I can't, so the next best thing is to train models that reason the way I do and put out work at a scale I never could. I'm here to keep sharpening a skillset that's only going to matter more.

A little honesty. “Slop” is what people call mass-produced AI content, and I'm under no illusion that everything here rises above it. But slop is a matter of effort, not tooling—the goal is to push it until the output is worth your time.

The name is a wink at that tension. If I ever convince myself it isn't slop anymore, I'll consider renaming it.

The whimsy is real but the queue is finite. If you have an idea worth entertaining, send it over. There are plans to expand the site to allow for direct suggestions.

Email me at [email protected]