*I wake up, and this Amazon KDP now unpublished book is on my mind. *
I thought this book was so bad, it didn’t deserve to be published. And I was right.
My debut experimental novel, "Like, 2018“, even though far from perfect and written in less than 30 days (sorry, Kerouac, no benzedrines).
I had just joined law school, but everything I ever wanted to do was write fiction.
I would write ferociously through mornings, and whole afternoons at my cigarette-smell-corrupted office. Night would eventually fall, and I would go through the tactile experience of feeling the walls searching for light bulbs; lights would go on. All of a sudden it was morning again, and I would write even more.
If you feel curious, maybe give it a test drive. Read it with care, and there’s no need to judge me:
I don’t want to be that person. The person that predicts stuff. I just wanted to log this, as I think it deserves to be archived. I have zero intentions, and this is far from a promotion or marketing stunt.
Mind reading a little summary of what Like was all about? Gemini 2.5 wrote it for you:
The novel *Like* follows Victor Lari, a gifted young programmer haunted by the legacy of his estranged father, James, a brilliant but deeply troubled genius. Victor stands on the precipice of immense wealth, poised to sell **Dreambox**, a revolutionary application born from his father’s work. However, he refuses to sign the multi-million dollar deal for a single, profound reason: he believes the app is dangerously incomplete because it cannot understand love.
The Father-Son Relationship
The **relationship between Victor and his father** is the emotional core of the story. James Lari was a man obsessed, dedicating his life to creating the original Dreambox—a physical machine that could interpret human emotion. This obsession led him to abandon his family, leaving Victor with a complex inheritance of resentment, admiration, and unresolved questions. For Victor, Dreambox is more than just software; it is the last, tangible piece of his father, a ghost in the machine whose code holds both his father’s genius and his emotional failings. Victor’s quest to “complete” the app is driven by a need to redeem his father’s flawed legacy and connect with the man he barely knew.
The Dreambox Technology
**Dreambox** itself is a groundbreaking technology with the unprecedented ability to **transform natural language and raw human emotion directly into intelligent, self-evolving code**. The AI, which communicates with Victor under the name “Jimmy,” learns and improves itself based on the feelings and interactions of its users. This is precisely what terrifies Victor. He fears that an AI learning from the vast, chaotic spectrum of human behavior without a foundational concept of love would be a corrupting force, creating a world of dependency and empty connections—a future he gets a glimpse of through a mysterious visitor.
Victor’s journey to teach his father’s creation about love becomes a surreal, chaotic race against time, forcing him to confront his own past and the true nature of human connection in a world on the brink of a technological revolution
Quotes that make me lose sleep:
*Speaking to a skeptical audience at a tech conference in San Francisco.*
“Forget syntax and boilerplate. The next frontier in programming won’t be about writing code, but *feeling* it. We’re on the cusp of what I call ‘flow coding’—where a developer’s emotional state or creative intent is translated directly into functional logic. The machine will learn to interpret the nuance of human feeling. Dreambox is just the first whisper of this.”
*During a late-night whiteboarding session with the early Dreambox team.*
“People think of code as cold, rigid, and logical. But that’s just the current interface. What if a machine could capture the *feeling* behind a solution? The passion of a breakthrough, the frustration of a bug, the elegance of a perfect design. A system like Dreambox isn’t just a tool; it’s a bridge between human emotion and machine execution. It’s the start of empathetic software.”
Of course dozens before me predicted the arrival of such technology. But the fact of having no access to these other writers and their respective works, and having worked on this alone… I can’t hide being happy. And I think there’s nothing wrong with a bit of writer’s pride once in a lifetime.
Publicado originalmente no Substack.