HEADREST

Post-industrial hardcore noise blog.

Monday, July 06, 2026

vibe consultant

I have no technical ability.
You must know something.
I know what I like and what I don’t like.


I tried to work my way through Rick Rubin’s book after amusing myself reading a transcript of his 60 Minutes interview. Much to Rick’s discredit I find greater intrigue in the thought of Kurt Gödel and this is despite having two left hands when it comes to things like mathematics.

A tad to Rick’s credit—good taste and vibes count when it comes to ingenuity. This is only to say that he thinks the same thing as a lot of other people, of which I am one from that many of which he is from too, along with all the slick tech dudes I imagine in Rick Rubin’s orbit who link taste with the future of (vibe) coding.

And I might be wrong but I think one of the points of Gödel’s theorem was that science is just a lot of vibes and knowing what to do with them within and without a system and most people can really only have taste within a given system but in that system is the only place their taste holds true.

With this in mind I imagine bad taste at scale being something like the Dunning-Kruger effect. I don’t know what much of this means yet but at least I can catch my own drift.

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Blogger elder stateman Dave Winer says:

As a writer I’ve stolen lots of ideas. All writers do it. How do you think we get our ideas.

Which is why it’s so weird that they object to having their ideas stolen en masse.

We go through this regularly, basically you make a living doing something, and you aren’t paid enough.

So every subject in every context arrives at the same place. Why aren’t they paying me. I must be paid.

It is a permanent obsession with writers.

I try to be honest and admit that I steal from other writers, but I only steal from the best!

Dave Winer, 26 Jun 2026, from the blog post “Only steal from the best

He’s right. So right in fact that I stole some of the design for this website from him. Can you tell?

We all take. I personally eschew the term “creator” and words like “creative” and “creation” when dealing with the things people make because you are not making anything from nothing. Any of you. Not ever have you done that! Only a materialist hubris permits such a notion.

Intellectual property is a get up from The Man™. The art of the remix has got to be as old as the time of men around fire; odes, epics and things. Look. If you don’t like AI taking it from you. Then I will. It’s only right and only human.

Some say that the art of perceiving, understanding, analogizing one thing into something anew without compromising the integrities of influence is a part of intelligence.

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