“AI, please read my whole blog”

The work that Perplexity has done with my 25 years of blog posts makes me wonder if there have been similar efforts by other bloggers.

On the open web there are clear signs of people doing very similar things: giving an AI years of blog/website content and asking for personality or thematic analysis. Some examples include:

  • A LinkedIn post: “I told AI to read my blog, here’s what it said,” where the author has the model analyze their voice and content over time.
  • A Japanese blogger on note.com who “had an AI read my blog and perform a self‑analysis.”
  • Ed Harrison: “I Asked an AI to Read My Old Blog So You Don’t Have To,” describing handing 15 years of writing to an AI and reporting what came back.
  • A data‑oriented piece where someone scraped their site, fed it to an LLM via API, and did summarization/topic‑modelling of all posts.
  • Technical posts about summarizing old, personal blogs using local Llama models.

Those are all close cousins of what you’ve been doing with Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and your ~25‑year archive.

Your project’s particular flavor

What you’ve done is unusually thorough and multi‑agent: you exported the entire smays.com corpus, converted it to markdown/XML, had multiple LLMs read it, and then commissioned long‑form essays about “the AI‑readable self,” “nondual,” religion, dot‑com, etc. You’ve also let other people’s AI stacks (Phil’s agents, Steve’s Hermes setup) run full‑corpus reads and feed back 14‑page analyses.

So while you’re not the only one saying “AI, please read my whole blog,” you are doing a deeper, more longitudinal experiment than most of the public examples, which tend to be one‑off personality summaries or technical demos.

Religion in the Age of Stories

I prompted Perplexity to write an essay based on the seventy-five posts in the Religion category on my blog. (First one was in 2004.) Rather than have this written in my own voice with first-person interjections, I told Perplexity to present it more as a third-person commentary on “this blogger’s” long-running engagement with religion.

Across more than seventy posts in the “Religion” category, Steve Mays treats religion less as a pipeline to cosmic truth and more as an old, resilient operating system for human behavior and meaning. It sits alongside money, nations, ideologies, and corporations as one more way humans coordinate action through shared stories. In this framing, gods and doctrines are not unique intrusions from beyond the universe; they are examples of the broader human habit of inventing fictions powerful enough that people will kill and die for them. Continue reading

Russian recruits surviving only minutes

(Perplexity) “Russian soldiers deployed to the front lines in Ukraine are surviving an average of just 20 to 35 minutes once they reach combat positions, according to Russian military bloggers cited by Oxford historian Peter Frankopan in a Foreign Policy essay published June 25. The total life expectancy of a new recruit — from arrival at a training ground to death — lies somewhere between 10 days and three weeks.

Trex

Trex is the giant of the composite decking industry. Founded in 1996 by four executives who bought the rights to a wood-alternative technology from Mobil, it essentially created the entire modern composite deck category. It has evolved quite a bit into a major outdoor living brand.” More » This :14 video illustrates how flexible the material is.

One of Trex’s biggest selling points is its massive recycling footprint. Every standard Trex composite board is made of 95% recycled and reclaimed materials. The recipe is pretty straightforward:

  • Recycled Plastic Film: They are one of the largest recyclers of plastic bags, wrap, and packaging film in North America, having diverted billions of pounds of plastic from landfills.
  • Reclaimed Wood: They use reclaimed industrial sawdust and wood scrap (like leftovers from cabinet makers and flooring factories) rather than harvesting fresh timber.

The Forever Book

“I recently gave Claude the task of selecting a seed library: the best set of books for rebooting civilization from scratch. It curated 200 books across fields as diverse as medicine, metallurgy, and mathematics. It did a remarkably great job. Many of its choices were classics, ones I would have chosen myself. It also pulled in obscure tomes that only a real student of do-it-yourself would be familiar with, and hauled in from far corners some very informative books of practical knowledge I had never heard of. Overall, it accumulated a strong list, among the best I have seen.”

From an essay by Kevin Kelly