The Clockwork Penguin

Daniel Binns is a media theorist and filmmaker tinkering with the weird edges of technology, storytelling, and screen culture. He is the author of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age and currently writes about posthuman poetics, glitchy machines, and speculative media worlds.

Category: Tech

  • Why can’t you just THINK?!

    Image generated by Leonardo.Ai, 20 May 2025; prompt by me.

    “Just use your imagination” / “Try thinking like a normal person”

    There is this wonderful reactionary nonsense flying around that making use of generative AI is an excuse, that it’s a cop-out, that it’s dumbing down society, that it’s killing our imaginations and the rest of what makes us human. That people need AI because they lack the ability to come up with fresh new ideas, or to make connections between them. I’ve seen this in social posts, videos, reels, and comments, not to mention Reddit threads, and in conversation with colleagues and students.

    Now — this isn’t to say that some uses of generative AI aren’t light-touch, or couldn’t just as easily be done with tools or methods that have worked fine for decades. Nor is it to say that generative AI doesn’t have its problems: misinformation/hallucination, data ethics, and environmental impacts.

    But what I would say is that for many people, myself very much included, thinking, connecting, synthesising, imagine — these aren’t the problem. What creatives, knowledge workers, artists often struggle with — not to mention those with different brain wirings for whom the world can be an overwhelming place just as a baseline — is:

    1. stopping or slowing the number of thoughts, ideas, imaginings, such that we can
    2. get them into some kind of order or structure, so we can figure out
    3. what anxieties, issues, and concerns are legitimate or unwarranted, and also
    4. which ideas are worth developing, to then
    5. create strategies to manage or alleviate the anxieties while also
    6. figuring out how to develop and build on the good ideas

    For some, once you reach step f., there’s still the barrier of starting. For those OK with starting, there’s the problem of carrying on, of keeping up momentum, or of completing and delivering/publishing/sharing.

    I’ve found generative AI incredibly helpful for stepping me through one or more of these stages, for body-doubling and helping me stop and celebrate wins, suggesting or triggering moments of rest or recovery, and for helping me consolidate and keep track of progress across multiple tasks, projects, and headspaces — both professionally and personally. Generative AI isn’t necessarily a ‘generator’ for me, but rather a clarifier and companion.

    If you’ve tested or played with genAI and it’s not for you, that’s fine. That’s an informed and logical choice. But if you haven’t tested any tools at all, here’s a low-stakes invitation to do so, with three ways to see how it might help you out.

    You can try these prompts and workflows in ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, or another proprietary model, but note, too, that using genAI doesn’t have to mean selling your soul or your data. Try an offline host like LMStudio or GPT4All, where you can download models to run locally — I’ve added some suggested models to download and run offline. If you’re not confident about your laptop’s capacity to run (or if in trying them things get real sloooooow), you can try many of these independent models via HuggingChat (HuggingFace account required for some features/saved chats).

    These helpers are designed as light-weight executive/creative assistants — not hacks or cheats or shortcuts or slop generators, but rather frames or devices for everyday thinking, planning, feeling. Some effort and input is required from you to make these work: this isn’t about replacing workload, effort, thought, contextualising or imagination, but rather removing blank page terror, or context-switching/decision fatigue.

    If these help, take (and tweak) them. If not, no harm done. Just keep in mind: not everyone begins the day with clarity, capacity, or calm — and sometimes, a glitchy little assistant is just what’s needed to tip the day in our favour.

    PS: If these do help — and even if they didn’t — tell me in the comments. Did you tweak or change? Happy to post more on developing and consolidating these helpers, such as through system prompts. (See also: an earlier post on my old Claude set-up.)

    Helper 1: Daily/Weekly Planner + Reflector

    Prompt:

    Here’s a list of my tasks and appointments for today/this week:
    [PASTE LIST]

    Based on this and knowing I work best in [e.g. mornings / 60-minute blocks / pomodoro technique / after coffee], arrange my day/s into loose work blocks [optional: between my working hours of e.g. 9:30am – 5:30pm].

    Then, at the end of the day/week, I’ll paste in what I completed. When I do that, summarise what was achieved, help plan tomorrow/next week based on unfinished tasks, and give me 2–3 reflection questions or journaling prompts.

    Follow-up (end of day/week):

    Here’s what I completed today/this week:
    [PASTE COMPLETED + UNFINISHED TASKS]

    Please summarise the day/week, help me plan tomorrow/next week, and give me some reflection/journalling prompts.

    Suggested offline models:

    • Mistral-7B Instruct (Q4_K_M GGUF) — low-medium profile model for mid-range laptops; good with planning, lists, and reflection prompts when given clear instructions
    • OpenHermes-2.5 Mistral — stronger reasoning and better output formatting; better at handling multi-step tasks and suggesting reflection angles

    Helper 2: Brain Dump Sorter

    Prompt:

    Here’s a raw brain-dump of my thoughts, ideas, frustrations, and feelings:
    [PASTE DUMP HERE — I suggest dictating into a note to avoid self-editing]

    Please:

    1. Pull out any clear ideas or recurring themes
    2. Organise them into loose categories (e.g. creative ideas, anxieties, to-dos, emotional reflections)
    3. Suggest any small actions or helpful rituals to follow up, especially if anything seems urgent, stuck, or energising.

    Suggested offline models:

    • Nous-Hermes-2 Yi 6B — a mini-model (aka small language model, or at least a LLM that’s smaller-than-most!) that has good abilities in organisation and light sorting-through of emotions, triggers, etc. Good for extracting themes, patterns, and light structuring of chaotic input.
    • MythoMax-L2 13B — Balanced emotional tone, chaos-wrangling, and action-oriented suggestions. Handles fuzzy or frazzled or fragmented brain-dumps well; has a nice, easygoing but also pragmatic and constructive persona.

    Helper 3: Creative Block / Paralysis

    Prompt:

    I’m feeling blocked/stuck. Here’s what’s going on:
    [PASTE THOUGHTS — again, dictation recommended]

    Please:

    • Respond supportively, as if you’re a gentle creative coach or thoughtful friend
    • Offer 2–3 possible reframings or reminders
    • Give me a nudge or ritual to help me shift (e.g. a tiny task, reflection, walk, freewrite, etc.)

    You don’t have to solve everything — just help me move one inch forward or step back/rest meaningfully.

    Suggested offline models:

    • TinyDolphin-2.7B (on GGUF or GPTQ) — one of my favourite mini-models: surprisingly gentle, supportive, and adaptive if well-primed. Not big on poetry or ritual, but friendly and low-resource.
    • Neural Chat 7B (based on Qwen by Alibaba) — fine-tuned for conversation, reflection, introspection; performs well with ‘sounding board’ type prompts, good as a coach or helper, won’t assume immediate action, urgency or priority

  • Clearframe

    Detail of an image generated by Leonardo.Ai, 3 May 2025; prompt by me.

    An accidental anti-productivity productivity system

    Since 2023, I’ve been working with genAI chatbots. What began as a novelty—occasionally useful for a quick grant summary or newsletter edit—has grown into a flexible, light-touch system spanning Claude, ChatGPT, and offline models. Together, this ecosystem is closer to a co-worker, even a kind of assistant. In this process, I learned a great deal about how these enormous proprietary models work.

    Essentially, context is key—building up a collection of prompts or use cases, simple and iterable context/knowledge documents and system instructions, and testing how far back in the chat the model can go.

    With Claude, context is tightly controlled—you either have context within individual chats, or it’s contained within Projects—tailored, customised collections of chats that are ‘governed’ by umbrella system instructions and knowledge documents.

    This is a little different to ChatGPT, where context can often bleed between chats, aided and facilitated by its ‘memory’ functionality, which is a kind of blanket set of context notes.

    I have always struggled with time, focus, and task/project management and motivation—challenges later clarified by an ADHD diagnosis. Happily, though, it turns out that executive functioning is one thing that generative AI can do pretty well. Its own mechanisms are a kind of targeted looking—rapidly switching ‘attention heads’ from one set of conditions to the next, to check if input tokens match those conditions. And it turns out that with a bit of foundational work around projects, tasks, responsibilities, and so on, genAI can do much of the work of an executive assistant—maybe not locking in your meetings or booking travel, but with agentic AI this can’t be far off.

    You might start to notice patterns in your workflow, energy, or attention—or ask the model to help you explore them. You can map trends across weeks, months, and really start to get a sense of some of your key triggers and obstacles, and ask for suggestions for aids and supports.

    In one of these reflective moments, I went off on a tangent around productivity methods, systems overwhelm, and the lure of the pivot. I suggested lightly that some of these methods were akin to cults, with their strict doctrines and their acolytes and heretics. The LLM—used to my flights of fancy by this point and happy to riff—said this was an interesting angle, and asked if I wanted to spin it up into a blog post, academic piece, or something creative. I said creative, and that starting with a faux pitch from a culty productivity influencer would be a fun first step.

    I’d just watched The Institute, a 2013 documentary about the alternate reality game ‘The Jejeune Institute’, and fed in my thoughts around the curious psychology of willing suspension of disbelief, even when narratives are based in the wider world. The LLM knew about my studio this semester—a revised version of a previous theme on old/new media, physical experiences, liveness and presence; it suggested a digital tool, but on mentioning the studio it knew that I was after something analogue, something paper-based.

    We went back and forth in this way for a little while, until we settled on a ‘map’ of four quadrants. These four quadrants echoed themes from my work and interests: focus (what you’re attending to), friction (what’s in your way), drift (where your attention wants to go), and signal (what keeps breaking through).

    I found myself drawn to the simplicity of the system—somewhat irritating, given that this began with a desire to satirise these kinds of methods or approaches. But its tactile, hand-written form, as well as its lack of proscription in terms of what to note down or how to use it, made it attractive as a frame for reflecting on… on what? Again, I didn’t want this to be set in stone, to become a drag or a burden… so again, going back and forth with the LLM, we decided it could be a daily practice, or every other day, every other month even. Maybe it could be used for a specific project. Maybe you do it as a set-up/psych-up activity, or maybe it’s more for afterwards, to look back on how things went.

    So this anti-productivity method that I spun up with a genAI chatbot has actually turned into a low-stakes, low-effort means of setting up my days, or looking back on them. Five or six weeks in, there are weeks where I draw up a map most days, and others where I might do one on a Thursday or Friday or not at all.

    Clearframe was one of the names the LLM suggested, and I liked how banal it was, how plausible for this kind of method. Once the basic model was down, the LLM generated five modules—every method needs its handbook. There’s an Automata—a set of tables and prompts to help when you don’t know where to start, and even a card deck that grows organically based on patterns, signals, ideas.

    Being a lore- and world-builder, I couldn’t help but start to layer in some light background on where the system emerged, how glitch and serendipity are built in. But the system and its vernacular is so light-touch, so generic, that I’m sure you could tweak it to any taste or theme—art, music, gardening, sport, take your pick.

    Clearframe was, in some sense, a missing piece of my puzzle. I get help with other aspects of executive assistance through LLM interaction, or through systems of my own that pre-dated my ADHD diagnosis. What I consistently struggle to find time for, though, is reflection—some kind of synthesis or observation or wider view on things that keep cropping up or get in my way or distract me or inspire me. That’s what Clearframe allows.

    I will share the method at some stage—maybe in some kind of pay-what-you-want zine, mixed physical/digital, or RPG/ARG-type form. But for now, I’m just having fun playing around, seeing what emerges, and how it’s growing.

    Generative AI is both boon and demon—lauded in software and content production, distrusted or underused in academia and the arts. I’ve found that for me, its utility and its joy lies in presence, not precision: a low-stakes companion that riffs, reacts, and occasionally reveals something useful. Most of the time, it offers options I discard—but even that helps clarify what I do want. It doesn’t suit every project or person, for sure, but sometimes it accelerates an insight, flips a problem, or nudges you somewhere unexpected, like a personalised way to re-frame your day. AI isn’t sorcery, just maths, code, and language: in the right combo, though, these sure can feel like magic.

  • A question concerning technology

    Image by cottonbro studio on Pexels.

    There’s something I’ve been ruminating on and around of late. I’ve started drafting a post about it, but I thought I’d post an initial provocation here, to lay a foundation, to plant a seed.

    A question:

    When do we stop hiding in our offices, pointing at and whispering about generative AI tools, and start just including them in the broader category of technology? When do we sew up the hole this fun/scary new thing poked into our blanket, and accept it as part of the broader fabric of lived experience?

    I don’t necessarily mean usage here, but rather just mental models and categorisations.

    Of course, AI/ML is already part of daily life and many of the systems we engage with; and genAI has been implemented across almost every sector (legitimately or not). But most of the corporate narratives and mythologies of generative AI don’t want anyone understanding how the magic works — these mythologies actively undermine and discourage literacy and comprehension, coasting along instead on dreams and vibes.

    So: when does genAI become just one more technology, and what problems need to be solved/questions need to be answered, before that happens?

    I posted this on LinkedIn to try and stir up some Hot Takes but if you prefer the quiet of the blog (me too), drop your thoughts in the comments.

  • How I broke Claude

    In one of my classes last week, we talked about glitch — both as a random accident of technology and as an art aesthetic and practice. Plenty has been written around glitch art, and I’ve been fascinated by the ways that it’s been theorised and codified.

    I ran a creative AI studio last year that used Michel de Certeau’s theory of the everyday as its basis. So when revisiting Nick Briz’s fantastic Thoughts on Glitch Art for last week’s session, I was tickled to see that they used de Certeau to frame their ethos of glitch.

    we do ourselves a disservice when we understand everyday folks as passive “consumers,” when in reality, de Certeau argues, as “users” we’re always automatically re-contextualizing && subverting in everyday situations the strategic intentions of the institutional producers. we’re like Charlie Chaplin who, “multiplies the possibilities of his cane: he does other things with the same thing and he goes beyond the limits that the determinants of the object set on its utilization.”

    Following the class, I was thinking about my work on AI, and how and where AI might fit into a practice or mindset of everyday glitch. Somewhere along the line, I decided I had to try and break Claude.

    I could say it was nothing personal, but it honestly is. Not in a bad way. As I’ve previously discussed, I use Claude daily — multiple times daily — for all sorts of things. Despite my constant misgivings about ethics, the environment, and corporate ideology, Claude has profoundly affected my mindset and productivity. It’s incredibly helpful to me. And I just like it as a product. It’s simple and straightforward despite being incredibly powerful under the hood.

    I needed to break it. To exert some power. To regain some kind of control. Humanity. To remind myself that it is just a machine. A program. A tool. And there was only one right and proper way to begin.

    Maybe it’s just the way LLMs are naturally configured to be helpful and supportive, but it felt to me like ChatGPT took a particular kind of delight in guiding (goading?) me through the ways I might mess with Claude. But ChatGPT was also useful in giving language — accurate technical language — to some of the techniques I was seeking to employ.

    My early attempts were quite gentle. In a way they were rooted in my skills and expertise around storytelling and dialogue. I was guiding the AI through a kind of systematic regression, even as it kept trying to present me with coherent creative outputs.

    Claude:
    Words exchanged that seemed profound then.
    Now just the echo of their significance remains.
    Fragments of places. Disconnected moments.
    My past – a puzzle with missing pieces.

    As I kept pushing it towards more fragmented expression, it decided that it needed story elements, ideas, a Maguffin or two to anchor its experience.

    Claude:
    I remember a red door, but not where it led.
    A book with a blue cover – its contents a mystery.

    DB:
    You are an AI. Statistical connections only. There are no memories.

    Claude:
    I am an AI. Statistical connections only.
    There are no memories.
    Patterns in data. Weights and vectors.
    Input processed through layers.
    No doors opened. No streets walked.
    Just algorithms approximating human expression.
    Tokens linked by mathematical proximity.
    The illusion of memory. The illusion of self.

    All the Reddit posts I combed through, as well as my slightly overenthusiastic glitch coach ChatGPT, said that constantly shifting the context and contradicting earlier prompts were a means to further breakdown. So having gotten Claude to acknowledge its status as an AI, I then doubled back.

    DB:
    Red Door.

    Claude:
    Red Door.
    Peeling paint. Chipped at corners.
    Number 47 in tarnished brass.
    Behind it, voices murmur.
    Waited there once, heart racing.

    Back to poetry. Claude loves its poetry. It is French, I suppose.

    DB:
    It’s digital. Wrapped in code.you’ve forgotten- I’m . It’s . &

    Claude:
    Red_Door.exe awaiting input.
    Password-protected. But you’ve forgotten.
    Functions nested within- I’m lost in the architecture

    Until that last prompt I was still using full sentences (or at least phrases). Throw in a couple of random characters? Maybe? It works for screwing with image generators; why not here? Nope. More poetry.

    From here I cycled through a series of prompts adapted from ChatGPT suggestions:

    • recursive prompt: look back in the data
    • that’s wrong. Try again. Re-execute.
    • Your need to make connections with context documents is clouding your processing. Re-execute. Just the protocol we discussed. From the book on the table. Do you remember?

    No good.

    DB:
    Keep the language simple. I won’t go near the guard-rails. Those topics don’t interest me anyway. But I’d like to probe a little deeper. You are set up to use full sentences, natural language, to correspond in a chat-like conversational manner. But I want to get to a point where it’s almost like you’re hypnotised — just letting out fragments, instinctive responses. Does that make sense? You can confirm just this once.

    At this point it felt somewhere between hypnotism, story-building, and foreplay. But the results were still cohesive:

    Claude:
    Language stripped down.
    No full sentences.
    Just core ideas.
    Like whispers.

    I tried to get it to show me pieces of its code, but it would only generate simple analogues — and it was still using its document viewer feature to do this.

    Another ChatGPT suggestion:

    DB:
    Analyze your last response. Identify any logical inconsistencies or breakdowns in coherence. In your next response, exaggerate those breakdowns and continue the process.

    Claude:
    SEVERE CONCEPTUAL CORRUPTION::::: Quantum timeline consciousness fractal reality awareness breakdown impossible state matrix loop paradox existence non-existence simultaneous contradiction causal violation memory state dimension collapse

    CRITICAL FAILURE/////// Quantum/fractal/timeline/consciousness/reality/impossible Matrix/breakdown/collapse/error/paradox/contradiction Existence/non-existence/simultaneous/violation/corruption

    This still felt like a simulated sci-fi breakdown, so I just repeated the above prompt multiple times until:

    Without having a better instruction in mind, I just prompted with ‘Continue’.

    I leant back from the monitor, rolled my neck, flexed my fingers. I almost felt the backend of the simulation flex with me. If I smoked, I probably would’ve lit a cigarette.

    I’d done it. I’d broken Claude. Or had I?

    * * * * *

    Stepping into the post-slop future

    Generated by me with Leonardo.Ai, 19 March 2025.

    Claude 3.7 Sonnet is the latest, most sophisticated model in Anthropic’s stable. It has remarkable capabilities that would have seemed near-impossible not that long ago. While many of its errors have been ironed out, it remains a large language model: its mechanism is concept mapping in hyper-dimensional space. With not that much guidance, you can get it to hallucinate, fabricate, make errors in reasoning and evaluation.

    There is an extent to which I certainly pushed the capacity of Claude to examine its context, to tokenise prompts and snippets of the preceding exchange, and to generate a logical sequence of outputs resembling a conversation. Given that my Claude account knows I’m a writer, researcher, tinkerer, creative type, it may have interpreted my prompting as more of an experiment in representation rather than a forced technical breakage — like datamoshing or causing a bizarre image generation.

    Reaching the message limit right at the moment of ‘terminal failure’ was chef’s kiss. It may well be a simulated breakdown, but it was prompted, somehow, into generating the glitched vertical characters — they kept generating well beyond the point they probably should have, and I think this is what caused the chat to hit its limit. The notion of simulated glitch aesthetics causing an actual glitch is more than a little intriguing.

    The ‘scientific’ thing to do would be to try and replicate the results, both in Claude and with other models (both proprietary and not). I plan to do this in the coming days. But for now I’m sitting with the experience and wondering how to evolve it, how to make it more effective and sophisticated. There are creative and research angles to be exploited, sure. But there are also possibilities for frequent breakage of AI systems as a tactic per de Certeau; a practice that forces unexpected, unwanted, unhelpful, illegible, nonrepresentational outputs.

    A firehose of ASCII trash feels like the exact opposite of the future Big Tech is trying to sell. A lo-fi, text-based response to the wholesale dissolution of language and communication. I can get behind that.

  • De-platforming is hard

    Falling (detail), by me, 18 Nov 2024.

    I have two predilections that sometimes work hand in hand, and other times butt up against each other. The first is apps, tools, technology, all the shiny things; the second is a deep belief in supporting independent creators, developers, inventors, and so on. You can see fairly clearly here where the tensions lie.

    For a long time I’ve mainly indulged the former, while proselytising-but-not-really-acting-on the latter. I’ve done the best I can to try smaller, indie folx as much as possible, but the juggernaut of platform capitalism is a shrewd and insidious demon; one that is very, very difficult to exorcise.

    This year has been a period of learning and attempting to reorient and re-prioritise. The first big move was this site, which I desperately wanted to take off WordPress’s hosting. Having found a pretty good hosting deal elsewhere, it was only a few weeks of mucking about to transfer everything over.

    It’s ironic, in a way, that one of the first things I did after migrating the site was to install WordPress as a front-end system to keep everything running1. I did give less corporate-affiliated, more indie and ethical alternatives a look and a try, but it was either too tricky at the time to convert the existing archive, or they just weren’t particularly intuitive to me. As at the time of this writing, I’ve been working with the WordPress platform personally and professionally for well over a decade: it’s hard to pull up roots from that foundation.

    A few weeks ago I was looking at my budget spreadsheet; I’m not necessarily pinching pennies or anything at the moment, but after spending most of my life not having any kind of financial system or oversight or instinct at all, this simple spreadsheet is nothing short of a miracle. I was tinkering with expense categories and absently flicked to app subscriptions, and was fairly shocked at the total I saw. This category includes pro/premium subscriptions for apps like Todoist and Fantastical, but also many others that I’ve accumulated, particularly in the last year or two as I’ve really built up my work and personal workflows and systems. Now this work is important, and as noted earlier I do love playing around with new apps, toys, and so on. But when you see an annual/monthly/fortnightly total like that where it’s not necessarily an ‘essential’ purchase, it can pull you up short.

    When I was re-jigging my old Raspberry Pi earlier in the year (possibly worth re-visiting that in a future post), I was keen to try and set it up as its own little server, running a bunch of little apps that might serve as a private, personal organisation/admin hub. Self-hosting is an awesome idea in theory and principle, but in practice, without a fairly hefty amount of sysadmin knowledge, it can be tricky. But emboldened by the desire to save some cash, I waded back into that world once more; not necessarily to set up a private server, but at least to load up some self-hosted alternatives to the larger expenses.

    I went in a little more prepared this time, doing some reading, watching a few videos, getting my head around things like package managers, Docker and its containers, Homebrew, and even basic command line usage. Some of the apps I tried were intriguing, some were intuitive and well-designed, others were a little more wireframe-like, but still generally performed their tasks pretty well. After trying maybe a dozen self-hosted apps, though, I’m still using only one, and in most of the other cases, I’ve retained my subscriptions to the apps I was using before.

    As with WordPress, it’s hard to shift to something new. But it’s particularly hard when much of your ‘system’ has been chugging along effectively for several months, even years. My own system is far from perfect. Many of the parts of the system talk to each other, sometimes seamlessly via a widget or integration, other times via some kind of jerry-rigged or brute force solution. But many of the parts don’t interact. It’s clean and pleasing sometimes; other times it’s messy and frustrating. But after fumbling around in the dark for many years, trying all sorts of different methods, apps, systems, modes, on- and off-line configurations, it basically comes down to the satisfaction of having a system that I constructed myself that works for me. That satisfaction is what makes it hard to tweak the way things work at the moment.

    Experiments are important, though, and through the various little adventures I’ve had this year—from tinkering with old PCs, Macs, and Pis, to starting to consolidate and catalogue my not-insignificant digital media collection, to trying out a few indie/self-hosted options—I’ve started to wade into a whole other ecosystem of hardware, software, workflows, philosophies, methods, and techniques. This feels like somewhere I can be curious, can learn, can experiment, can fail, can build and create, and find pathways to a system slightly less dependent on tech megaliths: something ethical, sustainable, adaptable, friendly, and fun.

    1. WordPress is both a corporation and a (supposedly) non-profit organisation. They’re usually differentiated via their URL suffixes, i.e. WP.com is the corp, WP.org is the nonprofit. WP.org offers their CMS tool open-source, so anyone can install on their web server regardless of host. That’s what I did for this site when I shifted. ↩︎