I looked in my home directory in my desktop Mac, which I don’t very often (I run a tidy operation here), and I found a file I didn’t recognise called out.html.
Here is out.html.
For the benefit of the tape: it is a half-baked GeoCities-style homepage complete with favourite poems, broken characters, and a "This page is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or higher!" message in the footer.
The creation date of the file is March of this year.
I don’t know how it got there.
Maybe my computer is haunted?
I have a vague memory of trying out local large language models for HTML generation, probably using the llm command-line tool.
out.html is pretty clearly made with AI (the HTML comments, if you View Source, are all very LLM-voice).
But it’s… bad. ChatGPT or Claude in 2025 would never make a fake GeoCities page this bad.
So what I suspect has happened is that I downloaded a model to run on my desktop Mac, prompted it to save its output into my home directory (lazily), then because the model was local it was really slow… then got distracted and forgot about it while it whirred away in a window in the background, only finding the output 6 months down the line.
UPDATE. This is exactly what happened! I just realised I can search my command history and here is what I typed:
llm -m gemma3:27b ‘Build a single page HTML+CSS+JavaScript UI which looks like an old school GeoCities page with poetry and fave books/celebs, and tons and tons of content. Use HTML+CSS really imaginatively because we do not have images. Respond with only the HTML so it can be run immediately’ > out.html
And that will have taken a whole bunch of time so I must have tabbed elsewhere and not even looked at the result.
Because I had forgotten all about it, it was as if I had discovered a file made by someone else. Other footprints on the deserted beach.
I love it.
I try to remain sensitive to New Feelings.
e.g…
The sense of height and scale in VR is a New Feeling: "What do we do now the gamut of interaction can include vertigo and awe? It’s like suddenly being given an extra colour."
And voice: way back I was asked to nominate for Designs of the Year 2016 and one my nominations was Amazon Echo – it was new! Here’s part of my nomination statement:
we’re now moving into a Post PC world: Our photos, social networks, and taxi services live not in physical devices but in the cloud. Computing surrounds us. But how will we interact with it?
So the New Feeling wasn’t voice per se, but that the location of computing/the internet had transitioned from being contained to containing us, and that felt new.
(That year I also nominated Moth Generator and Unmade, both detailed in dezeen.)
I got a New Feeling when I found out.html just now.
Stumbling across littered AI slop, randomly in my workspace!
I love it, I love it.
It’s like having a cat that leaves dead birds in the hall.
Going from living in a house in which nothing changes when nobody is in the house to a house which has a cat and you might walk back into… anything… is going from 0 to 1 with “aliveness.” It’s not much but it’s different.
Suddenly my computer feels more… inhabited??… haunted maybe, but in a good way.
Three references about computers being inhabited:
- Every page on my blog has multiplayer cursors and cursor chat because every webpage deserves to be a place (2024) – and once you realise that a webpage can show passers-by then all other webpages feel obstinately lonely.
- Little Computer People (1985), the Commodore 64 game that revealed that your computer was really a tiny inhabited house, and I was obsessed at the time. LCP has been excellently written up by Jay Springett (2024).
- I wrote about Gordon Brander’s concept for Geists (2022). Geists are/were little bots that meander over your notes directory, "finding connections between notes, remixing notes, issuing oracular provocations and gnomic utterances."
And let’s not forget Steve Jobs’ unrealised vision for Mister Macintosh: "a mysterious little man who lives inside each Macintosh. He pops up every once in a while, when you least expect it, and then winks at you and disappears again."
After encountering out.html I realise that I have an Old Feeling which is totally unrecognised, and the old feeling, which has always been there it turns out, is that being in my personal computer is lonely.
I would love a little geist that runs a local LLM and wanders around my filesystem at night, perpetually out of sight.
I would know its presence only by the slop it left behind, slop as ectoplasm from where the ghost has been,
a collage of smiles cut out of photos from 2013 and dropped in a mysterious jpg,
some doggerel inspired by a note left in a text file in a rarely-visited dusty folder,
if I hit Back one to many times in my web browser it should start hallucinating whole new internets that have never been.
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