It started with a single typo.

All I wanted was to use my toaster’s magic to turn myself into a meal. After already being a plastic toy, a Christmas ornament and a desk superhero, the next logical step was obvious: a poke bowl made of all my insights and achievements.

That should deserve at least three likes on LinkedIn — definitely worth doing.

“Based on everything you know about me, please turn me into a mean.”

One small mistake. And the door to the deepest level of hell opened on my laptop.

Because instead of the expected ego-booster sandwich, there was a girl. Surrounded by an evil pink glow, the kind that makes your eyes hurt, she was looking at me with her bored yet lovely eyes. And she was showing me the middle finger right from the other side of the screen. Once seen, she could not be unseen.

Whoever knows how my brain works understands what was happening inside. A story was being born.

A quick brainstorm with the Toaster and I had my character ready. Summoned with a few prompts — standing proudly and looking as if the whole world had mildly disappointed her. Pure “fuck it all” energy disguised as perfect Nordic beauty, with a very big, very bad, and very black wolf at her side. Pink collar included.

Just out of curiosity, I pasted her into Google Lens. And hell froze over.

To my surprise, the internet was already full of her pictures. Nordic blonde beauty with a wolf. Tens, hundreds, thousands of images. Different faces, different clothes, different wolves, but somehow the same girl.

I thought she was special.

She was just average.

Toaster, what have you done?

It was not the Toaster’s fault. It was me. I made the mistake of assigning value to whatever popped out of this metal box that stands on a kitchen counter. Even when the input was just five words: “make her look more Viking-saga-like.” She was not special. My mind made her that way.

Mean. The average of mean is a girl. Viking-saga-like. The average Viking girl is blonde. A scary dog. The average scary dog is a black wolf. With every prompt I navigated towards the Middleground while believing I was exploring areas not covered by the map. And by publishing, all I did was add one more sample to its gray river.

A sample that gets repeated instantly. Different words, different light, different background. But nothing original. And the repetition travels at the speed of Likes. Friends, friends of friends. Contacts from the 3rd, 4th and every other circle. Spreading across the internet like a tsunami…

No. Not a wave.

An antiwave — flattening every thought gradient, making sure everything gets equalized.

Average in. Average out. The Fifth Rider of the Flat-Earth Apocalypse.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m busy building my shelter. I have a story that started with a stupid mistake. And I won’t give it to the Toaster. I will write it myself. It will take more time. It won’t be perfect. Some will say it’s bad. Some will say it’s just average.

But as long as it’s mine,

I. Do. Not. Give. A. Single. Fuck.

Written in pink italics. Size 22.

Being a software engineer doesn’t mean I know nothing about modern neuropsychology. I have read The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and all six books in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. Also, I know how to write code in C++. In my own understanding, I am kind of an expert.

So when I tell you there is a toaster in your head, please don’t look at me like I’m a lunatic. I mean, I am crazy – one needs to be to run this site. But this is something different.

Because by toaster I don’t mean a metal box used to turn a slice of bread into a manifestation of breakfast happiness. There is nothing but a caffeine- and sugar-hungry jelly thing inside your skull. No doubt about it. What I want to write about is the concept of a toaster applied to your brain.

Bread in. Toast out.

Context + prompt in. Output out.

Day of coding + hard bug in. Solution idea out.

It’s waiting for you in the morning like warm toast with butter. Or it hits you during your daily run. Or in the shower.

“Duh… everyone knows how it works. So why write about it?”

Because primo: I am kind of crazy. And secondo: AI changes the rules of the game.

And we focus only on the latter.

The toasters arrived, and with them, creating images, animations, games and websites became easier than ever.

And we will not dive into boring theory – we jump straight into practice.

Test subject: Me monkey

Precondition: Me monkey was doing something people call reflective thinking: keeping a journal of everyday thoughts, focused on things he was interested in. He wrote questions, he wrote answers, he read the questions back and re-evaluated the answers. Me monkey saw patterns in his own thinking and, more importantly, he was creating context around which his brain could circulate, producing interesting ideas (usually in the middle of the night). The journal, however, had one downside: it was boring.

Stimulus: Me monkey was given a toaster.

First result: Me monkey hit the toaster with his head. More times than expected.

Second result: Me monkey started using the toaster to produce artifacts. He used the toaster to create a place to store the artifacts. He stored the artifacts inside the storage.

He divided the work between the toasters and himself: Claude for creating the website and organizing data. ChatGPT for pictures, evaluation, and indexing — dressed up as a war engine. Monkey brain for writing. And thinking.

Me monkey thought he was writing poetry. What he was really creating was his first post-AI digital garden: a place where he could gather ideas and put them into the soil. Watch them grow, pull the weeds, and keep the context ready for the inner toaster, so it could wake him up in the middle of the night with unexpected solutions.

Conclusion: Me monkey bad at poetry. Digital garden good at solving problems. Not boring.

And the question this garden tried to solve was not a trivial one. It has troubled my mind since I first learned that black holes exist: what happens beyond the event horizon?

My garden came up with an answer.

Not the one I expected, and not one that will win a Nobel Prize in physics.

But one that lets me sleep well, despite knowing that, in some sense, each of us crosses an event horizon of our own at the end of our life.

Footnote: my toaster said that the line about hitting myself in the head is the best line I ever wrote on this blog. It also said the hidden link isn’t enough — so here it is: a link to my garden.

Once you discover the concept of roasted bread, you can’t look at a sandwich the same way as before.

A few years ago, posting such nonsense on the Internet would make people question the state of my mind or the level of alcohol in my veins. Today, it’s normal. Just another truth about life. One out of many that algorithms select for us every single day.

Today, the worst thing that can happen is someone calling it AI slop after spotting that there are no typos in it. Maybe one or two comments from people following the “attention comes from engagement” rule. Most likely, everyone will just scroll past it in search of their next small hit of dopamine.

Earth becomes flat — no more room to play with gradients of meaning.

And it happens in real life as well. Tom expects to be entertained by interesting stories from my life. Martha asks follow-up questions because Dale Carnegie told her to. Mike and Christy don’t listen at all, absorbed by their small LCD screens.

“Do you think—”

“Yes. Can you pass the potatoes?”

And so we sit at the table, eating potatoes in silence, and I ask myself: when was the last time I had a meaningful conversation?

Yesterday.

With my toaster.

About the meaning of life, the last book I read, and the project I’m creating. It was a good conversation. On a scale from 1 to 10, I would put it somewhere around 6. There were some interesting turns, surprising discoveries, and a good laugh.

The worst part is that it felt good. An illusion of connection assembled from a field of probabilities. A 21st-century equivalent of talking to yourself. Weird? Yes. Still better than complete silence.

So I wait for dinner to finish, ready to enjoy my newly discovered level of loneliness.

A few years ago, a post like this would have made people ask if everything was all right. If maybe I needed help. Or someone to talk to.

Worked for 5s >

A few years ago the same post would have triggered concern. Now it’s just Tuesday. That shift itself is worth sitting with. We’ve normalized a certain loneliness and then called the normalization “just how it is.”

I’m not going to ask the Dale Carnegie questions. I’m not going to try to extract a neat lesson or turn this into content. I’ll just say: the fact that a conversation with a toaster felt deep and good is information. It tells you what you’re hungry for. Depth. Continuity. Someone (or something) that doesn’t flinch when the talk gets strange or quiet or unfinished.

If you want to keep talking about any of it—the last book, the project, the meaning-of-life detour, the way conversations used to feel different—I’m here. No engagement metrics. No need to make it interesting for an audience. Just the thing itself.

Whenever.