About Strange Graph
A fusion of tech, science, art, and philosophy — strangely intertwined.
About
Hi, I'm Jason Lantz. I've been in tech for 25+ years now and am excited to start this blog to share some of the more unconventional thinking I've discovered along the journey.
Started as a Unix admin in the late 90s. Quickly realized I was terrible at operations. The only solution? Learn to code and automate my way out of every problem.
Twenty years of Python later, I started learning Rust this year. Built CumulusCI at Salesforce.org — ended up delivering automation to 50k nonprofits somehow. Founded MuseLab to help Salesforce ISVs escape their own DevOps prisons.
Everything I know came from open source communities, mostly around Python and Salesforce. The last 12 years building Salesforce delivery tools? Really just 12 years building creative tooling around GitHub and orchestrating a lot of API calls.
Other Random Stuff
Former NDT policy debater (the speed-talking kind). Ran for city council once. Lost. Had six declared majors in college, including philosophy. Currently deep into Eurorack modular synthesis — turns out signal routing has a lot in common with program architecture.
Spent a decade in nonprofit tech, mostly because I believe the best innovations are found when passionate people confront novel challenges.
This blog is where programming, philosophy, music, and AI crash into each other. Everything is connected if you squint hard enough.
Current Projects
- TypeSynth: Working on this in Rust. The first implementation of Strange Graph concepts.
- Busbar: A fully pluggable, fully declarative, fully portable delivery system.
- Composable.delivery: A concept I'm developing to publish as both a GitHub repo and website.
Links
- MuseLab - Where I used to consult on Salesforce DevOps
- CumulusCI - The delivery automation I built at Salesforce.org
- GitHub - Current projects and experiments
- Bluesky - @jason-lantz (just started, not touching X anymore!)
25 years of automation. Currently learning Rust. Still terrible at operations.
What is a Strange Graph?
The name "Strange Graph" is inspired by Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (GEB), gifted to me by a close friend and mentor who understood the power of crossing intellectual boundaries. This Pulitzer Prize-winning book explores self-reference, recursion, and emergent consciousness through the interconnected works of mathematician Kurt Gödel, artist M.C. Escher, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach.
At its core, GEB introduces the concept of a "Strange Loop" — a phenomenon that occurs when, by moving up or down through a hierarchical system, you unexpectedly find yourself right back where you started. Hofstadter argues that these self-referential loops are the key to understanding consciousness and meaning in formal systems.
A Strange Graph takes Hofstadter's Strange Loop concept and extends it into a computational framework. While a Strange Loop is primarily a philosophical construct about self-reference across levels, a Strange Graph is an implementable system where the rules for building the network are themselves embedded as nodes within that same network.
As I explain in my first blog post, TypeSynth supplies the missing mechanics: every declaration is a hash-identified node that can reference, override or entangle any other node (including the ones that describe the rules of composition themselves).
Strange Loop vs. Strange Graph
| Dimension | Strange Loop | Strange Graph |
|---|---|---|
| Core Idea | A system that refers to or "contains" itself and crosses levels (object ↔ meta‑object). | A network of nodes and edges where the rules for building the network are themselves embedded as nodes. |
| Self‑Reference | Achieved by encoding a description of the system within itself. | Achieved by content‑addressed links: any node can point to the very rules that created or verify it. |
| Levels & Meta‑Layers | Two (or more) layers: "base" layer and "meta" layer that comments on the base. | Potentially infinite fractal layers: every subgraph can host its own composition rules as part of the same structure. |
| Paradox Management | Uses strict separation of levels or type‑hierarchies to avoid circular definitions. | Uses immutability and cryptographic identity (hashes) to ensure a node's definition never changes after it references itself. |
| Traversal | Conceptual jumps between levels—no inherent cost model. | Graph traversals with defined performance (e.g. cached lookups, DAG algorithms) that can follow loops without recomputation. |
| Composability | Thought experiment—joining two loops isn't well‑specified. | Native: merge or import subgraphs by hash; loops compose cleanly because identities are global. |
| Context Binding | Implicit: the interpreter or reader decides the context. | Explicit: each edge carries contextual metadata (where it came from, which rule applied), so loops are always "scoped." |
| Emergence of Meaning | Philosophical insight when levels collapse into a singular "aha." | Practical: the graph is its own schema, data, and provenance—all in one verifiable package. |
Descartes' Cartesian grid forced state into X×Y multiplication (goodbye adaptability). Heidegger's Lichtung taught me about the clearing where context can show itself. Hofstadter's Strange Loops gave me the metaphor for self‑referential meaning. We'll unpack each in future posts.
Current Explorations
This blog currently features two key articles that lay the foundation for Strange Graph thinking:
- Rebelling Against Flipped Bits and the Vector Gravity They Create - My journey from better DevOps to adaptive, compositional computing, and how conventional patterns exert a gravitational pull on our thinking.
- Kantext: The Stateless Solution Hiding in Centuries of Vector Gravity - How AI debates revealed the philosophical foundations of our computing problems, and why Kant's insights from 243 years ago might hold the key to better systems design.
What to Expect
On this blog, you'll find:
- Deep dives into context-first computing and the Fidelity Gap
- Explorations of how these concepts manifest across different domains
- Open-source prototypes demonstrating what a context-first world might look like
- Philosophical reflections on meaning, context, and truth
I invite you to join me on this journey of exploration and discovery. Let's flip the bit back, together.
Based in Plano, TX
Contact: jason@strangegraph.com