Heaven Sent

It’s day 7 of the rewrites. This one is another digression. But of course it is. If there is no point then what is not a digression?


Death is mere non-existence. That’s not how most people think of it though. So to describe as dying what happens to the previous day’s self after sleep might not be helpful. That’s a mistake from yesterday.

There are other analogies. Theseus’s famous ship comes to mind. But that’s a very old tale and nobody rebuilds anything anymore. Capitalism rewards the production of disposable goods and all that. So sleeping is a git merge and waking up is a pull request instead? But then what is a fork?

Fork is what Kage-bunshin no Jutsu does and why Naruto is such imba. Each time he merges his clones it’s like he has lived so much longer faster. It’s not at all dissimilar to entering the Hyperbolic Time Chamber in Dragon Ball. Narrative tools to explain away how characters get good at what they do make a good point.

In the documentary Inside Bill’s Brain, Mr. Gates’ secretary made an interesting remark. The billionaire he said was very sensitive in managing his time and being punctual. Of all the resources available to him the one thing he cannot have more of is an extra hour a day. Back to reality.

I better stop before this line of thought stops hitting sweet nostalgic heartstrings. If I continue it might regress to below the mean and get too long. I will continue this thought tomorrow unless something else comes up.

Enough for today.


Some thoughts: The git vcs comparison needs a little more fleshing out. A fork is a clone, no issues there. But the analogies for sleeping and waking up needs clarification. REM sleep, let’s say, is the merge. But when one wakes up using the same master branch, did the master “die”? It’s confusing because a yes answer here is a no answer to the original ship question. Not that it’s relevant to the “argument” because it already presumes both. So, whatever.

Some more thoughts: Reading about nCoV while having flu-like symptoms is such a mood. I am self-quarantined by default though, so no worries for me.

Some things I noticed 01/31/2020:
  1. On feigenbaum constant, mention of which should automatically include this song, apparently.
  2. Dude was able to hold back dropping the F word for 6 minutes. Impressive.
  3. Nice but still Flash?
  4. Scrcpy
  5. This reminds me of that trapped in a tower Doctor Who episode (Capaldi)
  6. Trippy sphygmomanometer
  7. nCoV reporting by Sky News
  8. There should be a market for this. (There probably already is.)
  9. Creep Google Autocomplete edition

Meena

It’s day 6 of the rewrites. This entry was in its entirety a commentary of the previous day’s entry, told in a roundabout manner. Well, so is this paragraph so what gives?


I wrote a blanket statement yesterday claiming that humans write for self-reflection. Now that I had time to think about it more I realize it is very seldom the case. Not in an intentional manner, at least.

In fact, it is more often the case that people write to communicate. When it is to oneself, that’s when writing as self-reflection is a subset of this activity.

It’s tempting to add to this the idea of dying when falling asleep and being different waking up. It is late though, so I’d continue this train of thought tomorrow, unless something comes up.

Enough for today.


I should have written instead about the inspiration for the title though. It’s from a comment author M. Gladwell made describing F·R·I·E·N·D·S characters as “perfectly matched.” That’s when happy people look happy, and sad people look sad.

In the real world, he said, it is seldom the case one could see in other people their actual inner state of being. As for me, it seems true, though I only appreciate him for naming the idea. Putting a label to an abstract thought gives it a handle somewhat. One could then play with it with ease along other mental models one has.

Easily,” Hemingway App. What is so wrong with that word?

Some things I noticed 01/30/2020:
  1. estuve pensando que tengo que escribir más en español, aunque no sé mucho, así tecleé «si no es ahora cuando» y encontré esto por casualidad
  2. a more powerful decoder was the key to higher conversational quality” – Ja 1:19. Also, pretty sure I score low on this newfangled SSA metric.
  3. A cascade of virtue-signalling and nothing else, most of it.
  4. Choppers don’t have black boxes.
  5. Realpolitik, open-source ed.
  6. Tailscale. Too cluey; didn’t read.

Kuresh

It’s day 5 of the rewrites. I remember writing this one. It was pure stream of consciousness with very little editing involved. It’s funny how when one writes I think and the editor says, “Be bold, don’t hedge.” It’s like, come on, why you gotta make this personal, Hemingway app?


I’m in what I call reverse withdrawal stage. It’s when one is looking for excuses to not continue doing what one is doing. Meaning, while writing this entry, I was thinking about how writing is obsolete now. Algorithms that can generate text like GPT-2 exist and are only getting better. I fed some prompt to the algorithm here. A lot of times it spits out better gibberish than I ever could. For the moment it seems I found the perfect reason to not write.

But doing this led to several other thoughts. Those thoughts then provided an opposite excuse to continue writing. Why did the algorithm need a prompt? Would it be able to write something unprompted? What would it write? Of course it could and it would pick something random from its training data.

My initial reaction was to compare what the algorithm was doing to how people think. Aren’t humans also responding to prompts most of the time? In the physiological sense, at least? Thoughts pop up in random from the synthesis of our training data, i.e. our experience, all the time. And when that happens, it appears as if we come up with something original. Down this path, isn’t GPT-2 also sort of thinking? Or it could be the opposite. We assume we are thinking but like GPT-2 we are not.

But that’s a repulsive thought. GPT-2 writes for the sake of having written something. Humans write as self-reflection. Or do they? Also, how sure am I GPT-2 doesn’t have a self? Or that I do? Pretty soon this whole train of thought devolves into asking what a self is.

At this point, I have to confess I wrote the following yesterday: “One’s writing reveals one’s depth. I know this is self-serving to write, but thoughts are not thoughts unless written.”

I have no intention to even try to answer what a self is or what a thought is. I will be sure to be out of my depth pretty quick. Instead, my question is meta. Did I write all that so I could quote myself? Not in the beginning. The proof is that the first two paragraphs in this entry contradict what I wrote.

But after realizing I would like to use those two sentences, I started to think about how I’m thinking. I noticed that in the context of admitting that, the quote would become relevant. Now I’m writing about how I thought of that, so this entry could land on something.

That’s what separates humans from GPT-2. We don’t limit ourselves to thinking about stuff, we also think about our thoughts. We even think about how we come up with them. This includes instances when we propose writing as a way to think better. When we write our thoughts down, we reach some semblance of clarity. But then is it not possible to transfer all these to an algorithm?

This post has gotten too long. So much for beginning with coming up for an excuse not to write. Enough for today.


In the spirit of amusement, I fed the first two of the last three paragraphs above to GPT-2. It wrote, “At this point, I realize I need to learn about the program I am about to propose.” What’s proposing what now? GTFOOH.

Some things I noticed 01/29/2020:
  1. Educate people. Or find meaning.
  2. Drama. Or truth.
  3. That moment when you realize that the very magnificent sounding name Cyrus the Great was a guy named Kuresh.
  4. Traffic claims lives.

Metaturnal Shift

Day 4 of the rewrites. Knowing what happened is less important than knowing how it did or did not change oneself. That is, of course, if one places the utmost value to knowing oneself.


If I were to continue yesterday’s thoughts, here’s how it would go. Knowing that one would leave a record of one’s activities changes one’s behavior. Ephemerality is like a safe space where one could entertain a wider array of ideas, even “wrong” ones. Otherwise, one might restrict oneself to comfortable patterns of thought.

But if I wrote at this very moment that I’d like to walk back on that, I could. If I write something one day, the fact that I’m recording it does not stop me from denying the thought the day after. One can always admit to a change of mind, even in this paragraph. Doing that here highlights how hypocritical it is to say ephemerality is decreasing. Even records can be overwritten.

To scale back a bit, in the context of differing timescales, both could be right. For example, compared to a mosquito I could swat in a heartbeat, I’m rather not ephemeral at the moment. But then this version of me today would be as good as dead once I sleep later. After merging the changes from today, it might be by a little bit, but I would be different tomorrow. Enough of that will happen, and though I wish not in the same manner, I will definitely expire like the mosquito.

I could say more, but this entry is getting too long, so I better reserve some for tomorrow.

Enough for today.


This entry was all over the place. It took a shortcut. It wanted to say that the supposed bad effects of the seeming lack of ephemerality weren’t so bad. But then midway it conflated the freedom to change one’s thoughts with ephemerality. That’s why it’s confusing.

At least, if the point was to itself be a proof of ephemerality, it succeeded. I definitely won’t be back reading this again.

Some things I noticed 01/28/2020:
  1. Ha! Joke’s on you CGPGrey. (And no, that one date due to metaturnal shift doesn’t count. Also, knock on wood, finger’s crossed, bite lips, lick elbow.)
  2. Engineer all the food.
  3. All meaning is ascribed.
  4. We stand up here confused and grateful.” – Mr. F. O’Connell
  5. Well-played.
  6. Termites vs Ants standoff
  7. Language of Thought Hypothesis

OMYaC

Day 3 of the rewrites. I took out the note about performing one’s ablutions in the original. Still it is curious to realize while writing this that I also did partake of the same today. What a coincidence!


In broad strokes, the line of thought about ephemerality goes like this:

We have limited brainspace. To keep the noggins running, it is important to be able to forget. In this regard nature is helpful for being ephemeral. We forget what we have not seen for a long time. But then we started recording things.

This complaint is not new. Socrates complained about the invention of writing in his time. Yet our experience of the world is so different now. Even ephemerality seems rare sometimes.

For example, we leave records of our conversations by default in some contexts. This must be unusual to our brains. Intent used to not be necessary to forgetting. Now cases when we have to decide which to let go to make space for new stuff are increasing.

Many other thoughts spring from this observation, like self-censorship and erosion of agency. Or haven’t I heard of Snapchat? But then this entry is now too long, so I will write about that tomorrow, unless something else comes up.

Enough for today.


That bit about needing intent is new. I came up with it during this rewrite, because that must be what I meant. Otherwise, what the heck did I mean by what I wrote? Just another old man yelling at clouds, I guess.

Come on Hemingway App, just is a very useful word. Just highlight it all you want. I must not sit in silence while this injustice to adverbs goes on.

Some things I noticed 01/27/2020:
  1. 別のアプローチをトライしてみない?
  2. The good, the bad and the even.
  3. Comments sections are fertile ground for new math stuff.
  4. There’s a lot to be said for ecosystems, irrespective of everything else.
  5. Why not add garlic, onion, sugar, salt, and calamansi while at it?
  6. 「教育があって常識がないよりも、教育がなくて常識がある方がはるかによい。」

FIFO

It’s day two of the Hemingway App rewrites.

One, I underestimated how tedious this process would be. I wrote some long uninteresting stuff. I’m way over my time limit.

Two, I noticed I’m doing this do-over First In First Out. So it’s not recursion in the technical sense, is it? Oh well. No going back now. This will all be over in no time.


What happened:
  • I thought I needed Microsoft Office, I logged in to office.com to check up on Excel online. Then it turned out I did not need it.
  • But because of this I found out that the account had 2FA tied to the Microsoft Authenticator app. I had long since uninstalled the app from my phone, so I had to sort that out. I used Google Auth for it instead, which I did not know was possible.
  • Since I changed the password for the account, I made sure I could still log in to Windows. I booted up Windows on Virtualbox, and the updates had piled up. Doing all the updates took a while.
  • While at it, I also booted up my Windows partition. It has been two years (!) so there were even more updates backed up.
  • I ran out of disk space, so I ran Bleachbit on temporary files. It was still not enough, so I deleted some files from my android firmware backups. While freeing up space, I learned about the Windows 10 feature called Storage Sense.
  • The computer still had files from the previous installation of Windows so I let go of those.
  • I will hunt for the deleted android ROMs some other time
  • I’m typing this on Notepad. I wish there would be not much fuss booting back to Linux after all these upgrades on Windows.

Last time, I mentioned vague thoughts about Facebook. After writing the thought, I realized it might be due to me being old.

The idea goes like this. Being normal is not standing out. If one wishes to be normal, one has to try to take part in the attention economy. So it’s hard not to stand out, because if one does not try, one does. Ex falso quod libet.

(I remember one quite famous tweet. It was about how creepy someone at a coffee shop is. The person wore no headphones, had no phones, and did nothing but sit.)

But this thought I had was wrong. It assumes that the concept of normalcy does not change. It does. It only seems to not change to those who fail to get the update.

I have a similar vague thought about ephemerality. But this entry is now too long. So I will reserve that for tomorrow unless something else comes up.

Enough for today.


That’s it. Day two.

Also, I decided the “Some things I noticed” section would be exempt from the grammar police.

Some things I noticed 01/26/2020:
  1. Twitter is making up for yesterday. This two is enough for today. I don’t know why I even got back.
  2. Triangle of Power
  3. Nobody said it was easy.
  4. Of course, it depends.
  5. GDP vis-a-vis Goodhart’s law
  6. A person who cannot see to the bottom of her own ideas becomes a vehicle for the transmission of confusion.” Ouch. Harsh much. 🙂

Recurse

Since I have no idea where this blog is going, I guess I have to stick to going along with the flow. Yesterday I used the Hemingway app to write the entry, and it served me well. So since I also do not know what else to write about that doesn’t involve writing about me, here’s an idea. I will in the next series of posts rewrite what I have written so far in this cookie cutter of a writing tool. Give it some shape. Make it intelligible. Remove all the “justs” and the “I thinks” and the “maybes” and all the adverbs. And chop ’em long ass sentences to pieces.

Starting from the beginning, here goes.


Let’s be honest. (Of course, the following words will only say things comfortable for the writer to be honest about.)

I was considering giving up coffee for 2020. The plan was that I would post Days Until I Last Had Coffee on Facebook everyday and watch the number grow. I was also thinking it’s the most I could tolerate doing on that abominable site. But guess what I’m drinking before starting this. Yeah right.

So instead, I will attempt to post on this blog on a regular manner instead. I have some vague thoughts about Facebook, but I should reserve that for tomorrow.

Enough for today.


Ha. How about that for a recursion. In an abrupt manner I have a lot of material to end up having written in the future. Even though this prohibition of adverbs is killing me. How does one express suddenly without saying the damn word?

Some things I noticed 01/25/2020:
  1. On the other hand, those who give the air of having never procrastinated are often cold-ass coasts who make contributing to society feel morally incorrect somehow. I mean beaches. The one with a T.
  2. Pretty sure whoever wrote this letter doesn’t procrastinate.
  3. Or these people. (Warning: if in a good mood rn, don’t even watch)
  4. Meta: It’s like Twitter knows I haven’t been back in a while so it’s trying to rile me up. Well played. GG.
  5. From WK today:
    • 過去のことは水に流す。
    • 「努力は裏切らない」とは嘘だ。
  6. To the point about the complicated being rather more interesting.
  7. Dead.
  8. KNPP shirts are fine, imho.
  9. Stan since Frances Ha.