Cookie Cutter

Alright, let’s right this one on the Hemingway App. I’m pretty sure after this the whole entry will not sound like me at all. This is the same reason why English words have funny spelling. Someone invented the printing press and brought stupid quirks along ink on paper. See, that last sentence wasn’t how I would write it.

I also don’t want to install Grammarly, marked as an adverb on this editor by the way. Also the automatic reply suggestions on Gmail. And let’s not get started on the automatic call answering software that’s coming. Soon after robots do all the communication for humans, what’s next?

Yeah this is a very conservative take on things. Most of these technologies are cool. It doesn’t feel right to dumb down oneself for imagined readers that doesn’t exist, is all. Wait, don’t tell me I can’t use the phrase “on the other hand?” I like that one. Phrase has a simpler alternative, you say, but so what? There’s beauty in the complicated some of the time.

And I was about to praise this tool too. I was just about to say that writing this entry with all the constraints made the experience easier. Somewhat. In an ironic manner. Oh well. Apparently except when one is trying to praise it. Come on! Adverbs have a place, why ban it? And passive voice? I like that too. Whatever Hemingway App.

Enough for today.

Some things I noticed 01/23/2020:
  1. Very assuming of you TSOL. Why would I want to make people feel good? Make yourself feel good yourself.
  2. I approve of this.
  3. Old news, BBC. Old news. Also, cyberloafing? Really?

GIGO

I am not in the mood to delve into further bovine scatology in this post, so this one would go meta. There’s nothing like one good sleep to rid oneself of intrusive thoughts that require thought dumping I guess.

As I do not have anything to write about, the only recourse is to write about what I have already written. I make it a point to not read my earlier entries, but just before writing this I had to fangle about the settings of the CMS to limit the amount of entries displayed on the homepage, and thus I had some time to skim through some of the stuff. And man, is it a snoozefest! What a bore. Even the use of the word fest anywhere near here even as sarcasm is an insult to the word.

But I guess that’s what makes this thing good for its purpose. That’s the point. The very definition of normalcy is that nothing remotely interesting is happening, and that’s great. It’s like, if there’s something truly valuable in the trash, then why is it there? For the purpose of this exercise, which is to have something written, and to make space for any runoff process not garbage-collected by the brain, writing it down is the way to kill it.

Ooops. Timer’s up. Enough for today.

Some things I noticed 01/22/2020:
  1. very tasteful use of the pedal steel
  2. algorithms learning to play hide and seek with each other are like babies
  3. look at all that wasted space
  4. I finally got to finish reading Tim Urban’s A Sick Giant. So maybe the dishonesty metric in his media matrix was what my recent word soup regarding subjectivity was supposed look like if it were intelligible. Still, I like my word soup, it’s mine.
  5. This deserves its own link. Funny.
  6. each one gets 2, the other one passed around a third of the time (of which, thanks to the Babylonians, our measure is perfectly divisible by three)

Shiritori

One can of course recurse the argument from yesterday and say that subjectivity does not exist either, as one’s conception of what oneself even is also requires the gaze of some other, perhaps what we said was the collective subjectivity we imagine as objectivity, because truly seeing oneself without one’s reflection on another is impossible. It seems one needs a language to describe oneself (does one?), and how is a language to be if just of one? (Possible?)

Where am I going with this? (Again disclaimer, this is all bs and I have no idea, this writing exercise is just a Markov chain of daily entries, but let’s take a stab at it anyway.) If objectivity exists only in the collective subjective, but subjectivity can also only exist with the help of the gaze of others, how can this circle be squared?

Well I guess I succeeded in confusing myself as I wrote yesterday. Maybe the takeaway here is that there are many oughts for every is, and surprisingly there seems to also be many ises. (Are there now?)

Enough for today.

Some things I noticed 01/21/2020:
  1. No comment
  2. Best way to go, maybe not so for the audience
  3. January is almost up, and I haven’t touched any of the books that I wanted to read yet.
  4. The need to be got. Such a foreign concept.
  5. Ynot zoklākogon daor.

What Chair

(Such an interesting character, Rasputin was.)

Alright, everything that can “see” is a subject, and when we ascribe to objects inherently having no point-of-view a point-of-view, the object still has no point-of-view; the point-of-view is still ours, in our imagination. And thus the idea of objectivity is just an excuse to relieve oneself of the implications of being a subject that can see. (Ascribe, btw, was the tip-of-the-tongue word from yesterday.)

So while it could be argued that in the layer of the inter-subject objectivity exists, it is only there that it exists, not elsewhere, as is often thought to be. Of course, for those insisting on the utility of objectivity it is available for the taking, as is wont of subjects that often do, unknowingly invoking the power of the bigger inter-subject when deferring to so-called objectivity.

Now is the part of the entry where I refute these statements, but my timer is up, so maybe tomorrow, unless something else comes up.

Enough for today.

Some things I noticed 01/20/2020:
  1. But if it’s not in memory, it’s not a memory palace anymore, is it?
  2. The most beautiful of questions are almost always those without answers.
  3. Rice cookers are clever
  4. Information is literally the metadata of matter it’s awesome
  5. Say anything anywhere on the internet, something extremely relevant somehow finds its way back. Like it’s alive. (Ofc needs to control for pareidolia to confirm if true. OTOH, clear cookies.)
  6. Oh no I’ve been using pretty good incorrectly this whole time. It’s pretty bad.
  7. Starships Canon in D – Nicki Minaj x Pachelbel (Creating remixes like this seem to be something that could be automated, or at least the selection of which songs fit.)
  8. Kina – Cannonball

GGSS

I said in the previous entry that I would write about why everybody should just commit to absolute subjectivity. Good, since I have no idea what to write about. Bad, because wth did I mean with that?

I guess the idea was that since that which is considered objective is decided by a majority of subjectivities anyway, then to label anything objective is in effect just an exercise of power. Big statement. So much to untangle.

First, the underlying assumption is that thoughts arise only from configurations of matter capable of introspection, those with self. But to imagine objectivity is to imagine the gaze of an absolute non participating third party, one preferably without a self, because otherwise that is just another subject.

It’s like, oh well. Maybe I’d continue this tomorrow. There’s a thought that requires the use of a word I cannot recall at the moment, but pretty sure it already exists. Meh.

Enough for today.

Some things I noticed 01/19/2020:
  1. What is Sisyphus, deprived of his boulder?
  2. Flerken was a pretty clever metaphor, very anti-Freudian. Also very subtle. (Or maybe not, for the natives.)
  3. Of course, there’s a ppa for haskell! I was just lost in the leaves again, mucking around with sources. Note to self: from the roots, always.
  4. When young uns dare to cross the fence to steal fruit, I root for them secretly. It’s just fruit. The opportunity to experience doing that seem to only get much rarer. Of course, kids with foresight brought up in a safe environment where they feel free to ask are better. Or are they? Self, stop debating self.
  5. If SNS is for the KSP, this medium is for the GGSS. As long as self aware. Roger that.

Haig

The past few days I was listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History episodes on Word War I, I think I’m just about to finish Blueprint for Armageddon IV, the butchery at the battle of the Somme just happened. So basically my thoughts are about a lot of forgotten dead people, how maybe the world is ripe for another war, and how stupid that would be.

But then maybe it’s also true that all past and present and all we think we currently experience right now is just a fluke that’s happening in one very strange moment, by a universe that through sheer bigness birthed a certainty that such a configuration would arise as to become the collection of information such as everything we experience seem to be, with all its imagined history and lore and future, including us, only to collapse again into randomness thereafter, even though the illusion at the moment is as real as any and all subjective reality could get.

This, of course, is just an intellectual gag reflex to the idea of so many senseless deaths. When in discomfort, think of the Boltzmann brain, I guess.

I remember now, yesterday I was thinking maybe I should write about why I think objectivity doesn’t really exist, and that people are better off being explicitly subjective, but then I forgot, so maybe tomorrow.

Enough for today.

Some things I noticed 01/18/2020:
  • Oh so we’re imagining it the other way around now? From having brains as basis for machine learning, to updating our mental models of brains based on how machines “learn”? Sure. Okay.
  • Timbre-transfer algorithm. The voice-to-violin sample, so evocative.
  • « vous devrez être sur le même réseau wifi avec votre appareil et votre ordinateur. » ngeh.
  • So humans still need apply? (cf. CGP Grey)
  • everything that meets our foolish eyes gives proof sufficient of its vanity.” – What is Life?
  • The designer is Paul Rand, the politician Rand Paul. And no, the presidential candidate was a Paul, but Ron.
  • I’d like to call auto-exclusion monism a certain sect to single-exclusion monism, but there’s already a word for that. 8 letters, starts with p, mostly vowels.
Tech rant:
  • TidalCycles is being such a flimsy contraption. So far I finally took care of the scsynth, sclang, scide part of things; it’s getting tidal to work that’s losing me. Can’t install through cabal, so installed through stack. stack ghci seems to work fine, but then both in atom and vscode extensions for tidalcycles are throwing a fit about ghci being on stack. So it looks like I’m back trying get cabal to work directly.

Dust

Let’s start this on a positive note by ranting about how either the recent Chrome update or the recent Bleachbit update, which I ran afterwards on temporary files, totally nuked the contents of my Writespace Chrome extension – the ilk of which apparently also being sunsetted by the big G this year, but I digress; containing words that are now gone forever. So much for lamenting the lack of ephemerality.

(Word soup Too Soupy Didn’t Read: Writespace has words. Chrome and Bleachbit got updated. Words gone. Do not know which of the two the culprit was. Also, sidenote: Chrome extensions like Writespace will be unsupported by Google in 2020. Also, another sidenote: ranting about this is hypocritical considering the writer was ranting about lack of ephemerality on earlier posts.)

Now that’s out of the way, I don’t know whether I should agree or disagree with what I wrote yesterday. That seems to be what I’ve been doing this whole time, I just noticed.

It’s as if one views oneself objectively as a meaningless collection of information randomly caused by nature to form, somehow gathering mass and thus attracting more compatible information to that which has come before, and if one looks at oneself and recognizes one’s existence as such, this collection of information is naturally bequeathed with value, as the self, and for that which is capable of considering value, that is also able to decide which is meaningful or not.

Ha! How about that for taking a stab at the meaning of meaning? Although pretty sure tomorrow I would read that previous paragraph and laugh at how stupid it is. Today, I would rather cherish having another stab at clawing against the surface of oneself with words, knowing full well that getting to do this is a privilege not afforded to people possibly bathing in dust this week.

Enough for today.

Some things I noticed 01/17/2020:
  1. so apparently x-ray crystallography is shape-shadow matching
  2. Ano ba naman ang mga kabataan ngayon, masyadong makakalimutin?” – Lola Flora, today’s episode, regarding CD et al’s excuse to thug up
  3. was installing and reinstalling cabal and ghci and stack and still can’t get tidal to work because some math-functions package won’t link. was able to compile and install supercollider though, so at least there’s that. But then, what’s the point?
  4. I’ve been typing set time for 15 minutes this whole time and been at the mercy of Google’s Did you mean…? autocorrect. Corporate idiot compassion.