nov 17
Symphony 5 in C Minor - 3rd movement – majestic and sweet at the same time.
nov 12
Just read a goodreads review of “the last kamikaze” that I wrote in 2016 when I read the book. I don’t remember anything from that book. I read the review, it sounds like me, but I don’t remember the details from the book.
What’s the point of reading so much if you don’t remember anything from a book? Maybe less is more is also true for reading? My grandma read the mostly one book, the Bible, but she read it so many times that she could recite full chapters. I read probably more than a thousand books by now, and I do not remember almost any paragraph by heart. None of the two approaches is ideal. The middle way probably would probably be best. Maybe we should all create our own Bible – from gr. biblos = library – a collection of books that we read and re-read because we find them valuable.
nov 3
Reading an article entitled the left has forgotten its phylosophy and i’m thinking about the following…
The left used to care about the dispossessed. And the left was powerful because it would normally have on it’s side the energy of the youth, who, by definition are the ones who should want equality for everybody, a natural consequence of the fact that they do not have yet power and would like to share. From whence also the adagio: “if by 20 you’re not a socialist you don’t have a heart; and after 40 you’re still one, you don’t have a brain”.
However, this side of the century, the youth are not fighting for the dispossessed anymore. Indeed, there still are some relics of the traditional left who care about economic equality, e.g. the eternal Bernie Sanders, but most of the youth are not focused on that, but rather, on the politics of sexual preferences, gender self-perception, and skin-color intersectional identities. A vague political cause, that is trying to figure out exactly where does it want to go and whom does it want to protest against. And in the process it dissipates the force of the youth.
Compare that with the alternative scenario in which the young generation would target its protest at economic inequality. They would have rightful reasons for anger – so many of them are worse off than their parents already, have falling life expectancy, and the outlook is not brighter for the future. In fact, many of the people in the older generations would definitely join them as the 99% share of economical wealth has been constantly declining to the benefit of a handful of individuals. Indeed, Gates, Buffet, and Bezos have more wealth together than half the country. The most powerful country in the world that is.
At the first sight, this is a wasted opportunity.
But at a second glance, this is a good thing for the stability of America and more generally the west. It is not clear that the politicians could deliver more economical equality or that they would even be interested in doing so given that they are already part of the beneficiaries of the current system and the rich are also too powerful by now.
So in some sense, the youth who are supposed to be liberal are doing the conservative job of preserving the status quo by not focusing their energy on fighting for economic equality. And maybe it is for the best after all? Maybe it’s a feature not a bug? After all, when the young communists got to power and had their chance to impose equality, the world did not become a better place.
oct 30
second day of water fasting. in the evening i go to volleyball training. I was a bit worried, but I completely forgot that I was fasting. i did a few super nice attacks, i felt like I might be spiking a bit better than normal. especially my timing seemed a bit better. i love this game.
oct 24
Christians used to think of God as a great king (king of kings) or a great lord (lord of lords). Not surprising: every age has it’s own idea of who’s the most powerful in the world. In the past military might was the epitome of power. Now, we seem to believe that it’s creative power. With our current understanding of the world, it’s much more likely that the most powerful being we would imagine would be something like a physicist of physicists or hacker of hackers. Or physicist-hacker of physicist-hackers. And this is because the dominant metaphor of our age is computation. Thus, we imagine the whole universe as a “simulation inside of a computer”.
If one thinks of God as hacker, they’d probably imagine an interventionist god: stop the execution of the universe, make a change because something seems wrong (or because one of the protagonists asks with all their heart?); then restart. A bit like a Smalltalk debugger: pause, change, continue.
If God was a physicist, he’d be much more about running multiple simulations. Because how could he ever decide that a given state is bad without having left the simulation run till the end? So he would owe it to himself to let our timeline with the holocaust run to it’s completion just to figure out whether that local maximum of suffering might not be the seed of future good. Just as he owes it to himself to run a simulation w/o Hitler reaching adulthood. And one with slightly different speed of light maybe too.
Assuming he’s a hacker-physicist that wants to minimize suffering in the universe he’s created, which would be the only thing would make sense for us anyway, does he not owe it to himself to run an infinite number of simulations? Maybe, but it’s very likely that even God’s infra would not scale to that. He must be pruning some of the timelines early if they end up being too miserable. So in a sense, if every one of us would try to minimize suffering, maybe we’d help him just a bit along in his sysyphian quest?
This is getting too complicated a model. I think it’s easier to think of a king of kings after all.
oct 18
Thomas Seyfried talks about 1) Ketosis and 2) Albert Schweizer in the same video. Two of my favorite topics in one talk.
**
Will GenAI increase the importance of unit tests and contracts? In principle, the more tests you have, the more contracts you have, the more confident you can be that the generated code might actually do what you want. Although… the devil is always in the details. And the bugs are always in the corner cases…
oct 17
We’ve tried outsourcing software engineering to the east. It did not work, because we realized that it takes so much time to specify something precisely enough for it to be implemented that we might just as well implement it ourselves. Did we learn something from it?
Nope.
Now we’re hoping that we can “solve” software engineering by outsourcing to the west: the capitalistic magic black box that has ingested the whole internet will surely be able to take our wishes and give us for cheap programs that do what we need, even if we don’t put in the effort to specify unambiguously what we want.
Nothing is new under the sun.
oct 10
in the US.
crossing the street in front of one of the (monster) trucks they casually drive there. the first time in my life i feel afraid to cross in front of a stopped car: what if the driver does not see me. so i rush to the other side.
sep 29
natural language (ambiguous) running on LLMs (non-semantic / non-deterministic? machines) will never replace programming languages (non-ambiguous) running on vms languages (semantic, deterministic) for any of the tasks for which the latter are good at.
sep 27
homo sapiens. homo faber. homo ludens. you can’t have one without the other. or you can, but it’s not fun. or stupid.
sept 20
morning swimming in the sea. it’s cold. makes happy. and wakes one up better than the most Italian espresso.
sep 13
everything ends. even the universe. the ultimate melancholy. or schadenfreude.
alternative to everything has an end is “everything changes”. from the Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Where there is this religion where people worship Change. because there is nothing else as eternal as change.
sep 1
we have writing to see how shallow our thoughts are. and we have programming too see how shallow our writing is
Aug 26
quite unintuitive, but the resting energy expenditure of our bodies increase when we fast, and this effect can be seen for up to four days even. (scientific article). Although at a second thought, it’s not that unintuitive: the person needs more energy to find food! (more elaborate discussion)
Aug 21
hermeneutic spiral - https://youtu.be/qKJP93dWn40?si=InwMKPrP07RM7TPI - you must go around a problem a few times before you solve it.
sometimes slow is better than fast: https://youtu.be/Bc9jFbxrkMk?si=lAOmQiLfZJ1Lxl2J
Aug 15
People watching in Bergamo, Piazza Vecchia. Each one of this people - an inner world that i.m oblivious of. Each one carrying with them thoughts that ill never know. Except the old man that stops to tell me about the citta alta of his youth :)
Aug 9
So easy to judge in others what i indulge in myself.
Aug 8
Ludwig Wittgenstein: „Where others go ahead, I remain still”.
Also L.W.: “we must follow our conscience, while also accepting the world as it comes to us”.
**
Schopenhauer (…) whose ethics consists simply of extinguishing one’s own desires while trying to reduce the suffering of others. source.
Aug 2
China learned from the west to use markets. The west will have to learn from China to give more power to the governments. You can’t hope that some for profit company from a different country is going to care about the long term of your own infrastructure.
Aug 1
Most scholars agree that Mark was the first of the gospels to be composed and that the authors of Matthew and Luke used it plus a second document called the Q source when composing their own gospels. Although it is debated, marcan priority seems to be most plausible.
Jul 29
Morning coffee discussing with my father a quote from a book: “In our culture people put more effort in the job than in the family”. We both agree he didn’t do that; he put family first. Good? Bad? Who knows.
Jul 28
My answer to the two questions from the interview with Robert Waldinger on happiness:
Why are you alive? To make the world ever so slightly better.
For what are you willing to die today? I can list people for which I would die. I don’t think I would die for an idea.
It was interesting to see the answer of the host to “Would you die for your country”? Nope. I wrote about this before: I don’t think our generation is ready to die for the abstract concept of a nation anymore.
**
If you do your work because you want to serve. Remember to always ask: Is this going to serve?
**
Evening, after big dinner in town, I still have strong cravings for sugar. This can not be my brain. This has to be some bastard bacteria that in my gut that are pulling on the vagus nerve. My brain can’t be so stupid… can it?
Jul 26
The elites in the US have had it so easily that they started this meaningless attack on meritocracy. If they are to stay relevant, they have to reverse it.
Jul 24
I heard that Bobby Fischer had this principle in chess: do not let the opponent’s piece linger in your half board. As soon as it enters, as soon as you kick it out. I like that.
Jul 20
Lunch with L. Realizing that making choices is hard when they fall outside of an overall goal. As per Alice in Wonderland: if you don’t know where you’re going, any way will do.
Jul 19
Seeing a 3yo watch cartoons is a thing of wonder: the wide eyes, the 100% focus. How much would I be able to learn if I had the same focus?
**
Marvin, das Steppende Pferd in German saved me from doomscrolling in during the 2008 economic crisis. Could it be that in 2024 Gurli Gris in Danish will save me from reading and watching materials about the upcoming third world war and economic disasters?
**
Day #2 of fasting; 18.30: 8 pull ups?! on a normal day I do 5-6!
Jul 8
There’s somebody near me in the plane with an IronMan bracelet, and it reminded me that I always admired people who finished such a race. Maybe one day I’ll do one too.
**
So many things to do, so little time.
**
Reading Heretic by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. What an alien religion is Islam. The funny thing is that I’m sure for them, christianity is just as alien. In fact, I remember discussing religion with S., a friend who was really amused at the idea of Jesus being the son of God. How can God have a son? In any case, the book by Hirsi Ali is a reminder that Islam is in dire need of a reformation: the combination of literalist interpretation and warlord-period inspired ethics does not fit in the modern world. Unfortunately, I think Ayyan is preaching to the choir.
**
Discussing with M. yesterday: what if Calvin is right, and in a Loki-_esque_ manner, The Creator has endowed some humans with the capacity of feeling spirituality, and some others without it. Now the two groups can contradict each other forever without any of them being able to understand the other.
Jul 6
Stallone: “I wanted to at least have the opportunity to say to myself, well, you tried”. (https://www.instagram.com/p/C8KX5q1x2hB/)
Jul 1
Under the starry sky, at night, in the mountains.
From Kingdom of Heaven: What man is a man who does not make the world a better place? The beauty of this, as a philosophy of life is that, no matter who you are and where you are, as long as you still are, you can try to live up to it. Obviously it’s unfinished a philosophy of life, because it’s dependent on what one understands “better” to mean. But maybe in combination with Schweitzer’s “life who wants to live in the middle of life who wants to live” it could become a moral code? I guess first implication would be vegetarianism. And a more advanced implication would be the buddhist monks who are afraid of even stepping on an ant?
**
Might it be the time that I travel more to the mountains? And I should really start writing down a list of my hikes?
Jun 28
On repeat today: Soy, by Gipsy Kings.
**
Arm(airport)chair geopolitics:
In the US doctrine of war it stands written that: US is allowed to respond militarily to any entity threatening its economical interests. It does not make much difference if the threat is intentional or unintentional. Any entity that threatens the us economy will have to back down or explode… it does not matter that it is a currency, a gas pipe, a dictators, or a democratically elected leader … economies can sometimes back down voluntarily (e.g. japan), gas pipes get delayed or explode; dictators rarely back down voluntarily:
Jun 27
Seen somewhere: if you believe in a deterministic universe, you believe in the same qualities that describe God in the Judeo-Christian traditions. Determinism assumes preservation of information, no loss of knowledge from the beginning of time. The assumption of accessible determinism requires knowledge for everything, everywhere, all at once. Determinism assumes the emergence of life as inevitable, a quality of the universe. God in these traditions is: timeless, omniscient, omnipresent, immutable, complete, creator of all things.
Counter argument: So we move the complexity one level up to explaining the existence of God. This doesn’t get us anywhere. Why invent a more complex thing (God) to explain a less complex thing (Universe) because we can’t explain the less complex thing.
**
Seen somewhere: Databases are the pragmatic intersection and application of all the fundamental topics in CS: algorithms and data structures, distributed systems, PL and compilers, operating systems, hardware, etc.
**
Morning depressing listen: us is opening 15 military bases in Sweden. The deal is horrible: swedes have no right to even know what kind of installations are going to be deployed. Not even if they will place atomic weapons. Why is Europe walking towards war so happily?
**
Fasting feels like hope.
Jun 26
woke up and while still in bed felt inspired to compose a few verses as a dedication to my mother.
The blood in my veins
The spark in my eyes
The will that i have
The love for the sky
I have them from you.
clearly quite childish verses. and maybe inspired by the discussion with D. about how he asks his kids to write a poem. but this was the first thing that came to my mind in the morning. not reaching out for the phone. not thinking about food. but verses!
does my mind really work better in a fasted state? is this for others too or only for me? It must, somebody was telling me about the buddhist monks who mediate while fasting.
are we normally walking around lost in mental fog just because we love food too much?
**
Biked to the airport for my trip to Aalborg. Slightly less power in legs. Saw the same yesterday evening for a few games of beach volleyball. I felt slightly slower. At the same time, my passes were much, much more precise than usually!
16:37.
I’m tired and feel like sleeping But it’s a bodily tiredness Not a mental tiredness.
Slept half an hour woke up super fresh and ready.
After waking up started listening to Keith Jarrett. The notes are sweeter.
“Nobody writes poems on a full stomach”. “Stay hungry, stay foolish”. These sayings receive new meaning.
Sunny evening in Aalborg. Life is so much more beautiful in the sun. No wonder some of the ancients worshipped it.
Jun 25
Day #2 of fasting. Last night I dreamt with food :)
When awake though, I’m not troubled at all. It’s actually a wonderful overall feeling. I feel calm and more focused. More present somehow. Why don’t I do this more often?
**
Aren’t our bodies miracles?
One thing they do is turn on autophagy. The term is Greek for “self-eating,” and that’s exactly what happens. During autophagy, your cells check all their internal parts, find anything that’s old, damaged, or functioning poorly, and replace them with shiny new versions. The old parts are either recycled into new materials or destroyed.
(source)
**
My sense of smell is now supercharged by the evening of day #2.
Jun 20
Interesting take by e luttwak on the implications of living in a post heroic era. I don’t think he’s got it right. Having fewer children is not the root cause; root cause is individualism. We live in a more individualistic society. This is why few people would be willing to go to war.
Jun 19
An adaptation, with mild changes for a slightly more positive ending, of one of my favorite Lucian Blaga poems.
Give me a body
you mountains.
And you seas,
give me another body to discharge my madness
in full!
Wide earth, be my chest,
be the breast of this rushing heart,
pretend to be the place of the storms that crush me,
be the amphora of my rebellious self!
Through the cosmos
then my great steps would be heard
and I would appear suddenly and freely
such as I am.
When i would love
I would stretch all the seas to the sky
like wild, wild hot arms,
to the sky
to grasp it
and to kiss its twinkling stars.
When i would hate
I would crush under my feet
poor passenger suns
and maybe I would smile.
But I only have you, my passing body.
So I decorate you with white and red flowers
even though you're too small and too weak
for this tumultuous soul of mine.
**
Plants are slow-motion miracles. You put a little old garlic in the ground, pour water over it every few days, and the next thing you know is that the one garlic has transformed into twelve fresh garlics.
Observation made possible by some of the most ambitious garlics in the world who, even if held in the fridge, decided to sprout, and thus, persuaded me to plant them. Somehow reminds me of Albert Schweitzer’s: “I am life who wants to live in the middle of life who wants to live”.
June 18
Went for a walk to the beach and saw the most intense fluorescent pink band in the sunset ever. Took dozens of photos trying to capture it. No photo can do justice to the majesty of the sunset. And to think that in 4 billion years the Andromeda galaxy will intersect ours and probably will interfere with the sunsets!
June 17
Niall Ferguson also observes that the new, modern quasi-religions are similar to the ones that they displaced, only worse. In that sense they are tapping into very similar psychological human needs: excluding the blasphemers (deniers), worrying about the end of days (worrying about climate extinction), preparing by fasting (become vegan), etc.. Also, your sins can be forgiven in the old religion; in the new one, there is no forgiveness: you said something racist ten years ago, it’s forever a stain on your character; you were born white, this is an original sin for which there’s no forgiveness.
**
Evening mood: Un Alt Inceput
**
You only have one life: live it. You only have one conscience: use it. (heard in the interview between Peterson and Solzhenitsyn’s son).
June 12
Solzhenitsyn: you could be sentenced for 5 years for “negative attitude towards the party or one of its plans”. What makes us believe that what was possible 80years ago is not possible anymore. What changed in the human soul to prevent this?
Denounciations were useful tools for the speeding up of the sentencing and easing the job of the bureaucrats who did the sentencing.
June 5
Archipelago and Dogville: both reminders of human capacity for evil.
McBeth was so weak: he went mad with remorse for a single crime. To scale, evil needs ideology. Indeed, that was exactly the story in the Ordinary Men by Browning.
June 2
the line that divides good and evil cuts through the heart of every man. i always thought this was a remarcabile thing to say. i think i could see it in my heart, but every man? and evil, not merely weakness, imperfection, or other ways of missing the mark?
if it were about missing the mark of a good life, it could be interpreted the same way as “happy families are all alike, while unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way” of tolstoi. perfect people are all alike, and each imperfect one is imperfect in their own way.
but there are people that i have a hard time imagining doing evil. i guess it’s time to read solzhenitsyn.
though, the real reason for starting on solzhenitsyn is a documentary i saw yesterday about Mao. it sparked my interest in totalitarian regimes, and “class struggle” as a way of ordering a society. Sometimes it seems like our world is slowly inching that way.
**
“ever tried, ever failed. no matter… try again, fail again…”. it.s time for a re.committment to the no-added-sugars no-gluten diet. i think i can feel my joints a bit more painful after a few weeks of exceptions that culminated with an anti-diet day.
**
schism by tool. quite dramatic piece. and a bit primitive?
May 30
how much i hate that my own files, written by myself, deeply personal, i can’t open when i’m not online because they have been moved in the cloud by apple? a lot.
this is deeply disturbing. i never remember opt-ing in to anything like this. i think we have to get back down to earth and away from the clouds.
May 29
Today’s Soundtrack: Dream Theater.
**
so many stories and myths about how one must never look back. nor left and right. but following their oen way, wherever it leads.
if I could learn to live in such a way as to never look back. maybe even the decisions i would take would weigh different.
May 27
You must accept reality. You have to dance with the reality. You have to improvise with it.
You have to yes-and reality. Otherwise, it will slap you in the face. And it’s got a heavy hand.
**
Programming as a hero’s journey: fighting and encapsulating complexity monsters into their own little boxes.
May 23
beating addiction with addiction: went with the colleagues for ice cream but got coffee instead :)
May 22
Now Sam Altman is not cool. Yesterday he was the savior. Today Musk is not cool. Yesterday he was the savior. Elisabeth Holmes. Sam Bankman-Fried. At some point the whole media ecosystem sings to one of these praises. At the next point we realize: they’re not supermen, superwomen, or the prophets. In fact, they’re as flawed as everybody. Actually more.
UML is all you need. OO programming is all you need. Map-reduce is all you need. Bitcoin is all you need. Microservices is all you need. Generative AI is all you need. (Literally, there are people who believe that we won’t need programming languages anymore. I must really get writing that paper about prompt engineering teams replacing of software engineering teams..). Each new technological end of the world turns out to be just another phase in our quest for the ultimate silver bullet.
The same pattern over and over again with both people and technologies.
How does the world not learn? I guess there’s an eternal stream of naïve hopeful-hearted young people that are willing to believe. By the time they get older, and learn a thing or two, the new avalanche of youngsters fall into the same: personality cults, ponzi schemes, and techno-savior schemes. And the problem is that the online society has very little respect for experience. In the old days, there was respect for the elderly, whom probably would have not fallen so easily into the last hype. But that is not part of our societal fundamentals anymore. Still happens individually here and there, but I guess that’s the patriarchy and matriarchy that we’ve done with.
Sure, I do not think it was fun to live in a patriarchal society. It’s too much waiting till one gets to have an opinion and freedom there. Then again, in a world as complex as ours, that might be good sometimes? Still… Jiro at 90 still does not leave the business to his son who’s almost 70… he is still not ready… he still has to learn :)
May 18
Uncopenhagenly sunny today.
May 17
Watched The Cowboy and the Frenchman with friends tonight. David Lynch is a dork.
May 16
Lunch discussion. C. thinks that free will is a model from the point of view of a limited agent. Basically, from my point of view, C has free will because I can never predict his internal states and the way they will interact with the environment. Thus, for all the practical purposes, from the outside, for me, he has full control of his choices.
This aligns with my understanding. From the society’s POV it’s exactly the same. Society also does not know anybody’s internal state. So for all practical purposes, everybody has free will. The benefit of this? It allows us to have a legal system and build a civilization. Not a bad deal, you must admit :)
This also implies that an omniscient agent might not perceive us as having free will. I guess this is what Calvin was also trying to say? So Calvin was writing from the POV of God (and Arminius from the POV of humanity… and when you’re human, it’s really stupid to write from the POV of God. Thus, Arminius beats Calvin any day for breakfast).
**
Could an omniscient agent that knows the internal state of everybody not feel what everybody feels? And then, if it felt simultaneously all the feelings of all living, could it make anything of it? All the joy and the pain in the world at the same time. Impossible to imagine.
**
In the same way in which free will is an assumption, the fact that we can be construed as individuals, is also an assumption.
May 15
What makes us human?
Discussing with a sociologist whom I tried to convince of my definition: not acting on our instincts and thinking about the future. Indeed, she countered with: lions do not act on their instincts even when, e.g, whey they get upset by their cubs who bite their tail, they don’t kill them. I guess that’s arguable. And the difference is in doing the things consciously.
I think Peterson would say: sacrificing the present for the future consciously.
In any case, her view was that creating meta-tools is something that no animal has ever been observed to do. Some animals use tools to do stuff, but that’s it, but we never recorded an animal creating tools to create tools.
Then the discussion went to cultures and how different cultures
So then I proposed that we might be able to use this most human trait to compare cultures. Isn’t a culture that creates more meta-tools more advanced, and more human than another one?
May 5
The joy of spring.
The melancholy of knowing that the number of springs in your life is limited.
The realization that their limitness is actually necessary for the joy.
**
Orthodox Easter today.
The ultimate message of christianity is one of hope. The story of Christ says that, not even after death one should give up hope. Hope is greater than death.
And “love is greater than hope”. The arithmetic of christianity :)
May 4
Mesopotamia = ancient greek for the land between the rivers
Hippopotamus = ancient greek for river horse
Now, guess how does one say river in ancient greek.
**
Culture is the stories you tell.
Nobody reads the law to learn how to live. And virtually nobody reads philosophy for this purpose either. Most will not remember twenty distinct principles from Marcus Aurelius. In fact many will probably not even finish the meditations. I know I tried multiple times.
But everybody can remember twenty essential stories. This is why, culture is built on stories.
May 3
We teach scalability. We should teach downscaling. Otherwise we end up with everybody doing gigantic systems when they don’t need to. Possible topic for the In Software It Depends Course. Will fit the lichess case study.
Another topic that I’d like to teach would be profiling. People talk about profilers as magic. Only after you implement your own you can be less impressed. A bit like that company that was paying a ton of money for an off-the-shelf feature flag infrastructure.
**
If you use Kubernetes then you can not be doing devops.
May 2
I don’t think people realize how complex UI development is. Aaln average react app is more complicated than a balancing a red-black tree. I would like to be able to prove this empirically.
April 20
Dark mode is such a funny preference. One must be born after 2000 to enjoy it I think.
April 18
No interesting system has only one “AI” inside it. There is no ghost in this shell.
In a complex system, you might need several AI, ML, and in general statistical sub-components, each one specific to its task. These stochastic components are each specialized in doing it’s own thing. And because all these sub-components, by their nature, are sometimes going to mis-predict or mis-classify, you need to build carefully the system around their imprecision. And you always have to allow the user to provide the final decision on whether the statistical component is right or wrong. This is why you never deploy such a system in a critical component (e.g. in the steering subsystem for a car).
A better view on these models is that they are the liabilities of those systems, they are the weak links not the holy graals actually. Why do I say this? Think about it: we value software systems for their predictability and the comfort that their automation give to our lives. I type git push and this text is updated on the server. I turn off the car engine and the automatic break is deployed. Always. How would it feel if your mail client would be advertised as having an F1 score of 90%, meaning that most of the emails will be sent to mostly the right recipient most of the time? Or the breaks of your car would have a 99% precision? You would not pay much for that, would you?
Adding AI models in a system is a last resort step that we do because we don’t have a perfect solution or because the problem is indeed too big (e.g. labeling all the images of muffins on the web, spying on all the phone conversations that are intercepted by the NSA). But these statistical components are always imprecise, and they are only useful in those situations where there is no better or cost-efficient alternative. But I think we should see these components, as an evil we have to live with, rather than unalloyed good.
In a few years, everybody will understand this, when the disappointment between the over-hyped expectations and reality with respect to AI settles in. Although everybody will be busy hyperventilating over the next big thing. As a wise man said, nothing’s new under the sun.
April 15
Obsidian. This application feels like a labor of love. What if we all worked to create the same kind of user-friendliness? #interactiondesign
**
I pulled a muscle in my calf probably because I didn’t warm up sufficiently at practice last week. It’s got better and I think I can play already if I’m careful, but it still feels a bit tender and I’m afraid of reinjury. So I’m thinking: if I really love this sport I should not play yet. Otherwise for the joy of today, I might endanger future opportunities of play and practice.
Is this some kind of general life lesson? When you really love something you have to distance yourself from it sometime?
**
The instinct of getting the phone out when somebody else does it. This is addiction.
April 13
Little pockets of meaning in a cold universe
April 11
Achievement unlocked: ironing shirts without music, podcasts, or audiobooks. Just me and my thoughts. Clearer mind. Unwrinkled shirts. Mircea - Entropy: 2 - 0, this morning.
**
There should be a word for that moment when the first meandering molecule of smoke reaches your olfactory receptors and instantly conjures in your mind the image of the food that is now burnt on the stove because you left it there “only for two minutes”… while quickly doing this other thing in this other room.
**
Following up on one of yesterday’s ideas: Alexis Zorba and Atticus Finch are both following their own conscience, as far as I can tell. With very different results.
**
The world would be a better place if every now and then an academic would remove one of their old papers from the internet, instead of writing yet another one.
April 10
To value so much your own life that you prefer it to scrolling the internet.
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To live up to the exigence of your own conscience. Not even God would ask more.
April 9
Trolling technical debt people: introducing the concept of technical depth :)
April 8
Yesterday, at lunch with M, I remember that I have promised more than one year ago to try an experiment, that I never really started. Experiment is simple: at every salary, I take three times 10% and I use them in three different ways:
Then, one year, five years, ten years down the line, look back and figure out: which of the three tithes will have represented the best use of my money. As M says: think of yourself as an administrator of your money. Shared this commitment also with my friend A. Now there’s more people to hold me accountable :)
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Sometimes you do the stupid thing, and it still turns out right. What if Google super-botched release of their hyper-woke conversational AI has shown the world how bad these things actually are, and will indirectly hit their main competitor: microsoft with chatgpt.
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With microsoft betting it all on AI they might actually lose quite a bit when everybody realizes that it’s still a solution looking for a problem. I see a few months to years of slow growth if not even decline for microsoft. However, for the long term I would still bet on them: they are a fair company, in the sense that they make their business by selling software. As opposed to selling ads, which I think is less ethical a business.
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I’m thankful for Obsidian and GH Pages. Obsidian makes editing and GHP makes publishing my homepage so easy. Still the GH Pages part I have to move away from. Why do I depend on their infra to host my text? And why do I have to wait for a few minutes for the text to be updated? Why do I need to have a build interrupted email message when I push a correction, and why do I have to have a new commit for every little typo fix. No wonder that one of our students found out I’m one of the “top committers” on GitHub from Denmark :))
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April 7
If we are serious about sustainability, we will have to encourage people to read more. It should not be necessary to create a series with 30 episodes, that costs more 150 million dollars just in order to re-tell the story from one book. Why do you need to see the story on screen, when you could read and see it in your mind’s eye? What’s wrong with imagination?
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One more argument for reading? It separates us humans from animals. Reading, writing, and controlling our urges. Feelings, kindness, playfulness, desires: most of the mammals have them too. A dog can watch TV and cats can play tablet games. Chimps can scroll through pictures and movies. But reading and writing, this only humans do. And controlling our instincts. To the degree in which we succeed.
April 5
my iphone reminds me very often of beautiful memories. it takes away attention from my immediate life. but it gives a bit of attention to my past life. sure, most of the attention is still redirected to consuming digital entertainment. but for this little bit that’s redirected to past memories, i’m thankful.
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a book on “how would famous people” program. Dalai Lama: he would certainly not get angry with ugly code. Jesuss: would spend 50% of the time thinking about the reader of his code (love the other as you would love yourself). LR is interested in becoming a co-author :)
April, 4th
Even before GenAI and for sure after, the web is becoming such a cesspool of junk that we might actually be tempted by the imperfect but clean chatGPT-like answers to our questions. Alternatively, being able to have an authority to ask, e.g. WebMD will become much more important. Or maybe a SV startup will reinvent the equivalent of Yahoo Directories soon :)
April, 2th
I’d love to have a software engineering master’s course where we look at modern technologies, especially the hype-du-jour, and discuss when do they make sense and when do they do not. And teach the students to disentangle the exaggeration from the actually useful.
Motivational lecture
Topics
Project
Readings
P.S. A special module of that course would be the “It is not new, anyway” module, in which we take one of the modern techniques, and show that very likely, there was a predecessor about 40 years ago, that everybody forgot about it (e.g. deep learning, server side rendering, document databases, etc.)
I always thought that I should write a book about “the eternal return of computer science” in which I talk about how there’s this eternal “reinvention of the wheel”. Fat client - thin client - fat client - … No types - strong types - no types - strong types… etc.
However, I wonder if it would be more polite and more optimistic to phrase it as the eternal spiral. The benefit of the spiral metaphor is that it allows for learning, it allows for a progression. It’s also more humble and less judgemental and less fatalistic: computer science progress is not an eternal groundhog day. It’s more like the solar system where the planets rotate around the sun and together with the sun they travel around the universe :)
Re-starting my no-artificial sugar challenge today. I started together with my sister, she completed it and i failed in the middle.
So today, after having a cookie with my father in the morning for coffee, I restarted. I will try to not have any stuff that contains sugars or sweeteners for the next 40 days. I’ve failed to keep the fastelavn with the danes. Maybe I’ll be able to (mostly) align myself with the orthodox now, who already started and will fast for the next month. Rules of the engagement: no artificial sugars in food or drinks. Including no exaggeratedly sweetened home-made smoothies, e.g. two bananas in a smoothie is too much. In general, it’s the sugar taste that I feel cravings for and I must learn to let go of. Thus, even if it’s made of fruits, if it’s too sweet (e.g., fresh pressed fruit juice) it’s still a no go. That would be cheating. So that’s excluded too. Sweeteners are also off the table.
In case I fail, I restart counting.
P.S. Also, will try also no gluten to the best of my ability: there’s the story with Djokovic improving his athletic performance when doing that. I would like to improve mine too. I guess this is a test of how much I want that improvement.
I don’t understand the culture wars.
Equity, cf to the dictionary on my machine, is the quality of being fair and impartial. Now, given that we know that each human has their preferences and capabilities, will inevitably lead to different outcomes. However, as far as I can tell, people who claim they want equity, refer to equality of outcomes. I guess it’s a technique taken from advertising: claim that you deliver something that you absolutely do not do (e.g. airlines - comfort, detergents - family happiness, etc.)
Turns out I’m in select company. Solzhenitsyn: “Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free”.
31 March ‘24
Our relationship with our phones is very similar to the one of Frodo and the ring. The ring in his pocket would always call for him, and he would always feel the compulsion to take it out and try it on. Also, when he would put it on, he would see crazy stuff (if I remember correctly scenes from the movie… I also read the book, but I don’t remember that part from reading. Would the fact that you remember different things be an argument for both reading and watching the same novel?)
Our relationship with the social media is of a very similar nature. It also calls to us from our pocket, and we also see crazy stuff when we connect to it. The combination of having in our pocket both the phone and social media on it, makes the combo twice more addictive. Frodo was right to destroy the ring by throwing it in the fire. The device in our pockets, on the other hand, seems to be there to stay.
Ah, and too much exposure to the ring made a monster out of Gollum!
Why do religions imagine gods as persons?
Because we’re a social species and thinking in terms of other persons comes naturally to us. And things, but I guess things are out of the question for this one.
Thinking about God as a person enables us to have a object for our feelings of “thankfulness” and “anger”. It would be meaningless to be thankful to the universe. Or the multiverse. Also, one can not be angry with the universe when, say, their child dies (see Decalog by Kieslovski, Ep.1). In a sense, believing in a personal God allows one to be more expressive with their feelings than otherwise.
We have no free will is the same as saying: humans are mostly made out of empty space. Indeed, both might be true at the microscopic level, but it’s the wrong abstraction level when you talk about humans.
Indeed, because the electrons and the nucleus are so smal and the forces between them so strong, most of the space in the atom is actually empty. And thus, every human is mostly empty space. But at the societal level, that level of analysis is meaningless.
The same with free will. Even if the universe were deterministic at the atomic level, talking about how humans are made of atoms when discussing ethics and society is meaningless. It would be like when an individual punches another in the nose, we would say: it does not matter, it’s mostly empty space pushing on other mostly empty space. No, it’s not empty space hitting empty space. It’s a person, who decided to punch the other one. And at the level of ethics, we judge that act as it were the will of the puncher. Not the turning of some atomic clockwork.
Also, there’s quantum uncertainty at the atomic level.
P.S. (Apr 2) Or could I accept that both facts are true? The wisdom of the Rabbi who told everybody that they were right?
P.P.S. Writing does not exist. Just atoms of my hands kicking other atoms of a keyboard. There’s a proper level of analysis for everything and a purpose for every level of analysis.
I recently developed a love for volleyball and I play in the lowest men’s danish league. My role in the team, middle blocker, requires a lot of jumping, and my knee is starting to hurt a bit sometimes after a long match. I really wish that as a society we would prioritize much more working on artificial knees than artificial intelligence. But there’s not enough wisdom in Sillicon Valley to realize that. And unfortunately nobody is working on artificial wisdom either.
Why not maintain my own timeline of silly little thoughts? I used to try to contribute my thoughts to Twitter. But that’s a cacophony of everything, thoughts, the most outrageous recent things, advertising in your face, and covert. And Elon holds the button that turns craziness up and down there too.