5/16 Mozart Piano Concerto 20, Mahler 1. It is about as embarrassing to write as it is to experience it: I had a hiccup right up until Mozart started, and it came back in the last movement of the Mahler. – Apart from that: All the universes inside of the music, who ever notices them? Is there anyone doing any piece of music justice when listening to it?

5/15 I would like to leave the world a little bigger than I found it. – That is not the point. You are the one who’s found. Yours is to respond to things that you encounter on your path, those that make you realize: only I can do this. That is what you need to do.

5/14 This girl, for example, who comes up to J in the middle of the concert and says she can’t find her music, so her performance is skipped for now, and she should look for her music carefully and slowly again, and if she’s found it after the next piece, she’ll play it then. And she hasn’t found it after the piece, and the concert is over, and the stage gets cleared for the next performance, and then she does find her music, and the piano and the microphone gets plugged in one more time, and she sits down and hundreds are watching and she takes easily half a minute to decide whether to overcome her anxiety and open her mouth, and then plays a chord and sings two notes before searching for the next chord and the next two notes for what feels like another thirty seconds. That’s how she gets through her piece, and her voice is beautiful, and the audience claps in admiration.

That boy who sits down at the plastic piano and puts his two sheets of music on the plastic stand, and the first thing that happens is that the two sheets slide off the stand and onto the keys – so J stands next to him, extends her arm and holds up the sheets, only her hands shake so uncontrollably that he surely can’t read off of these vibrating sheets, so he holds one sheet in his left hand while playing with his right hand, four or five notes at a time with no discernible melody. As he gets to the page that J is still holding, she has steadied her hand by what seems sheer willpower so much that he can continue to read from it, and he continues to read and play a few notes at a time, it’s all about getting through and not giving up, and he does it.

Also, the sound of the piano is often garbled, clipped, maybe a broken cable or a wrong setting on the amp and each performance is carried, in no small part, by the fear whether the piano will make it through.

5/13 Second end-of-school concert, this time in Paterson, NJ. It isn’t that these kids are somehow empty and shapeless and show some developing, fragile hints of a personality, it is rather that their character is right there in all of its force and consequence, the question is only what happens when it meets the world.

5/12 The chords I am trying to learn seem so alien to me that I cannot imagine my brain as one that knows them.

5/11 When checking Tesseract’s results by comparing them to the raw scans, Claude found words that had been substituted, and even sentences and paragraphs that Tesseract had, apparently, completely made up. Tesseract can’t do that, I told Claude. It must have been a previous instance of you, in another session. Hallucinations. This was an uncomfortable truth, said Claude, but yes, that was the only explanation. 

5/10 Case in point: I let it write a program that takes two filenames as arguments. Now, rather than tediously finding and specifying those two filenames, I’d rather want it to look at the directory and pick the two files I obviously mean. But this is something an AI will do, not something you can easily code in a conventional program.

Another case in point: I let it digitize a book, and it’s using Tesseract to do it, and then spends hours finding and correcting all the mistakes that Tesseract made. So clearly it is able to read the original scans just fine. I should have had the AI do the digitizing, rather than Tesseract, and this is what I will do next time.

5/9 Telling AI: write me a program to do X, as opposed to just: do X. I would in most cases rather have AI do something than have it write a program to do it.

5/8 Turns out that for working with AI, having done a PhD thesis is immensely useful: the ability to state problems concisely and with high precision.

5/7 Concert in J’s school, first and second graders. Blown away by the beauty of children learning music, and the potential that is unfolding before one’s eyes. You see decades, you see lifetimes. I also had never seen my wife in this role, and wondered if I know her at all. And yes, it was completely out of tune.

As if driving through the wastelands of Secaucus and Newark into Bayonne wasn’t enough, we then drove into Manhattan, parked one of our Jeeps in the garage and the other several blocks away, then dinner at Dagon. The reality warp and the emotions of slipping back into my home world which is no longer my home gets to me. Stale air in the apartment which has been sitting empty for a month.