3/15 artificial intelligence report: no help during coding. wrong solutions put forward with great confidence. you might even think that the suggested solutions show how the tools i’m using should in fact work, but they don’t, and so the solution is wrong. even with multiple attempts at correcting or nudging the ai i’m not getting closer to an actual solution, we’re just stuck in a loop. j is confident that this boundary will always exist, the human programmer will always be on top of the machine, even though the level and nature of their tasks may shift. i am not sure if we are looking at a quantitative or a qualitative issue.

artificial intelligence report ii: the recommendations of story graph, the small blurbs where it explains why i may or may not like this particular book, comparing it to other books i’ve read but also to more abstract notions of what i’m interested in, such as generality or even the pace of a book – those blurbs are absolutely addictive. i want to read more books just so the blurbs become even more interesting. i want to prove the blurbs wrong. i want to go on the ride of the blurbs.

and yet this is where it goes wrong. i should not read books because i might like them. each book should be so deeply disturbing that nothing could have anticipated it. a book should leave a different human behind.

and then why is that about books. it should be the days, the places, the people that do that. and that’s a tall order. who can live a life like that. a life in constant metamorphosis is meaningless. also, compare youth and old age.

don’t get me started on middle age. you are moving from young to old, of course you are in the middle, always. this conveys no information.

books: a bridge technology, futile or even dangerous to be idolized. just because of a few centuries in which we had nothing but books. i don’t want to say no to anything because i can’t handle it. i am not prepared to accept that we can’t do any better than books, and that we must remove ourselves from everything but the books if we don’t want to deteriorate.

3/14 Programmed all day with high intensity. Yet I can describe what the program does in two or three sentences. This discrepancy will only have lasted a few decades.

3/13 I have been removed from all other projects so I can work on a critical one. This, I guess, also means that I am not particularly available for this project.

3/12 Supposed to be immersed in work. Usually this is easier.

3/11 It may be catastrophic thinking, but my optimism and my entire worldview have taken a hit, because it’s not that by accident a devious con-artist got into power, it’s that half of the country voted for him consciously and deliberately, and half of the country continues to think it’s completely okay what he’s doing.

It seems as if the consensus of a scientific worldview has so far been more of a rule by elites, and those elites, and the scientific worldview with them, are now being cast off.

I don’t worry much about myself. If there’s war, life will somehow continue, or it won’t. I always look at my wealth with a certain caution, exercising the thought that one day it could all be gone again.

But I am choking on my optimism for humanity.

3/10 And now a student has been arrested for voicing an unwelcome opinion while being on Green Card, the same status I had until July last year. How could I write about anything else, although what could I write about it.

3/9 I am practicing about half an hour per day, which is barely enough to keep me in the Emerald league of Tonic. The more intense your practice, the vaster the amount of things you might also practice, that you should absolutely practice to make any meaningful progress. I have nobody fifty years younger than me to compare myself to, the result would likely be as humiliating as the hike into the Grand Canyon. Then again, the other night on Tonic, I heard someone who had started in their mid-sixties play with a gravity that only age can build. That is how I want to play.

3/8 My table is a mess, half of it is strewn with debris of daily life, the other half I keep clear as good as i can, but there’s always like ten or even twenty items in that supposedly clear area, a glass of water, a mug of coffee, also my metal box of medications, black, with the lid that shifts in such a tight and satisfying way to reveal the contents, my anti-seizure meds that I need to take twice a day, and some other pills in the third compartment that I keep silent about because they have to do with my age. Also, one of my Leathermans, the Signal which I had on our trip in the Grand Canyon, and which I later sought to replace with a Charge because I wanted scissors that the Signal sadly lacks. And yet I keep the Signal, in its tactical green, because what would you do with it other than keep it, and it’s just so satisfying to have it around. The felt case of my headset, of which I have two, one here in Manhattan and one in Newburgh, so I don’t have to carry one back and forth between the places. Reading glasses, two of my three pairs are right here on the table.

People who are itching to talk to me, such as the man who is at the pool in Newburgh every morning, he is an embodiment of the desire to talk, and I have to use all my energy to make it abundantly clear, by looking intensely in a direction away from him, probably with a fearsome frown, that I do not want to talk. He still cannot help but ask whether “that bathing suit” which I’m wearing “does not bother me swimming laps”. I’m having a lot of fun wearing those swim briefs, as I would call them, they hit exactly the right spot for me of being a little too daring, but not so much that it makes me feel vulnerable, and I take pleasure telling him that it’s all for additional speed in the water.

3/7 That took me a while. Valley of Ages, the essay about our hike into the Grand Canyon.

3/6 A group of coworkers had invited me to come to the office and give a little talk, show a few slides about some of the more exciting work I’ve done recently. Gushing praise, almost admiration. I am elevated to a position of authority which I cannot remember ever having tried to attain. They ask me how I approach problems and what tools I use. I seem to have a license to be a little quirky, uttering weird pieces of knowledge and using tools nobody has ever heard of, but oh, how primitive they are.