josephc

I think back to times I’ve eaten a thing and remember the sensation, then try replaying the feeling to see if it would be just as satisfying.

At the moment, I’m in the mood for a snack. I’m thinking about the dried fruit I had yesterday and the sensations it elicited when I ate it. Those same sensations of flavor and texture sound agreeable, so I’m thinking that would be nice.

Not everyone has this form of recall all the time. Some people have it intermittently. I asked my partner what she wanted to eat and she said she could not tell if she was hungry or if any food sounded good. I took this as a warning and we stopped at the nearest restaurant immediately. Fortunately, this was the right decision and we both felt better afterwards.

If you’re feeling hungry, imagine the smells of a food. Sense memory tends to run deep in people. If you find that you can’t recall or reject a sensation, that’s okay! Plenty of folks are in the same situation.

Imagine you’re writing a book. In this book you need to be perfectly consistent and coherent because the people reading it are so incredibly literal that if there’s ambiguity or inconsistency they will run into your home and defecate on your carpet.

Short stories are easy enough. There’s only a character or two and you can generally remember what they’re wearing and what they said, but as the stores get longer you start to work yourself into corners and lose track of what you said in the previous chapters.

Let’s say you reach a scene where the main character needs to hop on a train. You write a scene where they purchase a ticket. But wait, a few chapters ago you said they got mugged! So you decide to cut that scene. Now they can pay for a ticket, but the scene where they said they got mugged is wrong and the scene where they said they can’t pay their bill doesn’t work!

Computers read instructions and interpret them. They follow orders. Programming raw hardware is tricky, so we add abstractions to make it easier. Collectively we agree, “we’ll put a return pointer here, then push these instructions here and set the program counter here” as the way we call subroutines or send data or something else. If there’s ambiguity in the specification then two people might build two different programs which they both expect to work. One of them will fail. If there are ten people implementing things with an API, perhaps all ten will fail.

Hyrem’s Law says any observable behavior will eventually become part of a workflow.

There are 86 billion neurons in the brain and 31* pairs of spinal column nerves with about 7 trillion interconnections. When I pulled that figure it wasn’t obvious if it included connections inside the brain, too.

*I found one article that said 43 pairs of nerves connected to the spinal cord and 12 to the brain, but Wikipedia says 31.

It started with basic indifference and became a feature.

In the beginning, people were manually receiving and reviewing resumes given to them in person.

This moved online and, for a time, normal humans continued to upload their resumes. Humans continued to review them.

Eventually someone decided they wanted to spam resumes, like someone swiping right on every potential Tinder match and turning people down later. This spam became problematic, so companies needed a way to automatically filter folks. Extracting info from PDFs wasn’t easy at the time.

Having a form to fill out prevented some spam and let them do keyword searches and filtering, but more importantly now it gives them two things: It prefilters people who don’t care enough to complete it and add a sight sunk cost bias to folks who are on the fence.

I used to ask if I could work extra and leave a little early or take a long lunch. My current employer is far more chill about it and will let me do so if there’s nothing pressing. Still had to burn a half day of sick time to bring doggo to the vet.

But like others are saying, “you don’t.” Life is a Sisyphean nightmare of falling behind on laundry, cleaning, legal obligations, etc. Live in quiet desperation and perpetual exhaustion. “Truly the best of all possible worlds.”

If I send you a 24TB hard drive in the mail and it takes three days to arrive, thats high bandwidth, high latency.

If I send you a 24 character morse code message over the radio it’s low latency and low bandwidth.

I also quite like the smaller feel, but I will admit I miss having a ready stream of really cute animal photos and videos. It’s a double edged sword.

Bandcamp for music. Libro.fm for audiobooks.

I used to spend days rotoscoping people in videos. Generative infill for background painting and automatic rotoscoping have saved probably a year of my life at this point. Image generation relies on CLIP, which needs a language model for conditioning.