Ok at work i am a software developer which means i have some onus to keep up to date with best practices and such. I tell myself this while reading hacker news for hours each day.

The consequence of which is that i am marinated in these particular contexts, somewhat. I don't know that i like it, at all.

I wanted to write down some short thoughts, partly as blogging practice, but mostly as a time capsule? For my own sake. I'm not at all claiming that these thoughts are unique, worthwhile, anything like that. And then once done i'll domain block hacker news, maybe.

Yeah. With that out of the way, let's begin.

Attention

The feeling is one of being pulled in ten thousand directions. Ever so slightly, but relentlessly. Death by a thousand tweets.

Many interesting articles each day, but not enough mental bandwidth. Many reports from wars, genocides, fascist plots... but not enough emotional bandwidth. The result is shutdown, apathy.

By culling many of these sources, maybe one can have the capacity to actually care, for the few that remain? I uninstalled my RSS reader and blocked several newspaper websites. On my phone i removed all social media apps. I did keep HN access on my work computer, but there's settings to limit daily exposure (it blocks you for X minutes, Y minutes after first access).

This blogpost is a part of this. An attempt to be concrete about where my attention goes. There's another one to be written about social media and posting vs identity building.

See also: The political effects of X's feed algorithm - scary. I urge anyone using that site to stop. This is probably true of all sites with an algorithmic or "FYP" mechanism.

LLM's and their proliferation

Long before these were a thing i was into predictive text. Super fun to make a markov chain of your own tweets and try to divine the future from it's sometimes poetic outputs. GPT-2 was, from the eyes i had at the time, very cool - the same kind of fun gibberish, but now it could kinda make sense!

Now, all i feel is a tiredness. The technology's seen EXTREME progress, and in the process, got rid of everything that was fun about it. Working with the technology (transformers in python is a best case, using some Azure API the worse one) is severingly boring. Using them in artistic endeavours is shooting yourself in the foot (you're also shooting all your peers). They're good for looking quick stuff up if you know how to go about it, i suppose. But who cares?

I think there ARE cool possibilities with these, especially in UX? Having a way to understand a user's natural language should be freeing. Maybe. But right now all i hear is how it will "replace workers", "destroy juniors", "destroy the world", and such things. Yet, there's been no WOW moment apart from the technology itself.

One can wonder though. Put an LLM in your decision pipeline and you will never answer for anything again. Must've been the machine that hallucinated!

Like, i am tired to all hell about these things for now. We're still too close to see any effects clearly. In the meantime, i am trying to think about this less.

Ubiquitous surveillance

It seems everything that's "fun" according to the industry at large, is often very useful if you want to create a technofascism. Face scanning is one thing. Also, it's in vouge for everyone to scrape the entire internet, because they need at least that much data for their "secret project".

Maybe it was always the case that whatever you posted online was collected and analyzed and used in various processes. IDK, it just seems to be done at such scale now. Lot's of crawlers around... reddit licensing access to OpenAI or whatever for training... such items.

Porn and censorship thereof

It's incredible how USA exports both a very macho patriarchal worldview, and puranitanian values. Porn should be male gazey and also forbidden. Like, there are many horrible things going on with the porn industry and it would probably be good if some light was shone on it. But what we get is written simpsons porn being banned on itch.io...

Very dividing topic but it's eye opening to me how much power the american payment networks have over people on other continents.

Quantum mechanics

I'm not a quantum mechanic but i believe in their beliefs. With that i mean that i am far from doing the math, but it's cozy to read wikipedia on these things, watch some videos maybe. It's not like i'm doing any classical physics math either. But chipping away at the planetary nucleus model i still keep in my mind... it's fun.

Originally for me this is about chemistry, organic chemistry is super fun to think about, and it has super neat diagrams. You know what has even wilder diagrams? Quantum chemistry. So then i get to learn about orbitals and rotational symmetry and shit. Hell yeas!

Anyway, without the math it's mostly beyond me. Very surface level, this. But still, the kind of questions you can ask once you get some models and some vocab...

What IS a field? Why is mass "downstream" of the hamiltonian? How, the fuck, can it be that "lepton flavor is not conserved"?

Wikipedia links

Some noteworthy pages, i guess.

Conceptual stuff:

• List of fractals by Hausdorff dimension
• Equidistributed sequence
• Pickover stalk mandelbrot artifacts

Concrete things, that are physical:

• PoweredUSB 144W? and LOOK at these connectors
• AM404 it might be that paracetamol works through the cannabinoid system?
• Akosombo dam aka Volta dam. The "impacts" section is interesting.
• Acoustic mirror

Society and its animals:

• Mitrochondrial Eve
• Cognitive dimensions of notations
• The staff ate it later about not wasting food on TV
• Psychological inertia will stay in motion etc
• Subaltern (postcolonialism)
• Graveyard spiral interesting phenomenon in aviation where your senses trick you into crashing your plane
• Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

Space:

• List of gravitationally rounded objects of the solar system
• 2009 satellite collission
• Hypervelocity "Thus, metals and fluids behave alike under hypervelocity impact"

Persons:

• Corc Herbert Volker Bus
• Nausicaa

...and finally, one for the swedes:

• Svenska ortnamnsefterled!!!