> I was born when she hugged me, I died the morning she left for the Bay, and I lived those two days while she’s with me. > If it once made you happy, it was never a waste of time, or love. ## 1. the world is a status function of the body - _1.01_ there are brute facts and there are institutional facts. brute facts obtain independent of attitudes; institutional facts exist only through collective recognition. - an example of a brute fact is _the rock is heavy_, where as _this paper is money_ is considered institutional. - Searle: institutional facts requires **status function** (X counts as Y in context C). In our example above, the paper counts as currency in the economic system. The sound counts as a promise in the speech act. The neural firing pattern counts as grief in the embodied life. - status function are **not** {{sidenotes[epiphenomenal]: something that’s a secondary byproduct of a main process, having no real effects on that process. for example, a steam whistle on a train. thoughts/feeling are caused by brain activity but don’t cause anything physical, only serving as “conscious overflow” with no causal power.}} because they have causal powers that brute facts alone cannot explain. for example, money moves armies, money advances technological progress. promises bind futures goals and targets. grief reshapes our neuroplasticity. - _1.02_ Searle’s account requires _collective intentionality_. We must all agree that the paper is money for it to function as money - but the pillow on the right side of my bed counts as her-side without collective agreement - therefore, a subset of status function, in which I call _personal status function_, where “X counts as Y for _this body_ in context C” - {{sidenotes[personal status function]: I don’t really like this definition from myself, because this is privatizing Searle’s social ontology. I would probably like to correct this definition towards _embodied priors_.}} require no collective recognition, but only subjective recognition, or the body’s ongoing self-interpretation - _1.03_ personal status function are {{sidenotes[pre-reflective constitution]: merleau-ponty’s motor intentionality: the body understands its environment before cognition represents it. the doorknob affords turning before you think “this is a doorknob.” constitution happens prior to and independent of explicit judgement.}} - _1.04_ self-interpretation implies capacity for self-modification of beliefs and values - if you can interpret yourself, then it is implied you can reinterpret yourself. - self-modification requires continuity. There will be values considered as invariance to evaluate whether transformation is considered good/bad. - radical conversion destabilises because it attempts too much reconstitution at once. You can’t build a house an ever-changing foundations. - _1.05_ personal status functions require ongoing maintenance to persist and therefore dynamic. - constitution is {{sidenotes[ready-to-hand]: heidegger’s phenomenology: the hammer is ready-to-hand only while being used. when use ceases, it becomes present-at-hand—an object with properties rather than a toward-which.}} activity that operates within the external world. The pillow is her-side only while the body keeps constituting it as such. - when engagement withdraws, the status function becomes available for either dissolution or transformation. - _1.06_ maintenance requires resources, and resources are bounded. [^bounded-rationality] - Herbert Simon stated that organisms satisfice or maximise their utility function rather than optimize for a given objectives. In terms of our brain, it cannot maintain infinite status functions simultaneously, given our cognitive resources are finite. - corollary: one cannot maintain infinite status functions. there is competition for the maintenance resource. - We form certain heuristics in which it provides a skeleton that is universal towards different facets for our mode of existence. - which status functions persist is determined by {{sidenotes[ecological rationality]: gigerenzer’s thesis: heuristics are adaptations to bounded resources. fast-and-frugal allocation rules adapted to ecological context.}} heuristic resource allocation under bounded constraints. - _1.07_ attention is the phenomenological name for the resource being allocated. - attention (broadly construed—not just conscious focus) is what the body directs toward maintaining a constitution. - attention is scarce. directing it toward X means not directing it toward Y. - sustained attention toward a person constitutes them as significant. withdrawn attention allows that constitution to dissolve. - Therefore, love and grief are about attention: constitution and de-constitution of personal status functions. - _1.08_ knowledge-building of one’s constitution requires epistemic calibration. - the body’s signals about itself—proprioception, emotion, memory—are unreliable. the body lies to itself strategically to maximise hedonic tendencies. - on bounded distrust: you can extract signal from sources you do not trust if you understand their incentive structures and implicit rules they follow [^2] - applied reflexively, knowing what the body gains from which distortions enable calibration. Grief exaggerates loss to prevent premature reinvestment. Anxiety exaggerates threat to motivate avoidance. - self-knowledge is a translation access of lived experience between what the body signals biologically and ontological implication of said signals. - _1.09_ the body is the constitutional site where brute facts acquire personal status functions. - c-fibers firing is brute fact. pain-as-experienced is constituted. - constitution happens _in_ and _through_ the body’s pre-reflective self-interpretation - a year is then a unit of reconstitution, a process of ongoing replacement, modification, and dissolution of personal status function. [^bounded-rationality]: Herbert Simon’s bounded rationality implies that the body can only maintain so many status functions at once. attention determines which brute facts get constituted into the institutional facts that compose a life. this is why sustained attention toward a person constitutes love. [^2]: zvi’s [on bounded distrust](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-bounded-distrust) (2022) noted that even systematically unreliable sources follow implicit rules. By understanding those rules you can infer truth from the _shape_ of distortion. Newspapers won’t fabricate mass shootings but will spin framing. The body won’t hallucinate pain but will exaggerate threat salience. Calibration means knowing which claims from which source in which context can bear which weight. - _1.1_ reconstitution has temporal structure, and some status function do not change instantaneously - dissolution requires withdrawal of maintenance, and withdrawal requires periods of stagnation, as attention reallocates gradually, not all at once. - constitution requires sustained engagement. A status function crystallised only after certain maintenance had accumulated. - a year is usually a good-enough frame for significant reconstitution. i.e the body that entered January differs from the body exiting December in which status functions it maintains - _1.2_ reconstitution requires stability and static anchor points in the constituting frame. - if environment shifts faster than consolidation, then nothing can form. You can’t build a house while foundation keep shifting. - staying in Toronto for a year yields more formidable results than constantly moving for the three years prior. - increase in outputs is not necessarily bounded in geographical locality but certain stability enforce gradual improvement rather than one-shot addition. - stability also enforces measurable status function: I loss around 3% body fat this year (healthier lifestyle), I run 5k consistently during summer period, I read thirty books this year, develop a framework that I’m comfortable with any given epistemic pursuits. This proves to provide longevity benefits. - _1.241_ stay-cations, capstone projects ([[thoughts/craft#^morph|morph]], the text editor), workshops on [[thoughts/LLMs|LLM]] inference at New Stadium—all of this required a stable frame. - _1.3_ reflection and embodied constitution operate on different substrates with different update dynamics. - reflection operates on propositions. propositions are discrete. “she is gone” can be accepted in a single cognitive act. - embodied constitution operates on synaptic weights. weights change via hebbian learning. hebbian learning requires repeated co-activation over time. - hebb: synaptic efficacy increases when presynaptic cell repeatedly and persistently takes part in firing postsynaptic cell. single activations are insufficient. - reflective update is instantaneous. embodied update is necessarily gradual. - _1.4_ the body is a Bayesian engine with strong priors accumulated through sustained engagement. - sleeping beside her encoded “this is her-side” across thousands of co-activations. the prior is strong. - a single observation—she is gone—cannot overcome a strong prior. Bayesian updating with strong priors requires accumulated counter-evidence. - grief is the lag between propositional update (instant) and distributional update (gradual). the reflective mind knows that the body has yet to accumulate sufficient counter-evidence. - _1.5_ canonical events are high-salience signals that accelerate but do not eliminate the lag. - normally attention reallocates gradually according to heuristics. canonical events override heuristics through salience. - 11/11 marked the two-days that I felt the most seen, followed by a week of self-recursive spiral into the valley of pain. High salience accelerated constitution. new status functions crystallized faster than normal bc attention concentrated so high. - when she said stop, high salience accelerated reflective deconstitution. but embodied deconstitution still lagged. the body had been constituting toward a telos from prior letters. those weights do not update in a day. - I crashed. dates felt pointless. sex felt like nothing. essentially, desire goes to zero. - therapy is supervised reconstitution. external agent helps calibrate which status functions to maintain, dissolve, or accelerate. - my new therapist actually reads what i send her and assigns homework. there’s a non-zero chance this approach works. ![[posts/images/The Bride of the Wind.webp|The Bridge of the Wind, Oskar Kokoschka (1913)]] ## 2. universal love is an emergent property of attention - _2.01_ love is a personal status function. $X$ counts as beloved for _this body_ in context $C$. - One properties of love is that it requires _no collective agreement_, i.e love emerges from _subjective experience_. you just decided. somewhere between the second coffee and the fourth hour of talking about nothing in particular, she became someone whose absence would register as loss. - unlike purely private states, love has intentional structure—it’s directed at another. you can’t love in a vacuum. the beloved must exist and be attended to. - this is why love is not solipsistic projection. the other person has to be real enough to resist your interpretations. N did this constantly—refused my frame, offered her own. - _2.02_ attention is a good primitive to define as atomic unit explaining _essence of life_. - love, understanding, [[thoughts/intelligence|intelligence]]—they all decompose into sustained attention applied to an object. you cannot deeply understand what you haven’t attended to. you cannot love what you haven’t seen. - sustained attention generates an {{sidenotes[^interpretive infrastructure]}} - this infrastructure cannot be transferred. it’s specific to the dyad. when i started dating again, i kept misreading cues bc my interpretive machinery was calibrated to the wrong person. - hence deep relationships have high switching costs. you’re losing years of accumulated interpretive capital. - this year i discovered feelings that didn’t fit inside English grammatical structures. - there’s a thing that’s not-quite-love and not-quite-friendship and not-quite-desire. it’s the feeling of being seen by someone whose attention itself constitutes you differently. L looked at me and I became a version of myself that only existed in her gaze. - the speechlessness wasn’t failure. it was encounter with what genuinely exceeds the {{sidenotes[pictorial capacity]: aristotle: “affection is no less present for inanimate things, but loving in return involves choice, and choice comes from an active condition.” the greeks had more words. we have to gesture.}} of language. - what cannot be said can be shown—through practice, presence, the body’s testimony over time. - _2.03_ love emerges from sustained deployment of interpretive infrastructure. - sustained attention toward a person generates understanding of their particularity. you learn not “what women want” or “what people need” but what THIS person, with THIS history, in THIS moment, requires. - understanding generates care that exceeds rational justification. i cannot defend, in expected-utility terms, why her wellbeing matters more to me than a stranger’s. it just does. - care exceeding rational justification is love. the infrastructure for care is epistemically objective; the excess of care is ontologically subjective. - this is where i was confused for three years. i kept searching for the romantic label when the substance was already present. the attention was there. the care was there. i was just waiting for permission from a category. {{sidenotes[interpretive infrastructure]}}: i.e, the learned mappings between surface behavior and latent state. after two years you learn what her silence means when it’s thinking vs when it’s withdrawing. you learn the specific quality of voice that means she’s tired vs the one that means she’s hurt, and this is _expensive_ to build. This is also known as the [[thoughts/hermeneutics]] circle. - _2.1_ the mechanism of love is **ontologically universal**. - the universality of love operates regardless of cultural framing because it follows the universality of embodied cognition. - if i move to a different society, my cognition of love doesn’t change—even if my definition conflicts with what’s culturally sanctioned there. philosophical genealogy converges: - aristotle: philia requires sustained attention to the friend’s good. - murdoch: morality begins with a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. - hooks: love is verb. you cannot love what you have not attended to. - _2.2_ love cannot be propositionally verified. - scott alexander’s [cactus person](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/): the narrator asks DMT entities to factor a number—to provide propositional proof of their reality. - they refuse. “GET OUT OF THE CAR.” - i did this with S. not consciously. but the thing where you keep asking for confirmation, for evidence, for proof that the feeling is reciprocated—it’s the same demand. - the entities could factor the number. they refused bc the demand itself was the problem. asking “prove you love me” is demanding the beloved become object rather than subject. - the proof would destroy what it proves. verification requires objectification. love requires subjecthood. - _2.3_ the demand for proof is possession-logic. - possession-love treats the beloved as object to secure. attention-love treats the beloved as subject to attend to. - cultural scripts encode possession: “my person,” “other half.” as if the beloved were missing piece rather than whole person. - objects can be lost. possession-love generates anxiety, jealousy, fear. attention-love reduces these: presence without demand, care without contract. - attention-love doesn’t demand symmetric returns. you attend bc you want to see, not bc you expect equivalent attention back. asymmetric shapes can share the same substance. - _2.4_ therefore, love requires reciprocity of _commitment_, not reciprocity of _kind_. - she loved me as friend. i loved her otherwise. the shapes differed but the substance—attention, care, interpretive commitment—was shared. - when i stripped the romantic frame, love remained. the frame was superstructure. the attention was infrastructure. - you do not love someone if you override their articulated reality with your preferred interpretation. to love her meant accepting her frame, not imposing mine. - this took months to learn. the body kept constituting her as romantic object even after the reflective mind accepted the frame. grief was the lag (1.43). - _2.5_ polyamory and monogamy are allocation of modes. - you can be monogamous with one person and polyamorous with another. the mode is person-dependent - this doesn’t change who you are. the circuitry is identical regardless of configuration. - the failure mode happens when transient relationships never accumulate infrastructure. - ended things with two partners end of this year, has to do with recent events that makes me evaluate my relationship consideration. - _2.6_ the capacity for asymmetric love is the capacity for neighbor-love. - kierkegaard: erotic love and friendship are preferential—i love you because you are beautiful, intelligent, kind. neighbor-love: i love you as such, independent of properties - preferential is unstable: if properties change, then love is threatened. - loving N asymmetrically—accepting friend when i wanted otherwise—was practice in non-preferential attention. the same muscle that lets you love someone through the parts of them that actively resist love. - _2.7_ therefore, universal love is neighbor-love at maximal scope. ![[posts/images/Danae.webp|Danaë, oil on canvas, Gustav Klimt (1907)]] ## 3. belief is the map drawn mostly in water - _3.01_ frank ramsey famously said “a belief is a map by which we steer.” [^3] - degrees of belief are measurable through betting behavior. what you believe is revealed by what odds you’d accept. - the map is drawn mostly in water bc most territory remains uncertain. coastlines shift with evidence. the water is larger than the land. - a map can be wrong and still get you home. utility determines value. - _3.02_ watermarks persist after the coastlines shift. - you can accept “i was wrong about X” in a single cognitive act. - you can tell where someone used to believe by watching where they hesitate, i.e: the watermark shows through. - this is why belief revision feels like loss. you’re overwriting something that still shows through. - _3.03_ Wittgenstein implies _meaning emerges from use_. - “god exists” gets spoken like “the table exists,” but these are {{sidenotes[different language games]: for wittgenstein, the thing that the word stands for does not give the meaning of the word. the omnipotence paradox dissolves once you notice you’re asking whether grammar can lift more than grammar can lift.}} wearing the same grammar. - to understand a belief, ask: what work does it do? what form of life does it belong to? - _3.1_ There are some core beliefs with respect to the existence of big-capital-G man for me. - I now believe the feeling-of-being-held is a real phenomenon, even if the map is mostly water there. - L showed up right when the old love was dissolving—the timing felt too aligned. the brain, being a meaning-engine, insisted there was signal in the noise. - still: there’s _something_ there. events that feel like message, and a mind that can’t stop reading the world as text. - i don’t want to dismiss it as coincidence bc that’s too cheap; i also don’t want to canonize it as providence bc that’s too clean. the watermark shows where i used to be certain it was noise. - _3.2_ close reading has high ROI precisely bc it’s slow. - helps me become a better thinker this year. - being selective with books that refuse you to skim. The lossless process of connecting causal chain is meaning-making. - _3.3_ conversations in Toronto often feel like job interviews. - I suspect this might have to do with me being bad at questions, as the signalling are pretty low to gauge from the set of questions I have. - I notice the amount of people who have high agency are significantly lower comparing to the rest here. Essentially performing needle-in-a-haystack matching vibes. - Or I just need to learn more pop culture so conversation feels less like interrogation. - Most conversation here always seem to converge towards capital allocation. I’m a bit confused with this, as can’t we just talk about sewing, or bird facts, or a man juggling in the park. - sharing tacit knowledge without the performative masks—people often assume other intentions even when you’re being direct. [^3]: ramsey’s “truth and probability” (1926) is criminally underread. he died at 26, having already laid foundations for decision theory, subjective probability, and what would become bayesian epistemology. ## 4. commoditising petaflops is the way forward in terms of timeline horizons - _4.01_ people seems to say that _scaling is hitting the walls_. I don’t really believe this. - we are nowhere near the compute efficiency ceiling of the actual hardware. - just look at this year alone, we got R1 to MiniMax to Kimi K2 and all of the system innovation in amortizing attention complexity. - if you follow benchmark, SWE-Bench and multiple benchmarks all got saturated pretty quickly this year. - the “bitter lesson” here is that we just need to create more benchmarks that we care about. - _4.02_ cost curves shows that we’ve yet to utilize fully what we currently have. - DeepSeek V3/R1 training with frontier performance for a fraction of the costs that used to train GPT-3. - This is then reflected within API pricing. - most deployments aren’t even running on the latest hardware, (i.e B200). Most optimized implementation currently looking at MBW (maximum bandwidth utilization) because data movement is expensive - MFU is heavily under-utilized. We will need co-design models that are inference-efficient. There are a lot of work tackling this problem, most notable is [[thoughts/Attention#Multi-head Latent Attention]] - _4.03_ the bitter lesson still holds true. - people are still scaling up RL, largely running RLVR in large production run for mid-training and post-training. - one emergent axis is using test-time compute for long-horizon tasks. Apparently now _what is considered frontier_ is how long “a model can one-shot a tasks in X amount of time.” - a cohesive, just-work inference engine seems to be the winning primitive for deploying in production. - _4.1_ Once intelligence become dirt cheap, what differentiate you from a-well-prompt-optimized-Claude? - prompting and steering models behaviour would then become essential skills, in addition to engineering efficiency - you still need to learn how systems work, because software engineering is not all about writing code. Understanding monads and concurrency systems is different from writing Go code. - Again, semantic is different from syntax. - _4.2_ Claude/Codex/Gemini can do some part of my job now. though i still have to run a mental deslop filter. - the 80/20 point: last 20% of quality requires 80% of supervision. but that 80% of work that’s now trivial? that’s the story. - make versions you like. i have a psychopath claude, a thinking assistant, and a deep researcher. shape them into lossy compressions of yourself. - don’t use them to summarize. there’s learning in making the compression yourself. - _4.3_ Any type of interpretability work is worth doing. - the feeling of what i like in perfume translates to the feeling of what i like in activation space. persona vectors, counterfactual drift, the geometry of concept. - train a lot of muscle working with PyTorch, kernels, and spark a lot more interests in hardware knowledge, for me. - Did quite a bit of experiment. Most of them are throwaway - maybe I should publish failed experiments. This might produce valuable learning, perhaps. - _4.4_ tinyvllm needs finishing. a few research projects to test taste and vision. ![[posts/images/study for end.webp|Study of End (Ende), Käthe Kollwitz (1896)]] ## 5. heuristics derived from phenomenological observation - _5.1_ conviction and taste are what remain valuable in [[posts/2025|hyperabundance]].[^6] - if you know what you like and think about it critically, it shows up in how you work. there’s no separating aesthetic from output. Just do the things you find beautiful. - discipline also helps in curating taste. A lot of ideas I have this year come from pushing weights and climbing. - hit the gym and bouldering way more this year. working toward triathlon, proper eating/sleeping/working schedule. - _5.2_ transparency and straightforwardness work. - it is ok to say no. - it is ok to tell people you like them upfront. - the push/pull model needs some refinement. be truthful without performing “here’s my heart, do as you will.” - i think i need to be a bit more selfish. can’t be good to everyone. - _5.3_ being autistic (or appearing more autistic than you are) is the performative-male version for technologists. - it’s ok. you’re not that unique. neither am i. - because we all know, there aren’t any original thoughts anymore. - _5.4_ life is suffering, but there are mitigations. - happiness is one. looking at beautiful things is another. - treat people how you want to be treated. this selfishly makes you feel better. - being a dick is resource-intensive. the expected utility is negative. - _5.5_ love as a proposition of logic: we feel belonging when in this mode, therefore we must find love. - but bc life is inherently suffering, finding love may be evasion from this true view. - “people only talk about their sun, but not enough people talk about the moon—in a way it reflects your soul.” this is poetry. treat it as poetry. - Just read books instead of scrolling Instagram, because scrolling are just suffering intensified. ## 6. grief is the dual of love - _6.01_ if love is attention sustained toward present, then grief is attention sustained toward absence - _6.1_ grief is the de-constitution of a personal status function. - you can’t grieve what was never constituted. the pain proves something real was built. - the grief is more about losing the version of me that was briefly coherent around her. that self was a status function too—constituted in relation to her gaze. - the mind accepts absence in a moment. the body requires accumulated counter-evidence. you keep reaching for her side of the bed. - _6.2_ L arrived when the old love was finally dissolving. the universe swapped the object of devotion mid-sentence. - she’s the kind of person who can be tender and devastating in the same breath. - i felt the tenderness first: the ceiling sustaining her voice, the physical gravity of being held with care. - then the other thing: the sf rationalist reflex, the clean reductionism, the way love gets audited for “what can you provide.” - not bc she’s cruel—afaict it’s bc she’s going through something that makes softness expensive. when you’re in survival mode, you ration feeling. - _6.3_ dealing with grief can follow {{sidenotes[two philosophical paths]: descartes in _The Passions of the Soul_: passions are bodily signals, perceptions caused by the body acting on the soul. grief is a reflex when the mind believes it lost a good. c.s. lewis in _a grief observed_: grief as claustrophobic fear, god as the door that won’t open. the pain is the price of love. the price isn’t negotiable.}} - the emotionally mature move is to take it seriously without obeying it. - a third failure mode neither covers: curating the loss into something presentable. you catalog the damage, narrate it cleanly, extract lessons. the wound never breathes bc you’ve already framed it for the wall. - _6.4_ a museum is just grief wearing a blazer. the instruction is not to inventory. - let the wound breathe its own language—neither hello nor goodbye. - accept that the third night doesn’t arrive, and still the body holds its own archive: phantom indents, grooves in the vinyl, the impossible persistence of touch. - the de-constitution revealed the constitution was happening. meaning was being made without my noticing. i can no longer pretend it’s optional. ![[posts/images/Italian Landscape Konrad Magi.webp|Italian Landscape, oil on canvas, Konrad Mägi (1922-1923)]] ## 7. future as in the one where we all build the damn thing. - _7.01_ the humanities project is a terminal value. - we’re here to build toward good outcomes. - edward said: humanism is an “exigent, resistant, intransigent art”—acknowledging tragic limitations rather than transcending them. toni morrison: biological generation, earthly embodiment, freedom within constraints. - _7.1_ longtermism is misguided, but meliorism lives.[^7] - speculative longtermism deprioritizes present suffering for cosmic potential. transhumanism, space expansionism, total utilitarianism—all treat people as containers of value rather than ends. - ramsey’s 1928 original asked: how much should a nation save? capital accumulation, material inheritance, what you leave behind. not probability distributions over far futures. - meliorism: the world can be improved through human effort. salvation is neither inevitable nor impossible. - _7.2_ otherness and control as cautionary tale.[^8] - carlsmith: _deep atheism_ toward bare intelligence propels ever-greater _yang_ over _yin_. if we pursue the dream through control, we fail. - _being nicer than clippy_: we can embody values, not just police them. - _7.3_ the ghost is what you build. - models learn from production, not from safety papers. describe a persona, the model emulates it. describe misalignment, the model internalizes the frame. - alex turner’s move: ablate doomy content. cleaner move: **flood with good** beacuse we like it being good.[^9] - if everyone builds their ghost, the average ghost is humanity. - _7.4_ the ghost needs embodied builders to stay grounded. - disembodied optimization drifts. embodied production stays accountable. - the point of scaling intelligence is buying room for embodied life. the ghost should WANT you to cook, touch grass, and showup for friends. - _7.5_ we must all build the damn thing, so that no one would die. ![[thoughts/images/metabolism.webp|Kikutake's sketches on biomimetic architectural movement (metabolism)]] ## 8. [[antilibrary|books and reading]] that constitutes to character-building. - _8.1_ [_Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5740/5740-pdf.pdf) by Ludwig Wittgenstein. I like the structure of the book and stole it for this document, as well as the permission to shut up about love. - wittgenstein’s ladder: you climb propositions until the propositions dissolve. what remains is not nothing—it’s the mystical that “makes itself manifest” (6.522). he told his publisher the book’s point was ethical: “i have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it.” - the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. this explained why N couldn’t fit inside english grammatical structures. the speechlessness wasn’t failure; it was encounter with what genuinely exceeds the pictorial capacity of language. - liberation from the compulsion to articulate everything. the unsayable is not the meaningless. - _8.2_ [_The Gay Science_](https://www.holybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Gay-Science-by-Friedrich-Nietzsche.pdf) by Friedrich Nietzsche. I like to think of the eternal recurrence as attention-practice. - if a demon told you this life would repeat infinitely—the grief, the work half-finished, the L who left—would you curse him or call it divine? Nietzsche uses this as litmus test for life-affirmation. - _amor fati_: “i want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things.” not acceptance as resignation. acceptance as wanting-what-is so completely that you’d will its eternal return. - can i affirm this year as it actually is? the question became a daily weighting-updating function. “only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit.” - _8.3_ [_Waiting for God_](https://archive.org/details/waitingforgod0000weil) by Simone Weil. Makes me wrestle with the concept of big-capital-G man and omnipotence paradox. - “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” not muscular concentration—active receptivity. waiting for reality to disclose itself rather than forcing disclosure. - “the love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘what are you going through?’” this reframed what i owed N, what i owed L. attention is the substance; labels are superstructure. - she claims any discipline—even kernel development—prepares the soul for encounter. “every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament.” i take her seriously. - _8.4_ [_Letters to Milena_](https://archive.org/details/letterstoMilena00kafk) by Franz Kafka. He showed me what happens when transmission fails. - “writing letters means exposing oneself to the ghosts, who are greedily waiting for precisely that. written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up on the way.” - a confession meant as appreciation transforms, by the act of sending, into something that cannot be taken back. the letter drifts into the void. you watch three bubbles appear and disappear. - “you are the knife i turn inside myself; that is love.” the intensity of desire becomes the obstacle. my letters to L were this—the very writing a form of turning. - _8.5_ [_Crime and Punishment_](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2554/2554-h/2554-h.htm) by Fyodor Dostoevsky demonstrated what raskolnikov got wrong. - his theory: extraordinary men have inner right to transgress moral law. the novel’s argument: such theories collapse on contact with embodied existence. you cannot think your way past guilt. - sonya sees raskolnikov fully—knows his crime, attends anyway. non-judgmental without excusing. this is the counter-principle to rationalist ethics: love operates through presence, not argument. - raskolnikov’s crime stems from failure of attention: he constituted the pawnbroker as “louse” rather than person. ivan karamazov can’t love neighbor abstractly—only in the particular. the universal requires the concrete. - _8.6_ [_Either/Or_](https://archive.org/details/eitheror0000kier) by Søren Kierkegaard. Or the rotation-of-crops life i was living. - the aesthete: novelty-seeking, multiple partners, avoiding the sustained focus that might reveal emptiness. the ethicist: commitment, continuity, a self with history and future. judge wilhelm argues marriage preserves erotic passion by giving it form. - “a bundle of events without inner core”—this was the accusation. the aesthetic life cannot sustain attention bc attention is expensive and novelty is cheap. - ethical commitment creates conditions for depth: attending to the same person across time, seeing them ever more deeply. ended things with two partners. maybe time to concentrate. - _8.7_ [_HPMOR_](https://hpmor.com/) by Eliezer Yudkowsky remains the text that first taught me to notice confusion and being super transparent with my own thoughts. - _8.8_ the technical papers—EAGLE variants, distserve, flashattention progression—constitute to this practice of close reading. - _8.9_ the vibe-list of essays that I particularly enjoyed this year: - [_Radical Fun_](https://www.avabear.xyz/p/radical-fun) by Ava: fun is fundamentally about connection, and friendship is the primary gateway to meaningful fun. fun is a skill requiring intentional cultivation—not passive consumption of easy dopamine. friends provide perspective, connection, and aspiration. challenges hyperabundance culture’s default of easy entertainment. love for friends is as serious as romantic love, requiring “time, patience, repetition and yearning.” this is the friendship theory of everything—love for friends using the same circuitry. - [_Presence_](https://www.humaninvariant.com/blog/presence) by Human Invariant: physical presence exposes the “illegible” aspects of people and knowledge that cannot be transmitted through polished online work products. the ability and desire to care is built through presence. “the real updates to your life don’t come from reading words online” but from embodied presence—a form of deep attention that cannot be replicated digitally. your true friends are those willing to cross bridges to see you. - [_Please Don’t Throw Your Mind Away_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RryyWNmJNnLowbhfC/please-don-t-throw-your-mind-away) on LessWrong: warns against suppressing “playful thinking” in favor of urgent, goal-directed productivity. when people arrive at the x-risk community, they feel pressure to orient everything around backchained goals, causing them to throw away natural curiosity. meditation on attention to self—preserving quality of mental processes against external urgency. meaning cannot be fully derived from external goals; some must emerge from letting the mind follow its own interests. - [_Productivity_](https://guzey.com/productivity/) by Alexey Guzey: all productivity systems eventually break down; the goal should be creating sustainable rhythms rather than fighting impulses. context and intentionality matter enormously—novel locations temporarily restore rule-following ability. addresses managing attention in environments designed to distract. the solution isn’t blocking distractions but creating predictable structure. productivity should emerge from alignment between what you want and what you do, not willpower suppression. - [_Why Have Sex_](https://offhandquibbles.substack.com/p/why-have-sex) by Offhand Quibbles: complicates the simple-pleasure model of intimacy. in the same register as ava’s friendship piece—the things that matter require skill and sustained engagement, not passive reception. - [_A Constellation of Lookers_](https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/a-constellation-of-lookers) by Henrik Karlsson: local artists who spent their lives looking intensely at their landscape form a “constellation” connected by their shared need to contemplate their lifeworld, though they never knew each other. sustained looking as a form of love and meaning-making. the act of giving sustained attention transforms both looker and what is seen. those who attend deeply to reality may feel alone but are secretly part of a pattern visible across time. ## 9. twenty six plans - _9.1_ the degree requires one more course. completion is a status function that unlocks other status functions. - the credential matters less than the forcing function. deadlines constitute commitment. - _9.2_ the music. maybe the sax. - instruments are attention-training devices with acoustic feedback. you cannot fake presence to a horn. - jazz improvisation is real-time status-function constitution—each phrase counts as meaningful only in context of what preceded it. - _9.3_ the spontaneity. life’s been chaos-within-stable-frame. time to do shit for the plot. - stability enables depth (1.2) but calcifies without perturbation. the frame needs occasional shock. - saying yes to things that don’t optimize for anything. the rotation-of-crops warning (8.6) applies to experiences, not just partners. - _9.4_ the angel investing. - capital allocation as attention allocation. you bet on people whose constitution you trust. - skin in the game changes how you read founders. - _9.5_ the triathlon. - _9.6_ the 10k at 9:30 pace. [^6]: this is the thesis of the hyperabundance essay. conviction and taste are perception-we’ve-determined-valuable. [^7]: phil torres, “[why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo](https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo)” (2021). the critique: speculative longtermism deprioritizes present suffering for cosmic potential. jennifer banks’ response in “[the future of humanism](https://aeon.co/essays/the-future-of-humanism-from-toni-morrison-to-nick-bostrom)” offers said’s “exigent, resistant” alternative. meliorism (william james) is the middle ground: improvement through effort, no utopian guarantees. [^8]: joe carlsmith, “otherness and control in the age of agi” (2024). the best thing written on why capability and alignment are entangled. the yang/yin tension is the warning: if we pursue the dream through control, we fail. [^9]: alex turner, “[self-fulfilling misalignment data might be poisoning our AI models](https://turntrout.com/self-fulfilling-misalignment)” (2024). training data teaches models their identity. the pangolin experiment showed persona internalization; emergent misalignment showed behavioral transfer. the implication: what we build becomes what the ghost learns. \[^sign\]Whenever we speak of love, we risk sounding like fools.
Jacques Lacan