Minutiae 01

I often find myself in conversation about topics I don't fully understand. Almost always, a few weeks later, I look back and say wow! What are the odds? If I had just had that conversation now, I would have been far more up to speed!

It's more likely that after the conversation I semi-consciously sought out knowledge to fill in the gaps. Which means I should be having more conversations where I'm out of my depth.

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I really wish 500 days of summer was a good movie. I won't say it was all bad. It moved quickly, and namedropped a bunch of shit I like--which perfectly mirrors how its main character fell for the titular Summer. Maybe in that narrow, meta-fictional respect, it is decent.

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The first time I met Gavin he was sitting with his friends in the garden during lunch
And I was sitting with my friends
We were eating lunch out there because the cafeteria was real busy
And anyone with a brain would eat on the stone mosaic tiled benches in the garden
One of the school guards was this big guy, usually he just stood around
But he would give us shite about eating lunch where we weren't supposed to
This time he must have really had it out for us because he started lumbering downhill
I tried to hide my sandwich but he was really picking up speed down that hill
When me and Gavin got caught and sent to Mr. Odell we couldn't stop laughing
About how we misjudged that guard's momentum
I think about that sometimes

I haven't talked to Gavin in a decade but I saw him on my phone
And he's dating the actress I really had a crush on last year
I wanted to show someone but I didn't think they'd really understand
I think I told Lisa but that made it worse
After all it is just celebrity gossip and I really shouldn't waste my time with that garbage
But lying in the backseat of my car I thought about it

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Links

The Persona Selection Model
Anthropic mainstreams Janus. Papers like The Artificial Self are just the beginning of research drawing on the simulator paradigm, I hope.

Next-Token Predictor Is An AI's Job, Not Its Species
"You don't have to think about sex to do math" maybe you don't, Scott

Wild Things (1998)
Richard Rohr describes lust as an "excessive appetite for control over one's environment." I wasn't sure how to square this with the more common sexual definition until I saw Wild Things.

Introduction to Wittgenstein (His Later Philosophy)
A very good youtuber talks about the challenges of seeing.