Blog — Intentions

Everyday things

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The modern version of the sunk cost fallacy: States universally demonstrate that they are incapable of fulfilling their purpose, yet rather than considering their dissolution, people choose to strengthen them. War, corruption, and inflation are considered detestable, and governments everywhere are judged useless, yet people are incapable of conceiving of a life without their severe and stupid interference.

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It is sad that Elon Musk and company insist on such a mentally inefficient hypothesis as the one claiming we live in a simulation. The Cartesian evil demon is as philosophically ancient as it is boring and superfluous. Ex falso quodlibet.

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Using the category “far right” to designate a political position in Ancient Greece is equivalent to using the term “State” to refer to the form of political organization of the Greek polis, though curiously only the former is cause for scandal.

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It is a known fact that the most favorable conditions for studying Alan Turing on a Sunday morning involve using the treadmill at the gym with a Daria Kolosova set blasting at full volume through your headphones and two guys on the verge of passing out doing deadlifts in front of you.

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After seven continuous hours of trying, with a severe existential crisis along the way, I managed to solve a problem with just a few lines of code. Nothing in my life had ever made me feel so miserably stupid as Python.

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Turning 28, “Disco eterno” by Soda Stereo plays. An urgent need to be productive consumes me; messages and memories of family and friends cause in me, for the first time in my life, a slight nostalgia; the age I am has become, for some time now, diffuse and mildly worrying. Miseries besiege us from all corners of the world, and perhaps symptomatically the reflection I most unconsciously turn to these days is this one by Stefan Zweig:

“People believed as little in the possibility of barbaric relapses, such as wars between the nations of Europe, as in witches and ghosts; our fathers were thoroughly imbued with confidence in the infallibly binding power of tolerance and conciliation. They honestly believed that the borders of divergence between nations and creeds would gradually melt into a common humanity, and that mankind would thus achieve peace and security, those supreme goods. For us today, who have long since struck the word ‘security’ from our vocabulary as a phantom, it is easy to laugh at the optimistic illusion of that generation, blinded by idealism, for whom technical progress necessarily entailed an equally swift moral progress. We, who in the new century have learned not to be surprised at any new outbreak of collective bestiality; we, who each day expected an atrocity worse than the day before, are considerably more skeptical about the possibility of morally educating mankind. We had to concede that Freud was right when he saw in our culture and civilization merely a thin veneer that at any moment could be pierced by the destructive forces of the underworld; we have had to accustom ourselves little by little to living without ground beneath our feet, without rights, without freedom, without security. To safeguard our own existence, we long ago renounced the religion of our fathers, their faith in a swift and lasting progress of humanity; to us who learned with horror, that precipitous optimism seems trivial in the face of a catastrophe that, in a single blow, set us back a thousand years of human effort.”

September 11 marks the occurrence of an atrocious event and of my birthday. I always strive to make my own the Spinozan maxim: “neither to laugh, nor to weep, nor to detest, but to understand.” Withdrawn in the peace of these deserts, I get by with tranquility and good temper, though that does not keep me from worrying that one of these days this world of wretches might trample me underfoot.

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My wife’s mind is inscrutable. Since I have known her, there has not been a single time when she has let me know that I have food stuck between my teeth. She does not tell me when we eat at home, when we eat out, when we eat alone, or when we eat with company. Discovering it has become an established ritual for me. I look in the bathroom mirror, and shame washes over me when I realize that I have spent the last hour making everyone uncomfortable with a piece of bread stuck to my canine. I leave the bathroom and make a beeline for her. I confront her, and she looks at me in confusion, saying it is no big deal. I try to calm down and let it go. When we get home, I reproach her once more and ask her—for the love of God!—to tell me next time. She stares at me in bewilderment, as though trying to dispel her suspicion that I suffer from some mental disorder difficult to identify. She promises she will, though deep down we both know she will not. Both of us dissatisfied, we go to bed, and before falling asleep I ponder the fine line between personality and madness.

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I have discovered a truly marvelous deep learning architecture that surpasses the transformer, which this margin is too narrow to contain.