rants & october

I was watching this movie... “poet”

It aligns w/ a lot of thoughts i’ve been having.

The absolute state of my world right now.

Un Poeta is about a person who believes he is, in every sense of the word, a “true” poet.

Oscar

Our protagonist is Oscar Restrepo. His idol, the person he believes to be “the poet”, is José Silva, a tormented poet who died by suicide at the age of 30. This fueled his belief that true art must be born out of deep suffering.

i could go on about how the borders of the frames represent his mental state and whatnot, but i want to talk about:

Yurlady (JOOR - ah - lehr - dee).

She’s the second from right.

Yurlady is this schoolgirl with a very unfortunate background. She lives in a home where her father left them. She’s the youngest of her brothers and sisters; all her sisters were either married or pregnant, and had kids. The youngest w/ a kid in their family is 17. They don’t have money to feed their family, yet her brothers and sisters make foolish decisions like buying a TV on credit.

Yurlady writes. She doesn’t like to define what she writes as “poetry”. She sketches and draws, but she likewise doesn’t like to define it as “paintings”.

It’s just a form of self-expression for her. She doesn’t do it for an audience.

Oscar somehow stumbles upon Yurlady’s writings and poems, as he’s her new school teacher. He finds them beautiful: vivid expressions of what she feels, paired w/ sketches that try to paint a picture of the complex self she has, and everyone does.

He means well, but wants her to turn her expression into a career. He lures her w/ money and food, but he’s not our antagonist, as he later realizes that this is not what she wants or what’s best for her.

But the poets, academics, and socialites want her to perform. They further lure her w/ fame, money, but they don’t look at her for who she is.

For them, she’s not Yurlady; she’s a kid who lives in a ghetto, who is scared of the violence in the streets of Medellín, and is suffering because of the consequences of the economics of Colombia.

One of the poets suggests that she not speak about the coincidence of sunlight bouncing and falling on her palms, but instead write about the “miserable conditions” her community is in.

But she actually just cares about providing for her family. She doesn’t necessarily think that her community is miserable. It’s normal for her, this is where she grew up.

But society projected a view upon her and asked her to perform so that they have content, content to talk about their world view, their motivated reasonings, their ambitions for change, and their fulfillment of feeling human, manufactured empathy, and feeling like they can make a change.

the system gathered around her to sell out the innocent creation and expression of a girl, forcing her expression to conform to the boxes that fit neatly in society.

this is the very fucking problem with the whole fucking world right now, everyone needs to fit into a neat little box, you’re right, you’re left, you’re a commie, and you’re a fascist.

I love my cousin’s instagram bio, “I hate boxes, unless it’s takeout”

Ok, so what is society, and what does it mean to be a part of society.

A society is an organism imo, and we are the organs. We think that we are independent selves, and maybe for an organ to do its job it needs to think that. The organism keeps growing, evolving, developing more abilities, healing, constantly developing cancerous organs and fixing them.

This organism has to consume more and more to grow, and grow stronger, and smarter. There is no other way. It starts by taking land, then consuming every piece of energy left in the world, and then the solar system and then the galaxy.

Each organ can identify what hurts it and make decisions on that basis. To be a part of society, we as the organ need to provide value to it, otherwise we are of no use to the organism.

But to be born as an organ, shouldn’t it be easy to provide value?

Now if the organ does provide value, what does it get in return? It gets security of survival. The organism lives, so does the organ.

ughghghghghgh, this metaphor is dragging me. apologies, let me just speak my mind out.

today, people grow up in unfortunate circumstances. They don’t have the privilege of information, neither the privilege of economic freedom nor even freedom. They are told, you develop skills that provide value, and you will be safe. You go to school, you will be safe, you go to university and you will be safe.

Remember we were born in this construct, we had to abide by the rules of the system, we were already in the factory line, and some of us accept that, we are happy with it cause it brings us security, we don’t complain.

Yet, society doesn’t guarantee you will even have the opportunity of providing value. I see so many kids in my university having applied for 1000 jobs, with 2 interviews and no jobs.

this is not an exaggeration.

Sorry, after 20 years of the factory line promising you a thing, the game changed and we are shutting down the factory.

Some of you might say, oh so boo fucking hoo, the game is unfair, play to win, and yes some of us are agentic enough to figure out how to win and provide value.

but:

1. your world view ignores terrible situations that nobody would be able to rise up from.
2. that is not the point

people had to abide by the rules of your game, sitting in the factory line for 20 years, with the promise of security. if they did all that and got nothing in return, why should they keep abiding by those rules?

They should then just create their own game. You can’t make a game where you set some rules, and then you say there are no rules.

idk i can’t comprehend it, and i need more content to form an opinion and participate in the discourse. Hence i’ve started reading walden by thoreau, but it is extremely difficult for me to read, barely get through 2 pages in a day :/.

Capitalism gave us an incentive to solve problems that are of value, instead of having a constrained system where the authority decides what is important. But now we solve for hedonistic needs and wants and not actual problems. The organism, idk if it’s dying or not, but i don’t think this is the optimal way to grow.

fortunately people like me have capitalized on our passions, and society rewards us for it, but sometimes i just do not find it fair.

some recent readings have been pointing me to think that all reasoning is motivated reasoning.

Reasoning might be a mechanism we developed to explain decisions after we’ve made them, to convince society to be on our side and ensure social cohesion. That would mean active thinking rarely happens when you make decisions or say things.

Which already might be true w/ this essay.

i was sent this post on instagram where a person who didn’t miss people felt like they were a “bad person”. The whole definition of a bad or good person comes from morality that dictates social cohesion -- being a good person “for the good of society”.

why be a good person if society isn’t good for me.

I finished “if anyone builds it, everyone dies”, I would say it’s a must-read for everyone. It’s written in a way that makes it so simple to understand the technical complexity of training LLMs using metaphors, it must’ve been tough to frame things this way without losing nuance.

The book draws an elaborate no-win scenario: it won’t matter who “grows” a Super Intelligence. Once they do, it would spiral out of control. And it won’t be like Hiroshima, where we would have the opportunity to learn from our terrible mistakes -- it would be game over.

IT is extremely important for all of us to advocate for AI safety, participate in research for those who can, and use it cautiously yet not fall behind in using it. We want to be the civilization that engineered super intelligence instead of finding an alien mind of our own creation.

don’t get me started on LLMs. I am in absolute awe of the information explosion we are about to see, but the people behind it haven’t thought it out. Relentless pursuit of meaningless progress is how I would describe the current state of affairs.

Instead of looking at it from a positive-sum game of information boom, industry execs look at it from a cost-cutting perspective. Instead of looking to fund a massive new sector of understanding LLMs, we fund making even better LLMs. Doesn’t matter if it costs us the world itself, but yes we want MORE PROGRESS.

The current LLMs are powerful enough to sustain the existing knowledge workers and empower them to be ever more productive. But we’re still spending billions on training runs to create even bigger LLMs, because other execs won’t stop in this race, and it’s now a dick-measuring contest between the capitalists.

humanity putting people in boxes is the human condition itself ig.

Jürgen Schmidhuber · IDSIA2009 · PDFArt & Science as By-Products of Search for Novel Patterns, or Data Compressible in Unknown Yet Learnable Ways ↗A theory of curiosity, creativity, and subjective beauty built around discovering new patterns and making progress in compression.

Interesting perspective about how humans have a compression machine inside them. We try to compress all information we receive into abstract patterns, thus we find things that fit easily into these abstract patterns beautiful. Art, images, thoughts, any information whatsoever.

Compression might be required for the prediction mechanism of the human mind to work. Prediction helps us stay safe, it has to generalize, and it has to be fast.

WE thus put humans in boxes associated w/ the objects they own, the clothes they wear, the thoughts they have. boxes make prediction fast, but they also make us misunderstand the person in front of us.

Stanford UniversityArticleKarl Deisseroth wins Nobel Prize ↗Stanford’s announcement of the 2026 Nobel Prize for discoveries leading to optogenetics.

this is amazing yet scary. now we can study the circuits of our brain and turn things on and off to see if it helps. might fix Alzheimer’s etc etc.

Springer NatureResearch articleAltered brain network organization in romantic love as measured with resting-state fMRI and graph theory ↗A resting-state fMRI study of how brain networks are organized during romantic love.

also apparently the state of being in love (i would rather say the state of being infatuated w/ someone) is similar to the state of addiction.

so uhhhh goooood luck, and on that note read this poem:

Shabby Doll House · Hera Lindsay BirdPoemHaving Already Walked Out On Everyone I Ever Said I Loved ↗A poem about love, anticipated heartache, and being let back in. Artwork by Emma Ensley. WikipediaProfileJean Drèze ↗Welfare economist, social scientist, and activist working on development in India.

Found out about Jean Drèze and his contributions to the economic and social foundations of India. It’s extremely unfortunate that good people aren’t brought to the forefront of attention. My friend says that people like him should’ve been in our civics textbooks, and he’s right.

hundreds have been detained. internet has been shut down. news channels are already bought out and won't show this.

1000s of votes have been faked, yet people don't even have the freedom to express their disdain for the situation. All political opponents are also being detained at undisclosed locations.

i have a lot of respect for the people protesting there, and feel like a coward to be an observer of the situation. but i hope everything turns out to be good.

🆘 SOS IS STILL ACTIVE 🆘 Delhi POLICE IS BEATING WOMEN PROTESTORS IN A PRISON VAN!! YOU CAN HEAR THEIR SCREAMS

~ ~ update, i might be doing something... lets see... fingers crossed for everyone there

i have bought my third electric guitar, a baritone. i cashed in every last spare penny i had left 💀 other than what i need for my survival over the next 8 months until i go back and join the workforce.

I went to quite a few open mics and met a lot of amazing people. i love talking to them.

we got 2 plants that i have to try to keep alive, let’s see...

and i have tooooo much to study so bye