Monday, October 24

[soid]

 I woke up around noon. So hard to get up for some reason. Coffee, "Bulgarian" breakfast (eggplant spread and a boiled egg), some chocolate. Exciting projects come in my mind: what if I find the history books from Russia and contrast them with how the Middle East history covered in the US? Or even Russian 1990s history vs 2010s history – may find some telling differences. Or, if my Greek was better, it would be interesting to see how the Greek national mythology covers the Ottomans. That might be even more interesting than the "true" history – after all why does it matter so much what actually happened? Truth is overvalued. What matters is what we, as the world, presently think about it, what bullshit we believe, and what choices of bullshit to believe we have to pick from. How we will think about it in the future. How it affects our decisions today. That’s what’s important. But no, not now, not today. No time for it now. Now I have to focus on the myriad of other things. Why do I always get exciting ideas when I don't have time for them? 

3-4pm I brewed a thermos of green tea and went to writing office hours with K.H. Her background is in post-colonial studies, so I thought she could give me some feedback on my history writing in general. We talked about my paper, discussed history paper writing, then I read my paper aloud, and we edited it. She said I should think deep of each term in question and try to formulate how exactly I understand it, and what parts of it I agree or disagree (the prompt is "Do you agree with Gelvin that World War I was the single most important political event in the history of the modern Middle East?"). Otherwise she seemed to like my paper; she said the argument was clear and sophisticated enough, but I had to add more context. Good, that's the way to beef it up. Naively, I didn't think about someone reading it without context.

4-8pm continued writing the paper in the Library. Let's proceed with Kant – Sapere aude! – Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding! Let it be my motto for today. Forget Foucault for today.

In the library people were loud and abrupt. Slamming the doors, noisily typing on the keyboard – nothing like yesterday's chill Sunday quietness. Either people who don't study on Sundays came today, or the deadlines make people more nervous. Or, are we just all over-caffeinated Monday dorks pretending to study? Totally different vibe compared to Sunday in the Library.

I wrote other 4 or 5 pages.

Sadly, I skipped Navalny's symposium somewhere in downtown at 6pm. Volkov and Pevchikh were at panel there, but I got too much shit to do these days. Maria Pevchikh is amazing; so intelligent person and so much energy – but on YouTube she looks a bit muted as a journalist. Last time I saw her giving a speech she came out as a different person comparing to how I know her from YouTube (I didn’t see too much though). She has interesting opinion and good analysis.

In a grocery store I ran into J. We started the same year, then talked at a picnic and ran into each other at other events. Then the pandemic happened and everyone isolated so much. So I saw her for the first time since then. She was talking, like talking in space, as trying to think and analyze herself, choosing good words, and then she said she was good. So many interesting friends I could have had if I followed up and checked up on them and tried to learn them better. Maybe I should invite her for a coffee another day. Ah, so many coffees and dinners I wanted to schedule, but I never did. I’m so bad at managing friendships. I have become this yet another fake dude saying “see you later” to people that I will never see again.

Reading NLG papers after dinner at 9pm. 

Flamengo paper which is like GPT3, but takes both text and images and even video as an input, then generates text. They demonstrate they are few shot learner as GPT3 too. The pre-selected demos are eye-popping, of course. They give it an image and ask questions about it; the demon machine gives reasonable intelligent answers. Blows my mind. In 20 years people will be talking to computers out of boredom and take it for granted.

Bed around 2am, but couldn't sleep till after 4am. Strange things with the sleep again. Maybe I should leave my phone somewhere far away from the table, so I get too bored to not sleep.

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

What a progress with AI, omg.