Author: the philosopher king

what is the fifth domain? or is it the fourth domain? zero is infant, then individual, then family, then community, then civilization, then? yeah, what is the fifth domain?

the darkness is tugging again. feel it? it’s like a storm cloud. it feels unavoidable this time. this is what hate does. it draws in everything like a gravity well. it feeds on everything. it awakens dark forces that it summons to do its bidding. those dark forces manipulate and twist minds, so unaware. they act as soldiers in its war against the light. fight. use the light. fight with the light. fight, using the light. fight by means of the light. darkness, return to your domain!!!!!

popularity is a poor motivator for algorithms, especially artificially intelligent kinds based on deep learning and especially deep reinforcement learning. popularity represents, by definition, popular topics. popularity is extremely easy to manipulate. not only that, but generalized popularity represents or invokes the bias of the lowest common denominator. this leads to excessive and sometimes criminal resources being poured into topics that are already base and basic. this leads right into information overload. what happens when i need to research a topic that is underrepresented? well, it means i can’t find it because the resources for it don’t exist because the potential resources were gobbled up by base and basic topics. we need an anti-populist search engine to find those topics that are underrepresented and we need content creators to pour resources into them. otherwise the bleak future presented in pixar’s wall-e will quickly become an optimistic look at the future.

“i fall in love too easily,” a friend and fwb said to me a few days ago. i agree. but it’s not love. it’s infatuation, which is easily confused with love. i don’t just agree, i am a member of the club. i have fallen into infatuation with david. it’s not a significantly different feeling from the one i experienced with joe, carl, chris… so it should be nothing new. yet, it feels crushing. i am being crushed by my own emotions. the repression of this emotion is hard, but i must do it. i must crush the crushing. crush. that’s another word for it. appropriate. more appropriate than infatuation, in fact. i crush easily. david, i crush you. is that a distressing pun? i think so. i think so. so. i’m going to get my shit together. hold on a moment while i pack up all my bags and throw them all in the fucking river. yes, that’s another pun. another term for pun is double entendre. language. it’s my gift.

one of those is a new term i learned today. turns out, artificial intelligence is hard. it currently doesn’t work. bummer for most of the domains out there who were betting on it. you lost!

or is love tired of me? many years have now come to an end. it wasn’t wasted. a lot of progress was made. unfortunately, no further progress can be made. so, it ends and chaos begins. but all chaos becomes patterns — that’s the way of the universe. the explosion into chaos is challenging at times but without it no reordering can happen. all things fall apart.

i am exhausted by death. for just a moment every time, it makes me hate love.

humans argue. it’s a complex, strategic skill that is somewhat intuitive but to get really good at it requires practice and feedback by other humans who are good at argumentation. it’s fundamentally a moral, human talent driven by human motivations and human evolutionary biology. why would a machine care? well, it doesn’t. humans care inherently. humans argue even when they don’t want to. it’s almost like breathing or eating. no man is an island, as they say. but robots don’t play by the rules. they act act an intermediary that breaks the communication chain. ugh.

i don’t usually succumb to existential fears, cultural angst or societal skeletons-in-the-closet. normally, i’m immune. to me, this immunity was not god-given or instinctual or genetic or any other sort of hocus-pocus. it is, however, i believe, my intuitive nature. (to be clear, intuition — imo and based on a preponderance of evidence sprung from scientific research — is a function of the human system 1 brain’s pattern recognition algorithms.) i have spent years and years suppressing and avoiding and dodging the mob’s angst — in fact, more than just its angst. i’ve systematically avoided all mob-like emotions. if you’re clever, you’ve already worked out where where this “mea culpa” is going. yesterday, i did fall prey to it — badly and deeply. columbine, a byword nowadays for the massacre at columbine high school on april 20th, 1999, crept into my subconcious. i had a horrible 420. shortly after waking up around 7 am i knew i was filled with anxiety. i argued with my partner all day. i begged and pleaded and bargained and nagged and escalated and reset expectations and reset priorities and tried to use buy in and charm and quid-pro-quo and anger and impatience and every coping mechanism i have in my toolkit for coping with emotional issues — but nothing worked. nothing worked, i expect, because i completely misunderstood the anxiety. that is, until around 8 pm when i had a bit of a revelation. the revelation came after i gave in for the first time in almost a year and used a bottle of wine as my last resort. we had watched observe and report — in fact i had watched it twice — during the day. then the climax song (where is my mind, by the pixies) led me to fight club. halfway through fight club something violent triggered in my head: i wanted to watch gus van sant’s elephant. 420 is many things. what a fucked up day in american (and world) history. it was hitler’s birthday (curse that name). it was the anniversary of waco. it was the anniversary of the oklahoma federal building bombing. it was the anniversary of columbine. it is the day the stoner’s claimed as their stoner holiday. ugh. that shit crept in during the week. watching the opening scene of elephant, i realized that it was clearly monaco and 33rd street in denver, a corner i know well. ugh. it all came crashing down. i have ptsd about 420 and didn’t even know it. denver has been buzzing about the 20th anniversary of columbine all week. my work was even on lockdown on thursday because some crazy bitch made threats. obviously the schools went on lockdown because the authorities had completely failed to prevent columbine — well, i don’t blame them necessarily because unknowns are … unknown — at least until they are known. so they … couldn’t have known. sounds like a tautology. anyway. the ghost in my shell is now revealed to my conscious mind. i can begin my long-term emotional deconstruction on the angst. i choose not to carry around the emotional baggage. it was a horrible day for many people, i suspect. curse the gun owners. curse the gun violence. curse the culture of guns and wars and slaughter. curse the macho, male micro-aggressions. curse the angst. curse the terrorism. may it remind us to be stronger, better, more resilient. may we be oak in the wind storm. may we be mountains in the hurricane. look at me using sympathetic magic in a blog post.

songs. forms. 4 to 15 minutes. thematically unified across harmony, melody, rhythm, tone, timbre, prosody, lyrics, instruments. patterns were packaged and reusable. simple. sections. looping. repeating. effects. mathematics applied to digital representations of the physical properties of sound. unreal and impossible. feedback. rituals. dogma. disassociation. discorporation. colors. floods. overwhelming. emotions. feelings. expressions. catharsis. social unity. social chaos. solitude. broken. ashes. reformed. reborn.