A note to myself

A note to myself

I realized how much I dislike experiences that are flat, patterned, unremarkable. They leave an itch, a low buzzing annoyance, somehow harder to sit with than pain that is sharp and clear.

When I feel terrible I think through the worst case and find it isn't that bad. It goes like this, then like that, then this again, and then it's over. The me at fifty won't remember one small hurt. A little bug inside a very large truck.

Keep your arms open to yourself, always. Adjust as you go. Don't become one of those sharp people who live at the extremes.

Also, the things that are true to you have to be done by you. The same goes for exercise, and for finding the anchors in a life.

I've been reading some genuinely deep pieces on X. I hope I can share views that actually illuminate something, rather than rambling, scattering myself too widely across vague ideas, or posturing at being literary.

I want to express myself precisely, with a sense of control. At the same time, I want to face and speak my desires and ambition. I don't want to be an axis with only one half drawn in. The things I'm usually too embarrassed to say aloud: I want to understand where the embarrassment lives, and why I've kept quiet.

Finding the opposite of a thing matters.

Good RL environments, wide taste, extremely high-level input, writing and expression: these are the most effective resistance we have against the homogenization that comes with the rise of agents. Handwriting is still the best encoding I have.

Keep doing the inconvenient, unglamorous things. Compounding applies to every single thing in life. When I'm very certain what the reward is, certain about what is signal and what is noise, there is probably no reward and no signal in my life at all.

Language, in every sense of the word, is always important. Language can be extremely high-dimensional, more complex than signals we tend to think of as sophisticated, and the paths through it are infinite. More important than language are the tacit things that can't be expressed. Spirit, feeling, intuition, phenomena science doesn't explain, and explanations no phenomenon confirms.

I still believe that to let go is to receive.

On the whole, I still feel lucky, and happy. The world is quite good. I have beautiful things in my heart and around me. My bad self and my good self both. I will, and I have to, keep getting better.

I hope I compromise less. That I don't need to know too much. That I do what I love, and become someone I would actually admire. That I can protect the things I find interesting. That I have the courage and the ground beneath me to refuse conclusions driven only by experience. That I can hold firmly that some things are simply nonsense and entirely unnecessary. That I bring fun to my surroundings. That I have fun.