Autumn thoughts.

2023-10-28, post № 279

conducted-computing, #politics, #brief, #ai

Of late, one pervasive thought has evermore clouded my mind: “I am only interested in the uninteresting.”

I am interested in self-emitting ANSI escape codes for light formatting. I am interested in the mere structure of UTF-8 and its implications for byte output. I see an innate beauty in discrete information representation, in ordering the soon-to-be-trashed. In classifying the unimportant.
But also in sincerely tackling the digital, its ways to see information in a purer light: unconstrained from physical representation medias, formatting idiosyncrasies or chronical decay. I find these properties a driving force in realising that the digital holds vast amounts of untapped possibilities. Untapped most likely due to their lack of sheen.

Scrolling through my university’s lecture timetable, I stumbled upon a lecture called [generative language model currently of economic relevance] in rhetoric. I am unsure if these tools will ever reach people outside the very small intersection of academic insiders and hazy fad. When the workflow gains of the humble text file were not able to penetrate the rock-like wall of ignorance over the past fifty years, how should a tool of such intricacy?

I was today (a lot of moons past the last calling had been) called a missionary in regards to digital privacy, potentially the broader topic of morally passable human-computer interaction. I don’t know if I am. But I am certainly trying to bring something to the grand table at which those infected with the malady of knowing about bits sit. And with my recent hiccough in my (bit-alien!) studies implying a delay, freeing up time for frivolous bit-minded thought, Brief development is bound to pick up speed once more.

Truly do I wonder what there is for me personally to gain from these machines. Lingering in this murk of thought, I evermore edge closer to the realisation that there nothing lies.