Autumn thoughts. (#279)

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.