The annoying thing about having to write for a short period of time whatever comes to mind is that there’s so little time to actually think about anything. One’s thoughts are like a word cloud and to catch anything one has to have a preliminary thought to act as some sort of bait, and most of what follows depend on what the bait initially was. Of course based on some mathematical thing that I know I don’t know but I know exists, if one would try to persist catching ideas this way long enough and use all the subsequent catches as baits, eventually there would be a good catch, so to speak. But to have a good catch takes time, and that’s what sucks when putting a time-limit to when one is writing.

The upside to time boxing a writing session, on the other hand, and kind of letting it be a stream-of-consciousness kind of affair, is that it guarantees that there’d be an output later on, as opposed to having the writing session open ended, which usually end up having the writer lost pulling some long train of thought that never quite have the form suitable to being written, unless by having the patience to hammer it down to something more understandable.

I guess if one’s purpose is to have a written artifact, one cannot go wrong starting with a rant. Unfortunately, if one wants to prepare something that will end up becoming something worth reading afterwards, rants get old very fast because ranting is so easy.

Of course, this entry is an evidence that if one is pressed for time, ranting about ranting is the way to go. Nothing is more tautological than saying everything, given enough time, goes meta.

Enough for today.

Some things I noticed 01/13/2020:
  1. That stray dog in Turkey using the rollover car wash machine to be petted, is like this. Also, of course, that’s what that machine is called and it can be ordered online. Okay.
  2. Anly busking
  3. Messiah‘s politics is more blasphemous than its theology, or lack thereof, which I like.
  4. A thin film of dust courtesy of Taal volcano on my bike seat.


At least today, based on reading what I wrote for the last couple of days, I do not like where this daily writing exercise is going. It’s clear at the outset that I’m writing for myself, but it’s as if I’m still performing while doing so, getting all pretentious writing about supposedly deep topics I have no business writing about. On the one hand it’s quite entertaining to see myself dare, but at some point one has to regroup and avoid falling into some sunk cost reasoning that since I started pulling some thread I somehow have no choice but not to stop. I can stop.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that there is no shame in changing one’s mind. One could always take the digression more seriously than the original intent, especially while recognizing that initially there was no intent whatsoever, intent mostly just applied retroactively to things that seem to work, as what usually happens anyway, but never quite admitted out loud. From here I see the thread of agency and free will dangling and very tempting to pull; but not today.

To have some retroactive explanation for what I’m doing, maybe I’m collecting some training data. Maybe I’m just practicing producing words lest I forget the ability to do so, lately having most of my brain muscles attuned to consumption of ideas and less to producing them, which I think is unhealthy. Maybe this is a an exercise of conscious synthesis of thoughts. Or maybe this is just a distraction. But if one would for a moment take seriously the randomness of living, what isn’t? At least the opportunity cost is just half-an-hour and some sense of satisfaction after.

After all, it turns out I’m able to say a whole lot of nothing with so many words. That’s pretty cool, I think, at least.

Enough for today.

Some things I noticed 01/12/2020:
  1. arsenic was historically used to remove awkward people? Oh no.
  2. Nataly Dawn Don’t Start Now
  3. how breasts became browsers
  4. if this is true, then everything is naturally expected to go downhill from birth. (This is true, why am I always hedging?)
  5. oh wow so i get why something poetic could be derived from this concept. I have to get to finally reading that book
  6. so bummed about yesterday’s entry while writing it, because nothing of substance was coming to mind the whole time, but then exactly after hitting publish the timer sounds, and it was satisfying


At the sort of reverse withdrawal stage when one is actively looking for absurdities in one’s ongoing action in order to justify inaction instead, ergo at the very moment I was composing this entry, I was thinking about how maybe writing is now obsolete anyway because algorithms like GPT2 exist and are only getting better. So I fed some prompt to the algorithm here and indeed there are times when it spits out better gibberish than I ever could so for a moment I felt vindicated I found the perfect excuse for inaction.

Doing so led to several other thoughts, however, providing an opposite excuse to continue writing. Like why did the algorithm need a prompt and would it be able to write something unprompted and if so what would it write? Of course it could and it would pick something random from its training data.

Now the initial reaction to this is to compare what the algorithm is doing to how we think. Humans seem to also just respond to prompts, albeit often physiological. When thoughts randomly pop up from the synthesis of our training data i.e. our experience, we appear as if coming up with something original. Down this path, one might say either GPT2 is thinking or maybe it is the case that we think we’re thinking but like GPT2 we really aren’t.

But that’s a repulsive thought. GPT2 is more plausibly just writing for the sake of having written something while humans are writing as a self-reflection. But then as I write that how sure am I GPT2 doesn’t have a self, or that I do? Pretty soon this whole train of thought devolves into asking what a self is.

At this point, I have to confess yesterday I wrote the following: “One doesn’t know the shallowness of one’s perceived depth unless measured through writing. I am perfectly aware how self-serving this is in the context of this exercise, but thoughts are not thoughts unless written.”

I have no intention to even attempt answering what a self is or what a thought is because then I would be out of my depth pretty quickly. So instead the question is, was the reason I wrote all of the above just so I could use that aphorism for which I apparently developed a day-old attachment? Not initially. The first two paragraphs above directly contradicting what I wrote yesterday attest to that.

But then after realizing I have those two sentences and that I would like to include them in this entry I started writing about how I think I’m thinking instead, because in that context the artifact would then become relevant, and now I’m writing about how I think about that, to provide a runway for this whole writeup to land on.

Maybe that’s what separates humans from GPT2. We don’t just think, we also think about our thoughts, and sometimes about how we come up with them, including instances when we think writing down our thoughts make us think better by virtue of seeing our thoughts more clearly. But then maybe that’s also not entirely non-transferrable to an algorithm.

This post has gotten too long. So much for beginning with coming up for an excuse not to write. Enough for today.

Some things I noticed 01/05/2020:
  1. mema, the Gen Z Filipino slang short for memaisulat, memagawa, memasabi seems to be in the same ilk as KSP, but more politically correct, mocking just the action as opposed to the whole person of the perpetrator
  2. materials for niche educational topics on Youtube are getting better, such as this playlist containing a video recommended to me by the algorithm
  3. tried the Calm app; so much meta-commentary I can’t even; but on the surface I found the scenes feature much better than the unnatural white-noise generator I was using so there’s that