Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas.
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— Kunal
2 fun articles from around the internet:
Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.
After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
I've been tearing through The Tyrant Philosophers by Adrian Tchaikovsky: it's engrossing and heart-breaking and fascinating all at one go. I loved reading Terry Pratchett because he taught me a lot about how to see the world -- and I didn't realize it till much later, when I had internalized the stories. Adrian does something similar.
It's so much easier to empathize with other others in the books than it is to read about other people suffering: perhaps because I'm not yet calloused, and in a fantasy world I can afford to engage with every character with curiousity and sympathy; and not cynicism.
As I happened to be reading, I realized that DeepSeek v4 just dropped. I look forward to trying it out, and learning enough to really feel comfortable with the paper: adding a project to build this through ChatGPT/Claude's help later this year.