Another year of public notes

Saturday, February 1, 2025

Last year, on January 15, 2024, I started public notes. It's been very cool to read them again. I think I started the previous year with a writing bug and I wanted to have a lot of my thoughts codified. I think much of my thinking had been documented which is interesting to say. Now things are different. For example, I use a notes app that I enjoy and I've been using it pretty consistently. The app is Remnote and I have a lot of interesting tidbits there but haven't been compelled to turn them into a post.

Anyway, I think there's a lot of benefit to scribing things and having them in the web format. But the medium and the structure from last year might no longer work for me. I'm excited about having more longer-form content, but what happens to the in-progress developments? I care about this because it's nice to have something to show for your thinking when the work doesn't make it across the finish line. I think my written outputs are planned to be more polished and shared outside of my blog, so this site will take on a different-role: perhaps context-giving. That is, the ramblings might really find their solace on my site and other kinds of writing might be interspersed around the scene.

Now, I'm compelled to explain this blog and my site:

• I like it because I get to document the past. I've never kept a consistent journal. I'm a little too unorganized to even remember the notebook that I would dedicate to a diary. Therefore, no matter it's digital form, this site can act as the final storage for whatever I choose to keep in it. I can type whatever and wherever; then, I can put that stuff on it's final shelf -- my site.
• In this Marginal Revolution post, Tyler quotes a passage to answer the question, "Why should you write?" The summary is that you can train LLMs. There's a grander thing, I assume, where the goal is to have LLMs be the information retrieval final-boss and therefore you want your thoughts to be in the corpus of words that it can retrieve from -- I have thoughts on this, and these thoughts when phrased cleaner and approached more formally was the seed of my burgeoning research project at Topos (which now has an updated site!)
• In this thesis advising book I was reading to help me wrap my mind around the projects that were academic-shaped but not done at university, they explained that the end of a "research session" consisting of source-finding, reading, question-forming, and thinking were to write in full-sentences: to summarize the work and its ideas in full-sentences, to write your takeaways in full-sentences, to write how the source fits in your work into full-sentences. Besides my grammatical faux pas, I approve of this. Constructing sentences is a means to fundamental and formal expression. When these sentences are constructed by us, they are fundamental, formal means to thought.
• Writing more in general is also just for practice. I could edit, refine, seek revisions for any given thing, but being able to turn-around work faster is valuable in itself. I can practice with each post to improve on the dimensions that I care about. I think I will write less "full" posts this year, as this is now my point-of-focus. Secondary ones include using punctuation correctly (lol), being able to capture different styles while still having a piece of writing that feels true to me, and being better at responding to prompts? Be able to use the writing process as a process for finding my answers, and then communicating those answers well. In this regard, having this process be streamlined would be great.
• Lastly, writing about books that I read has been valuable. I do wonder whether this self-prescribed task means I have more hesitance in what I read. I do read slower because of it: highlighting, adding notes, and marking new words and concepts I don't know. Because time passing has in fact shown to be a memory-fader, I care about getting this process right. Perhaps the mental orientation is having an artifact of my thoughts and ideas while reading and the inspirational flames that were lit while reading -- doing a better job of tying the book in question into what I'm thinking about in the moment, and then orienting myself around the format of the resulting blog post.

Side-note:

• I've been thinking/interacting with etymology a lot more.

As of late, in meetings about my project; the advisor, project mentor (?) would go over a draft and ask GPT or Claude and find definitions for comparatively colloquial terms. I think this is really good practice for reasons I get into below. For one, for any word that points to an idea, concept, or thing that's sufficiently complex; usually the definition will be the meaning of multiple ideas, concepts, and things. If you had the weird task of trying to describe the main idea, concept, or thing by merely copying the definitions of the idea, concepts, or things that it's made of, there's no guarantee it would be comprehensible or lead you to think about this set idea, concept, or thing. In other words, having these parts and putting them together doesn't necessarily complete predict what the compound-term would mean. Chomsky's phrase: " Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." in his book Syntactic Sugar (1957) he represents this notion pretty well. For example, we have synonyms, but also some definitions are modular. They combine two or more concepts and bring them into one. I wonder how this affects the effort to "get my words right." Be able to decode what I say, use a dictionary as a non-English reader and get the exact gist of what I was trying to say. I think this dictionary example is actually capturing what I mean pretty well. But for my project, writing, and thinking about the ouevre of my vocation: it's really important that I can share exactly what I mean.

• I also want to use sub-titles more.
• I'm thinking about my French language facilities. I've been speaking French much more but I could definitely see it slipping away in my life. It's a cool experiment to just see how I morph and my thinking when I use my second language. I've been thinking more about language learning, particularly trying to learn a new one. I think Arabic might be the language to learn how to speak, understand, and read and write better. Mandarin would be great to learn as well, but these language are both hard to learn and I would probably be stretched mentally very thin if I tried to learn both at once.

Sunday, February 2, 2025

It's Sunday night and I'm in Boston! Through a series of unexpected events I've found myself here. This place is so interesting to me. It's where I'd visit pretty frequently in my senior year of high school. I think beside the GTA, Montreal and the Bay Area, I definitely know the most people here. It's weird but coming back I saw many of these people again and it's wild to really feel that you're growing up and so is everyone you know. We're really just living our lives because they've really started. This weekend I was ask about what I cared about, why I did what I did? And once again I couldn't answer. To be frank, it's not that I didn't know, but that I wasn't secure enough to just say that I was finding things out? It's never sat well with me that you have the thing that defines all your actions but there's a good chance that there is the guiding thing I just haven't found the words to express them well.