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quotes ranting

Memory, Biography, or Identity

Most of what we do does not leave any traces in our memory, biography, or identity

Hartmut Rosa, interview with Claudio Gallo, published in LA Review of Books [lareviewofbooks.org], June 2015

I came across this quote in Productivity: Are We Okay? [youtube.com], a video by Wisecrack discussing if the drive for productivity and “hustle culture” is making us (or at least most of us) worse off: overstressed, depressed and burn out.

Almost nothing you do on a daily basis is going to be a core memory. Be it in the pursuit of work —be it your job or side hustle— or keeping up with the Joneses, or “bettering” yourself by reading all the latest and must read books, or whatever. In short “self optimization” or “grinding”.

I don’t grind, or spend effort self optimizing. In my “free time” I write this blog, read, watch movies, practice my photography, and do a little exercise. Or at least these are the things I define as my hobbies but finding the time to do any of that when I have two teenage kids… And I long ago gave up on achieving all of it, something had to give. So a lot of that lost out to the kids, they are the most important part.

Photography probably suffered the most. I used to go out for the express purpose of taking photos with my fancy camera, but now my camera is almost exclusively a thing I use on holiday, and then I have to balance between being with my family and taking good photos… being with the family wins, so my travel photos are, meh.

Confusion also suffered. The pace of posting slowed way down when my kids were born. Etc. etc. Focusing on the kids, even if it meant doing less of my hobbies makes sense examined in the spirit of the quote: my kids are going to leave the biggest traces on my “memory, biography and identity.” This is why I had kids, while they don’t define me, they are integal to my definition of self.

In the past few years, as the girls have gotten older, I have had more time, and started to filling that time by returning to other hobbies. I read more (though you wouldn’t know that from Confusion, I have not posted many book reviews in the past decade, I have in fact read a lot in the past few years, mostly focused on working through the complete corpus of a number of writers short stories: Turgenev, Chekov, Nabokov, Hemingway, O’Conner and more.) Speaking of Confusion, I have posted more at a faster pace in the past few years. I spend more time going out with my friends, not just with my family. I’ve also watched a lot more movies and TV shows —that aren’t Disney or Pixar or the like— in the past few years.

All of this is in the service of doing more things I enjoy as my kids don’t take up so much of my time, and inevitably want to spend less of their time with me. In, short, I’ve been doing more things that make me happy. What I have not been doing is “hustling”; I don’t spend excessive hours working outside of “normal work hours”; something that I am proud of, especially as I transitioned to working at home when COVID lockdowns started and I still work from home more than 90 percent of the time. But I don’t feel work has invaded my home like some people do. I’m not a workaholic.

But it was not always so. In my first jobs I spent almost all my time working. I remember one stretch, working on a project, where I worked, in the office, more then 365 days straight; more than a year. I did not take a day off, I worked on every Saturday and Sunday, I worked on Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year’s and every other holiday, no sick days. I arrived at the office before 7AM and left at 9, 10 or 11PM. Saturday morning my boss would call me at 8AM and ask me what time I was going to be in. “11”. It’s not that I didn’t do other things, I did meet up with friends, watch movies and TV and so forth. It’s just that these things were limited to just a few hours a week.

I didn’t resent my boss for this, as stressful and tiring as all this was, I was into it. At that time we were doing something that felt like it could really be impacting the world, something that would be part of my “memory, biography and identity”. In some small sense I was part of changing the world, a tiny part but I was there. We were part of the early adoption of the mobile phone, the rise of SMS. We were not responsible for it, but we played an important role in making SMS work in the US.

All of that work and hustle paid off, it was a key part of how I ended up in Singapore, met my wife, and so forth. So it was worth it, I enjoyed it. But as I moved on to other jobs, the sense of changing the world wasn’t there. Maybe it was just getting older, or perhaps it’s better to say, maybe it was youthful optimism that I thought I was ever helping to change the world… In any case, I decided work was not how I defined myself.

Many of the other people at this particular job worked long hours. I’m not sure anyone was a crazy as me during that project, at least not for that long but many people worked longs hours. It was a startup, and that was startup culture. But not everyone. There were a couple of people, two guys specifically, who were at their desk at 9AM and went home at 5 or, latest, 5:30PM. A lot of us made jokes about them. It was never mean spirited or anything but it was a running joke about their commitment to work.

Maybe the rest of us were all victims of American Capitalism, selling our souls to the company. Maybe it was these two guys who had it figured out. We seem to be in a bit of a backlash against the “work defines” you and “find fulfillment in your work” mentality of the 90’s and 2000’s. I any case I think that today I’m more like those two guys than the workaholic I was back then. It’s not that I’m some sort of strict 9-to-5’er, some days I start at 8, some days I end at 7. During specific period I work late nights, but only as the exception and when it’s justified.

I work in the modern tech-comany office, meaning video calls, emails and instant messaging. Work is what happens between these interruptions but these interruptions are also work. When I first moved to Singapore it was the height of the Blackberry craze. I had a crackberry, I fell asleep with it in my hand, waiting for then next email. And I still answer emails outside office hours, usually in a burst just before bed. But I reserved the right, and exercise the right, to not respond to email instantly; to not check and reply to office instance messaging, and don’t respond to meeting invites outside of my office hours. I may attend meetings if I think there is really a reason to be doing them outside of office hours; deadlines we can’t change or time zones meaning someone is going to be working overtime, etc. This drives the personal assistants of some of my VPs crazy, they are always chasing me by email and instant message to make sure I “accept the meeting” but I reserve the right to not respond to or attend any meeting set outside my work hours. I can get away from this because I get my work done, I do attend those things that are truly important and I do quality work. I guess not everyone has the privilege to push back against work-creep in this way, so I’m grateful I can.

I’m rambling a bit. All of this is to say that this quote struck me, I like it. It’s similar to, but deeper than, “don’t sweat the small stuff”. I think people should take it to heart. If work make you happy then by all means devote yourself to it, and most of us need to work to feed and cloth ourselves, but forget to spend time on those things that will leave traces in your memory, biography, and identity.

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quotes

I’ve seen this movie…

A person jumped on the hood of a Waymo driverless taxi and smashed its windshield in San Francisco’s Chinatown last night around 9PM PT, generating applause before a crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows, and ultimately set it on fire.

Wes Davis, in A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco [theverge.com], published on The Verge.

It didn’t end well for the humans.

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quotes

It is hubris

[I]t is hubris and self-importance and almost touching delusion to expect an indifferent cosmos to bend to our will, our wishes, and our plans

Maria Popova, in Yes: William Stafford’s Poetic Calibration of Perspective [themarginalian.org], published on The Marginalian
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quotes ranting

The A.I. Bubble and Life-Changing Use Cases

A.I. can write book reviews no one reads of A.I. novels no one buys, generate playlists no one listens to of A.I. songs no one hears, and create A.I. images no one looks at for websites no one visits.

This seems to be the future A.I. promises. Endless content generated by robots, enjoyed by no one, clogging up everything, and wasting everyone’s time.

Lincoln Michel, in The Year that A.I Came for Culture [newreplublic.com], published in The New Republic

Will A.I. turn the internet into a virtual version of the Earth in Wall-E? Abandoned under so much garbage we have to evacuate? Some army of little A.I.’s left behind to cleanup the shit —to correct the hallucinations, remove the copyright infringing generated images and text?

Maybe not. 2023 was the year of A.I.. It’s been building for some time, with AI/ML being a term discussed endlessly at work for a few years. But in 2023, with the launch of ChatGPT (actually in November 2022 with GPT 3.5), A.I. went from something on the periphery of everyday life —something you heard about in passing news stories about tech— to an inescapable monster, on the lips of everyone, from tech CEOs to cultural commentators. A.I. managed to hold our collective attention in a way few things can in our hyperactive zeitgeist.

I don’t agree with everything Lincoln Michel discuses in the New Republic article but there was a line that caught my eye:

A.I. costs lots of money, and once investors stop subsidizing its use, A.I.—or at least quality A.I.—may prove cost-prohibitive for most tasks.

This caught my eye because I just read an article by Cory Doctorow the other day in Locus. In Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI [locusmag.com] Doctorow addresses the the same idea, that the cost of A.I. is it’s Achilles heel:

The universe of low-stakes, high-dollar applications for AI is so small that I can’t think of anything that belongs in it.

Basically Doctorow says that A.I. is unlikely to be able to fully replace a human for high-stakes applications —think doctors. A.I. can help speed up the process but do you trust an A.I. to make a life-or-death medical decision without human review? And if the A.I. is augmenting the human and not replacing it the economics don’t seem to work given the cost of running the most advanced A.I. models.

Of course A.I. is still getting better. So maybe in a few years it will get to the point that we all trust it to make life-or-death decisions for us without a “human in the loop”. Maybe people born after the LLM revolution will grow up just trusting A.I. more than those born before.

A.I. researches are looking at how to bring the cost down without sacrificing the quality of their models. Apple is working on models that will run on an iPhone rather than whole data centers. After all, technologies march to shrink it’s size and power consumption while increasing it’s power is incredible:

In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1.

Roy Longbottom, in Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets [roylongbottom.org.uk]

How long will it take today’s data center sized A.I. models to run in my pocket or on my wrist? And by then will the data center sized models be trustworthy enough to handle the high-stakes —fault intolerant—, high-dollar applications?

Who knows. I’ll leave predicting to future to the Sci-Fi authors like Doctorow.

But, I think Doctorow’s point is good; the current hype around A.I. is a bubble. What will be left when it bursts? Will, as Lincoln Michel wonders, A.I. technology plateau as so many other technology promises have, forever just a few years away?

I’m personally skeptical of truly life changing things coming from the current bubble, small incremental improvements, sure, endless annoying low-stakes use cases, absolutely, but truly life changing? I remain skeptical.

Though, the ability for ChatGPT to answer all your homework problems will force education to change, but schools adapted to pocket calculator and then graphing calculators, they will adapt to A.I. bots in the kids pockets too.

It should also be noted that the current hype cycle is over Generative A.I., which is only one branch of A.I.. Some life changing A.I. applications are already out there, like IBM’s A.I. for folding proteins. I think this is the kind of A.I. that will truly change the world in the long run, helping scientists to push medicine forward rather than spitting out clickbate content to game the online advertising world.

Categories
quotes

Odds & Ends

A collection of quotes I’ve stumbled across and wanted to write something about or share but never finished a proper post. Collected here with half finished or no commentary…


I have the most devoted and ardent of friends, and affectionate relatives — and of enemies I really make no account.

Walt Whitman, in a letter to a German friend on his sixty fourth birthday

Words to live by? Contrast with “keep your friends close but your enemies closer,” from The Godfather Part II.


Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species.

Wade Davis in The Unraveling of America [rollingstone.com], published in Rolling Stone

The whole article is worth reading, depressing as it is. But if Americans don’t start to internalize the decline of America and its ideals, replaced as they have become by quick and catchy political slogans and dogma packaged as identity then nothing will change and America is doomed as an idea if not a country.

Someone once told me that the founding documents of America, the. Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution with the Bill of Rights, are some of the most enlightened and important documents in the history of humanity and human thought. A bit of hyperbole but point taken. He also said that America’s history is an ongoing experiment to see if humanity can live up to such lofty ideals. It took us “four score and seven years” to even begin to live up to the first line of the Declaration, that “all men are create equal” and as we approach 250 years we are still struggling with that one.

Progress has been slow and fitful, but there has been progress. But somehow there is always a significant number of Americans that fall back on their tribalism and unite in their fear of the other. It’s a sad irony that those who publicly shout about the greatness and sanctity of the Constitution are the ones who seem to be the furthest for living up to ideals on which it is based.


In competitive athletics you play the best you can on that day, and sometimes you lose and sometimes you win. It is best to not be overly attached to the final result if you want to play your best…

Richard Geib, posted in “Mushin” – A Legacy to My Daughter [rjgeib.com] on rjgeib.com

[W]e judge the sophistication of our peers by how sophisticated they are with use of language. Your smartest friends can use deadpan sarcasm, and your smartest friends can get it when you’re deadpanning sarcasm

Stanley Dubinsky, quoted in “The Dad-Joke Doctrine” [theatlantic.com], pubished by The Atlantic

The article is from 2018 but it showed up in a list of Fathers Day related articles this year. It’s interesting giving some theories on why the dad joke exists, how there is analogous ‘traditions’ in some other cultures and languages. Serious lack of dad jokes in the article through. And the few they do give just re-enforce the “dad-jokes = bad-jokes” stereotype.

Anyway, it’s not the dad jokes that this quote is about, it’s about the use of complex linguistics like sarcasm, or puns. I love sarcasm and puns. But living in Singapore I think a lot of my sarcasm and puns go over most peoples heads. To the point that I use a lot less of them than I used to, though sometimes I can’t help myself, the immediate response or comment to a what someone says just comes out without conscious thought, it has to for it to work, if you wait five minutes to make a sarcastic remark or come up with a pun as part of your response then there is no point.

The issue is mostly because English is not most people’s first or primary language. Even when it is the primary language for a lot of Singaporeans, taught in school as the main language, the proficiency and vocabulary is not strong enough to handle more complex puns and sarcasm. There is just too high a proportion of non-native speakers you talk to in daily life, daily interactions demand simpler language. People just don’t use puns and sarcasm so much.

I feel like many snappy retorts and come-backs are lost on most people I speak with, they just don’t immediately get the joke.


My mother is very religious so I’m very much aware of the attitude that these are the last days. But, let’s face it, no matter where we have been in history, whoever has existed has been living in the last days… their own. When each of us dies the world ends for us.

Octavia E. Butler, in Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

I’ve never read Octavia Butler, always on the list, never at the top. But I like this quote I found in a post on The Marginalian [themarginalian.org].


Expressing oneself in the world and creativity are the same. It may not be possible to know who you are without somehow expressing it.

Rick Ruben, in The Creative Act

I’ve always had to desire to create, but never the drive to truly create. I play at it but I don’t put in the hours to be a truly creative person.

For example, I’ve been doing photography for more than 25 years, but I’ve never tried to truly learn to be a photographer. I never took a class or read a book. I’ve googled my way to solving specific problems or copying a cool effect I see. I’ve absorbed a lot of lingo and I can control my camera fairly well. Even enough to master full manual mode.

I use Lightroom to clean up my photo. And it comes with photoshop but I’ve rarely opened photoshop. The closest to creativity with images I get is using Adobe’s Express to make the featured images on my posts. I am happy with most of those, especially the ones I did for my series of posts covering my best mobile photos [confusion.cc] year by year since 2004.