to write more

dear friends,

Computation can build, but essence sings.

There's much I want to leave you, to impart, to impress upon you: to uplift your soul. There it was, awoken in me. A ferocious beast gnawing away.

There was no beast, no teeth, no claws. There was no danger, nothing in the world, no danger at all. Yet, the fear was there, this imminence within every living cell in me: it all felt out of place in each and every way.

I have been rewriting the first chapter of the Book repeatedly with over six or seven iterations, trying to capture the right essence. There is no telling, no true understanding to the madness of taste. The melancholy, the panic, the strange liberation after despair. It all emerges in every which way. How do I describe a feeling without seeming so obvious?

I want to be free as the Nightingale whom impresses the Emperor with her song. To unify these threads of mine into a single through-line for those who yearn to learn of life and hope. Writing is a lifeline and a form of transformation, an autotelic craft of emergence and self-reference.

Let your words and writing act as a leaven for your spirit, my friend.

Write more; through pain and wonder, you must write. Write through the persistent tensions of faith x reason, of emulation x creation, of order x emergence, of compassion x self-preservation, of helping x enabling.

Weave through the paradoxes to scrum for truth and distillation. Find the way forward. Find the way back. You may walk the lonely path, but walk nonetheless.

your friend(ly)

jakester :P

I am the monkey throwing shit and bananas at the wall.

Have I actually learned something or have I learned a new party trick of flaunting my jaundiced intelligence?

With so much tools and resources at our disposal, it's hard to find the space or the feeling of actual genuine learning. Everything is spoon-fed. Everything is convenient. Everything is within arms reach. What does it mean to actually learn?

Pretending to learn feels good. Actual learning often feels bad. You must possess the psychological resilience to feel stupid and bad in a new subject.

I don't want to take the joy out of learning but there are moments where I worry if this joy is blinding me from true learning. One must hold an honest conversation and question whether the knowledge they are pursuing is worthwhile to learn. It's a difficult inquiry to take on but vital in discerning between what is noise and what is signal: what is fake and what is real.

There is a significance distinction between memorizing "passwords" to actually understanding something deeply. We were not intended to be memorizers of knowledge and factoids. We were never intended to become mere cogs of a great machine. We are not machines.

We are but wondrous creatures with a certain wind of life spun inside.

Explain in your own words, in your own story. Allow for lessons to pass through you and embody the experience you lead. Create meaningful projects near the edges of your limitations. Don't sell yourself short. Write more earnestly and intentionally. Allow for your thoughts to pour. Don't hold back. Don't pull your punches.

Read dense books. Ask difficult questions. Apply old lessons and insights to new context. Explain to others and try to teach it. Anchor knowledge into meaning and emotions. Ask why it matters: to you and to others.

Embrace iteration and spaced forgetting. Forgetting is not failure: it's part of learning, of unlearning. Allow for lessons to breathe. Create spaced repetition rather than rehearsal. Spaced repetition is not about brute force memory. Rather, it mirrors the rhythm of seasons, tides, and breath. A tree grows rings with each return of spring.

Re-encounter wisdom with a new set of eyes to see and examine what truly resonates. Memory is fickle but carries with it a certain weight only seen by the human eye, the manic mind.

Whenever the machine shrinks me down into an existential frame of mind, I remind myself of the grey nightingale of the greenwood forest fabled from the East.

To those that don't know the tale of The Nightingale, it is a story by Hans Christian Anderson of Fairy Tales. It's a short story and I recommend you go read it here.

A classical tale of man attempting to emulate nature's beauty through the mimicry of the nightingale's song. Man attempts to create an artifact, an ornate automaton of the nightingale itself in hopes to have her song at a moments notice.

The real nightingale was banished from the land and the ornate automaton became the Emperor's personal "Singer of the Imperial Toilet Table" of fine porcelain. Time passes and the golden mechanical bird degrades and dwindles. It could not maintain its beauty as the grey nightingale had. Then, eventually the Emperor grew sick.

I won't spoil the ending, the fate of the Emperor. You must go find out and experience it yourself fellow reader :p

…

I write of this story because of it's clear relevance to today. Stories are told time and time again in timeless fashion recounting of lessons we humans resonate to. The lessons are not obvious, of course, and interpretations can vary. There's a certain bend to short stories that approximates the senses of our souls. The way its configured and our worldly attempts to dissect and arrange it for the sake of human knowledge and our drive for control. It hits at the heart of our nature.

And here lies my conflict: there is beauty in our nature, of our insatiable desire to understand, our wondrous curiosity. We are unlike the golden, ornate automaton, which requires a hand to wind it before it can animate life. Yet, it is us who tries to create life through our probabilistic thinking machines to which we construct our babbling towers of code and greed. We seek to create artifacts and we mask it as planting seeds. We imbue meaning into the seeds we sow, to the artifacts we materialize. There is a certain beauty here I wish to not disgrace. There is beauty to creating, to finding order within the chaos.

In essence, my intuition leads me to heed the lessons displayed by the Nightingale but I do not think we should halt our drive in understanding ourselves through our probabilistic machines, rather, of neural networks and large language models. There is a certain beauty to our wonder that aligns with the Nightingale within our human nature, a nature we may not be in control of. There is a sense of emergence within, of the blind monkeys throwing chance at the wall, of Langton's ants crawling and tunneling intelligent highways through the world, in busy beavers inscribing infinity on the blank tape of Turing machines.

There is beauty to computation, an essence hidden within: the song of emergence in utter and complete randomness?

As I stare out to the boid under the starlings of stars, I ask the night, to the nightingale whom sings on the lone greenwood branch under the moonlit sky: what do you make of this?

It is strange, this whole vibe coding frame. As I attempt to create worlds, of websites, and of simple dashboards, I find myself lost in the streams of code generated by different seeds of prompts and machinery. I hardly can call my meanderings as that of beauty. It resembles closer to that of Frankenstein.

"The code that can be named is not the eternal code."

Any framework, language, or syntax we point to is already a reduction of the underlying substrate of truth and beauty. Yet, there it lies, the eternal code, regardless of what we say or do.

We toy with essence and artifacts to construct ourselves within our reflection of consciousness. Our konatus, our own inner drives, we seek to understand: the code with our way.

I feel as though I am an idiot in the face of the machine I do not understand. I seek to climb this high tower, to conquer the machine that stares me down, never questioning if I was supposed to climb it in the first place. Again, here I lie, an observer of the great patterns of emergence, unbeknownst and stupid. My faith and reason, a jaundiced jest I sing.

I stare up at the Nightingale, the branch it breaks as it takes flight once more. To myself, I thought, 'How lucky I am, a lucky star!' as if the Universe spoke to me. What a weird fellow, to stare up at the Nightingale.

Smell the Dragon Well?

In the great Teahouse, tell me 'Is it real?'

Please, tell me you picked it, in your taste-smell!

Imperial Dragon Well! Imperial Dragon Well!

~

At peak, the third round of Honey, then Life withers away.

Oolong, Oh long! The Dragon sings his song!

Smoky, High Mountains, the Collectors play!

Handpicked, Natural Withering, the smell of flower's strong.

[Leo Tolstoy's A Confession (IV)](search 'dragon')

Remember, remember the taste!

What is left within this space?

Blue Tree Leaves, the Branch breaks, don't haste.

Tea Sense, the Glass Tea House, the Glass Pot breaks.

Nonsense, taste the Time; again, don't haste.

~ ~

Take haste, don't pace. Take haste? Don't pace!

Meaning comes, meaning goes. You wonder, where Time goes?

Down the well, the Dragon's mouth…

The Beast awaits, you dare climb: the scent of fear grows.

~ ~ ~

You Golden Monkey, find Heart, in Heaven and Hell.

Blue Bird, Blue Heron, Grey Nightingale.

Groundless Glasshouse of Fractal Glass Shards tell,

In shatters, down the well, you fell.

Branch up, the True Spiral, the Dragon's Tale!