Yapping
So, today, I was looking at that one building from our balcony, which is seen the tallest, and is especially beautiful during the sunsets. I was thinking about numerous stuff and suddenly that one thing felt beautiful - and I found myself, thinking in mind, maybe there's an intergalactic space, or less likely, a star, sitting at exactly the angle I was looking at the building in.
Regardless.
That's one of the many random thoughts I have during the day, and even though at that moment I felt like maybe I could write a book extending my glossary of thoughts about just that one building. But that'd be useless, wouldn't it? Who likes to continuously yap about a building. Rather, I thought perhaps let's extend it into something which I can actually write about in my blog.
Speaking of extending - I actually learnt how to extend a HashMap when I was working on defaults-rs for my Mac tooling/apps company. It's fairly easy -
- Prepare the existing hashmap, or maybe if you're in a function, get a mutable reference to it, so assuming if the variable was
some_map, you'd have to do:fn merge(&mut some_map) -> HashMap<String, PrefValue> {...}. - Prepare the other hashmap. That's what I'd do inside the function.
- Call:
some_map.extend(new_map.clone())
I just wrote a raw representation of what I'd do in Rust (that I learnt today). I don't even know if this would make clippy happy, but you get the point. I like sharing, and I don't know, maybe you like reading :D or do you? :eyes:
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The thing that I actually wanted to share through this is, the lack of open talk, and I'm very much afraid at how its scaling better than AI data centers nowadays. Researchers suggest that loneliness is at peak during these times, and yet people buy subscriptions to talk to their favorite custom characters/avatars "powered by AI" (well maybe I don't know, maybe transformer models are simply feeling more understanding than humans nowadays? I'm no one to judge).
I actually find it kind of frustrating that we are literally surrounded by people around us - and yet we feel so lonely, and that so many people are suffering from the same issue but no one is willing to give up their attention-seeking machines to stabilize their dopamine economy. The world's simply not like that anymore.
Or, is it?
Quitting my phone has been fairly easy so far. I'm studying for entrance, and even then sometimes I get attracted by my laptop to do some programming on the open-core organization I'm trying to establish. Maybe it's a good thing - maybe it's not. But regardless, I have found myself to be much more attracted to work when I'm not using my phone. Programming feels like a craft - and genuinely I think those AI gurus who are generalizing the attention economy and spreading false-positives on LinkedIn about how AI is giving them x%+ gains are simply missing the point of cognitive debt in a spectacular fashion. And, I think it doesn't just apply to programming, it applies to all means of life.
Let me remind you that these are the same algorithms which feed on your data for their survival and keep you engaged. Maybe you won't even find a toddler nowadays who wouldn't eat without TikTok sitting right in front of his underdeveloped eyes.
Anyways,
Let's return to open-talk. What happens after you do leave your phone for good?
I mean this article surely wasn't about phones or AI or even that hashmap merger I previously mentioned. I'm just trying to get you on flow with my thoughts of the preface here - it's just harder to explain without it. Open-talk is significantly undervalued in our society. In a world where you can get your answers from a non-emotional reasoning artifact, its generally costly to do so. But it does preserve one critical aspect. Organic conversations.
Maybe you get your answers slow. Maybe its generally fuzzier, and even conflicting in some cases due to a second ideology being involved during the conversation, but you eventually share pieces of you which you otherwise couldn't. Not even to a chatbot - your conscious simply won't allow for it.
Maybe I got that part covered. Let's talk about a different aspect.
How about, umm... enforcement of thoughts? Okay this one's good..
I'd like to believe in the fact that most problems we think of everyday, including the overestimation of goals, are created by ourselves.We simply overcalculate things we have not even reached. I'd also like to believe that this is a clear indication of escalated overthinking. I mean, most people don't even get to start that one initiative they thought was groundbreaking, just because they had enforced the thought in their neural pathways that it simply was too far-reaching.
My take? You have no risk of failure (except its something different which I'm not covering here), so there's no risk in trying to succeed in something. Enforcement will only get you so far - and possibly even lock you into your own demise.
I think I've covered this aspect too, let's cover a different one.
Umm..
Well, let's talk about something else for now.
I've written this blog entry without too much markdown because it gives me the creative liberty/space I need for my brain to stretch the vocabularies out into something meaningful. I got this habit from minimalizing my desktop setup. I've done the following:
- Plain window management (caps-lock as the hyper key).
- Very minimal Neovim (although I've been writing stuff in Zed which is specifically for programming). I do love to keep the raw completions and LSP just in case I do decide to write some code, though.
- Tried to translate formal gibberish into casual manuals when I'm writing my GitHub READMEs.
So, what minimalism actually did to me is, I've started to do my conversations in a more straightforward way, which leaves pathways and some additional working memory on my brain open if I decide to add some creative salt. What this does is - it gives you the raw open-talk feel, but instead now its generated by you, which is kind of self-healing in a way.
It also elevates the liberty you wish to have in your creations or probably even your thoughts. The Internet's so much of a simplified and generalized nonsensical wasteland nowadays that we're often forced to believe that there's only one or two ways of presenting something. Let it be our personal blogs, or even our posts on social media.
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Social media engagement is also a big aspect of loneliness, which many people don't want to leave. I mean, leaving wouldn't be an ideal advice in this case, rather, what you can try is "desensitizing" your social media.
I regularly talk in places with E2E encryption enabled. One cool option is WhatsApp - but with the crazy amount of data Meta ingests from these platforms, there's no wonder why I get insanely accurate advertisements on its child platform Instagram. So I ditched both of them, rooted for something that only me and my personal contacts can use. In the process, I have also deactivated a bunch of other social medias in favor of more desensitized ones like BlueSky and Mastodon.
What it really gave me is, I got the transparency to show up not just in my projects, but also in my social profiles. It helps me present the originality I really want to produce, and hopefully you will too.
Have some real conversation. With the people you love.
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The art of believing that life's fixable is what I believe to be a genuine form of mental art. I don't think its too much to yap about, but life actually fixes itself if you just allow the small, incremental changes to happen. What I really meant by representing these three tiny aspects is that, even though the descriptions might be regulated to small terms, these issues actually add up, and often scale to millions of people. It's like we're at the brink of selling melancholy, quite literally.
But, by displaying these aspects, I also wanted to share my take on how they can easily be removed
That's a lot of yapping. See you next time!