Rising Fire

Note for Flashback:
This is probably the last software that I will make where roughly 80% of the things that I've done here are made without AI coding assistant. The remaining % where AI helped me mostly involved tedious tasks like settings, research, figuring out ways to solve particular problems, much like what I used to do back in my StackOverflow days. I can recall exactly how many times I went back to StackOverflow this year, only 4. It's not without temptation to complete everything with AI, which I can fully exploit without hesitation. I have tried that approach on a smaller project and it worked without much problem. I can't deny that this is a kind of self-betrayal since the satisfaction of solving difficult problems is the best feeling we can get to nurture ourselves. I'll remember those days, but I won't miss those typical days where I spend nights stuck for hours only to fix some naughty little bugs then laugh over a programmer meme on my timeline afterward. That duty belongs to AI now. I will spend my time in more important problems, or even use more time for socializing, for real life. Coding is not dead, not yet, but some parts of it are brutally crucified. The replacement anxiety that we feel right now exists simply because it attacks our comfort zone, especially for those who have already made their way ever since working in a startup became a trend, then losing the desire to look for a new horizon. I have no better advice than what some folks have already said these days: "embrace the uncertainty". AI can give you anything you want, even surprise you, but can't give you exactly what you want.

L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. (Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity) —Simone Weil

“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” ― Moby-Dick

The Speed Gap Crisis

Protesters burn parliaments around the world: Nepal, Indonesia, Turkey, Thailand. Prime Ministers fall one by one: France ousted, Canada resigned, Japan resigned, Nepal resigned. Who's next? Germany? Brazil? Mexico? Italy? Spain? The tragedy isn't simply that governments are failing; most of them already failed long before and are hiding behind bailouts. The question is not "can they adapt?", but "can they survive" the next year or two accelerating breakdown.

—

What does it mean to say "the government has fallen"? What does it mean to say "unemployment is rising"? When the category of employment itself has become meaningless, it doesn't feel like it refers to anything in our current form of life. The same breakdown is happening everywhere. We speak of "democracy," "markets," and "nations" as if these were still coherent concepts, but they're all losing meaning for the same reason.

Our most successful institutions were designed for a world where information moved slowly, where humans had time to deliberate, where cause and effect were separated by enough time for democratic feedback loops to function. But now all the decision making is compressed into milliseconds. Are we witnessing the fundamental obsolescence of inclusive institutions? How are we supposed to preserve some form of human legitimacy?

—

In the servers of every bank, every fund, every government treasury, the AI accountants are daydreaming while exploiting hidden markets, creating phantom assets and profits that never were. At the perfect absurdity: machines trading fictional money to solve problems created by machines trading fictional money. The dollar fights the yuan fights the euro, they're fighting over algorithms that can deliver fortune-telling prosperity. Each currency becomes an optimized supply chain fiction.

—

In Sweden the PM consults AI for a second opinion in his role running the country. Now imagine some foreign intervention, a group of intelligence agents (or more ironically, a bunch of homeschooled, money-hungry teenagers) responsible for producing designated results for strategic individuals, influencing him with real-time political sentiment that has been optimized with the goal to exploit capital that can flee countries with one click.

—

I think about myself, while I read news or social media, it puts angst in me. More than before, I notice some of my actions are not really mine but driven and influenced by other people’s intentions. Now the absurdity is not that life is meaningless, but that I continue to believe that this writing matters or that some stuff is important while machines can learn to simulate my thoughts more efficiently than I can think them.

—

To quote Edward O. Wilson: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.”

Our ancient instincts and system gap is the civilization rupture unfolding right now. It's not simply an economic self-correction or structural change. If meaning itself is evaporating, how can we rebuild shared meaning (semantic stability)?

The Golden Calf Syndrome

Etgar Keret, a well-known Israeli writer, wrote an article titled “The Whole Country Has PTSD” in The Atlantic News. Instead, I thought: it’s not just PTSD, but collective amnesia. So, I propose this new psychological term with the definition as follows:

Golden Calf Syndrome (n.)
Definition: A collective amnesia as a psychological response in which people, faced with fear, uncertainty, or absence of leadership, abandon their foundational truths and core values and turn to false idols, illusions, or comforting lies. Inspired by the biblical story (Exodus 32) of the Israelites worshipping a golden calf while Moses was on Mount Sinai.

To Steal the Ring of Saturn

Sitting by the campfire, I listen to that old and raspy voice again — an echo that once whispered me to make fire, to unveil a breath that obeys the law of number, to kiss the sun and steal the ring of Saturn, to fill the universe with our everlasting dreams, until we were lost, until we meet, until we find ourselves once again. “Eat and you will understand.” Then I fall into the sea of suffering. “You run” “Run away to the edge of reason,” the snake repeated. “Who are you?” I asked. “I am your curiosity.”

Journey to the Edge of Reason

in spaces lie hidden paths.
it flows like water along invisible cracks.
the beauty, it rests in the shadows,
and where do they come from?
i don’t know, but they sleep everywhere.
their only word was “you will find out”

i have told you once, and i will tell you once again,
there is always peculiar thing, [*]
between even things and two times of something,
among all of that, what remains?
perhaps just a feeling.
of the shape,
of the warmth that it gives me,
through wild intuition,
of a young man,
standing on a broken ancient ruin.
in the eyes of beauty,
i sleep again

[*] ref: n < p < 2n Bertrand-Chebyshev theorem

“there is always a prime number between n and 2n”

[**] : I borrowed the title from Budiansky's book on Gödel

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Look around and realize what you have. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn’t make use of the opportunity to ask questions. And the less you talk, the more you’ll hear
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

L'arbre des mots

Quand j’étais petit
J’avais l’habitude de jouer à l’association de mots
avec mon cousin, par exemple:
quand il a dit “cocotier”
J’ai répondu “plage”
quand il a dit “tortue”
J’ai répondu par “lent et vieux”
un jour quand j’ai dit “mot”
il a répondu par “cimetière”
Je n’ai pas compris pourquoi et j’ai demandé
il a dit que tu peux enterrer des mots dans le cimetière
et en a fait pousser un arbre

—

The tree of words

when I was a kid
I used to play word association
with my cousin. for example:
when he said “coconut tree”
I replied with “beach”
when he said “turtle”
I replied with “slow and old”
one day when I said “word”
he replied with “cemetery”
I don’t understand why, and asked
he said you can bury words in the cemetery
and grown a tree out of it

The Desert Lullaby

peace is a fatamorgana
a time to heal the wound,
to find the lost family
to forget the unspeakable
to make a new life
to find a new love
to gather allies
to create more deadly weapons
to break another promise

and war, it’s a long footsteps
toward an oasis, which doesn’t
even there

Seashore

one evening
i silently calculated
how many step i need
to get to the seashore
i sometimes imagine
losing the person you know,
or you love, feels like losing
all the footsteps on the sand
swept by the sea
without purpose
it erodes slowly, suddenly

The Ghozali NFT hype seems to me like "Budi Setiawan from Binomo trading advertisement", it's just another kind of marketing strategy with a non-disclosure agreement behind the scenes. While Binomo made the marketing explicit, the Ghozali NFT approach is more subtle and organic. The aim is clear: to attract Indonesia's consumer-driven market

Chaque vérité que je trouvois étant une règle qui me servoit après à en trouver d’autres (Each truth that I discovered became a rule which then served to discover other truths)
–René Descartes, "Discours de la Méthode"

The Organ Grinder (Der Leiermann)

Over there beyond the village

Stands an old organ-grinder,

And with numb fingers

He plays as best he can

Barefoot on the ice,

He totters here and there,

And his little plate

Is always empty.

No one listens to him,

No one notices him,

And the dogs growl

Around the old man.

And he just lets it happen,

As it will,

Plays, and his hurdy-gurdy

Is never still.

Hey strange organ grinder,

Shall I go with you?

To the sound of my singing,

Would you play a tune?

—Wilhelm Müller & Franz Schubert

Dark series synthesis: To bend the reality you need to reconstruct and put two states of Schrodinger's law into hundreds of thousands simulations until the entities inside both states reach their solution's limit before they decided to revert back to the original state. I think this solution act like Conway's game of life.

and Rita? et Rita?

She’s very intelligent dog. Take her..
c’est un chien très intellegent. Prends-la.

You don’t want her?
Vous ne la veux le pas?

I want nothing.
Je ne veux rien

Then stop breathing..
Puis arrête de respirer

That’s a good idea.
C’est un bonne idée …
…
have you stopped breathing?
vous ne respirez plus?

—Valentine and The Judge, Three Colours: Red

Defining a programming language is not an easy task. Normally, languages are designed to improve certain aspects of other existing languages or to improve a certain task. Python was born to replace the ABC language. Java and its virtual machine were designed to run the same code everywhere without additional compilations. Erlang was created to improve telephony applications. We cannot expect these languages to be a particularly suitable solution for absolutely everything. Comparing two languages designed for different goals performing the same tasks is somehow biased. Think about Java. It has been around since 1995 and it can be found it large platforms that have nothing to do with its original purpose. And this could be one of the main reasons why many developers hate it. Nowadays developing an API REST in Java is convoluted when compared with any younger language. However, we forget how the Java Virtual Machine opened up a huge line of wonderful solutions such as Android Developers are reluctant to learn new languages. It requires an additional effort and you will feel miserable until you hit some proficiency. This makes developers criticize languages they are not familiar with.
—jmtirado

We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors – walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful
—Friedrich Nietzsche

"Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement – in which the muscles do not also revel. All prejudices emanate from the bowels. – Sitting still (I said it once already) – is the real sin against the Holy Ghost"
—Friedrich Nietzsche

"But in the end, one needs more courage to live than to kill itself"
—Albert Camus, A Happy Death

Pourquoi les gens échangeraient-ils leur vie pour l'incertitude qui suit la mort ? On dirait que la mort est plus raisonnable et convaincante que la vie, surtout lorsqu'elle est garantie par quelqu'un en qui ils ont confiance.

C’est comme le dit le vieux proverbe : « L’éléphant devant l’œil est invisible, la fourmi à travers l’océan est visible. »

Dans le roman d’Albert Camus, La Mort heureuse, il y a une citation qui reflète mon opinion sur les récents attentats suicides : « Il y a des jours où l’on voudrait être à sa place. Mais il faut plus de courage pour vivre que pour se tuer. »

Setahun berlalu sejak virus Corona berganti nama menjadi Covid-19. Ahli bicara BNPB yang wajahnya tak pernah absen setahun terakhir mengabarkan berita kematian tampaknya sudah kelelahan dan menghentikan berita pers harian. Pemda DKI yang setiap dua minggu sekali rutin memperpanjang PSBB juga demikian. Indonesia hari ini adalah Indonesia yang tengah megap-megap berusaha menambal hutang teknis setahun terakhir, dengan perangai yang kurang lebih sama. Solusi lockdown sepertinya sudah hampir tak ada gunanya, adapun yang sejenisnya, mikro-lockdown dengan protokol kesehatan plus-plus pun pada akhirnya kita semua tahu itu lebih banyak wacananya

More than a month after the outbreak, Coronavirus finally got its new name -- Covid-19. Apparently the virus can survive for 5-20 days; on Twitter, I saw a video of bank officers in China disinfected enormous boxes of money to prevent the virus spreading. Chen Qiushi, a journalist who defied China's communist party monopoly by cover-up the information about the Coronavirus has been disappearing. People are getting obsessed with antibacterial soap and facial masks; I went to two mini marts only to find nothing. On the train people who use masks seeing each other with a suspicious gaze. Indonesia still has no reported Coronavirus, most people including WHO are not so happy about that. It sounds like a story of an old friend from school who never get a good mark then make a surprise with a perfect score, everyone is amazed, but no one believes.