Author: Josephius Page 4 of 5

Echoes

On March 16, 2022

I remember the lights. It was a night downtown walking with friends. We had this way of ignoring the traffic lights and narrowly averting disaster. I felt alive. It was silly…

I remember the snow. My hands were freezing, but these cardboard boxes needed to be flattened or else we’d all get into trouble later I thought. You were inside, dancing with Daniel I guess. Much later he told me that he’d really meant it when he told you he and his ex were done, and it wasn’t just a temporary thing at the time that she later claimed. I think he didn’t realize I had no way of telling you this tidbit by that point…

I remember waking up and seeing your silhouette outside of the kitchen screen door for some reason. The dinner the previous night had not digested well and I ran to the washroom. Sorry for not letting you in when you were trapped outside for a while. This was after that Durarara marathon, where we’d slept on couches since it had been so late. I think I accidentally stepped on the cat that night as I was fumbling in the dark. Poor cat. He seemed confused…

I remember being angry when it turned out the assignment required more memory than your poor laptop could handle. I honestly respected that you wanted to look through the code and try to understand it and make it your own. The perfume though was a bit strong. I could smell it even from across the room…

I remember when you meowed back at me. We were at my place surrounded by friends getting ready to watch some anime and I took you by surprise by meowing at you in the first place…

I remember when we first met at the bubble tea event. I’d seen your picture on the Facebook group before, but this was the first time in person. The Star Trek movie was on in the background, and a bunch of the folks I’d learn to call friends for a time were there…

I remember the last time you said anything to me in person. It was after a different bubble tea event two years later. You told me you didn’t appreciate the talks we’d had and wasn’t interested in another one, and walked off. It took a while for me to process what you’d said, and by then you were gone…

I remember the first Halloween party. The time I was a ninja and showed off my martial arts prowess with a wooden sword in a small park. You were dressed in a sorta elegant gothic lolitaish dress. Alas, despite being a ninja, I didn’t know how to dance…

I remember at another Halloween event, while holding the door for everyone, exhausted from the day of turning cardboard boxes and garbage bags into a haunted house, someone touched my hand as she went past. I still don’t know who that was, and it probably doesn’t matter now…

I remember the day I lost your trust. You’d already printed out the form I’d asked you to print for me and didn’t even look at what was on it, since it was technically confidential tax stuff. I was standing in your room, complaining about stupid emo things that didn’t matter even back then. You kept saying if I trusted you, I’d say what I wanted to say. So I put my hand on the stack of journals on your lap and said something. Not really what I wanted to say to be honest. I couldn’t say that. To let you know I was deeply, madly in love with you back then…

I remember when we went together to the Durarara cosplay meetup at the convention. After the old cellphones were broken to bits to re-enact that scene, I told people the next Dollars mission was to clean things up for the environment, then promptly went to a photoshoot rather than staying and helping like I really should have to set a better example…

I remember meeting you at the sushi restaurant. I’d gotten there early and made a bunch of blue roses out of crafting paper from a store nearby, thinking this was such a good idea for some reason. You didn’t seem impressed. I remember generally being an idiot back then, and not taking the rejection well…

I remember you wanting to be the next Marie Curie. I think I mentioned this to a certain mutual friend shortly before a certain game of Apples-To-Apples…

I remember being annoyed that the PSP was so expensive that even with all the donations they covered only half the cost, as this was before the price drop. The most important thing was that it came from the club, and not from me. I gave you a less impressive throwaway present at the same time to try to make it seem this way. You seemed very happy when you opened the present from the club. I ran away and didn’t see the rest of what happened though…

I remember you standing at the front of the classroom. I remember how you could command the attention of everyone in the room, even though you were talking about something like Vocaloid fandoms…

I remember karaoke. You sang songs in Japanese that I couldn’t. I sang dumb emo English songs because back then that was all I knew…

I remember that you wanted to make sure your distant future child if it was a boy would read some girls’ literature so he could understand the female mind and experience…

I remember you said your dad’s bible was the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. You recommended it to me, and I read it eventually. I learned what synergy really means from that book…

I remember thinking for some reason it would be a good idea to get you a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, even though it was probably, in retrospect, not something you would find tasteful…

I remember walking through a museum, wishing that I had gone with you instead of on my own. For some reason I thought the dark, morbid exhibit would interest you somehow. I think my state of mind wasn’t great at that point…

I remember reading your LiveJournal and feeling empathy towards your daily struggles, but never being self-confident enough to reach out and show that I cared…

I remember being an awkward, cringey person. You were as kind to me as you could be, all things considered…

I remember you because you left a deep impression on me. And for that, I’m grateful to have crossed paths. Thank you. I’m sorry I wasn’t the good friend you deserved. I’ve done my best to try to be better since then. You helped me become who I am now. Again, thank you.

What Does It Mean?

by Josephius

On March 14, 2022

In Life

It’s a strange thing. Despite everything, there’s still a part of me that cares about how she’s doing these days. Why her? Of all the people in the world, why is it that I worry about how she feels now?

I love my wife very much, but I also know exactly how she’s doing now, so it doesn’t bother me like it does with this person. This person who for all intents and purposes abandoned me as a friend a decade ago. Any sane person would have long ago given up hope to reconcile. Like, I know that events in your twenties supposedly leave a deeper impression or something. Maybe that’s it?

Or maybe I feel residual responsibility for not representing what I believed in well, and so I worry she learned the wrong lessons and came to the wrong conclusions because I failed as an example. That seems, kinda arrogant though, to think that my small failures would leave much of an impression on someone who I knew to be strong-willed and principled in her outlook.

Or maybe it’s the strange things I’ve heard that suggest she took it particularly badly. Of course, every attempt I’ve made to reach out has only made things worse, so I don’t even know if there’s anything I can reasonably do to alleviate things.

And… I don’t trust myself to read the tea leaves in an unbiased way. I have a history of reading too much into small signs that in truth meant nothing.

So, I’m left with just a sense of loss and guilt. It’s my fault that things got this way in the first place. Ultimately, I must bear the consequences of my foolish youth. I won’t say that the feelings are all gone, but at this point, I mostly just miss my friends. Technically both of them, though they are not sisters. It’s a long story, and not one I think is worth bringing up in any sort of detail on a post like this.

I guess I also have a nagging worry about certain other people who may have had ill intentions and could have contributed to things, though I can’t confirm with certainty whether this was the case. Regardless, it was my fault that I handled the whole situation poorly.

I suppose that’s the thing. An apology never properly spoken. A wish to at least let her know what she perhaps fears isn’t true. A way to clear the air and fix possible misunderstandings. This is what I want. But I know I don’t deserve it.

Or maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe I was wrong about her. That could explain a lot. But for some reason I cling to the faith in my former friends, that they are decent people and wouldn’t go that far. Honestly though, I can’t know for certain. I can only hope it’s a misunderstanding that’s just spiralled out of control.

A misunderstanding I enabled by being unreliable and inconsistent in the first place. I can’t control what others think or do, but I should have done better than I did. I lost her trust. That was my fault. If that didn’t happen, everything could have been figured out better. I could have asked about the thing that made me paranoid, and found out the probably mundane reason for it. Regrettably, I let things spiral into chaos and confusion instead.

And then I continued to do some really dumb things that just made things worse. The rest is history.

So, what does it mean? It means I get hung up on past regrets easily. It means sometimes there’s no way forward. Life can be painfully indifferent in that way. And people suffer for your mistakes, and you can do nothing to help them. This is a dark reality. The truth of the brutality of the universe.

I normally try to somehow turn this around to say something I think is inspiring, but sometimes it’s just impossible. You’re put in impossible situations with no good way out. Except to let go and move on, I guess. The universe is not a wish granting machine. It is a pile of stuff that occasionally moves and fights you for the limited amount of energy present. That we are able to push together a remotely satisfactory life out of this struggle is to be applauded I suppose. But we can’t always get what we want.

Sometimes problems evolve to the point where there is just no solution. In which case, one should focus on other problems instead. But it doesn’t feel great.

What Does It Mean?

by Josephius

On March 14, 2022

In Life, Poetry

What does it mean to dream of lost ones?

To wish and yearn for a past that never was?

What does it mean to believe in someone?

And hold secrets in your heart for eternity?

What does it mean to not know the future?

But wander through timelines that can’t exist?

What does it mean to seek solace in obscurity?

And to choose to be forgotten rather than seen?

It means that there are places we cannot go.

And dreams we can never fulfill.

It means our hopes are dashed in a darkness unknown.

And yet we stand again to face a mysterious calling.

And so it cannot be.

And yet it must be.

That we reflect the image of the divine.

That we burden ourselves so that others may feel light.

Keep Going

by Josephius

On November 14, 2021

In Motivational

When I was a kid, I participated in piano recitals and competitions. The most important thing my teacher back then taught me about performing was that, if you make a mistake, don’t stop, keep going.

In life, true confidence is not about being right all the time. It’s about knowing that when you make a mistake, you can recover from it and bounce back and continue to do the thing that needs to be done.

There is a time for reflecting and learning from mistakes. But in the midst of a time sensitive situation, sometimes you have to keep moving no matter what. Wisdom is knowing when this is and isn’t the case.

When In Doubt…

by Josephius

On October 5, 2021

In Motivational

When in doubt, try to remember why you’re doing this. Try to remember what drives you forward. Remember what makes you passionate about what you’re doing. There’s a reason why.

Sometimes when you’re in the midst of the struggle, you can forget it, but it’s worth remembering why you care about the things you do.

Every day comes with its own challenges. Some are stranger than others. But at the end of the day, you believe in something that pushes you to take another step. What matters is that you take a step, how ever small, in the right direction.

Life is a journey of small steps. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. We make a map of the world by where we visit. Sometimes there are dragons we must face.

Sometimes the dragons drawn on our map are already defeated, and we just have to find out what’s actually there now.

The things we do matter. They may only matter to us, to our close family and friends, but that’s more than enough. If something matters to anyone, it matters in this grand universe of ours.

So take a step forward. Keep moving. Even if it’s hard. If you’re debating between the hard and the easy, it’s because the hard thing is somehow worth more, otherwise you’d just do the easy thing.

Sometimes life is darker than bright. In those times we should remember our dreams, because they can be a light, how ever faint, that guides us through the dark forest of doubt.

On Politics, Being a Liberal, and The Canadian Federal Election 2021

by Josephius

On September 16, 2021

In Life, Politics

So, a bit of background to explain where I’m coming from. I’ve been on and off involved in politics since my university days, when I took a first year political studies course and participated in the online forum discussions. I also took a political philosophy course. Back then I identified initially as a Christian Socialist and a communitarian on most political issues. As my political values matured this morphed into support for centre-left modern liberalism. It was back then that I started going to meetings of the Young Liberals. I still remember, back in the day, shaking hands with Michael Ignatieff during a rally. I didn’t join the party though until a chance meeting at the Young Liberals with Sheila Copps, who convinced me to get more involved.

Thus, when the Liberals were going through yet another leadership race after Ignatieff stepped down, I joined the party and initially sought to support Marc Garneau, the former astronaut. He eventually dropped out and encouraged his supporters to support Justin Trudeau. While I was wary of Trudeau being a kind of princeling, I respected that he had charisma, and voted for his leadership candidacy. Afterwards I bought a copy of his book, Common Ground, and admitted it was a decent read, more relevant at least than Ignatieff’s The Needs of Strangers, which had told me little about where Ignatieff actually stood on things or why.

In 2015, there was an election. The increasingly tired Conservative government under Stephen Harper faced off against a refreshed Liberal party under Trudeau, as well as the NDP under Thomas Mulcair, the Bloc Quebecois under Gilles Duceppe, and the Green party under Elizabeth May. By then I was quite angered by Harper’s government, and it only got more so when he made a series of controversial choices that seemed to play to the xenophobia of the far-right.

When the election started, and Harper started using dog-whistles like “old stock Canadians”, I was incensed and felt motivated to kick these people out of office in favour of someone who, back in those heady days, I thought was a breath of fresh air. Back when Trudeau said “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian”, taking a seemingly less than popular stand on the issue of second class citizenship rights to would-be terrorists, I thought of him as the closest we had to a Captain Canada, who would stand up for Charter rights and the Canadian ideals I believe in.

And so, after canvassing and making phone calls and doing a bunch of random odd jobs that needed to be done as a volunteer, I remember being a scrutineer for the Liberals on election day 2015, and hearing from the dejected Conservative scrutineers who’d just checked their phones and found out that us Liberals had managed to win a majority. Somehow.

Back then I was quite happy with things politically. After the election, the newly elected Liberal MP decided I was a reliable enough person that I was encouraged to run as VP Policy on the board of the riding association. I was acclaimed and sat for about a year, though work on the job front ended up distracting me greatly and I didn’t end up doing as much as I would have liked in terms of making things happen. I’d hoped to organize a town hall event for them and other things, but instead there was a rush to get our policy resolutions ready for the upcoming convention and the process wasn’t as grassroots as I would have liked. Neverthless, it was fun to be on the board of a sitting MP, who had stories to tell about Parliament Hill.

Over time though, the realities of governance led to my developing grievances with Trudeau and his way of handling things. I did not like his decision to essentially renege on the promise that 2015 would be the last election by First Past The Post. Electoral reform was an important issue to me, one that, while knocking on doors, I’d declared confidently that we’d do. So it was disappointing.

Other disappointments also happened. Things like SNC-Lavalin and the way Trudeau handled the Jody Wilson Raybould situation. Generally, I became somewhat disillusioned. At one point, I found myself in a debate with old Liberal friends on Facebook on these issues, as I showed my dissent within the party over Trudeau’s judgment.

So, in addition to being quite busy with work, by now having landed a job at a major tech company, I was not motivated to help out when the 2019 election rolled around, and I basically sat it out.

More recently, I’ve also noticed a drift in my political values, that I’ve gradually shifted leftward and away from the centre. While the Liberals still fit within my positions, I’ve also admittedly looked at other parties like the NDP and Greens, and provided them some modest donations (ostensibly to support all the progressive parties), if not actually volunteering or joining them. Locally, I still support the Liberals, because I tend to find the local candidates of the Liberal party to be higher quality in terms of who I would want to represent me in Ottawa.

I participated in the online Liberal convention this year. I voted for pharmacare and a basic income to be our policies in the future. To be honest, I was a little disappointed that the NDP are more interested in having these policies in their platform than whoever wrote the Liberal platform.

Before the 2021 election call, I moved to a new riding. I noticed that the race here has historically been a close one between the Liberals and Conservatives, similar to my old riding. So, I got into contact with the local Liberals and the candidate. In some ways the candidate reminded me of the past candidate I’d helped. Understated, yet a strong, thoughtful, and thoroughly professional person who seems to sincerely care about their constituents and want to do good in Ottawa. These are the types of Liberals I find that keep me with this party.

I’ll admit I still have reservations about giving Trudeau another mandate. A part of me wonders if it wouldn’t be better to see turnover at the top. But then, in the English debate, I was reminded of why I voted for Trudeau. Even Jagmeet Singh admits that Trudeau seems to really care. Singh seems to think he doesn’t do enough, but respects that Trudeau at least shares some common values.

When Trudeau called the election, I didn’t like it. I thought it was unnecessary in the face of this pandemic. But at the same time, I respect that Trudeau did a lot when the pandemic first hit, that he has guided the country fairly well all things considered in a very trying time. And when the odious PPC protesters shout and throw gravel at him, a part of me wants to defend him. He may be wrong sometimes, but overall, he’s decent-hearted leader, trying his best to balance the complexities of Canada and the world.

So, I am volunteering for the Liberals again this election. I do so with somewhat more mixed feelings than I did in 2015, but I still think this is the right thing to do. To be engaged in politics and democracy and be present in the processes that lead to the leadership of the country. I may not be a candidate or anyone of particular importance, but I think it’s important to participate in politics. For the greatest good of this country, and the world.

Of The Wedding And Other Thoughts

by Josephius

On September 2, 2021

In Life, Motivational

It was kind of surreal. We’d had to postpone the wedding on several occasions due to the COVID-19 pandemic so far. And then, there was a window of time where it seemed like restrictions were easing and life might go back to normal. My fiancee was tired of pushing things back. She really wanted to move forward with her life, and I felt the same.

It’s kind of strange. To be married. To have this ring on my finger that represents a promise and means so much. In some ways I never thought I’d reach this point. For a long time in my life, I’d assumed that good things happened to other people, that my life was just a bunch of suffering and stuff that happened for reasons beyond my control.

I’m happy. Somehow, my life seems to have turned out okay. I’m married to a wonderful girl, kind, intelligent, beautiful, innocent, and adventurous. My dream girl for all intents and purposes. She understands me. She gets my weird quirks and listens to my silly intellectual meanderings. She’s the one person I can be myself around. Apparently I am something of a cat.

She visited me as often as she could when I was in the hospital. I matter to her, and she matters to me. We click. We have the same taste in video games. We are very silly at home when no one else is around to disapprove of our silliness. She has an imagination, a beautiful, creative, brilliant mind. She is inherently decent. The core values that really, deeply matter, we share.

At the end of the day, what matters in a partner is that you find someone you can grow old together with. Someone who can share in the adventure of life. Someone you can really, deeply trust the judgment of. This is why I chose her. She is wise beyond her years.

She isn’t perfect. No one is. There are things I can find a bit annoying. Arguments about ideas that stem from the very different cultures that we grew up in. But these aren’t important. I don’t need the One to agree with me all the time. In fact, I want her to challenge me if she thinks I’m wrong. What’s important is the intangibles. Her sense of humanity. Her thoughtful consideration. Her willingness to be reasoned with and to try to understand why.

Ultimately, I want her to be happy. Unlike many others in my past, her dreams had a place for me. She’s brought me such happiness in the past three years. Without her, I doubt I would have stayed strong in the face of many of the challenges my life threw at me. She’s been a pillar of support, the light of my life. With her, I am finally, truly happy.

I hope that you, dear reader, if you haven’t already, will be able to find such happiness as well.

The Tragedy of Afghanistan and The Promise of Democracy

by Josephius

On August 17, 2021

In Politics

As a Canadian, I am upset at the situation in Afghanistan. Regardless of whether we should have been there in the first place, what does our word as a country mean if we cannot protect even those who supported us when we were there.

The people now falling from planes trying to escape were people who believed in us when we said we came to help their country. People who were willing to believe in this now apparent siren song of democracy and modernity that we claimed to represent.

What is the value of a promise by a western liberal democracy worth now? Who will trust us to honour what we claim to believe in and stand for?

You can’t force democracy on people, that’s a contradiction in terms, because democracy is by definition built by popular support rather than imposed from outside.

But even so, we led a generation of people to believe in something that is now, for all appearances, abandoning them to their fate. And that is a tragedy all in itself.

The history of Afghanistan is already tragic. It is a graveyard of empires, but also a place of poverty. It is not always well known that the Taliban originated from the CIA-backed Mujahideen that were equipped and trained by the Americans to fight the Soviet-backed Communist regime that ruled before them. In that light, the idea that the Afghan civil war has nothing to do with America, is at best naive, and at worst duplicitous.

Afghanistan is what it is because of American foreign policy. The same policies that helped overthrow democratic governments in Iran and Chile historically when they didn’t favour American interests. That America now wants to leave the country alone after all of that has been done?

Perhaps in time Afghanistan will heal. But the damage to western credibility is done. People will remember. What lesson will they learn from all of this? That our flowery words ring hollow? That “democracy” is a trojan horse for the interests of an unstable, unreliable American empire?

It’s just very disappointing. And of course, tragic for the people who must suffer for the hubris of others. Tragic for people who still believe in democracy and hope and aspire to its ideals. What hope is there for the world if the great city on a hill appears to be nothing but a mirage?

It’s just very disillusioning to see these events play out. After 9/11, America had all the goodwill in the world. Somehow in 20 years they’ve managed to squander it. Even in the Obama years people still had faith. But now I find it hard to defend the ideals of democracy when the practice and execution are so poor.

On paper democracy is great. Everyone gets a vote and their voice heard. The foolish ideas cancel out and the truth prevails because differing experiences agree on them. The wisdom of crowds leads us forward. Or so it should be.

In practice, large media conglomerates owned by wealthy power brokers essentially decide what people think is true. That or isolated conspiracy theory infested online bubbles, foreign state-influenced fake news outlets and the like.

Democracy is further corrupted by such malfeasances as gerrymandered districts, or electoral college shenanigans in the U.S. If democracy is the will of the majority, then the winner of the popular vote should always lead, but frequently this is not the case in many countries whether Presidential or Parliamentary.

So, the truth is that many of our so called democracies aren’t really democratic. At best, they are elected dictatorships, built to legitimize the establishment and create a false sense of popular will for the powers that be. It’s hard to say what a true democracy would look like, or whether it will necessarily be the best government either, but we should stop pretending like our system is 100% absolutely the best thing full stop.

There is much room for improvement. I’m naturally inclined towards reform from within the system, because I think it’s salvagable. But we need to stop assuming that liberal representative democracy is the end of history, the solution to all problems.

Else we sell a false dream that can be dashed by the realities of a world that is far from perfect. As I watch people fall from the sky, their dreams lost to the cold, uncaring march of history. We must do better.

On Dreams

by Josephius

On July 14, 2021

In Life, Philosophy

When I was a child, I wanted, at various times, to be a jet fighter pilot, the next Sherlock Holmes (unaware he was fictional), or a great scientist like Albert Einstein. As I grew older, I found myself drawn to creative hobbies, like writing stories (or at least coming up with ideas for them) and making computer games in my spare time. In grade 8 I won an English award, mostly because I’d shown such fervour in reading my teacher’s copy of The Lord Of The Rings, and written some interesting things while inspired to be like J.R.R. Tolkien, or Isaac Asimov.

In high school my highest grades were reserved for computer science initially, where I managed to turn a hobby of making silly computer games into a top final project a couple years in a row. Even though, at the end of high school, I won another award, this time the Social Science Book award, after doing quite well in a modern history class, I decided to go into computer science in undergrad.

For various reasons, I got depressed at the end of high school, and the depression dragged through the beginning of undergrad where I was no longer a top student. I struggled with the freedom I had, and I wasn’t particularly focused or diligent. Programming became work to me, and my game design hobby fell by the wayside. Writing essays for school made me lose interest in my novel ideas as well.

At some point, one of the few morning lectures I was able to drag myself to was presented by a professor who mentioned he wanted a research assistant for a project. Later that summer, I somehow convinced him to take me on and spent time in a lab trying to get projectors to work with mirrors and fresnel lenses to make a kind of flight simulator for birds. It didn’t go far, but it gave me a taste for this research thing.

I spent the rest of my undergrad trying to shore up my GPA so I could get into a masters program and attempt to learn to be a scientist. In a way, I’d gone full circle to an early dream I had as a child. I’d also become increasingly interested in neural networks as a path towards AI, having switched from software design to cognitive science as my computing specialization early on.

The masters was also a struggle. Around this time emotional and mental health issues made me ineffective at times, and although I did find an understanding professor to be my thesis supervisor, I was often distracted from my work.

Eventually though, I finished my thesis. I technically also published two papers with it, although I don’t consider these my best work. While in the big city, I was also able to attend a machine learning course at a more prestigeous university, and got swept up in the deep learning wave that was happening around then.

Around then I devoted myself to some ambitious projects, like the original iteration of the Earthquake Predictor and Music-RNN. Riding the wave, I joined a startup as a data scientist, briefly, and then a big tech company as a research scientist. I poured my heart and soul into some ideas that I thought had potential, unaware that most of them were either flukes of experimental randomness, or doomed to be swept away by the continuing tide of new innovations that would quickly replace them.

Still, I found myself struggling to keep working on the ideas I thought were meaningful, and became disillusioned when it became apparent that they wouldn’t see support and I was sidelined into a lesser role than before, with little freedom to pursue my research.

In some sense, I left because I wanted to prove my ideas on my own. And then I tried to do so, and realized that I didn’t have the resources or the competency. Further experiments were inconclusive. The thing I thought was my most important work, this activation function that I thought could replace the default, turned out to be less clearly optimal than I’d theorized. My most recent experiments suggest it still is something that is better calibrated and leads to less overconfident models, but I don’t think I have the capabilities to turn this into a paper and publish it anywhere worthwhile. And I’m not sure if I’m just still holding onto a silly hope that all the experiments and effort that went into this project weren’t a grand waste of time.

I’d hoped that I could find my way into a position somewhere that would appreciate the ideas that I’d developed, perhaps help me to finally publish them. I interviewed with places of some repute. But eventually I started to wonder if what I was doing even made sense.

This dream of AI research. It depended on the assumption that this technology would benefit humanity in the grandest way possible. It depended on the belief that by being somewhere in the machinary of research and engineering, I’d be able to help steer things in the right direction.

But then I read in a book about how AI capability was dramatically outpacing AI safety. I was vaguely aware of this fact before. The fact is that these corporations and governments want AI for the power that it offers them, and questions about friendliness and superintelligence seem silly and absurd when looking at the average model that simply perceives and reports probabilities that such and such a thing is such.

And I watched as the surveillance economy grew on the backs of these models. I realized that the people in charge weren’t necessarily considering the moral implications of things. I realized that by pursuing my dream, I was allowing myself to be a part of a machine that was starting to more closely resemble a kind of dystopian nightmare.

So I made a decision. That this dream didn’t serve the greatest good. That my dream was selfish. I took the opportunity that presented itself to go back to another dream from another life, the old one about designing games and telling stories. Because at least, I could see no way for those dreams to turn out wrong.

In theory, I could work on AI safety directly. In theory I could try a different version of the dream. But in practice, I don’t know where to begin that line of research. And I don’t want to be responsible for a mistake that ends the world.

So, for now at least, I’m choosing a dream I can live with. Something less grand, but also less dangerous. I don’t know if this is the right way to go. But it’s the path that seems open to me now. What else happens, I cannot predict. But I can try to take the path that seems best. Because my true dream is to do something that brings about the best world, with the most authentic happiness. How I go about it, that can change with the winds.

Letting Go

by Josephius

On February 11, 2021

In Projects

I’ve officially discontinued the Earthquake Predictor project for now. I still need to do backups of the data, but I’m no longer going to have the daily update script running. It had stopped for a while now due to a bug anyway, and I wasn’t able after a cursory effort to debug it so that it worked again. It also honestly didn’t do anything relevant, as the model only predicted high frequency, low magnitude quakes and not the low frequency, high magnitude ones that mattered. The architecture I was using was my old LSTM-RNN model, which has largely been superseded in the literature by the transformer architecture, so it badly needed to be taken offline and retrained anyway. Not sure if I’ll ever get around to retraining it with the new architecture. It kinda seems like a very silly longshot of a project that kept one entire GPU busy because I could never figure out how to properly unload models from memory without stopping the process. Even if it only updated once a day, it was a hassle because the thing would randomly error out and I’d have to start it up again after having missed several days of updates and having to backdate the sequence of updates made with the appropriate 24 hours of data. All in all, not a great system.