nokko

One of my friends says not to trust anything your mind puts forth past 9pm, and she's right, but I still breathe between then and sleeping

I have so little time. I don't feel like I do anything all that draining at work, logically, but I have so little time. Everything drains it away. Am I moving forward or staying in a holding pattern? Can I trust that I'll be better at life next year? I don't know. I'm trying to improve and friends are helping me and I'm helping them... it's all so hard.

I'm okay at relationships but bad at cleaning. Good at computer job, bad at doing computer job when I need to do computer job. People like me, I think. That's something.

Started exercising this year. Feeling better. Sticking to it. Expensive, I'm stupid so I pay a trainer I probably can't afford. But maybe it's making me stick to it. Or maybe it's just expensive. Doing it to feel better, I guess. To get skinnier, too. Not sure changing my body shape will make me happy, but maybe. Mostly I just want to see if I can. Let myself spend my late 20s ruining the body of my early 20s, I guess.

But I know whenever I've had the chance to do a bunch of cardio throughout the week I've been happier for it, so that should help. Has been helping, I think.

Is this it? 9-5 and asleep at 10-12 every weeknight? Maybe six hours to yourself? Add in a social life and that's two or three days doing whatever you do. Cooking instead of eating out is good, saves money. But it eats time.

Love my partner. But I don't think he likes that we don't see each other very often. But I have. No time. Should I have time? Am I meant to make time? Friday nights, sometimes, and a Saturday morning at least, usually we do a thing every week, I hope it's okay.

Am I just weak or something? Everyone does this, everyone lucky enough to even have a job that hasn't been casualized to shreds. My parents must have done it to put a roof over my head. Things cost more now but the time commitment is the same, roughly.

How do I do it? How do I do it how do I do it...?

I try to be good, I guess. Give money to things freely. I remember all the kindnesses I received from friends when I couldn't make rent or was between jobs. I try to pay it forward. Give to whomever needs it, buy gifts for my friends, do nice things. I hope it doesn't feel hollow. I hardly have time, I feel like, to properly sit down and make something nice. It's all just chotchkes and nice electronics (when I can) or just buying food. I try. I don't know

Am I happy? I think I'm happy. I wish I could keep it together better. I wish I didn't have ADHD. All my life I keep forgetting obvious shit, keep being an unfocused ditz, keep just failing at hurdles everyone else clears. But clearing other hurdles people fail. Spiky competence. Dumb.

I want to do so many things. But how? How can I ever afford anything I dream of? Studying in college again, or just taking a giant break to catch up on projects, write stuff, read stuff, make stuff. Money, time, time, money. I hate it. I could be thinking of so many better things. Would communism be a labour-saving device? In the sense that a moneyless society mightn't entail so much thinking about fucking money

Cohost is shutting down, which is really sad. These are our financial realities, I guess. Turns out I had a few things kicking around in my drafts, this one I’ll post verbatim. (I am in a better place now, uh, don’t worry.)

In 1999, a study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. To summarise the findings in broad strokes: The researchers investigated how well participants estimated their skills, and discovered that the relationship between a person’s estimation of their ability and their actual performance wasn’t always accurate. In later studies, this cognitive bias was termed the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The concept has been memed to death at this point. I’m not here to present new findings or insights into how the science was conducted, or how the popular understandings of the Effect often get it wrong – more qualified people than me have already done that.

I choose to bring it up because it speaks to me. Scientific investigation into how well we understand our own abilities has revealed that, often, we over-estimate our competence. Given that fact, maybe it’s worth investigating my own assessment of my skills.

I’ve been writing fiction for a long time, but not very regularly. 5 years ago I was writing sub-par sci-fi on short story forums, and between then and now I’ve had plenty of writing spurts. The urge comes over me to write a thing, I stick to it for two chapters or so, and abandon it not long after the initial excitement fades. 

Many people have trouble with this stuff. Writing is difficult, we’ve been new. In a cruel twist, it’s even more difficult for beginner writers. 

Ink has been spilled on the various problems with this sort of thing existing - unethical data harvesting, unethical uses for cheap, if somewhat low-quality intellectual labour, consequences for working writers, dystopian commercial applications of advanced NLP chat AIs, all that.

But, for once, I also see something genuinely good about this kind of model. It's a thing you can talk to, which has infinite patience and responds to you like a sort of boring conversation partner.

I've bounced ideas off it to finally finish plotting my latest novel project. Most of its suggestions are tripe that I don't want to write about, but that it keeps giving mediocre ideas no matter how much you ask, makes it easier to come up stuff that's better than what a model can do. The best writing is rewriting, and all that.

It's also got some potential as a kind of research assistant. It has some general knowledge about everything, but it frequently gets facts completely wrong. Maybe in some future model they'll hook it up to a search engine, (implications for continuous unscrupulous web scraping and all) but even without that capability, it's pretty good at suggesting search terms for a given topic.

Its understanding of English (the nuts and bolts, anyway) is mostly fine. Its Russian is at a level where I don't think it's making many errors.* (But I'm a heritage speaker, who am I to say) More importantly, it has helped me both to translate words from English to Russian, and to kind-of feel out the vocabulary around a certain topic, fill in my personal lacunas.

I'm willing to bet that for other languages it performs at a similar level, or a bit worse. So it's like an L2 speaker* you can bug ad nauseam with your broken French or whatever, which, like, holy shit? It's probably not a "technically good" way to learn a language, but that feels like a pretty awesome thing to fill in the gaps between actual lessons or conversations with speakers to me.

I'm impressed, and a little bit hopeful. If I had to bet on it, wide adoption of this NLP model and its future descendants is probably going to cause more harm than good. That being said, I do also see the good.

Footnotes:

*Shoot, I'm technically an L2 speaker of English, and I like to think I write better than GPT. I meant it in the sense of not quite being fluent, not as a diss to uh, most bilingual speakers...