2025-03-30: Untitled

Woke up today with typical levels of despair (high). Slept an extra three hours; it did nothing to help. Realized I would have to get through this the hard way. Read for a few hours at the cafe across the street (just opened), then went for a run which became a walk which became a run again. Text messages to a friend:

yeah i went for a run and then kinda walked at the end of the run down to DATA_EXPUNGED

actually there is a very beautiful park i found there called DATA_EXPUNGED or something where lots of happy families were playing fetch with stereotypical dogs

unfortunately i have new sunglasses that DATA_EXPUNGED that have endowed the cursed ability to See Through the Bullshit and it was difficult to view their joy without cynicism

but i comforted myself by imagining that perhaps they are just as scared and desperate as the rest of us and the dog is simply a gen X version of the cellphone, if you can picture that.

did you hear the one about how people who were 25 in 2000 are 50 now? that’s like, second or even third marriage age.

I stopped getting read receipts at about the third message, which, OK, fair enough.

I have always struggled with nice weather and happy families. Both remind me of when my parents divorced. And these picket-fence families feel me with additional resentment the closer I get to their age: how are they so blissful and functional in the face of all the Problems and Strife in the world, all the shit that keeps me up at night?

I find it hard to take people seriously who say they are “worried about the future” and then have a car, a mortgage, two kids. Those are not financial decisions you would make if you were really worried. I’m sorry—I take it back. Everyone struggles in their own way.

I’m going back to therapy tomorrow, might need to reestablish a regular thing. World is a bit of a fuck.

2025-03-29: Documentary lady

The lady in front of me on this flight is watching a truly infohazardous documentary on her phone about some mom whose teenage daughter got pulled into an online trafficking ring—one of those extremely rare and awful “stereotypical” predator stories that keeps parents up at night because it’s just so vivid and horrible. Have been mentally playing the Jason Isbell song “Save the World” for about an hour, that awkward guitar riff perhaps a picture of our own powerlessness over the inevitable march of time. Pedo documentary lady reminds me that I am not the only one despairing, as if that’s any comfort.

2025-03-29: Last girl in class

Have to tell this story in a very boring way to remove identifying details.

In college, I took a class in a subject that was of far greater interest to boys than girls. On day one of the class, there was only one girl in the class of about fifteen, and she seemed very shy. However, a round of introductions revealed that she was actually planning to minor in this subject (for which the class was a core requirement), and thus although it was awkward to have such a skewed gender ratio, I think the general mood was to be “cautiously optimistic” that there was a brave woman in the room. We were all progressive, young types who wanted (to some extent or another) to see gender roles shaken up, right?

Anyway, during one of the first few lectures, the girl’s phone went off. I’m not sure if it was a phone call or an alarm, but she’d forgotten to silence it, and the ringtone was some silly Nicki Minaj song. I think the lyrics were about sex, I don’t really remember. The girl immediately got a mortified look on her face, grabbed her stuff, ran out of the classroom, and never came back. Not to that lecture, not to any other lectures, just dropped the class and disappeared.

A few weeks later, I remember the professor (a man in his 50s or so) saying something like: “I know it’d be nice if we had more women in this class. I feel bad that the gender ratio is so uneven. But I have to admit that I feel a little relaxed now that it’s all guys in here.”

I have spent the years since wondering exactly what he meant by that: relaxed about what? This prof wasn’t an utter curmudgeon (although we had those); he was a hip college professor who probably voted for democrats, and it wasn’t like he had suddenly started going on weird sexist tirades in the girl’s absence. Nor did he think that this field was a “man’s game”—his own daughter later enrolled in the program. If we take a charitable interpretation, I think this was the height of hashtag MeToo and the prof was just genuinely afraid of being “canceled” and the pressure to watch his words had been weighing on him.

But then … why say that part, about feeling relaxed now that the girl was gone? Why not just keep that thought to himself? I wonder if part of what prof was doing was seeking reassurance from us—young, progressive boys who knew the “language” of MeToo and cancel culture better than him but also had experienced anxiety over being canceled—that his feeling of “relief” didn’t make him a sexist, or at least not the worst kind of sexist. The ironic thing is that his words had the exact opposite effect: the number one rule of fight club is don’t talk about fight club, viz., the number one rule of accidentally shaming the only girl out of your classroom is don’t acknowledge the gender dynamic responsible.

2025-03-29: Sorry, guys

I was at the edge of insanity and took a week off to exist in the real world. I wrote a bunch of random notes on my phone over the past week and will be uploading a few with today’s date as posts. Sorry for flooding your feed, and stay aloha.

2025-03-29: This is what CS majors actually believe

Thomas Hunter II: AI will change the world but not in the way you think

I have nothing huge to say about this. The argument is familiar, about how LLMs are just wasted effort because they insert a translation layer between my “write an email with these bullets” and your “summarize this email in bullets.” But what jumped out to me from Mr. II’s post was this aside, which is shockingly dismissive of humanities education:

The point of a book report is to test if a student read the required material and was able to comprehend what it was about and the use of an LLM tool defeated this test.

This is what computer science majors actually believe dot jpeg: That teachers assign book reports to check if students did the reading—not for any of the other skills that you practice in writing a book report, like penmanship, typing, forming coherent sentences, forming well-organized paragraphs, operating Microsoft Word, identifying significant plot points and characters, identifying themes, extracting meaning and making connections, encountering differences of interpretation with your peers and resolving them without violence…. We can keep going, and of course the purpose of a book report and what we expect from it depends on whether the author is in 2nd or 11th grade. But the blogger above is clearly just … a guy who didn’t do the reading. Who values speed over craft. Who would rather we send bullet points back and forth to each other than complete sentences.

Speaking of which, I never understood these people who think that emails with long paragraphs are unconditionally worse than those with bullet points. Sometimes a bulleted style can nudge you to be better organized, but in general, concision and organizedness are only loosely correlated. I can fuckin read, you know?