Alok Singh's Blog
I have grown up in the Bay area. What I love about this place is that people who are important are hard-working, talented, open-minded, and kind. In most places, any subset of these traits is not enough. But here you need all four just to survive and thrive and to matter, to be somebody. Since everyone’s so driven, we’re like highway truckers. All our crossings are transverse, barren gone. In work…
Opera night. I put on the suit I got in Vietnam. And then I went to Dream of the Red Chamber. So many steps at the hall. So sheer. I thought of how the Aztecs would roll corpses down the pyramids. And if I would be beside them. I was up in the top right in the nosebleed section, and I could see the nosebleed. I was so conscious of my nose, the feeling that it was dripping. The hook of it. The…
In 2016, in August, I went to China. This is just one chapter. I got on the plane and things, as always, are sacred place. I just didn’t sleep, and reached this liminal state between sleep and wake. By the time the layover landed in Shanghai, I was under waves of tiredness, but a core of me was wired. I felt like the crew of the pirate song pilgrims on a long journey, that as long as I moved…
I spent a decent fraction of today trying to explain to Scott Sumner that an analogy is like a functor, or like a functor is like the idealization of an analogy. What makes an analogy useful isn’t saying A is like B because, you know, his jacket is like that plant. The jacket has a kind of leafy texture, the plant has a kind of leafy texture, you’ve made a sentence, you haven’t done anything yet.…
Clear the way or I’ll cut your eyes out and feed them to the gulls. The honor guard lieutenant looked like he meant it. The wives dispersed, the men wavered to show their mettle before thinking better of it. The auctioneer’s mustache was as shiny as Gavin Newsom’s hair. His purple coat and its fine lapis lazuli buttons gleamed. Sullen slaves shuffled under the weight of the tabernacle. The…
The day you say you don’t have it in you to write, or to do whatever is demanded of you, is a day you’ll be very, very different. Sammy, you dance to our beat. You have extraordinary sensitivity to phenomena, and it has served you well whether in jobs or likability or sex. It’s a very strong part of you, but it’s not you. Even your interiority — like Jimmy from Better Call Saul — is well served by…
The boy was so afraid. So nervy. That twitchy sperg. My friend A and I, we’re hanging out in Lindavista Park and the sun had gone. No daylight, but me no want to go home. So we started climbing. There’s something about the pace of walking or advancing to a goal that even with the wind and the cold, my focus, my fixation shrinks to a point. And before we knew it, we were at the crest. I hear a…
He felt swollen like a tick, head and gut. Ori had helped with the strokes. 2 years of work hewing the tree, hollowing it with the silent thuds of stone adzes and Ori’s soundless prayers. Ori had looked at him when he didn’t offer. Maalo had lied about the best bluff he’d found to drive the hunt. The best was for the wood to cure in the lees. Moving the trunk to the bluff had taken months and…
kairos. it’s what i’ve considering naming any future son. my daughter will be seraphina thanks to brian jacques. kairos is the gap in the armor, the shuttle in the loom, the kink in the knot, the separation in the closing. it sounds like a christian name but i think thats more for the early christians being caught in the greeks way like the rest of us. r scott bakker calls similar the gobozkoy,…
Proposal: implement https://www.arena.education/ in Lean. Why? My intuition is that theorem provers will end up in the final solution to AI safety, if there is one. And if one was devised in “not a theorem prover”, we’d soon want to put it in a theorem prover because the stakes are so high. For all its flaws, mechinterp is the main way I know of to “debug” neural nets. The low level. I’ve already…