> The kind of sex that requires sadness

Lauren Mayberry is a lyrical goddess

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBmn2TWCP_Q&list=PLQLmcTD5R-R9S6zlGdcmRlsGG639SKvlp&index=6

#theStudio #theLibrary

Little over halfway through 'The Three-Body Problem' by Cixin Liu. #theLibrary

warp of a weaver's bookshelf #theLibrary

two books i am carrying around these days - i barely manage to read fiction any more but i have soft spot for elegiac and numinous lives and testimonies <3 #theLibrary

Look at this funny little book I found in a second hand shop :-)!

#theLibrary

Started re-reading Sebald's "Rings of Saturn" and was reminded how much it changed my life and how much it is still changing my life.

#reading #library #nowreading #thelibrary #sebald

Found a really pretty edition of Butler's Butterfly Revolution.
#theLibrary

A simple map of early Polynesian/Melanesian migration voyages across the Pacific in open sailing canoes, without navigational instruments, relying on centuries (and thousands of sea miles) of memorised data — observations and experiences shared orally and via intuitive visual references, like stick and shell charts of archipelago swell patterns.

This map is just an outline — barely a preçis — of Pacific peoples' extraordinary achievements, which are equal to those of any of Europe's much-vaunted sailor-explorers.

Evening reading: David Lewis's We, The Navigators (1972).

#theLibrary

Reading a survey paper on vector embedding algorithms (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10098736) And oh god, the stuff surely looks extremely simple in retrospect. To the point of wondering what these #NLP people were even doing with such primitive tools. The jump to #LLM driven NLP looks extremely abrupt with this paper.

It might be that I picked an extremely subject-focused paper, though. Or just that I didn't finish it yet. Anyway, if I continue down the GOFNLP (Good Old-Fashioned NLP, like #GOFAI) road, I might change my views on that. And I both might (https://aartaka.me/tarot-biases) and might not actually follow that road. Who knows 🤷

#theLibrary

Revisiting one of my favourite #Buddhist texts, the Lankavatara sutra. It's 1600 years old and more psychedelic than any 1960's stuff you could imagine. In this bit, the Buddha has just come out of the deep sea where he hung out for 7 days and then has a conversation with a snake king about the nature of reality. An incredible text with incredible insights.

#nowreading #thelibrary #buddhism #books

Don't ask me why it took so long for me to pick up Annalee Newitz's extraordinary 2017 novel, Autonomous, but now that I have, I can't shake myself loose from it.

The last work of speculative fiction to grab me like this was William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, back in 2003.

Come to think of it, there's an unlikely commonality — and not just in style — between Gibson's protagonist, the brand-savant Cayce Pollard, and Newitz's underground (and underwater) pharma' pirate, Judith 'Jack' Chen.

#theLibrary

While waiting for the fiberglass to set, I went to trade some books at the thrift store, got some new ones for the summer.

The 10th anniversary edition of Ancilliary Justice is so pretty.

#theLibrary

" ...it took the war to teach it, that you are as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you do. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, it just stayed stored there in your eyes..."

– Michael Herr

[from Dispatches, 1977]

#theLibrary

"And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell."

– Malcolm Lowery

[from his 1947 novel Under The Volcano]

#theLibrary

Reading Banvard's Folly, it's excellent!
#theLibrary

Oh, so Altair BASIC (later to become MBASIC/M$-BASIC) manual (https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_mitsMITSAl_6669937/page/n60/mode/1up, Appendix F) has a whole page of one-liner math functions defined from built-in intrinsics (SIN, COS, TAN, ATN, LOG, SQR, and EXP). So my idea for math library (however smart and precise) is neither original nor necessary. So I don't have to understand trigonometry again!

#theLibrary

“The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting place.”

– Arthur Ransome

[from Racundra's Third Cruise, 1922]

for @rek and @neauoire

#theLibrary

"10. I hope that by reading this manual, you will be thoroughly encouraged to become a farmer."

-- Meti's Sword Manual, but also should be appended to most technical documentation and probably many legal texts too.
cc #KillSixBillionDemons #theLibrary

“It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”

– Joseph Conrad

[from Heart of Darkness, 1899]

#theLibrary

“I am a citizen of the most beautiful nation on earth. A nation whose laws are harsh yet simple, a nation that never cheats, which is immense and without borders, where life is lived in the present. In this limitless nation, this nation of wind, light, and peace, there is no other ruler besides the sea.”

– Bernard Moitessier

[from his book, The Long Way, 1974]

#theLibrary