STATUS: July 9, 2024

INBOX: 75 unread messages. I am going to let this cook until Thursday.

SHIPPING FORECAST: The most important things right now:

1. Preparing a couple of functionality demonstrations for my dissertation presentations (on the 11th and the 18th)

2. Encoding and organizing my Zettelkasten notes

3. Catching up on my reading (for both the dissertation and in general)

DISSERTATION: 57 pages, 1,197 notes. Still a lot of notes that need to be integrated into the manuscript. I am hoping that before the summer break begins I can inflict a draft upon my supervisors.

FOCUS TIME: 7 hours

ZETTELS ENCODED: 7

ZETTELS WRITTEN: 2

Summer Broke In Like a Hippo

Summer is here in Japan. According to the locals, only the Japan Meteorological Agency can make that call. But I come from a country where central authority is stupid and brittle - so I’ve always had to make that call for myself.

This site has been in shambles. In my defense, I have been busy taking classes and writing a dissertation (yes, I have website for my dissertation). I’m thinking more frequent status updates to give myself a dialogue on work commitments. I should also write more about my work here, the nature and the built environment. The community.

Nothing much done today except:

• Waste the whole morning fidgeting with Github settings and Jekyll config files in order to setup a nice website for my dissertation (which I can configure and update from the same code editor that I use to draft my thesis in LaTex)

• Have a first go at a liquidation report for my grant.

• Sent out some emails

• Some fiddling with my pre-presentation slides (for this Thursday)

Not sure if I should keep compiling research notes or if I should just study Japanese and then call it a day.

The Rundown: July 6, 2024

• Beautiful vintage Japanese train tickets from here.

• The Great Logging Off: “What happens when most "people" you interact with on the internet are fake? I think people start logging off.”

• LLM’s learn to deceive:
  
  “This study unravels a concerning capability in Large Language Models (LLMs): the ability to understand and induce deception strategies. As LLMs like GPT-4 intertwine with human communication, aligning them with human values becomes paramount. The paper demonstrates LLMs’ potential to create false beliefs in other agents within deception scenarios, highlighting a critical need for ethical considerations in the ongoing development and deployment of such advanced AI systems.”
  

• AI and the Indian Election:
  
  “The campaigns made extensive use of AI, including deepfake impersonations of candidates, celebrities and dead politicians…But, despite fears of widespread disinformation, for the most part the campaigns, candidates and activists used AI constructively in the election. They used AI for typical political activities, including mudslinging, but primarily to better connect with voters.”
  

• Seeing like a data structure.

The Rundown: May 2, 2024

Image: From the Office for the Preservation of Normalcy.

• Model Extraction Attack on Neural Networks

• The Map of Mathematics

• Analytical Democratic Theory:

“Realism is a demand dressed up as an observation. Realists like Margaret Thatcher insisted “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism, but what she meant was “stop trying to think of an alternative.” ”

• Workshop on reimagining democracy:

“Modern democracy was invented in the mid-eighteenth century, using mid-eighteenth-century technology. Were democracy to be invented from scratch today, with today’s technologies, it would look very different. Representation would look different. Adjudication would look different. Resource allocation and reallocation would look different. Everything would look different, because we would have much more powerful technology to build on and no legacy systems to worry about.”

• Use of Large Language Models to analyze case files for possible wrongful convictions.

Walking Out on Winter

February-March - Went back to the Philippines during the Spring Break:

1. I had a commitment to the IBP to deliver a talk on legal research and AI

2. Annual renewals: real estate tax, professional practice tax, car maintenance

3. Catching up with friends and family

4. Getting a massage and dental cleaning (cheaper and more hassle-free in the Philippines)

Now back in Fukuoka, missed much of the Sakura season because we had to move out of the dorm and into a private apartment. Updates coming again soon. At least it looks like Winter finally broke, and all the broken promises of Spring are done.

STATUS: January 18, 2024

INBOX: 100 unread emails. Still too many system notifications and newsletters. I am still too enmeshed. Need to free myself so I can do free-range reading.

DISSERTATION: 541 notes, not all of them in the manuscript. The write-up itself is now 30 pages long, a “release candidate” I intend to submit by Monday for a research seminar. I will need to refactor, maybe rewrite, the entire third section. For now, I need to step away from the thing so that I don’t get sick of it.

SHIPPING FORECAST: Will be out tomorrow in order to handle contractual stuff. Going back to notes and outlining.

WATCHING: Getting back to Season 2 of The White Lotus

STATUS: January 14, 2023

• INBOX - 9 unread messages (whittled down from the high of 156 last Friday)

• SHIPPING FORECAST: Will be very busy and unavailable pretty much the whole week: Sending out a parcel to my home university, arranging stuff for a move, more writing and editing.

• DISSERTATION: 23 pages, 528 notes. Got myself a minimum viable paper for submission on the 22nd, but I intend to clean it up further, add more citations, add new sections.

• WATCHING: The White Lotus. Just finished Season 1, now on to Season 2. Catching up on a lot of shows that came out during the pandemic but was too busy to watch.

STATUS: January 9, 2024

INBOX: 82 unread messages. Keeping on top of email from school but everything else would have to wait for the weekend.

DISSERTATION: 512 notes, current draft is at 20 pages (including bibliography). Implementing the Zettelkasten Method of organizing my research notes in Obsidian, outlining and linking things to death. Then when I think the notes have enough structure in them I put them in a LaTex file. Everything is text-based and change management is done through Git.

WATCHING: Shuttling between Mr. Robot and Californication. Maybe I’m also shuttling between the headspaces of a programmer and a struggling writer.

STATUS: January 4, 2024

INBOX: 4. Just faced the email client that has not been opened since Christmas morning - 178 messages. Missed on some updates, including a draft submission deadline that I should have been aware of - would have certainly gotten me out of my post-holiday slow down. But I’m awake now and I’m ready to scream and panic once again.

WATCHING: I am now two seasons into the original British TV version of House of Cards. I could not possibly comment.

LISTENING: TOM TOM, by Holy Fuck. Will need to put more randomness into my playlist - I think I’m in a rut. OK Google - Play me music for “shit I need to focus and keep writing.”

Christmas is for The Lovers

The University is closed for the winter holidays, and I am pausing all new academic work for the only real break I will have this year. The wife convinced me to crawl out of the dorm. So despite the cold, we ventured to the seaside (for some sightseeing), and later into the city (to hear mass and to get some good chow). 

Christmas is different here in Japan. It’s not reunions with friends and family. It’s date for sweethearts. It’s cake and KFC. The one party I attended was a two-hour affair with light dinner and polite conversation. Back home it would have been a whole battery of parties - with plenty of food, drinks, singing and dancing, and raffles. It made me miss home.