Author: Rebecca Toh

the future is written

blog, futuretech

Have you heard about GPT-3 yet? The language-generating AI? The AI that “writes”?

Here’s a screenplay it wrote, given this prompt –
Below is a screenplay for a film-noir hard boiled detective story by Raymond Chandler about the boy wizard Harry Potter:

“Scene: A small dingy office, early morning, furniture of the Salvation Army store variety. Sordid atmosphere. Harry Potter, in ratty tweed suit, unpressed shirt, and unshined shoes, sits behind the desk looking haggard, rumpled, and embittered. In one corner of the office a torn shade rattles at the wind gusts outside. Harry has one long index finger on the butt of a .38 and he broods over a photograph. The photograph shows a gorgeous blonde wearing an evening gown. She is holding a cocktail in one hand and looking pensively at a cigarette in the other. A tear adorns her cheek. Harry looks at her for a long moment, sighs, then puts his gun down and stands.”
— GPT-3

I’m kinda scared.

More here and here.

real feeling

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It’s not enough to do things, but I must do them with real feeling, with heart. Sometimes I catch myself coasting, nodding without real feeling, falling into things I don’t care for. But it’s all a waste of time.

Invest your entire being into the things you care about and you no longer need to wonder about the meaning of life. Meaning becomes the air you breathe — a basic, unquestionable element of life.

the time experiment

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For a day, an hour, or maybe just ten minutes, try this: Pretend time doesn’t exist, and live, for once, without the notions of “past” or “future”. Throw away your to-do lists, schedules, goals, worries, and live only in the deep now.

How does it feel?

Do you like how it makes you feel?

Dark to light

blog, writing

The silence at 5.30am is hynotizing.

I love it.

I’ve been waking up early these days and using the time to read and write and think through some conundrums in my life, and to organise the parts that feel out of place, misaligned. It’s been working surprisingly well.

It’s not just the waking up early, but the reading and the writing. Especially the writing. I’ve been dumping all my thoughts on a page, asking myself questions and answering them, picking apart my own logic, organising and reorganising my thoughts.

It’s funny. When I edit my sentences and paragraphs, I realise I’m also editing my thoughts. For me, thinking is writing—they’re one. I’ve gone long periods without thinking through writing. How did I manage to make the decisions I made? I have no idea.

But here I am, thinking+writing again. And it works. I love it.

When the day awakens, it turns from dark to light outside. Writing brings me through the same process—the dark confusion turns into clarity as I write and rewrite. I’m forced to see the fallacies and muddiness of my thoughts, forced to confront my pretensions, my insecurities, my tendencies to do what is easiest or most commonly accepted.

It’s meditation in action.

Hard but rewarding.

highlights from kevin kelly’s 68 bits of unsolicited advice

blog, life lessons

A selection of my favorite/the most useful bits. Original list here.

• Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.

• A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.

• When you are young spend at least 6 months to one year living as poor as you can, owning as little as you possibly can, eating beans and rice in a tiny room or tent, to experience what your “worst” lifestyle might be. That way any time you have to risk something in the future you won’t be afraid of the worst case scenario.

• The more you are interested in others, the more interesting they find you. To be interesting, be interested.

• To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.

• Separate the processes of creation from improving. You can’t write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgement.

• You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.

• Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.

• Art is in what you leave out.

• Buying tools: Start by buying the absolute cheapest tools you can find. Upgrade the ones you use a lot. If you wind up using some tool for a job, buy the very best you can afford.

• Following your bliss is a recipe for paralysis if you don’t know what you are passionate about. A better motto for most youth is “master something, anything”. Through mastery of one thing, you can drift towards extensions of that mastery that bring you more joy, and eventually discover where your bliss is.

• Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don’t have to ignore all the many problems we create; you just have to imagine improving our capacity to solve problems.