This is an extremely personal, intimate introduction to me. If you're not into that sort of thing, you can leave. Here's a good place to go. This replaces an earlier homepage along the same lines, which you can find here. The old one was much more pretentious than this one, and much more verbose. I was pretty miserable at that point. I'm still as melancholy as ever, but that tendency isn't as aggravated by my current circumstances.
Latest entry:http://pdf23ds.net/bin/diary/
First entry: http://pdf23ds.net/bin/diary/0
My diary is available online, for those of you with an interest in reading it. Most surnames have been changed, to protect the privacy of those involved in my life, but otherwise there is no editing. You can't view the most recent entries, for a variety of reasons, but rest assured: despite the old dates, I still update my diary about once a day on average, with a mean word count of around 250 - 300, if I recall correctly. Right now you can view any entry older a year, to protect the privacy of those involved in my life.
I think diaries like mine constitute a great form of art, a great tool for personal growth, and a great opportunity for others to gain an insight into their fellow human beings that would not otherwise be possible. Because of this, I'm willing to share all of my most intimate experiences with the world in the hopes that it encourages others to do the same, as I would love to be able to read this sort of thing from other, mostly normal people. I don't care to read the autobiographies of the famous, as they can't be trusted to be honest about anything--especially the politicians. Besides, they don't have the problems I do. Very few people have the exact problems I do. There are too many problems, and too few people. Every person has a different set of problems. I know that this sort of thing is often done, but I have yet to see a weblog that seriously deals with issues like this.
I was born in Texas in 1985, raised half in Colorado, and half in Texas. I liked computers almost from the beginning. I had some learning problems (mostly social), but on the whole was unusually bright. In fact, I think I'm smarter than the majority of people I meet, and I hang out with some smart people. However, the problem of quantifying intelligence and the difficulties and ambiguities involved are not lost on me, and I therefore cannot lay claim to any title, or even any great pride.
I haven't really had a great life, psychologically speaking. It's possible I'm a little bit autistic--I have a lot of strange mannerisms and am much more of a loner than anyone else I know (big surprise, eh?)--so people have always looked at me strangely. It doesn't bother me a lot--most of my opinions are in some way related to the fact that I consider myself and anyone like me (I can count the ones I've met one one hand) to be infinitely more interesting than any other kind of person.
My interests now are computer programming, IP theory and legislation, philosophy, language, logic, artificial intelligence, communication, network theory, autobiographies, sex, lisp, and, as always, self-improvement. I'm also interested in finding a mate, but don't let that scare you. I take a very relaxed view of commitment, to say the least, and I'm by no means clingy or desperate. I probably would be desperate, except for the fact that I'm very cynical/skeptical about most people's relationship skills, and I'm really picky when it comes to personal qualities.
I don't feel like writing more bio.
I'm working as a computer programmer in the middle of nowhere (software companies don't have big requirements for location), and I'm more or less single. I have a roommate, and I'm close to her, but she's nowhere near my ideal, nor will she ever be. It's just fun to live with someone.
I spend a lot of time thinking about working, reading weblogs instead, thinking about doing things and reading weblogs instead, and sleeping. I get depressed every so often when I realize what a fucked up world we live in, but it tends to pass. It's my philosophy that everyone has to live in a fantasy world to be able to survive, and that it's our task to construct as good of a fantasy world as we can. Healthy people are able to live in such a world without maintaining any illusions about the accuracy of their mental reality, without it getting to them. They can stick their head out of the sand every once in a while to correct their course. But no one can live with a realistic model of the world in their head and not go crazy. My goal is to make it as pleasant as possible. I think the big thing I'm missing is companionship.
Let's see. Schools are broken. The educational system, almost from the beginning, has been terribly ineffective, and even counterproductive, in regards to basically every function a school ought to have: teaching facts, teaching theory, teaching philosophy, teaching social mores (at least the ones in the curriculum), teaching ethics, or, in general, affecting our children in any desirable way.
Government in America is broken. For one, it's almost impossible to create a government that's effective in a society where the vast majority of the public (well, the voting public) are uninformed, easy to manipulate using dirty rhetorical tricks, and generally apathetic about most of the important social issues of the day. For another, it's impossible for different causes to play the system on equal footing when, oftentimes, one cause has backing from large corporations with deep pockets and another cause does not. These two basic conditions will have to change before anything could be done about fixing the system.
The Singularity Institute has a good chance of changing the world permanently, dramatically, and for the better.
Collaborative filtering could be the answer to the power of the media conglomerates. Along with liberal licensing, such as with the Creative Commons, (and possibly an expanded public domain,) free media content could completely replace professional, centrally controlled content. What collaborative filtering is, is using a network model of the preferences of a group of consumers to predict the tastes of other consumers, based on their distance from each other in the network. One way this could be applied is to weblogs. Every person with a weblog goes around looking at other weblogs and rating them on a scale of 1 to 500, where the scale is the amount of interest the reviewer has in the reviewed blog. These ratings are compiled, and used to identify groups of blogs that give each other high ratings. A person that liked one blog in a group would likely like the other blogs in the group. In fact, if most people end up having blogs (possible, eventually) and the world agrees on a way to uniquely identify each reviewable item (books, music, and other content) then every blogger could make available his ratings for such content. This kind of system would make the barrier to success for new content depend nearly entirely on the quality of the content. It would make content spread much more quickly, and reach its full potential more easily, than it could otherwise. The possibilities, and the benefits, are endless. The only barrier is getting it into widespread use.
I think I've sort of hinted at my low opinion of most entertainment. I think it's stupid. In fact, I really can't stand to watch TV nowadays. My stomach just turns at it. Much fiction is starting to give me a similar reaction.
I like writing. I like writing a lot. I like language--its ambiguities, its amazing complexity, the fact that we seem born to be linguistic creatures. I like the immense beauty it can create as well as the strong emotions it can evict and the wonderful fact that it can communicate information from one person to another. I like to explore the limits of that last aspect, and how much certain restrictions of certain languages impose on us, as well as alternative languages that aren't so restrictive. Lojban, for example. I'm slowly learning lojban, but I think it's not ready for prime time. I doubt it's an ideally constructed language, but it's so much better than anything we have now that there's no question that it should be learned by anyone interested in this sort of thing.
Well, I did say literary. OK, I hate fiction. I'll tell you that. I think fiction is contrived, and contrived situations never have the depth and ambiguities, the rough edges, so to speak, of real situations. I like non-fiction. I write a lot of it. Opinions, feedback for articles, comments, discussions, chats. It's not all published--it's not all high quality. But it's the sort of thing this world needs a lot more of.
I'm a very lonely person at the moment. I don't really care much for friends, but it's not because I'm anti-social. It's more because I have so many things that I want to do and so little time to do them in. In the town I live in, there are not many people akin to me in important respects. And the few that are here are too hard to find. It's simply not worth the effort in Mount Pleasant.
But I really want companionship. I want someone young and slim and female, born '83 to '88, to spend a lot of time with and to snuggle with a lot. Someone that can give me the affirmation and support that I need, who I can do the same for. I'm a big communicator. I'd want to talk about a lot of stuff, all the time. I'm big into introspection, and she would need to be too.
I guess my biggest requirement would be honesty: complete, unmitigated honesty and frankness in every aspect of our relationship. That means being frank about her opinions of and attitudes toward me, and willing to tell me what's on her mind at any and every moment (not that I'm nearly that possessive). It means that she treats me as if I'm entitled to know as much as she knows about everything that she knows. Basically, it means there are absolutely no communication barriers between us.
I would say something about "has to think that most people are incredibly stupid", but that would betray an immaturity in me. Of course most people are incredibly stupid. Who cares? They don't. They don't even know. Whose standards are you judging with? Your own, not their's. What does it mean?
What does it all mean? That's another immature question. Anyone that still has any hope of finding any coherent meaning in life is only halfway to where I am. (Though see my debate modeling, which is basically an attempt to find absolute truth and coherency. Even if I don't believe in absolute truth any more, I still believe in the prospects of debate modeling.) I wrote this in my match.com profile: I think we're all monkeys. We don't have anything to live for except filling our basic carnal desires. I'm not speaking only of sexual desires, though. I mean social and intellectual and culinary, too. I mean maximizing the esthetic quality of your surroundings, of your entertainment, and the consistency and quality of relationships. I mean developing your skills and interests to the maximum extent you can, so that you have more of life to enjoy. I mean planning for the future to make sure your pleasure will be continued. But the only thing you can't do is try to find any deeper meaning behind our existence. That'll just backfire on you. It's the only possible outcome. Because there isn't any deeper meaning. Until the Singularity comes, it's just you, me, and a barrel of monkeys.
So if you're reading this, you match my description, and you're still interested, call a psychologist. Or better yet, e-mail me at pdf23ds@gmail.com.
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2005-2-27