parable of the machine learning engineers
two machine learning engineers are on a walk. let us call them X and Y. step by step and then suddenly they have passed the age at which all their friends are married. bravely they attempt to lose themselves in the old game of street flirtation: seeing, being seen, & cetera, although now they find themselves longing not for hands but for hands holding hands / sex as the engine to move beyond sex / longing as the engine to move beyond longing /
and now it is clear that the roads all suffer from a very gentle but continuous curvature, so that the streets are neither straight, skew, or orthogonal but rather a series of enormous concentric circles. and it is impossible to tell where exactly all this walking will take us, whether divergent into ever-widening spaces or convergent onto a single perfect point in the center of the city. our engineers are lost. but X isn't worried. X is going to buy a house. and get married to … someone. someone quiet and compassionate and glowing. or maybe sharp and charismatic, with low body fat and lots of money and a partially-ironic proximity to the sorta fascist cluster of twitter. and that will be my world.
Y's fate is less clear. there are three possible futures. the upper bound: after years of walking, Y finally looks up and notices someone on the other side of the road. well, why don’t we walk together. the lateral step of companionship frees Y of the pressing sense of loss which accompanies perpetual motion.
the lower bound: Y stumbles upon not a lover but a library. inside they are confronted again with the limitless prison of the infinite, this time not in the winding lines of asphalt but the tightly bound spines of books. always the years. always the hours. Y finally understands that both Y's body and Y's work will soon fall into oblivion, because they merit oblivion.
the third ending is apocryphal. it is another day on the long road. the landscape is unimaginative, the blue sky slightly unreal, and slowly it occurs to Y that life, true life in its largeness and its grains of salt, its sheets of sunset and mysteries, has neither infinite straight lines nor perfect concentric circles. if there is any form to life, it exists only so that life can then destroy that form. therefore what i am now experiencing must not be reality but rather a waking dream. this is the dream of the maze. i'll never get out of the dream by trying to walk as straight as possible. instead what i need to do is to sit down and wait, and say to myself, “this is a dream”.
and then it happens. the closed door, the door of your waking and dreaming and pleading and procrastinating and stress-eating or not-eating and masturbating out of boredom, it opens. and, oh, it almost makes you want to weep. there are 4 saturdays in october and 2 of them are over.
Cutting. Text me back