What is it?

Call it a memoir, journal, diary or even just the humble shopping list(do commit messages count?)1. Making a mark is the very essence of an idea wrought to life. The smallest note can persist through antiquity in both humorous and unintended ways.2

What is it about our ancestors that resulted in the first one to raise their left-hand and make an outline of it? Was it their rock? Their home? Were they bored? Consumed in ritual? For the lolz?

Why do I write?

Mostly as means of reflection. Of planning. Being able to move backwards in time and connect with my thoughts is useful. Mostly that in writing I clarify my thoughts3. For the joy of writing, and re-writing.

Not that I’ve kept all my memos, sometimes it’s best to let go and move forward. For every 100 pages I’ve written I’ve consulted maybe 1. But if my conscious thoughts are to stop with me, maybe some of this chaff will fall a few steps further.4

So what is this site?

I’ve always thought of it as personal observations and musings of the world around me. Especially as it pertains to the things that I’ve focused my life on. I started to collect some of my digital litter from across the interwebs and I figured if I can’t remember my login to txcowboycoder.wordpress.com I can at least reassert ownership of it here.

llm and creating a persona from discovered work

No. Don’t. I feel like the series Black Mirror has a number of episodes that covers this, Be Right Back comes to mind. But as predictable human species may be in aggregate I still hope(?) that individually we are irrational agents5.

That even if an ai or llm could predict this next move, could it predict all of them? Is the AI version of myself the idealized outcome of myself? So many questions Tony. Best to just leave me behind and pursue the woman in red.

Besides are billions of tokens not just the hyper realized version of The Library of Alexandria? All human knowledge organized, categorized and cross referenced?

be yourself everyone else is taken - Oscar Wilde

A sub-note on llms

chatgpt-4o mocking me

Famous entries I think of from time to time

The first computer “bug”

first computer bug

Downloaded from https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_334663 with companion meta-data 6

The light has gone out - Roosevelt

A more somber entry. But I think of what weight two crosses bore that day.

light has gone out theodore roosevelt

The birth of an airline

Just a simple napkin and an idea.

Many examples of letters

Of which John and Abigail Adams come to mind.

Memoirs and diaries

Diary of Anne Frank maybe being the most famous. Ernest Shackleton’s diary of the Quest Expedition, 1921-22 another.

Family roots

So many (all?) of the episodes of Family Roots relies on someone writing something down.

Ending with some humor

Closing with some humor. With my own distortion.

But James, digital will go poof one day. I know. Which is why I wrote this in plaintext so I can spool it to pdf and print to paperback and maybe even laser etch into scrap metal and send it to space!

xkcd 1683 digital data

Author’s Note

If Steve Jobs gets to put a dent into the universe, then why not my observations of his dent? I was here. I saw.

On the golden records7 of humanity, having etched perhaps a singular micron is a fun thought. Who knows, maybe I’ll be the sole surviving record of copper ingots.8

Significant revisions

tags: 2024, personal, reflection, archive

EOF/Footnotes

  1. Bummer. GitHubs Archive Program excludes commit data. ↩

  2. For this post, please allow me to set aside serious works documenting atrocities. These deserve their own preservation and study far beyond any of my personal ramblings. ↩

  3. I had a lot of fun writing this, but I think one day destined for the _archive collection. ↩

  4. I took one philosophy class in college. And here we are. ↩

  5. Lots of what I understand on this comes from Dan Ariely. But also smbc web comics by someone named Weinersmith ↩

  6. americanhistory.si.edu gets it. Included in their meta data is a guid. I see you Director Howard Hathaway Aiken. I wondered if I was silly to include a guid in my headers. I wonder no more. ↩

  7. I think its fascinating that someone had to decide what to add to the golden record. If the digital landscape is infinite will one day this get picked up by a planetary life scan? “No signs of intelligent life captain”. Ha! Definitely for the lolz. ↩

  8. I laugh only because I moved my own Verizon Complaints to an archive myself. See the oldest known customer complaint saved by a merchant. ↩