First Post of 2024!

Foremost

I should maintain this more. My head has been filled with not super duper interesting thoughts as of late - ideally this will change soon, and I will gain ideas to write here.

What I’m Thinking About

Here’s a list:

• how to grow back a beard (flashback to November 2022) && how to resist the itch to shave
• graph neural networks being interesting
• how much I do not know about NLP ML (RAG, I’m looking at you)
• why do we people type in lowercase so much? what’s the appeal?

% Repeatable

Sorry for not maintaining this website as well as I should have.

Introduction

Lately, I’ve been thinking a bit about how much % of my daily actions are essentially the same each day. Because any action can be experienced in infinite ways, any given action cannot be repeated (see: Series of Observations). A better question would be to ask how much my experiences are performed each day that I cannot distinguish them from other days. Case-in-point: I can remember brushing with ketchup as a kid, but I can’t remember all the other thousands of days I’ve brushed before school.

Note, this article is kind of an extension of this one here and overlaps heavily with it. Maybe read that one first (?).

How To Approach

This is a hard problem to even approach. Theoretically, a copout answer would be 100% because I spend all of my times in 2 highly consistent units of time: (1) weekdays and (2) weekends.

Sampling Time

I could try to sample time. I could look at the % of repeatable there and then hope that gets a pretty decent estimate to the life. How much should we go for?

Let’s try a day first. In a day I do the following steps: (1) Waking up, (2) Getting ready, (3) Go to School, (4) Come Home … dang, seems repeatadable already?

The problem with this approach is that it’s nearly impossible to predict when something memorable will occur (or when I will perform a memorable action) leading to a memorable experience that doesn’t just blend in with the rest of my memories. Due to this uncertainty, I can only really estimate based on the number of days I remember from last school year: barely 10 out of ~180 come to mind. Does this mean that ~94% of the days are just a waste (besides enabling the ~6% to standout?)

This is probably the part where I’m supposed to say something cliché like try new things daily to increase this percentage, but I’m going to try to refrain from doing so. But I dare say the 94% is not a waste. Inside each day of the 94% are jokes and memories that lasted for much shorter durations (e.g. weeks, days, hours) but now months later are hard to recall. For what it’s worth, our current mood may just be an exponential moving average of the joy/negativity of our experiences and how much we remember them (highly correlated with recency.) Oooohh, I feel an integral coming!

Where \(P(e_{t})\) gives the memorability of a given event at time \(t\) and \(\int_{t=0}^{T} P(e_{t})\) = some constant (to make the memorability of each event at odds with each other).

Maximizing \(H(T)\) has been similarly detailed here, although in a slightly different form. Essentially, it’s a question of having many fun experiences or only a few super-duper fun ones.

The question of this article was what % of my life is memorable. But it operates on the wrong premise – that memorability is crucial to meaningful experiences. Based on the model of \(H(T)\), just living for the moment seems to be enough.

Mailing List?

Mailing List

Join it! If you want :}

But yea, I’ve created one to alert you whenever I drop something (translation: whenever I push to github.) If this works right, this should only occur when I push to the main branch I use for development.

Short article! See ya.

Worth A Listen?

A famous quote I’ve remembered for the last four years goes something like this:

If a book even has a few words of literary gold, it’s worth rereading the entire thing.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how many songs I listen to just for a few seconds - a tone change, a beat switch, etc. And how much do those seconds take up of the entire song?

Even further, is it better if they take up less seconds (so that I don’t get bored of them as much), or do I want these timespans of joy to be longer because well … they are nice to listen?

I don’t have an answer (yet). So, as a reasonable excuse to procrastinate on deliberating this question, I hope you enjoy/utilize my offering of the musical golden seconds I listen to in some of my favorite songs.

Musically Gold List (in no specific order)

With a three-word, freely-associated description of each interval!

1. You Only Live Twice - Drake ft. Lil Wayne, Rick Ross (0:49-1:00)

Tone: Inspirational, Uplifting, Funky

2. Cameras / Good Ones Go Interlude (Medley) - Drake (4:34-6:00)

Tone: Peaceful, Emotional, Soft

3. Tuscan Leather - Drake (3:12-3:42)

Tone: End, Of, (A) Movie

4. Shot For Me - Drake (3:25 - 3:36)

Tone: Optimistic, Upbeat, Wavy

5. Lord Knows - Drake, Rick Ross (3:26 - 4:15)

Tone: Elevated, Rising, Floating

6. Race My Mind - Drake (3:37 - 4:20)

Tone: Spaceship, Forward, Rushing

7. 0 To 100 / The Catch Up - Drake (3:00 - 3:28)

Tone: Reflective, Quiet, Lost

8. Connect - Drake (2:46 - 3:22)

Tone: Great, Gatsby, Vibes

9. Trophies - Drake (2:00 - 2:40)

Tone: Humble, Tired, Sweating

10. All The Parties - Drake (1:07 - 1:20)

Tone: Sad, Bored, Teary

Original Question

First of: yes, they did all have Drake in them.

Based on this song sample (which came straight from memory, so probably not super representative), it looks like shorter time frames almost always lead to stronger moments than those longer.

A Review: For All The Dogs

disclaimer: i am a drake stan

trigger warnings: Drake, album

TLDR

Not a bad album. I’ll repeat that again. Not a bad album.

Obviously, don’t expect another Nothing Was The Same and Take Care to get dropped by the 6 God, but don’t dismiss another solid album either. The album carries the same angry tone from Drizzy’s previous Her Loss album with a fair share of emotional tracks as well. Does it sound as reflective as his past works? No. Is it passable? More than so.

Lack of Changes

That being said, the album doesn’t come with a whole lot of changes. His style of complaining, crooning, denigrating, and out-of-pocket lyrics haven’t gone anywhere. It just feels like a natural extension of the angry tones on Her Loss with the perceived absurdity/memery of Certified Lover Boy. Personally, I find nothing wrong with sticking to one what knows, but the internet seems to have higher standards for him. Granted, he is in the top 3 (conservatively top 7) rappers of all time.

In particular, Drake got a lot of static for his use of features on this album. There’s no shortage of criticism that these days, regardless of whether it’s Lil Baby, SZA, J. Cole, or Yeat, Drake gets washed up with his features. While there may be some truth in that, I feel like that’s heavily overexaggerated and largely just a function of disagreements of with Drake’s style. Specifically his “zoned out” feel that makes him seem like he doesn’t want to be in a studio.

Defending the Sound (?)

Has nobody ever picked up that maybe he does this intentionally or that this frankly fits his lyrics more? Drake doesn’t need to be here. He doesn’t need to compete with current rap forerunners like Yeat, Lil Baby, or whoever else – he’s truly in a league of his own, rivaling widely recognized artists like Taylor Swift. As he said on First Person Shooter, he’s just short of Michael (Jordan). Not to mention that Drake quite literally has been doing this for perhaps too long? Few rappers are able to maintain prevalence for a couple of years, let alone decades. It should come as no surprise then that he needs a break.

A Note On Consistency

Drake is consistent in two ways: 1) creating music that sounds the same and 2) doing #1 over years. Few artists have maintained his consistency as he has done. Is this a good excuse for a B music-point average, compared to other artists with higher peaks? I would say it’s not entirely devoid of merit, but not to be overly celebrated either.

Of course, ideally Drake would be consistent in just creating sounds with a new song. But that’s not realistic.

And on an ending note, that drawing may have been his best album cover.