What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience[...]

—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

the human nervous system registers absence of touch as a form of chronic low-grade stress, measurable in cortisol levels and immune function degradation

in the progress of building a lossless silhouette of someone i recently came across, i found myself lying here, in this room, a kind of coffin but with better lightning, wondering: what is it exactly that i want? what is the emergent feelings that my brain trying to resist here? to be held, yes, but by whom? by anyone? no, that obscene, that’s the logic of the animal, and i am not an animal, i read books, i try articulate my thoughts onto papers, i’ve my own opinion on building my ghost, certain critiques against the Frankfürt school, i have refused to download tinder on principle, i resisted getting a new phone number to create a new hinge account. yet here i am, at, <time>07:23:34am</time> with my arms wrapped around my own chest like a man trying to hold his organs inside after a wound, which is precisely what it is, isn’t it, a wound, except there is no blood, there is nothing to point to, a doctor would find nothing wrong with me and that is the worst part, that i am entirely healthy and entirely dying at the same time, avoiding working on an interview in 4 hours.

the finns have a word, kalsarikännit, which loosely means to drink alone in your underwear with no intention of going out, and they have made this into a virtue, and i think perhaps i should move to Finland, i should go to the forests where the wolves are, and i would lie down in the snow and the cold would be a kind of touch, wouldn’t it, the cold touches everything, it is promiscuous with its attention, it does not ask whether you’ve earned it, it simply arrives and holds you and does not let go.

but that’s not what i want either. maybe in 20 years

Loneliness is the experience of being deserted by all human companions

—Hannah Arendt

[waking up...]

what i want, really, (and here is where it becomes humiliating, where i must avert my eyes from myself), is something so specific that it cannot be named without losing it. if saying it out loud, i afraid i will lose it forever. i want a particular weight of a particular arm wrapped across my chest. i want to hear breathing of the specific being, that is not my own. i want that part of computation to work, for once, in a while, for the feeling to find its proper substrate, for the thing i built in my mind to correspond to something external that does not flinch, that does not relocate to another city, that does not send the message that begins “i’m sorry for misleading you but still i want what is best for you.”

DOSTOEVSKY’S UNDERGROUND MAN CLAIMS HE DOES NOT WANT THE CRYSTAL PLACE. he wants to want, which is different, which is worse, because wanting-to-want means you are outside even your own desires, watching them as if a man watches fish swimming in an aquarium. I am watching my need for touch and I’m disgusted by it and I am also INSIDE it, drowning in it, and this is the contradiction that Socrates or Kierkegaard or Merleau-Ponty or Simone Weil cannot address.

[...] loneliness is a subjective internal state. It’s the distressing experience that results from perceived isolation or unmet need between an individual’s preferred and actual experience

—Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, U.S Surgeon General’s Advisory, (2023)

[in my dream...]

i’m in finland, and i’ve been walking aimlessly for hours. (my body has begun its long negotiation with temperature)

first stage initialized: shivering, which is to say my muscles are burning glycogen in small desperate contractions, 200-250 per minute, calculating heat-loss exceeds heat-production and activating the ancient mammalian subroutines, and i think: this is what it means to be held by biology, to have something inside you that wants you to live, even when you have stopped wanting it yourself.

the grey ones are watching. i can see them between the birches, which are white like bones, like those i will soon become, and the wolves are patient bc patience is what 40,000 years of evolution has taught them, that the cold does most of the work, and the two-legged things eventually stop moving if you wait long enough. i’m not afraid of them (this is either the self-made courage or the first symptom of cognitive decline from reduced cerebral blood flow. i suspect it to be the latter)

by the second stage i have completely forgotten why i came here. the shivering has stopped, as if my body has abandoned the last arithmetic it is programmed to do, and deemed the equation unsolvable. i’m conserving what remains for the core organs, the heart, the lungs, the brain, that is still producing these sentences though it has no reason to, though no one will read them, though they are being written in a medium that does not exist to the external world, which is to say that i am thinking, still, for no one, into nothingness, and this is the underground man’s final joke, that consciousness persists past the point of utility, that i am AWARE of my demise and cannot stop being aware, cannot simply become the object i wanted to become.

the varg, the susi, the canis lupus, they are closer now. i can see the vapour of their breathing. they are metabolising, converting matter into heat into motion into patience, and soon they will convert ME into these things, and is this not what i asked for? to be held? the wolf’s jaw is a kind of holding, the teeth that close around the throat are intimate in a way that nothing else has been, and i think of everyone who has touched me and how none of them touched me like THIS, with such complete attention, such focus, such unwavering PRESENCE.

the third stage. i am so hot, fuck me. this is wrong, i know it is wrong, the air is negative thirty for fuck sake! i’m pulling off my coat, my sweater, and the grey church assembles around me, six of them, eight, i have lost the ability to count, and they are watching me undress like i’m performing a ritual, and perhaps i am, perhaps this is the only sacred thing left, to give yourself to the forest, to stop being a subject and turn into a meal.

the alpha, she does not go for the throat. this is not how it’s supposed to happen. she goes for the flank, then my genitals (makes sense, because efficiency matters, especially for Mother Nature. she is ruthless, because she doesn’t care much for romanticism.) they couldn’t care less about the quick death, they care about calories, as i feel her teeth entering my calves, and i think: this is the touch i wanted. this is what being held must’ve felt like. this is the weight of another creature’s attention, in its totality and undivided, AND THE PAIN IS EXTRAORDINARY. the pain is the most real thing that has ever happened to me, and i am finally, FINALLY, not in my head, not watching myself from outside. i am HERE, in this body, in this moment, in this mouth.

the hemoglobin has a viscosity of approximately four centipoise, but it moves faster when the heart is panicking, and my heart is panicking, as a biological mechanism. it is doing its job, pumping blood out of me and onto the snow, where it steams for a moment before freezing, and i watch my own warmth vanish from the physical body and become part of the landscape. this is what you want right? to stop being contained, and leak into the world, to be held by everything instead of nothing.

the pack feeds, and i’m still fully conscious at this point, which shouldn’t be possible. but apparently consciousness is the last thing to go, the brain hoards its glucose like a miser, and so i am aware of being devoured by the function of nature, i am aware of becoming less, and there is something almost erotic about it. no, not erotic, that’s wrong, something...ECONOMIC, a transaction finally completing, as i’m paying my debt to the biosphere, and i’m repaying the calories i consumed, i.e. the pasta with wine, in addition to those elaborate dinners for people who did not stay.

the fenrir, the old wolf, the myth-wolf, she is eating my liver and i am thinking about Prometheus, who had this done to him daily as punishment. This is not punishment, my dear Prometheus, this is a gift, as in the world accepting to what i offered, and Prometheus, you were wrong to scream. You should have been grateful, to be wanted so completely, to be USEFUL, to have eagles return for you again and again because you are worth returning for.

i am less than i was, perhaps 70 kilograms becoming 60 becoming 50 becoming 40, and the wolves are becoming more, as Lavoisier’s principle states. i am becoming six wolves eight wolves, i am becoming the forest, i am becoming the snow that will melt in spring and flow into rivers and eventually into the sea, and is this not what loneliness always wanted? to stop being one thing and become all-of-things? to be held by the entire world bc you are now INSIDE the entire world?

the last thing i feel is not pain. less sensation, less thinking, less, me. but more the cold ground against my back, pressing up into me as gravity presses down. the last firing neurons from the dying brain towards the remaining muscles, and so what? for what purposes do i feel this way? maybe, this is the embrace i asked for wandering the Finnish forest, the planet itself holding me against its chest, and the wolves are eating and the stars are watching and i am

i am

i

[waking up once more...]

the loneliness will just become a second skeleton residing inside my skeleton, and i will tell no one about it, bc who could i tell, and what would they do, and would their doing-something not simply be another form of the wrong substrate, another computation that fails to compile?

i want to stop moving.

i want to be still and held and i want to stop wanting.

the wolves are patient. the snow is patient. but i’m not. i’m lying here, in this room, in the early morning of January winter, sweaty af after a 30-minute-hypertrophy-workout, in this coffin with wifi, typing this in neovim,

waiting for something to arrive.

waiting for something

wait.

2024 ended with you spending time with family (visited Los Angeles for the new year). There were a lot of unprompted and contingent emotions that surfaced during the process of writing letters to your friends (which is yet another tradition that we started in addition to writing yearly review). You found yourself among these letters, perplexed by your own emotions, in the same way spending time with parents has a way of undoing every architecture that you’d built to live with the absurdity of adulthood: the gratitude of a healthy and fulfilling life angled with exhaustion of modern day capitalism, unrequisite love stemmed from spending more time with friends juxtaposed with with irritation of how “safe it feels”. The tranquility of a financially stable life mixed with an eternal angst.

Some letter reminded you of the good times in San Francisco, others calcified as if they were frozen in time. However, the general theme seemed to be a deep sense of appreciation and platonic love that you had for people in general. You did build yourself a routine, a version of yourself that 2017 Aaron would be proud (and even now, we are more than contempt with our own growth, and it didn’t seem to slow down at anytime soon.). Yet, some unresolved sediment did come up, more like questions you’d shelved without answering, which has permeates through and through.

This year is a bit different. Inspired by our favorite book this year, I borrowed Wittgenstein’s form—note that this list is largely phenomenological. The gaps between claims are intentional: some “therefores” gesture rather than entail,
and the ladder is more mnemonic than deductive.

***
preamble: I’m only include partial section of this lists given that I turned out to be quite lengthy, but you can find the full version of the text here with format a la Wittgenstein.

1. the world is a status function of the body

• 1.1 reconstitution has temporal structure, and some status function do not change instantaneously

  • 1.11 dissolution requires withdrawal of maintenance, and withdrawal requires periods of stagnation, as attention reallocates gradually, not all at once.

  • 1.12 constitution requires sustained engagement. A status function crystallised only after certain maintenance had accumulated.

  • 1.13 a year is usually a good-enough frame for significant reconstitution. i.e the body that entered January differs from the body exiting December in which status functions it maintains

• 1.2 reconstitution requires stability and static anchor points in the constituting frame.

  • 1.21 if environment shifts faster than consolidation, then nothing can form. You can’t build a house while foundation keep shifting.

  • 1.22 staying in Toronto for a year yields more formidable results than constantly moving for the three years prior.

  • 1.23 increase in outputs is not necessarily bounded in geographical locality but certain stability enforce gradual improvement rather than one-shot addition.

  • 1.24 stability also enforces measurable status function: I loss around 3% body fat this year (healthier lifestyle), I run 5k consistently during summer period, I read thirty books this year, develop a framework that I’m comfortable with any given epistemic pursuits. This proves to provide longevity benefits.

    • 1.241 stay-cations, capstone projects (morph, the text editor), workshops on LLMs inference at New Stadium—all of this required a stable frame.

• 1.3 reflection and embodied constitution operate on different substrates with different update dynamics.

  • 1.31 reflection operates on propositions. propositions are discrete. “she is gone” can be accepted in a single cognitive act.

  • 1.32 embodied constitution operates on synaptic weights. weights change via hebbian learning. hebbian learning requires repeated co-activation over time.

  • 1.33 hebb: synaptic efficacy increases when presynaptic cell repeatedly and persistently takes part in firing postsynaptic cell. single activations are insufficient.

  • 1.34 reflective update is instantaneous. embodied update is necessarily gradual.

• 1.4 the body is a Bayesian engine with strong priors accumulated through sustained engagement.

  • 1.41 sleeping beside her encoded “this is her-side” across thousands of co-activations. the prior is strong.

  • 1.42 a single observation—she is gone—cannot overcome a strong prior. Bayesian updating with strong priors requires accumulated counter-evidence.

  • 1.43 grief is the lag between propositional update (instant) and distributional update (gradual). the reflective mind knows. the body has not yet accumulated sufficient counter-evidence.

• 1.5 canonical events are high-salience signals that accelerate but do not eliminate the lag.

  • 1.51 normally attention reallocates gradually according to heuristics. canonical events override heuristics through salience.

  • 1.52 November marked the two-days that I felt the most seen, followed by a week of self-recursive spiral into the valley of pain. High salience accelerated constitution. new status functions crystallized faster than normal bc attention concentrated so high.

  • 1.53 when she said stop, high salience accelerated reflective deconstitution. but embodied deconstitution still lagged. the body had been constituting toward a telos from prior letters. those weights do not update in a day.

    • 1.531 I crashed. dates felt pointless. sex felt like nothing. essentially, desire goes to zero.

• 1.54 therapy is supervised reconstitution. external agent helps calibrate which status functions to maintain, dissolve, or accelerate.

  • 1.541 my new therapist actually reads what i send her and assigns homework. there’s a non-zero chance this approach works.

2. universal love is an emergent property of attention

• 2.01 love is a personal status function. X counts as beloved for this body in context C.

• 2.02 attention is a good primitive.

  • 2.021 love, understanding, intelligence—they all decompose into sustained attention applied to an object. you cannot deeply understand what you haven’t attended to. you cannot love what you haven’t seen.

  • 2.022 sustained attention generates a interpretive infrastructure, or the learned mappings between surface behavior and latent state.

    • 2.0221 after two years you learn what her silence means when it’s thinking vs when it’s withdrawing. you learn the specific quality of voice that means she’s tired vs the one that means she’s hurt. this is expensive to build.

  • 2.023 the infrastructure cannot be transferred. it’s specific to the dyad. when i started dating again, i kept misreading cues bc my interpretive machinery was calibrated to the wrong person.

  • 2.024 hence deep relationships have high switching costs. you’re losing years of accumulated interpretive capital.

  • 2.025 this year i discovered feelings that didn’t fit inside English grammatical structures.

    • 2.0251 there’s a thing that’s not-quite-love and not-quite-friendship and not-quite-desire. it’s the feeling of being seen by someone whose attention itself constitutes you differently. L looked at me and I became a version of myself that only existed in her gaze.

    • 2.0252 aristotle: “affection is no less present for inanimate things, but loving in return involves choice, and choice comes from an active condition.” the greeks had more words. we have to gesture.

    • 2.0253 the speechlessness wasn’t failure. it was encounter with what genuinely exceeds the pictorial capacity of language.

  • 2.026 what cannot be said can be shown—through practice, presence, the body’s testimony over time.

• 2.03 love emerges from sustained deployment of interpretive infrastructure.

  • 2.031 sustained attention toward a person generates understanding of their particularity. you learn not “what women want” or “what people need” but what THIS person, with THIS history, in THIS moment, requires.

  • 2.032 understanding generates care that exceeds rational justification. i cannot defend, in expected-utility terms, why her wellbeing matters more to me than a stranger’s. it just does.

  • 2.033 care exceeding rational justification is love. the infrastructure for care is epistemically objective; the excess of care is ontologically subjective.

    • 2.0331 this is where i was confused for three years. i kept searching for the romantic label when the substance was already present. the attention was there. the care was there. i was just waiting for permission from a category.

• 2.1 the mechanism of love is ontologically universal.

  • 2.11 the universality of love operates regardless of cultural framing because it follows the universality of embodied cognition.

  • 2.12 if i move to a different society, my cognition of love doesn’t change—even if my definition conflicts with what’s culturally sanctioned there. philosophical genealogy converges:

    • 2.121 aristotle: philia requires sustained attention to the friend’s good.

    • 2.122 murdoch: morality begins with a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality.

    • 2.123 hooks: love is verb. you cannot love what you have not attended to.

• 2.2 love cannot be propositionally verified.

  • 2.21 scott alexander’s cactus person: the narrator asks DMT entities to factor a number—to provide propositional proof of their reality.

  • 2.22 they refuse. “GET OUT OF THE CAR.”

  • 2.23 i did this with N. not consciously. but the thing where you keep asking for confirmation, for evidence, for proof that the feeling is reciprocated—it’s the same demand.

  • 2.24 the entities could factor the number. they refused bc the demand itself was the problem. asking “prove you love me” is demanding the beloved become object rather than subject.

  • 2.25 the proof would destroy what it proves. verification requires objectification. love requires subjecthood.

• 2.3 the demand for proof is possession-logic.

  • 2.31 possession-love treats the beloved as object to secure. attention-love treats the beloved as subject to attend to.

  • 2.32 cultural scripts encode possession: “my person,” “other half.” as if the beloved were missing piece rather than whole person.

  • 2.33 objects can be lost. possession-love generates anxiety, jealousy, fear. attention-love reduces these: presence without demand, care without contract.

  • 2.34 attention-love doesn’t demand symmetric returns. you attend bc you want to see, not bc you expect equivalent attention back. asymmetric shapes can share the same substance.

• 2.4 therefore, love requires reciprocity of commitment, not reciprocity of kind.

  • 2.41 she loved me as friend. i loved her otherwise. the shapes differed but the substance—attention, care, interpretive commitment—was shared.

  • 2.42 when i stripped the romantic frame, love remained. the frame was superstructure. the attention was infrastructure.

  • 2.43 you do not love someone if you override their articulated reality with your preferred interpretation. to love her meant accepting her frame, not imposing mine.

• 2.5 polyamory and monogamy are allocation of modes.

  • 2.51 you can be monogamous with one person and polyamorous with another. the mode is person-dependent

  • 2.52 this doesn’t change who you are. the circuitry is identical regardless of configuration.

  • 2.53 the failure mode happens when transient relationships never accumulate infrastructure.

    • 2.531 ended things with two partners end of this year, has to do with recent events that makes me evaluate my relationship consideration.

• 2.6 the capacity for asymmetric love is the capacity for neighbor-love.

  • 2.61 kierkegaard: erotic love and friendship are preferential—i love you because you are beautiful, intelligent, kind. neighbor-love: i love you as such, independent of properties

  • 2.62 preferential is unstable: if properties change, then love is threatened.

  • 2.63 loving N asymmetrically—accepting friend when i wanted otherwise—was practice in non-preferential attention. the same muscle that lets you love someone through the parts of them that actively resist love.

• 2.7 therefore, universal love is neighbor-love at maximal scope.

  

3. belief is the map drawn mostly in water

• 3.1 There are some core beliefs with respect to the existence of big-capital-G man for me.

  • 3.11 I now believe the feeling-of-being-held is a real phenomenon, even if the map is mostly water there.

  • 3.12 L showed up right when the old love was dissolving—the timing felt too aligned. the brain, being a meaning-engine, insisted there was signal in the noise.

  • 3.13 still: there’s something there. events that feel like message, and a mind that can’t stop reading the world as text.

  • 3.14 i don’t want to dismiss it as coincidence bc that’s too cheap; i also don’t want to canonise it as providence bc that’s too clean. the watermark shows where i used to be certain it was noise.

• 3.2 close reading has high ROI precisely bc it’s slow.

  • 3.21 helps me become a better thinker this year.

  • 3.22 being selective with books that refuse you to skim. The lossless process of connecting causal chain is meaning-making.

• 3.3 conversations in Toronto often feel like job interviews.

  • 3.31 I suspect this might have to do with me being bad at questions, as the signalling are pretty low to gauge from the set of questions I have.

  • 3.32 I notice the amount of people who have high agency are significantly lower comparing to the rest here. Essentially performing needle-in-a-haystack matching vibes.

  • 3.33 Or I just need to learn more pop culture so conversation feels less like interrogation.

  • 3.34 Most conversation here always seem to converge towards capital allocation. I’m a bit confused with this, as can’t we just talk about sewing, or bird facts, or a man juggling in the park.

  • 3.35 sharing tacit knowledge without the performative masks—people often assume other intentions even when you’re being direct.

4. commoditising petaflops is the way forward in terms of timeline horizons

• 4.01 people seems to say that scaling is hitting the walls. I don’t really believe this.

  • 4.011 we are nowhere near the compute efficiency ceiling of the actual hardware.

• 4.02 cost curves shows that we’ve yet to utilize fully what we currently have.

  • 4.021 DeepSeek V3/R1 training with frontier performance for a fraction of the costs that used to train GPT-3.

  • 4.022 This is then reflected within API pricing.

  • 4.023 most deployments aren’t even running on the latest hardware, (i.e B200). Most optimized implementation currently looking at MBW (maximum bandwidth utilization) because data movement is expensive

  • 4.024 MFU is heavily under-utilized. We will need co-design models that are inference-efficient. There are a lot of work tackling this problem, most notable is MLA

• 4.03 the bitter lesson still holds true.

  • 4.031 one emergent axis is using test-time compute for long-horizon tasks. Apparently now what is considered frontier is how long “a model can one-shot a tasks in X amount of time.”

  • 4.032 a cohesive, just-work inference engine seems to be the winning primitive for deploying in production.

• 4.1 Once intelligence become dirt cheap, what differentiate you from a-well-prompt-optimized-Claude?

  • 4.11 prompting and steering models behaviour would then become essential skills, in addition to engineering efficiency

  • 4.12 you still need to learn how systems work, because software engineering is not all about writing code. Understanding monads and concurrency systems is different from writing Go code.

    • 4.121 Again, semantic is different from syntax.

• 4.2 Claude/Codex/Gemini can do a small part of my job. i still have to run a mental deslop filter.

  • 4.21 80/20 point: last 20% of quality requires 80% of supervision. but that 80% of work that’s now trivial?

  • 4.22 make versions you like. i have a psychopath claude, a thinking assistant, a writing partner. shape them into lossy compressions of yourself.

  • 4.23 don’t use them to summarize. there’s learning in making the compression yourself.

• 4.3 Any type of interpretability work is worth doing.

  • 4.31 the feeling of what i like in perfume translates to the feeling of what i like in activation space. persona vectors, counterfactual drift, the geometry of concept.

  • 4.32 train a lot of muscle working with PyTorch, kernels, and spark a lot more interests in hardware knowledge, for me.

  • 4.33 Did quite a bit of experiment. Most of them are throwaway

    • 4.321 maybe I should publish failed experiments. This might produce valuable learning, perhaps.

• 4.4 tinyvllm needs finishing. a few research projects to test taste and vision.
  

  

5. heuristics derived from phenomenological observation

• 5.1 conviction and taste are what remain valuable in hyperabundance

  • 5.11 if you know what you like and think about it critically, it shows up in how you work. there’s no separating aesthetic from output. Just do the things you find beautiful.

  • 5.12 discipline also helps in curating taste. A lot of ideas I have this year come from pushing weights and climbing.

  • 5.13 hit the gym and bouldering way more this year. working toward triathlon, proper eating/sleeping/working schedule.

• 5.2 transparency and straightforwardness work.

  • 5.21 it is ok to say no.

  • 5.22 it is ok to tell people you like them upfront.

  • 5.23 the push/pull model needs some refinement. be truthful without performing “here’s my heart, do as you will.”

  • 5.24 i think i need to be a bit more selfish. can’t be good to everyone.

• 5.3 being autistic (or appearing more autistic than you are) is the performative-male version for technologists.

  • 5.31 it’s ok. you’re not that unique. neither am i.

  • 5.32 because we all know, there aren’t any original thoughts anymore.

• 5.4 life is suffering, but there are mitigations.

  • 5.41 happiness is one. looking at beautiful things is another.

  • 5.42 treat people how you want to be treated. this selfishly makes you feel better.

  • 5.43 being a dick is resource-intensive. the expected utility is negative.

• 5.5 love as a proposition of logic: we feel belonging when in this mode, therefore we must find love.

  • 5.51 but bc life is inherently suffering, finding love may be evasion from this true view.

  • 5.52 “people only talk about their sun, but not enough people talk about the moon—in a way it reflects your soul.” this is poetry. treat it as poetry.

  • 5.53 Just read books instead of scrolling Instagram, because scrolling are just suffering intensified.

[…]

8. books and reading that constitutes to character-building.

• 8.1 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• 8.2 The Gay Science — Friedrich Nietzsche

• 8.3 Waiting for God — Simone Weil

• 8.4 Letters to Milena — Franz Kafka

• 8.5 Crime and Punishment — Fyoor Dostoevsky

• 8.6 Either/Or — Søren Kierkegaard

• 8.7 HPMOR — Eliezer Yudkowsky

• 8.8 Radical Fun — Ava

• 8.9 Presence — Human Invariant

• 8.10 Please Don’t Throw Your Mind Away — LessWrong

• 8.11 Productivity — Alexey Guzey

• 8.12 Why Have Sex — Offhand Quibbles

• 8.13 A Constellation of Lookers — Henrik Karlsson
  
  Your present self,

This is part 2. you can read part 1, part 3, part 4

the first night
where I notice your breath
  holds a different cadence
    than your words.

I’d memorized the spacing
  between your sentences—
	three seconds,
	one.
    two..
      three...
	then your thought.

but your lung took longer,
	hesitated on the inhale
	as if you were reading something over.

the ceiling sustains your tender voice
  like water in cupped palms.
  We hold each others,
  with such care.
  Your arm across my stomach,
	heavy as lineage,
	getting heavier by the minutes.

my grandmother’s grandmothers,
generations ago,
is a name i don’t know.
but in four generations,
  our blood could meet,
	in some child’s marrow,
	  as in we both know,
		our love exists within a subspace
		that transcends the need of procreation.

lying awake at four in the morning,
  when you were asleep,
	my mind wonders and perform genetic math
	because your shoulder blade
	  fits against my ribs
		the way a drawer closes
		when the house settles.

***

This is part 1. You can see part 2, part 3, and part 4.

sit with the splinter
  until it names itself.

do not polish the ache
  into a lesson.

let the room stay dark.
listen for the hinge
  that closes.

if another door appears
it will be because
  we built it after mourning.

	
do not 
  inventory the damage. 
do not 
  make a museum 
    of what touched you.

build nothing. 
mourn nothing. 
  let the wound breathe 
  
  its own language, 
  
   neither hello nor goodbye.

***

4:47 AM. The first light was an imperceptible, cold whisper over the ridge. In the valley, a coyote howled—to the gods, or to the void? He sat in the dark room, a canopy of emotions swirling around him like an unseen audience. Trapped in darkness, he watched shadows dance like forgotten marionettes. The ridges silhouetted against the pale sky, shifting in the uncertain light as night yielded to dawn.

Dawn broke over the Topanga hills with a pinkish glow, as though the sun itself hesitated. The last of the night clouds clung to the ridge line in ragged strips, pale shadows refusing to yield. The mountains looked half-formed, exhaling faint plumes of fog that caught the earliest hint of rose-gold. If one squinted, one could imagine them breathing, as though the canyons and chaparral were alive with the same uncertainty churning inside him.

The morning's hue hung dry, a hesitant forewarning of what was to come. A silent tension permeated the air, a hush that resonated with the fibers of each leaf. The filtered light through the cedar walls stirred an unspoken sadness he thought had been laid to rest. In the stillness, he gazed at the timbered ceiling, listening to the faded song of birds, yet hearing only the echoes of his own mind. The letter, now adrift in the digital void, had taken with it a confession that could never be reclaimed, leaving behind a hollow silence that mirrored the irreversibility of time itself.

Standing at the window, he couldn't discern if the morning's melancholy was originated in the landscape or in his chest. The pastel light trickled over the horizon, a quiet reverberation of his unresolved sorrow. He'd spent the night awake, staring at the blinking cursor. He'd meant to write an appreciation letter to her, a warm recounting of shared moments. But the words evaded him, and his heart, true to its nature, metamorphosed into the feelings he'd long suppressed. Within the networked passage of his consciousness, there emerged repeatedly a series of enigmatic images—a gentle smile, whispered conversations that never found their voice, acts of kindness—that resist any coherent interpretation. It was as if his mind, in its inscrutable way, was endeavouring to align these fragmented visions with the contours of his own expectations, as though they were the shadowy outlines of a reality he could never fully grasp.

The house smelled of stale coffee, drifting through the wide living room. He shuffled towards a small reading nook by the corner where the light has just started to percolate through. Yesterday's newspaper lay folded, half unread. He founded a peculiar comfort within the boundary of the walls, scanning the headlines he'd ignored: local politics, a possible wildfire risk. The light, in its quiet persistence, offered a semblance of warmth, a shadow of her presence that he clung to, even as the coldness of solitude crept in around the edges. A question floated among many: How many sunsets could we shared on this deck?

In the quiet morning, he made some new coffee. He thought of Kafka's letter to Milena1, how words can evaporate into nothingness, consumed by the shadows they cast. He wondered if his own messages had met the same fate, intercepted by unseen hands, each sip draining away the intent until only a faint echo remained.

The mountains stood witnesses, their massive forms unchanged by the passage of time or the undertone of the morning light. They held no answers, only the stubborn presence of stone and air, a reminder of the enduring mystery that surrounded him. He poured the fresh coffee, the aroma filling the small space, a temporary warmth against the chill of the room. The door creaked slightly, left ajar to the unknown.

*

[In the pale light of dawn, the phone emitted a muzzy ping, like a distant echo in a vast, empty hall]

Three bubbles appeared and disappeared, pulsating with the rhythm of a heart that had long ceased to beat. He watched them, as if they held the key to a labyrinth he could never escape.

Each word was a stone dropped into the deep well of his chest, reverberating with the cold certainty of fate. His heart, once aflutter with the possibility of hope, now lay still, entombed in the icy chambers of reality. She cared, yes, but caring and wanting were two distant stars in the vast cosmos of human emotion. The ache in his chest was a reminder of the bruise time had left, a wound that festered in the shadows.

The room, once a sanctuary, now felt oppressive, suffocated by the warmth of morning light that seemed to mock his despair. The mountains outside, indifferent sentinels of human folly, stood as immutable as the laws of a cruel bureaucracy. They had witnessed countless such moments, where hearts learned and relearned the futility of gravity, where some things fell no matter how carefully one tried to hold them. He sat there, phone in hand, as the second text arrived:

The paradox was a riddle posed by a world that thrived on contradictions. His confusion reached a crescendo, a symphony of absurdity in which logic was but a distant spectator. How could one care so deeply and yet declare they couldn't be together? The answer lay in the absurd nature of existence, where meaning was a fleeting shadow, always just out of reach.

He then realised: How can one expect reciprocation when one couldn't even stand the being of oneself?

The mountains still showed no sympathy. They had witnessed countless such moments, he supposed – all these human hearts learning and relearning the same lessons about gravity. About how some things fall no matter how carefully you try to hold them.

The phone buzzed once more, offering a lifeline or a noose:

And there it was – the careful return to normal, the gentle repositioning of boundaries. She was good at this, he noticed. Too good. She had probably done it before, had probably been on both sides of this conversation enough times to navigate it with expertise.

He looked out at the mountains, their peaks sharp and cruel in the afternoon light. Everything was defined now, as if the world had finally decided to reveal its true, unforgiving nature. He typed back, "Coffee sounds good," and meant it, with a smile he usually had. Because what was the alternative? To surrender to the nothingness, to let absence consume what little remained?

The hummingbird, a messenger of a world he no longer understood, hovered at the window. He watched it disappear, carrying with it the last vestiges of hope, into the remaining light.

[Life moved on, and he thought to himself: "We will be okay."]

"The love we have for someone will one day dissolve into the air, and we will no longer get to hold it, yet it's still the same air we breathe. I passed by some who wept, knowing they no longer hold the same feelings for this one person or how it's possible that our existence may no longer be as important as it is now. For that, I have to accept, and you do too. Because I think at some points in life, there will always be a moment when we yearn for this kind of love to arrive because it will be the one that gives comfort. Yet, in the next period of life, sometimes two people or even more can no longer provide that kind of love, so I guess we will just meet another person with a different kind of love, and perhaps it's what we truly need at that time. I just hope that no matter what the future holds for us, you will remember how your existence will always leave a mark on me. It will be remembered that you were once here, giving light to my life. But one day when it happens, please do it gently so it won't break me" — somewhere on Reddit

Cohere Toronto Office

feels and results.

The train station loomed, a grey monolith against the ever-darkening sky. It was half-past seven on a Sunday, and I ran late for the 20:23 Lakeshore West Train back to Hamilton. Quickly grabbing my laptops from the bags I packed for the weekend away, I hop back onto the stream to catch others' presentations. It wasn't any ordinary Sunday, but rather the demo night of New Build.

Exhaustion clung to me like a second skin after 48 hours of sleep deprivation and intense focus on hacking on a project. Our team had already finished the demo, yet something gnawed at the corner of my mind. A vague unease, shapeless as the fog, settled over me. I couldn't shake the feeling of displacement that slipped through my fingers, leaving the aftertaste of a half-remembered dream.

I have done a fair share of hackathons, yet New Build stood apart from most hackathons I have attended. New Build is the definition of "unc cracked tpot club" that builds projects during the weekend. It was the distilled essence of Toronto's raw talents that represents the ever-fast-growing tech scene in Canada. New Build was a multidisciplinary hackathon that combines intensive project development with team formation inspired by the NBA Draft1. One major feature that differentiated New from other hackathons is the draft mechanics. We knew who the team captains were. Lo and behold, yours truly was one of them.

Given the crowd of cracked and brilliant minds participating in this event, the weight of self-imposed expectations hung heavy. I felt compelled to match their prowess, not for their sake but to prove something to myself. Yet beneath it all, a voice whispered a simple desire lingering at the back of my mind—to savour the experience and craft something genuine and quaint. I had an idea in mind infused with warmth, a reflection of my inner child, free from the cold glare of corporatism.

I want to play and build something novel!

Yet, on Saturday morning, as soon as the clock struck 08:30, my corporate-wired mind took control, drowning out any remnants of authenticity I had. We immediately got carried away into short-term optimisation2 of the problem statement, maxing out the potential outcomes of the project. Additionally, we were fixated on the name, wanting to make it work.

We have fallen into the trap of the corporatisation of hackathons.**

This mindset got to me, and it showed during the demo. The panel said nothing. No questions, no grilling. Defeat washed over me, heavy as the silence. I felt small, like one of those shuttered storefronts dotting the neighbourhood.

On the train home, I watched the city blur past - all grit, neon, and late-night diners. Something shifted, quiet as a whisper: I know my shit. Damn good, actually. The city kept moving, indifferent. And so would I.

on hacker culture and implications of New Build.

the following is an excerpt from Hacking the Hackathon — Jacky

A weird thing about startup/hustle culture: We fetishise exhaustion as a badge of honour. We have collectively decided that bags under our eyes are way cooler than a new iPhone.

This behaviour stems from Silicon Valley's attitude toward saviorism problems. The time-boxed nature of hackathons only serves as microcosms of this zeitgeist and compels participants to push their limits in a 24-36 hours sprint to push out marketable products.

The fundamental issue with this approach is its reductionist nature. These rapid-fire development sessions rarely build upon existing knowledge or work in the field. More often than not, they ignore crucial context surrounding the complex issues they attempt to address, distilling multifaceted problems into a simple web app3.

This methodology prioritizes speed and novelty over depth and nuance, potentially leading to superficial innovations that fail to address root causes or consider long-term implications.

"Hackers" are makers compelled to create - not for money or fame, but for the pure joy of bringing something new to life. The congregations of craftsmen eventually led to the formation of hackerspaces such as hackathons – a kind of digital-age speakeasy for the intellectually adventurous. These spaces were initially conceived as the "third space" outside the state's influence and the capitalist market.

Yet, these spaces often struggle to remain true to their vision without intentional intervention. The commercialisation of hackathons can be seen as an unintended consequence of their underlying financial incentives. Hackathons aren't cheap to run, so organizers, with the best of intentions, turn to sponsorships to keep the lights on and the Red Bull flowing.

But each logo slapped on a banner chips away at the original ethos.

It's a classic chicken-and-egg problem.

Hackathons need money, but the incentive structure to foot the bill slowly morphs hackathons away from their original purposes.

It is tricky, right? How do you keep the spirit of innovation and learning while all these other factors are at play?

I think organizers should emphasize the ethos of hackathons, eliminate the focus on prizes and short-term projects, and replace it with something better.

Reclaiming the design spaces means cultivating a culture of play — a space for "unfettered exploration, which gives individuals the freedom to explore ideas that might not have clear monetary values."

  A hackathon should be the infrastructure layer so that everyone can play.

implications from New Build.

New Build addresses some problems and challenges pretty well, such as the draft mechanics, which introduce some entropy but fall short in terms of prize incentives.

K and I were chatting about how New Build felt like extended New Office Hours, which is a good first step in cultivating spaces for play.

New Build represents what Toronto has to offer, a first step to solve the "human capital flight" (often refers as "brain drain") in Canada.

Looking ahead, I'd love to see New Build create more space for pure play. Maybe even go full retreat-style, similar to rabbitholeathon.

I have faith in the New Build team. They've got good people. And good people are the ultimate moat.

going forward with hackathons.

As for me, I keep saying each hackathon will be my last.

The 36-hour coding binges aren't as appealing as they once were.

But I said that last time too, so who knows? There's something addictive about the energy of a good hackathon4.

Here's the thing about hackathons: they don't have to choose between being recruiting events and playgrounds for innovation.

The best ones are both. But right now, the scales are tipped too far towards recruitment. It's like optimizing for an acquisition instead of building something people want. The real magic of hackathons happens when you put hackers first.

Everything else – the jobs, the networking, the sponsorships – that all follows naturally when you get the core experience right.

to my teammates.

    I'm obsessed with your work.

    I'm so blessed to have a chance to work with you all.

    I'm sorry that I couldn't do more,

              but overall it was a net positive.

    I wouldn't trade anything for it.

    Even though we didn't win, I'm glad that we did work on something 
                                                                                                          together.

    I do hope that we would cross path again in the future.

                                                                                                                    regards, aaron.

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