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.

***

if you’re asleep, i hope this finds you drifting softly among the stars, dreaming about the life you want to live, feeling that quiet pull of what you long to do. i hope you find solace in the small things—how you know yourself best—and protect your peace, gently, against whatever currents try to pull you under.

if you’re awake, phone screen lighting your face in the dark, thumb hovering over my name, half-caught between wanting and waiting, i hope you’re kind to the way your mind spirals back.

⁂

yesterday i made coffee at 3:42am, the grinder too loud for that hour so i used the french press instead, counting mississippis while thinking about how you laugh. not the polite version but the real one—starts silent, shoulders moving first, then this sudden breath like you’re surprised by your own joy, the half-second delay before actual sound. by the time the coffee was ready i’d catalogued four other instances. we’ve met twice. my brain is building a case from insufficient evidence.

that night i drafted three texts. the first asked if you got home safe—i sent that one because that’s how i was raised. the second said i’d been thinking about our conversation. true, but too vulnerable. the third was just “hey.” maximum deniability. those last two sit in my notes app. last night, i thought of uber’ing across town just to give you a hug. not because you asked. because i wanted thirty seconds in your physical space.

i don’t just want you. i want the wanting itself.

yearning is a recursive loop, i find—you want the person, but you also want the state of wanting because it proves you still believe in transformation. that your life isn’t finished. that who you are isn’t fixed. that the right person could cultivate a space where you’re comfortable in your own skin.

when you said that it took time for you to let people in, part of me panicked. if we figure it out—yes or no—this state ends. right now everything is possible. i can draft 2am texts and think about bringing you your pumpkin spice latte and it all means i’m someone who still does this. someone who hasn’t optimized connection into a spreadsheet. when we talked last saturday my nervous system lit up like touching an electric fence. static from fingertips to sternum. i kept touching my chest on a walk later that night, checking if the charge was still there, extending how long i could hold that feeling.

most of my life is controlled. i plan meals, track sleep, answer emails within twenty-four hours, maintain friendships through scheduled coffee dates. i’m twenty-four and already running efficiently. but yearning doesn’t respect that. it makes me irrational in ways that feel sacred. i google the distance to your neighborhood at 2am. fourty minutes. i’ve memorized which coffee shops are between us. i draft emails i’ll never send. i want to drive across town monday night for a thirty-second hug. the stupidity feels like evidence—i’m still capable of wanting past the point where it makes sense.

L wrote once: “it’s a choice, because you look at the tapestry of feelings you’re feeling; you draw a boundary around them and say ‘these, i’ve decided they’re love’.” at 4:41am this tuesday, last week of october, i’ve drawn that boundary again. despite what my brain says—two meetings isn’t enough entry points, i’m constructing narrative faster than reality supports it—i’ve decided these feelings are love because i need them to be.

not because you need me to love you. you said you were raised to self-regulate, to fix problems rather than process feelings. i saw it in how you held the coffee mug filled with wine—both hands wrapped around the mug but never quite drinking, like comfort was something to hold but not consume. that my instinct to comfort you was confusing. i heard that. but i’m being kind to the loop. letting it run until it tires. whether you pace toward me or away, whether this becomes a story or a footnote, the wanting has already changed me. i’m sitting here at 4:41am, coffee cold now, typing this out because the feeling needs somewhere to go:

wanting to want is wanting twice over. and that’s enough for me.

[The fluorescent tube hummed, buzzed as if it, too, owed back rent.]

The apartment was a cast-off corner of an old paper mill, ten paces to the windows blackened with soot and wood dust. Gas pipes ran along the brick walls like exposed veins, feeding the single flickering lamp that cast everything in amber shadows. Sunlight crept a cautious half-flight up the ashen brick, then gave up, leaving the upper reaches in permanent dusk. Steel trusses crossed fifteen—no, twenty—feet overhead, bolted tight as though to contain the resonance of its past glory days.

[The ceiling pressed down between his shoulder blades. You walked in already stooped, as if the building itself demanded genuflection.]

Air tasted of coal dust and latent cold. Of bureaucratic forms left too long in damp filing cabinets. The radiator in the corner had been painted over so many times it looked like a small government monument to inefficiency, its brass nameplate reading “Reg. No. 7439-B” in script so ornate it might have been lifted from a Victorian death certificate.

The galley kitchenette clung to the south wall: single hotplate, half-sized fridge, enamel sink no wider than his shoulders. The Turkish cezve sat cold on the burner—J had brought it from the Berkeley flea market, back when mornings meant something. “For our mornings,” she’d said, and he’d believed in plural futures then.

Across the room, the futon disappeared beneath drifts of half-folded laundry. He sat at the blond-wood desk that N had helped him carry up the stairs last winter—or was it the winter before? The MacBook’s A and W keys had been rubbed to ghosts by his index finger, searching always for the same words: Ausführung (execution), Wahrheit (truth), Warten (to wait). Eight coffee cups formed a semicircle around the laptop, each one a failed attempt at staying productive.

one, two, three,…six, six, seven, eight, …, ten, … ,seventeen. He counted between the flickers.

“Vereinbarung”. Page sixty-three. Agreement. Arrangement. Understanding. He typed: “contract”.

…

The cursor hadn’t moved for another twenty minutes.

Aursführungsbestimmungen. Executive provisions. Or maybe just decisions. Or maybe nothing at all.

It was Tuesday, which meant he should have been on bar shift four hours ago. Or is it Thursday? The phone showed sixteen missed calls: K from Casa’s, the coffee shop manager.

Phone buzzing:

Her area code.

He let it ring. Watched the screen go black.

He deleted the other voice mails without listening. There was a peculiar comfort in not knowing what he was avoiding.

The radiator’s midnight clang unfurled through what morning light remained. His hands shook as he reached for the chipped Carrara-white mug. The espresso had grown a skin. The coffee tasted like yesterday, which tasted like the day before, which tasted like the slow dissolution of everything he used to think mattered.

[The tremor began in his jaw, radiated to those shaky hands. Jonesing for half a bar1.]

Across the courtyard, the couple in 3B had their curtains half-drawn again. Her blouse gaped; his hands braced against brick. Afternoon light gilded the sweat on her collarbone. He looked away, then back, caught in the strange voyeurism of the isolated—watching others live the life he’d somehow misplaced.

[He tongued the roof of his mouth: The chalky residue was now gone. Soon.]

A knock at the door. People had been knocking all week—HOA notices, gas inspections, the property manager about his succulents dying on the fire escape. Or was that last week? Time kinked around the pills.

“It’s T. From the shop.”

Which morning? The one that stretched back in time, or forward into the one that may never come?

Laptop showed 3:47 PM Tuesday. His watch: 8:15. The cezve was still cold. The grounds in the pot were dry, still.

He stood, knees buckled. When had he last stood? ninety-seven pages complete. Floor tilted, then leveled. He counted the coffee bags on the counter—seventeen, half torn, the other spilled on top of the counter—he couldn’t remember emptying them.

” I know you’re in there man. I can smell the coffee.”

But the cezve was cold. He smelled his palms, reeked of stale espresso.

“I’m sick,” he rasped.

“Yeah, okay. Just… M wants to know if you’re coming back. Ever.”

He patted his pockets. One bar left. The pharmacy on King closed at six. His hand shook against the brick wall.

“Tell him Thursday.”

“It is Thursday.”

The words hung in the air like a small betrayal. Time had slipped again, hours disappearing into the labyrinth of trying to translate untranslatable things. The subjunctive mood he was traversing—the grammar of things that might happen, could happen, probably wouldn’t.

“NEXT THURSDAY!” he shouted, voice splintering.

Footsteps receded.

“Okay, just checking. You okay, bud?”

[He stared at the cezve. Still cold. J’s mornings were five thousand miles away.]

“ye—s”, he murmured.

The hallway fell silent. Saved the file FINAL_FINAL_V7.txt, and opened his notebook: “Translation as a disappearing act.”

New e-mail from [email protected]: “Standard rate, due upon completion.”

He dry-swallowed the last half-bar. Thought-threads arranged themselves into neat ledger rows. Outside, light drained through budding branches.

His phone rang: San Francisco again—Dr. M’s office about the missed appointment. He’d been missing a lot of appointments lately. Missing everything, really, except this chair and this screen and the slow erosion of meaning.

Radiator knocked once, twice. A brown leaf pirouetted off the last living plant and lay on the sill. Tomorrow he would water them. Or Thursday. Whichever came bearing softer light.

He stood, eye fixed blankly on the door. T’s footsteps had faded, but the knocking persisted inside his skull. That clanging noise, that buzz. His jaw tensed, and wiped the damp palms against the jeans. The tremors had returned, fingers twitching.

[The pharmacy closes at six]

He fumbled for his wallet, fingers shaking as he counted the bills—twenty, forty, sixty. Expired credit card, edges worn. Barely enough for two bars.

At the door, he paused and looked back at the apartment: the cold cezve, the blinking cursor, the untranslated paragraph.

The warped floorboards yawning beneath each crooked steps. Halfway down, he leaned briefly against the cracked plaster, the wall bowing slightly, pressed against his shoulder. The floodlights now blurred into watercolor halos in the twilight. Faces passed—strangers casting sidelong glances at the thin man in yesterday’s clothes who moved like he was carrying invisible weight.

The pharmacy stood beside the coffee bar and Casa, a Victorian bones dressed in fluorescent decay — high tin ceilings blackened with centuries of cigarette smoke. He saw T leaning over the La Marzocco, the one he operated for two years before everything started sliding sideways. Their eyes met for a brief second. T mouthed something, but the street noise—car horns, distant sirens, the general hum of other people’s functioning lives—conveniently swallowed the words.

[He looked away, disappearing into the revolving door.]

“Two? Again?” The pharmacist’s recognition carried a particular kind of weariness.

He nodded, lips parting silently.

“Give me a minute.”

Shoulders tense, skin prickling beneath his shirt. Mirrors lining the back wall shines a dimple light against one’s fixture—a fractured procession of pale faces staring back, folding against the heavy pull of gravity. Is this how I look now?

Upon the shelves there stood arrayed such remedies as might comfort the minor afflictions of the commonplace—powders for the head, syrups for the throat, all manner of palliatives whose very names had been worn smooth by countless repetitions. The wallpaper, once perhaps bearing the dignity of official proclamations, now hung in tatters, its edges curled like the fingers of supplicants. Yet behind the mahogany counter, as if placed there by providence, stood a cabinet that it seemed to mock the decay surrounding it. Within its chamber, vials were arranged with the devotion of a monk tending relics—each bottle catching the gaslight like a small confession, blue and white and amber, promising either salvation or its more expedient cousin.

His eyes fixed on the cabinet while he waited. School buses, he thought, spotting the yellow rectangles. Ladders for the scored white ones. The taxonomy of chemical relief on borrowed time.

[He got the pills.]

Outside again, prescription folded in the palm of his hand like some covenant with suffering, he hesitated. The street lamps cast their judgment in pools of yellow light. Glendale Park lay nearby—a patch of greenery where he once believed in the redemptive power of literature, where Dostoevsky had made sense and Kafka had seemed merely clever rather than prophetic.

The gate stood open, as if expecting him.

He walked the familiar path past the memorial bench, past the oak where lovers carved their temporary eternities. His footsteps found their own rhythm, leading him to the small rise where the city’s glow dimmed to a suggestion. Here, he lay back upon the damp earth.

The pills dissolved bitter beneath his tongue—a communion of sorts. The sky stretched above him like black silk pierced by pinpoint stars, cool against his burning skin. When his phone rang—J’s ringtone, that particular melody of reproach—he felt the vibration through the ground more than heard it. He hadn’t returned her call back. Probably wouldn’t now.

Voices grew distant, submerged beneath a rhythmic murmur like waves pulsing behind his temples. T and K calling his name, their footsteps hurried across gravel. But their voices were already fading, drifting further away with each beat of his slowing heart.

“No pulse… Breathing shallow…”

A brightness hovered just beyond sight, warmth spilling over closed eyelids. Around him, rhythmic beeps threaded into an uncertain melody, metallic yet oddly comforting.

The cezve was warm again, he thought, smiling vaguely. Somewhere far away, gentle footsteps approached, whispering softly: Thursday, tomorrow, morning darling.

[Cezve steaming… Her laugh like low thunder…]

All the words he’d tried so hard to translate finally making sense in a language he’d never learned.

May 29th, 2025

Hi everyone, hope everyone is doing well

Quick lil life update: i moved to Toronto, for the time being

Let’s hang! pic.twitter.com/fxLLdIg3Ej

— aaron (@aarnphm_) 2 juin 2025

I had a bit of trouble publishing this one given that between moving and other life events, but finally got some pockets of time to finish this.

This piece is a homage to my previous apartment in Hamilton, where I lived for two years. I didn’t enjoy school and were dreading moving back to Canada after San Francisco. But this apartment became part of me—it made me enjoy my stay in Canada. Getting to know the people working in the neighborhood became a major part of my life.

If you’re ever in Hamilton, here are some recs:

• Democracy on Locke, and Epic Books

• My favorite bar—shout out to Cima and staff (if you’re ever in town, check them out and tell them Aaron sent you)

• James Waldron Butcher Shop

• Mickey McGuire Cheese shop on Ogilvie Street

• Locke Street

Things I did there:

• Made friends with people twenty years older than me. Learned a few things here and there.

• Hung out with neighbors, which was a lot of fun, got to know a lot of people my parents’ age 😸

• Hosted a few functions there. (Once my dining table arrives, I’ll resume this in Toronto!)

• Morning walks and runs near Chedoke Park

• Falling out of love

• Falling in love

• Falling out of love again

The thing about living alone is that you grow used to being lonely (wow no shit Sherlock!)—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This fits my workflow rather well, given the busy school and work schedule. I do miss Hamilton quite a bit: its silence, its tranquility. I sometimes miss the silent of the Locke St at 10pm during weeknights. Some of the people I met there have become lifelong friends. Watching their journeys grow, with ambitions and hope—it was good. But I knew I wouldn’t stay there permanently, so it felt like the right time to move.

I’ve been in this new spot for six weeks now, still finding my groove. Though I do feel a bit lost lately—not in the sense that something has gone wrong, but rather that the energy and flow of city living pushes me to go outside and do more, to be productive while I’m here. Sometimes this makes it hard to find pockets of time to do what I enjoy. Maybe I’ll rediscover this joy of cooking once the table arrives 😅

A bit of work-related: I have then become the core committers group for vLLM 🤟. I’m currently mostly working on structured outputs/speculative decoding/tool calling, so feel free to reach out if you have any questions related to these topics. More than happy to chat with!

Here’s are some literature I enjoyed recently:

• The Need For Roots by Simone Weil

• The third chair by Henrik Karlsson

• The history of album art, by Matt Ström-Awn

• Rearchitecting Hugging Face Uploads and Downloads, by the Xnet team (part of HuggingFace)

I’ve been mulling over this all morning, wondering what I want to write about love - the state that morphs into every crevice of one’s consciousness - romantic, platonic, familial.

What do I really know about it? Less than I’d like, more than I admit.

I went to grab a coffee earlier today. The barista knows my order by now - Latte, oat milk, hot. Today she slides over not just my drink but a small envelope, worn at the edges like it’s been carried around for a while. Her eyes meet mine for just a moment longer than usual:

“Someone left this for you,” she says, then turns to the next customer.

Inside, three words in unfamiliar handwriting:

I stand there, coffee cooling, envelope light in my hands. Part of me wants to ask who left it, when, why. The other part understands that some gifts are meant to stay mysteries. Like finding a dollar bill in an old coat pocket, or hearing your favourite song on a stranger’s radio - some moments of grace are better left unexplained. I pocket the note. Outside, February wind cuts through my jacket. But I’m thinking about how strange it is, how a few words from an unknown hand can make a person feel less, alone in the times of a loneliness epidemic.

**

From childhood through adulthood, we are drawn into relationships not simply to be loved, but to feel that we are part of something greater than ourselves. Think of joining a football team, working in fourth spaces, playing hanging with friends, etc. This longing for connection is somewhat primal, encoded deep inside our DNAs. Yet, this connection is often mistaken for the desire for another person’s affection, when it is in truth a yearning for a sense of home—a state of being where one is seen, accepted, and integrated.

The notion that love is about belonging challenges the popular narrative that it is a transaction or a fleeting emotional high. Instead, it proposes that love is an enduring, almost sacred, commitment to self-recognition and mutual acceptance. This understanding reframes our loneliness: isolation is not a lack of love, but rather a disconnection from the fundamental truth that we belong.

a projection of the Anima/Animus

Jungian psychology posits that romantic attraction begins with the projection of the anima (the unconscious feminine aspect in men) or animus (the unconscious masculine aspect in women) onto another person. This projection creates the illusion of “completeness,” as the beloved becomes a vessel for unintegrated parts of the self. For example, a man might idealize a partner as the embodiment of nurturing sensitivity—qualities he has repressed in his conscious identity—while a woman might project assertiveness or intellectual rigor onto a partner, mirroring her latent animus. Jung described this dynamic as a “religious search” for wholeness, where the lover unconsciously seeks to reunite with the lost halves of their psyche through another:

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

However, such projections are inherently unstable. When relationships falter under the weight of unmet archetypal expectations, the disillusioned ego often retreats into shame or resentment, mistaking the collapse of projection for the failure of love itself.

defensive isolation, and its shadows

Heartbreak ruptures the psyche’s fragile equilibrium, triggering a numinous experience—an encounter with the shadow, the repository of rejected traits and unresolved traumas. To avoid confronting this darkness, individuals often erect psychological barriers. These walls manifest as emotional detachment, intellectualisation of intimacy, or compulsive self-reliance—all attempts to “protect” the ego from further annihilation. For instance, an individual going through post-divorce isolation1 or and individual dealing with limerence illustrate how the shadow’s fear of vulnerability fuels self-sabotage. Jung observed that such defences arise from a primal terror of psychic disintegration:

The body will not allow itself to be exposed to annihilation. It’s prepared to annihilate itself to avoid that

Yet these walls, while temporarily numbing pain, perpetuate a cycle of alienation. By refusing to engage with the shadow’s raw material—grief, rage, longing—the individual stagnates, mistaking the atrophy of emotional risk for “strength”.

Jungian belonging transcends social affiliation; it is rooted in the collective unconscious—the shared reservoir of archetypes and primordial symbols that bind humanity. When emotional walls block access to this deeper stratum, individuals experience belonging as an intellectual concept rather than an embodied reality. As such, a recurring dream of “packing a suitcase” with unresolved urgency epitomises this disconnect: the psyche yearns for symbolic “homecoming” but remains trapped in superficial preparations.

True belonging, Jung argued, requires surrendering the ego’s insistence on control. In The Red Book, he wrote that the soul “circulates energy both outwardly and inwardly” only when the individual dares to love without guarantees. This aligns with accounts of heartbreak survivors who, after dismantling defences, discover belonging through radical self-acceptance rather than external validation.

Jung viewed heartbreak as an initiatory ordeal, compelling the ego to confront its limitations and renegotiate its relationship with the Self. The key lies in holding the tension between love’s idealised projections and its messy realities. For example, a woman who idealises her partner as a “hero” animus figure might, through betrayal or loss, confront her own repressed assertiveness—a step toward reclaiming projection as inner resource.

Alain de Botton’s assertion that love is a fundamental human requirement stems from his analysis of existential loneliness—“the tax we pay for consciousness”. Yet the anguish of feeling “out of love” arises not from love’s absence but from a misalignment between our own projections of connection and the raw, unvarnished reality of relationship. De Botton frames loneliness as an inevitable byproduct of self-awareness, a tax levied by our capacity to reflect on existence. Romanticism, he argues, sold humanity a dangerous myth: that a soulmate could resolve this existential solitude. When reality fails to meet this ideal—as it invariably does—many retreat into emotional isolation, interpreting disillusionment as proof of love’s impossibility rather than its maturation.

What must endure isn't "love" but friendship and trust.

Jung and Botton both implies that love as an antidote to modernity’s existential despair. Alain de Botton secularises the dynamic flow of love, as the “democracy of doubt”. Here, love becomes a rebellion against nihilism, not through grand gestures but through daily acts of attention: the way a hand adjusts to another’s in the dark, or the pause before voicing a difficult truth.

Alain Badiou’s warning against algorithmic dating resonates here: by sanitising love of risk, we sterilise its transformative potential. The surge in “religious but not spiritual” affiliations reflects a hunger for transcendent meaning—a void that Jungian belonging fills through engagement with archetypal narratives, while de Botton advocates for secular rituals (like shared meals or curated art) to cultivate communal grace. Both solutions reject individualism’s isolation, proposing instead that love is “the quiet revolution of mutual becoming”

interpretation.

I know it is so cliche, but before we can truly love another, we must first learn to love ourselves. When we view love through the lens of belonging, we notice that it is as much an internal state as it is an external interaction. The greatest acts of love often begin with the willingness to confront our internal conflicts—the projections, the shadows, the silent yearnings for radical self-acceptance. Only when we learn to sit with our discomforts and embrace our true selves can we truly share ourselves with another.

When we nurture our inner selves through honest self-reflection and care, we lay the groundwork for relationships that are not about filling a void, but about sharing a journey.

I have a hard time internalising the idea of loving myself, simply because:

• Humans are innately egotistical, and only you can look after the self. If you just sit there and thinks someone would help you heal or teach you to change your oil, then idea of life is somewhat naive from your point of view.

• Self-love should emerge naturally from this arrangement. Yet I find myself perpetually turned outward, my hands extended in offering. My instinct is to give, to pour, to fill other vessels while my own runs dry—a peculiar form of selfishness disguised as generosity. In the spaces between caring for others, I've somehow misplaced the grammar of self-regard, forgotten how to form those small, essential sentences: I need some rest.

• To find love is to find a friend, but I'm too protective of my friendship to allow myself falling in love.

• My manager once said, "Too much opportunity creates analysis paralysis." Same with love. When you approach relationships like a kid at Build-A-Bear Workshop (I’ll take the loyalty of a Golden Retriever, the wit of a Twitter troll, and… ooh, let’s stuff in some trauma resilience!), you end up with a Frankenstein’s monster of unmet expectations

• This is not permanent, but currently dealing with grief of losing a friend 2

But sometimes, You just have to stop optimising and give up on being lonely

**

Let me be seen.
  Let me be annoyed.
    Let me belong to myself first,
    so I can stop treating love
      like an exorcism.

**

I keep thinking about what my friend said: “You have to learn to be selfish.”

But maybe that’s backward. Maybe true selfishness isn’t building higher walls but learning to live without them. To be present even when presence hurts.

The hardest part isn’t being alone. It’s explaining to well-meaning friends why you choose it. How do you tell someone that sometimes loneliness feels like the closest thing to belonging? That there’s a difference between being lonely and being lost?

But then there are moments like finding that envelope. Small reminders that even in isolation, we’re tethered to each other in ways we can’t always see. That love isn’t just romantic partnership or family bonds - it’s also the anonymous kindness of leaving messages for strangers to find.

I don’t know if love is coming. But I know this: every day I choose to get up, to walk to this coffee shop, to sit among other humans pursuing their own solitudes. And maybe that’s its own kind of love. Maybe belonging isn’t something we find but something we practice, like patience or hope.

The envelope sits on my desk now, a small spot of red against white papers. I could spend hours theorising about who left it, analysing the meaning behind the message. Instead, I let it be what it is: a reminder that even in a world that often feels too big and too empty, someone took the time to write three words and leave them where they might be found.

Happy Valentines everyone, do something that you love today, if you are soloing it (I will definitely go out and enjoy some good food and books).

Here’s are some media, quotes, and unstructured thoughts. I hope you might find something out of it:

• If you have a Valentine date, and you are in tech:

  

• Ian McEwan once said:

  The way a hand adjusts to another’s in the dark, the pause before a difficult truth

  Love, is the antidote to solipsism: To project is human, to retract that projection and see others is divine.

• Belonging is a verb. It thrives not in static harmony but in the messy, glorious work of mutual revision.

• Thérèse and Isabelle, by Violette Leduc

  • an authentic read on queer loves, by a French author. This is the first book that I read in French, let’s just say that Claude is my translator’s partner.

• I watched La Belle Personne (2003) starring Léa Seydoux and Louis Garrel

  • Draws parallels to “La Princesse de Clèves,” using the classic novel’s themes of duty, honor, and forbidden love to explore modern teenage experiences.

  • Junie’s struggle to find her place in the world and understand her own desires reflects a broader search for identity and belonging. The film suggests that this journey is fraught with uncertainty and that true belonging comes from within, rather than from external validation.

• A letter from typo.love, by Kelly:

  i have a recurring dream that we’re visiting you. every time, i come with different people. and every time, i don’t know how we got up there. we’re just there. it’s empty at first, and then you appear. i bring your favourite cookies, we walk around and talk about what has changed. but i always wake up, i’m hundreds of kilometres away, and even if we went to where we remember you, i don’t even know if you’d be there.

  living alone diaries. is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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

Hey 2023 you,

I know that 2023 has been a tumultuous year, albeit a lot of things happened. You planned out steps by steps what needs to be done in '24. You worried about maintaining friendship by hosting functions, meeting new people.

Rest assured, we have kept up the tradition writing a "year-review" similar to previous years.

tl/dr: You achieve most of the things you set out to do for last year, with the main theme of "being-there". Lemme tell you the lore of twenty four.

Heidegger’s Dasein underscores that we are beings in the world, with others—searching for meaning.

Dasein exists in relations to other being, as the "essence of Dasein lies within its existence." We wake up each day, startled by own own presence. We spend our nights harboring dreams that might startle us awake.

But what does it mean to truly be there in an age when "there" has become everywhere and nowhere? When presence splits between pixels and flesh, between midnight texts and morning coffee?

You think about this often: how we inhabit spaces that aren't spaces, how we find ourselves in the gaps between digital signals and analog hearts.

Like ships in fog, feeling our way through the digital murk.

The kind of fog that makes you doubt your instruments, that turns familiar harbors strange. You send signals out into the void - a tweet here, a reply there - never sure if they'll reach anything solid.

Most bounce back empty. But sometimes, rarely, you hear an answering horn. Clear and true, cutting through the static.

That's how T and I found each other. Two vessels, running different courses but somehow on the same frequency. At first, just blips on each other's radar. "T from Twitter," I'd think, as if that digital marker could contain a person. Like how sailors must have once navigated by stars they'd named but never touched.

Strange how you can sense authenticity even through the fog. It's in the way someone signals back - not the polished ping of social media performance, but something rougher, realer.

The maritime equivalent of someone speaking in their real voice after hours of small talk. You recognise it instantly, even if you've never heard it before. The fog never really lifts in this city. It just thins sometimes, enough to see the shape of things. Enough to find your way to a coffee shop where someone you met through screens becomes flesh and blood,

becomes real in a way that surprises you both. The digital distance collapses, and suddenly you're in clear waters, talking like old friends who've finally found their way home.

We're both busy, but we find these pockets of time. The conversations pick up like they never paused. Walking through Toronto's glass canyons one day, T said something that stuck:

That's how it goes these days. You put yourself out there in bits and bytes, then occasionally, it reciprocates.

I went to T's co-working hours, a ritual space to chase our unfinished dreams. Went to high school friend parties too. Smiled until my face ached. They call it networking, but really it's just people trying not to be alone. You start to recognise the driven ones - they move differently, go-getters vibe, like they know time is running out.

Your birthday came around. We flinched. Birthday felt like accusations, after a certain age - each candle a small indictment of time spent, reminder of the absurdity of life. They're timestamps forcing us to acknowledge another year gone, marking the slow erosion of possibility into memory. Most years, I'd dodge the day entirely, treat it like any other Thursday.

Yet, this one felt, full, somehow. Not the fullness of a good meal or watching lovers in High Park on a June afternoon, their shadows long and tender on the grass. Not even the fullness of achievement or acquisition. This was the kind of fullness Montaigne wrote about, when he couldn't explain why he loved his friend except to say "Because it was him, because it was me." The kind that comes from being known, really known, in all your jagged edges and soft spots.

They showed up at your usual spot - N in her cream vest catching light, S fresh from a capstone meeting, M bringing that energy that fills rooms. Nobody was performing. Nobody was trying to network or optimise or leverage the moment. They were just there, present in that rare way that makes you feel like you exist more solidly in the world.

You know how sometimes a friend's gaze can make you feel more real? It was like that, multiplied.

We talked about nothing important. Failed projects. Post grad. Plans. Dreams. The way the city changes you when you're not looking. The conversation flowed like water finding its level, natural and unforced. No one checked their phone. No one had somewhere better to be. In a world of constant motion, of endless "sorry, been swamped, let's catch up soon," here was an island of stillness. Of attention freely given.

Later, walking home through streets gone quiet, I thought about how vulnerability makes us more resilient. How opening yourself to desire and attachment, accepting the love you feel and permitting yourself to receive the love you're given, builds a kind of strength. Maybe that's what made this birthday different. Not the number of people around the table, but the depth of the seeing. The willingness to be seen.

Someone once called me a cactus. Thorny exterior, life-giving inside. The kind that survives in harsh conditions, holding water for seasons unseen. Like how certain plants thrive in unlikely places, certain connections bloom in unexpected ways.

Maybe that's true. Maybe that's why you decided to cook for twenty people at the Orangeville retreat. Not because it made sense - it didn't - but because something in you recognised something in them. Not just people, as the old advice goes, but differently free people. Each one moving through the world in ways you couldn't predict, carrying stories you couldn't write.

The kitchen became an assembly line of chaos. Pasta station, prep station, voices calling for more salt, more time, more everything. Steam rising like prayers to forgotten gods. V and C cutting vegetables. You were on pasta duties. F was on photos duties. V telling stories between stirring the sauce. Nf arranging plates like she was painting with food. Each person bringing their own rhythm to the dance.

That night, attention flowed like wine. In the way Nf noticed when the garlic was about to burn. How W remembered everyone's dietary restrictions without being reminded. The small kindnesses that make a meal more than just fuel.

To feed people is to practice a particular kind of attention. You have to notice things: the slight tension in shoulders that means someone's had a rough day, the empty plate that speaks of hunger beyond food, the way conversation rises and falls like breath. You have to be present in a way that social media and scheduled meetings never demand.

Next year, I'll try again. Smaller scale. Ten people, maybe twelve. Not because twenty was too many, but because some things need more space to unfold. Sometimes, you have to start big to learn how to be small.

To understand, as Rao might say, that freedom isn't about capacity but about seeing reality without sentiment and acting with appropriate force.

In the end, everyone helped clean up. No one had to ask. Like a flock of birds turning in perfect synchronisation, we moved around each other in the kitchen's tight space, putting things right. Someone hummed. Someone else joined in. The night settled around us like a blanket.

That's the thing about being a cactus. You learn to store these moments, these oases of connection, for the dry seasons ahead. You learn that thorns aren't just for protection - they're also for gathering dew, for catching the light in unexpected ways.

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Authentic Being is its own measure, in other words when it does not have to justify it's existence as compared with anything else. -- Heidegger, B&T

The June air hung still in Hamilton, thick with absentee, pressing against my skin like a mere asseveration. Each morning I wake to find the city has transformed into something both familiar and grotesquely foreign.

Bird calls pierce the everlasting silence, as if nature itself has become an elaborate joke at my expense. The houses stand empty, their windows dark and judgmental, their inhabitants fled to summer cottages and coastal retreats.

I tell myself I've chosen to stay, muttering about stability and the virtue of mundane experience like a man trying to convince himself of his own sanity.

the (un)comfy corner

yearning for permanence

In August, I returned from a 6-month travel stint abroad comprising of my last semester of undergrad on exchange and some mini-travels. Ever since I’ve been back home, every interaction I’ve had with friends has been a reunion. Or namely, a catch-up session to talk about what I’ve been up to the last 6 months. “How was Korea?” “Are yo…

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2 years ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · kel

But in truth, I've become both the prisoner and the warden of my own isolation. The streets stretch out before me like the passages of a labyrinth I've designed myself, yet somehow cannot escape. Even my shadow seems to follow a few steps behind, as if unsure whether to keep me company.

K and I reconnect sporadically through screens and occasional New Office Hour, our friendship the kind Ava wrote about—minimum viable, sustained through authentic moments rather than constant contact. We orbit each other from afar, catching glimpses through social media, our conversations picking up right where it left.

The existential weight of friends graduating, moving away, settles like dust on everything. They leave one by one. A lunch, a hug, promises to keep in touch—the familiar choreography of loss. At work, I perform competence with mechanical efficiency. My calendar fills with meetings I attend in body only, my mind elsewhere, calculating the growing distance between here and everywhere else. I find myself failing to show up for meetings, the passion that once drove me now flickering like a candle running low on oxygen.

Jung wrote about the shadow—those parts of ourselves we prefer not to see. Mine lives in browser tabs: flight prices to NYC, London, Cancun; ML papers I haven't read; messages I haven't answered. The cognitive dissonance hums beneath every action, unfolding step by step. I track it like I track my GitHub contributions: green squares of productivity that correlate inversely with hours of sleep. At 2 AM, I catch myself with sixteen browser tabs open—four documentation pages, three ML papers, six apartment listings in different cities, two flight searches, and somehow, inevitably, a tab about burnout. Each tab is a thread pulling in opposite directions, and I've become skilled at holding the tension without resolving it. Your Strava shows longer runs, not because I'm training for anything, but because I'm running away from something I can't name. My calendar is a perfect grid of meetings and deadlines, while my Notes app fills with half-written resignation letters. The body keeps score: caffeine intake up 800%, sleep quality down 60%, productivity maintaining at an unsustainable line.

The industry doesn't wait for resolution. Each week brings new papers, new benchmarks, new proofs of my increasing obsolescence. I tell myself I'm being strategic, staying informed, but really I'm watching the future arrive like waves, each one making me feel smaller than the last. The anxiety isn't in the failures—those I could face. It's in the achievements that feel like accidents, the successes that seem to belong to someone else.

Star repositories, approved PRs, deployment metrics—perfect pebbles collected from a beach I no longer want to visit. My shadow self kicks sand over them, laughing.

The truth is simpler and harder: I'm afraid of becoming obsolete1, fully knowing that I have acquire enough engineering fluency to prove otherwise. Every time I open Twitter, someone younger has built something better. Every time I close it, I've lost another hour I could have spent building. The dissonance isn't between what I do and what I say—it's between what I am and what I think I should be. At 3 AM, debugging someone else's code, I wonder if this is what Jung meant by individuation: learning to hold these contradictions without breaking.

SS notices—they're understanding, thankfully. But understanding doesn't fill the spaces left by departed friends, doesn't answer the question that haunts me: why am I still here in Hamilton? Why not Toronto? NYC?

I run. Cook. Meet KS and Ki at bars (they work there, awesome human being). Build routines like walls against loneliness. But you can't dam an ocean with clay. Eventually, everything leaks through.

One day, everything stops. Not dramatically, but in the way summer heat can suddenly make you aware of your own breathing. I let myself feel it all. Cry, actually, a lot. There's something Heideggerian about it—this raw being-in-the-world, this Dasein moment of confronting one's own existence without pretense. It's not just about missing people. It's about recognizing that sometimes the only way forward is through. Through the feelings, through the uncertainty, through the knowledge that you can't go home again because home—like everything else—has already changed.

The bird calls still echo. But now they sound less like absence and more like presence. My presence, here, choosing to stay, choosing to feel, choosing to be.

I run at dawn now. The Canadian mornings carry a particular chill that takes me back to San Francisco nights with J. The way memory works: a temperature, a certain slant of light, and suddenly you're transported. Not to the person exactly, but to the shape they left behind.

The ghost of J appears in strange moments. Like how I still instinctively reach for my phone at 10 PM, the time we used to talk. Or how I order coffee for two before catching myself. Freud would call these slips revelatory, tiny betrayals of the unconscious mind still processing loss. Not just of J, but of what J represented: certainty, future, home.

The market of human connection operates on scarcity and substitution. When we lose something valuable, we seek replacements - not perfect substitutes, but approximations that might fill the same shape. It's basic economics of the heart. Yet every replacement carries its own opportunity cost. Each new connection risks comparison to what was lost.

I find myself performing cost-benefit analyses of vulnerability. Opening up to N feels different - there's no sunk cost fallacy here, no emotional debt to repay. But there's also this nagging awareness that I might be responding to market forces rather than genuine desire. Am I attracted to her, or to the idea of not being alone?

The truth is messier than both Freud and Friedman would admit. Sometimes a void isn't meant to be filled. Sometimes it's meant to be witnessed, acknowledged, allowed to exist as its own kind of space. N isn't a replacement for J. She's something entirely new, operating under different rules of exchange.

Yet these Freudian slips persist - calling her by J's name in my head, catching myself planning futures I have no right to imagine. The unconscious mind, ever the poor economist, trying to maximise returns on emotional investment through familiar patterns. But N deserves better than to be a hedge against loneliness. She deserves to be seen for who she is, not for the absence she might fill.

When you got the job, your excitement burst through the screen unfiltered, unapologetic. There’s something beautiful about watching someone you care about embrace joy without reservation. We celebrated a few nights after- you in your chic leather pants that caught the restaurant lights just so, wearing a perfume that reminded me of oak and coming home. I’ve read somewhere that certain people have this gift of turning ordinary evenings into core memories. You have that gift. You take mundane moments - a dinner, a laugh over wine, a shared glance - and somehow make them feel like photographs I want to keep forever.

There's something about N I can't quite name. It sits still in that undefined space between friendship and something else - like a word caught at the tip of your tongue. We've developed our own grammar of care: photos I found randomly on Reddit, that wig N wore for Halloween, dating stories, shared silences that feel like conversations, a gentle smile across the hall. Each one a small testament to thinking of each other in the midst of separate lives. Sometimes you would come across something - a particular piece of code, an elegant proof - and your first thought is how N would see it differently.

The ancient philosophers argued about whether eudaimonia required external goods or if virtue alone was sufficient. With N, I'm learning it might be about something else entirely: the quiet accumulation of shared understanding, the slow building of trust through consistent presence. Not the dramatic peaks of romantic love, but something steadier - a continuous choosing to remain in each other's orbit.

Sometimes I wonder if this is what Epicurus meant by sustainable pleasure - not the fleeting high of desire, but the deeper satisfaction of genuine connection. The way she remembers small details about my life, how she'll reference conversations from months ago as if they just happened. These aren't the katastematic pleasures Epicurus described, but they create a similar sense of completeness, of being exactly where you're meant to be.

Yet there's an edge to this undefined space we inhabit. Like atomic swerve in Epicurean physics - that unexpected deviation that creates new possibilities - I find myself wondering if this careful equilibrium we've built might one day shift into something else. Not better or worse, just different. The thought both thrills and terrifies me.

What would Epicurus make of our modern ataraxia? Finding tranquility in looking at each other, peace in the quiet ping of a message arriving.

Similar to Kate Crawford's study of the atlas of AI, we're really mapping human connection - trying to understand how minds meet and merge across distance. The technical becomes personal; the personal becomes technical. We send each other papers about attention mechanisms while paying attention to each other's subtle shifts in mood.

The school term settled into patterns. You negotiated fewer hours with SS, not from lack of interest but necessity - school was demanding more of you. You called it "pseudobalance," though that wasn't quite right. It was more like redistribution of hunger.

The capstone became your gateway into mechanistic interpretability. At work, you found yourself among the working group, including the likes from Berkeley, RedHat, Anyscale, Neural Magic, etc., on LLM inference engine. The work was technical. But there was something grounding about it all. The mathematics of inference provided its own kind of clarity.

You found yourself caught in this current of constant learning - expanding context windows, diving deeper into transformer architectures, discussing optimization strategies over Zoom that stretched into evening. Not because you had to, but because you wanted to understand. The way a mechanic wants to understand an engine, or a doctor the human body.

It wasn't exactly balance. But it felt authentic - this immersion in technical complexity, this way of being present in the work. Like you were finally operating at the right frequency.

The days blurred together. You were becoming something - not better necessarily, just more defined. More precisely yourself.

I find myself taking more photos lately. Not the carefully composed kind, just quick captures of ordinary moments - a coffee cup catching morning light, her profile turned away in conversation, shadows stretching long across park benches. It's not about making memories, exactly. More like leaving breadcrumbs for my future self, proof that these moments existed before time swept them away.

Maybe it's about learning to see things as they are, not as I wish them to be. The way Carver's characters stumble towards truth through the debris of their own delusions. The camera doesn't lie, even when we do. Through its lens, I'm teaching myself to notice: the slight downturn of her mouth when she's thinking hard, the particular way afternoon sun hits the kitchen wall, how certain silences feel fuller than others.

There's a kind of surrender in this - accepting that everything changes, that we can't hold onto anything except these fragmentary glimpses. Yet in the trying, in the paying attention, you will notice your core tenet: real seeing requires both the willingness to look and the courage to let go of what we think we'll find.

These photos pile up in my phone like fallen leaves. Most I'll never look at again. But taking them has become its own form of prayer, a way of saying: I was here, I noticed, this mattered.

2024 unfolded like one of those long poems I keep bookmarked - chaotic in its rhythms yet somehow peaceful in its completeness. The paradox sits comfortably now: how the most tumultuous year could bring such stillness.

I filled journals not meant for anyone else, letting thoughts spill onto pages without trying to make them presentable. There's a strange intimacy in writing purely for oneself - no performance, no carefully constructed narrative, just the raw material of a mind trying to understand itself.

Looking back feels like leafing through a book where the pages aren't quite in order, but the story somehow makes more sense that way. Each month brought its own particular shade of uncertainty, yet I moved through them with a steadiness that surprised me.

If you've read this far, you've witnessed a kind of unfolding I'm still trying to understand. Thank you for that. Not for reading, exactly, but for being present as these thoughts find their shape on the page, as 2024's version of me learns to exist in full color, without apology.

The year closes like a book with dog-eared pages and coffee stains, messy but well-loved. And isn't that exactly how it should be?

Regardless, a quick recap of what 2024's Aaron did/get, an unstructured streams of thoughts:

• I splurged on this bag and to be honest it is the best purchases I made this year. There are something comfortable, yet familiarity I found wearing this bag. It made me feel so grand :smile:

• Started capstone, working on vLLM structured decoding (more to come). To be honest, this year I'm very happy that I dive first into these technical topics. Maybe, you can just learn and do things.

• Tend to your garden, I'm pretty happy with the current state of this website. It demonstrate the real me, the inner child that was always too afraid to ask, to talk, simply for the fact of maintaining peace and quiet.

• You made great friends, for life. Just make sure you tend to them, treat them the same way you want to be treated. This year marks the creation of a lot of seeding, next year are important in a sense you should navigate this labyrinth of relationship with care, and self.

• Finished around 18 books this year, definitely happy with the amount of content per book.

• Attend one-of-its-kind hackathon.

Some rituals I would like to keep:

• seeing friends (I'm moving to Toronto soon!)

• be happy. (knowing me, yet keep trying to smile)

Kindly,

your present self

perception of a partner.

Aristotle famously said that friends are our mirrors, showing us our moral qualities in ways we can’t discern on our own. They become characters in our personal mythology - the one who saved us, the one who destroyed us, the one who showed us who we really were. But the truth is more unsettling: a partner is simply another human being carrying their own narratives, their own delusions, their own capacity for both tenderness and devastation. They are a mirror in which we see ourselves most clearly, and most distorted.

They are the ones that made “rupture and repair” possible - someone to cry, disappoint, or annoy and still continue with. The relationship wouldn’t fracture at the first conflict.

A partner is someone whose flaws become “your whole life” - not in the suffocating way, but in a sense their quirks become woven into your daily life. Their snoring, their way of loading the dishwasher wrong, their tendency to repeat stories you’ve heard before - these small irritations are paradoxically part of what makes the connection real and durable.

A partner is someone who makes you “toss and turn throughout the night” - not because anything is wrong, but because their presence in your life has become significant enough to disturb your equilibrium. They’re the “pea under the mattress” that makes you unable to rest easily in old patterns. Not in an obsessive way, but their light would make your day a bit warmer.

A partner is someone you are borrowing time with each other, the duration unknown, and that uncertainty makes it precious.

With essence, a partner is someone you choose to keep experimenting with, under whatever conditions possible. When one iteration of the relationship doesn’t work, you try another. You adapt and evolve together, knowing that, as “the true shape of things” puts it, “no one, no matter how prescient, can predict all the challenges that will emerge over 20 years of loving someone.”

Consider the moment you realize someone has become your partner. Not the formal declarations or ceremonies, but that subtle shift in consciousness when their presence in your life becomes both ordinary and extraordinary. When their particular way of stirring coffee or humming off-key while washing dishes becomes essential to your understanding of the world. The partner is both witness and accomplice to your life’s narrative, though they may be writing a completely different story in their own mind. It’s this disconnect - this impossible attempt to fully know another consciousness while being trapped in our own - that makes partnership both necessary and perpetually incomplete.

what’s rly happening here?

The line between friendship and love isn’t a line at all. It’s more like water seeping into soil - you never quite know where one ends and the other begins. Since writing that essay, I’ve noticed something shift, like a photograph slowly developing in darkroom fluid. The image isn’t what I expected.

I wrote it to capture gratitude - for how she made 2024 gentler, more navigable. But others saw something else: a confession masked as appreciation. It wasn’t until they mentioned it that I recognised the undertow in my own words.

Here’s what I know: I love her in a way that defies categorisation. It’s the kind of love that would cross continents for a single afternoon together. That remembers her nut allergy with the same vigilance I remember to breathe. That wants to send her pictures of interesting rocks found on morning walks, or screenshots of ridiculous luxury watches I’ll never buy. It’s love that manifests in tomato soup when she’s sick and memes when she’s sad.

What draws me isn’t desire but, her mind. The way she dissects problems like a surgeon, precise and purposeful. The way she makes the mundane meaningful just by observing it. I find myself unconsciously adopting her frameworks, seeing the world through her lens. Like water taking the shape of its container, I’ve begun to see things in her silhouette.

By every metric I’ve constructed for an ideal partner, she fits perfectly - the person I could build a life with, share silence with, grow old beside. But maybe that’s the trap. Maybe I’m pattern-matching against the space J left a year ago, trying to fill that particular emptiness with this particular friendship.

The question isn’t whether I love her - that’s beyond doubt. The question is whether I’m confusing the safety of deep friendship with romantic love. Whether I’m mistaking the comfort of being truly known for something else. As Ava would say, “When you love someone, their beauty acquires a different kind of meaning.” But does that meaning have to be romantic?

Like those eight-foot ropes binding Montano and Hsieh - romantic love is accepting both the connection and the space between, the togetherness and the separateness, the harmony and the discord. It’s choosing to remain tethered while maintaining individual integrity. Perhaps what I’m feeling isn’t love transforming into something else, but love expanding beyond my ability to categorise it. Something that exists in the space between friendship and romance, in that undefined territory where souls recognise each other without needing to name what they are.

What I know is this: she is the first person I want to tell things to.

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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Passage by Giorgio Morandi

Chaos isn't merely an undercurrent of life; it's a pervasive force, ever-present, often simmering just beneath the surface, ready to erupt and manifest in myriad forms.

It serves not only as a backdrop in the narratives of storytellers and the musings of philosophers but also as a distinct entity with the power to challenge those brave enough to embrace its unpredictability. To move abroad, to step into the unknown, is to court chaos – to acknowledge and accept the inevitability of change and the sharp tang of constant motion.

So far, I've lived alone (or far away from family) for a third of my life, having made the leap to Canada at 16. This move, though seemingly late compared to high school peers, was a turning point. It wasn't just a change of scenery; rather, it formed a new way of seeing and being in the world for me. To articulate about the essence of moving to a new continent, let alone partake in the Western educational system, still to this day, is a task fraught with complexity that I yet to comprehend.

In the years before my departure, I was enrolled at Hanoi-Amsterdam, some can considered the "crème de la crème" school within the public school system in Vietnam. Middle school was pretty much an endless march of memorisation and night classes, all leading up to the high school entrance exams. Within this rigorous routine, there was no room for complaints or questions. I wasn’t content, yet I found a way to push through, not realising the toll it was taking on my mental and physical health. Therapy, attempted much later, didn't reveal anything new. Perhaps, my continued sessions are a search for external validation that I've longed for. My sense of self was intertwined with being accepted into this institution.

Three weeks before the entrance exam, or something like that. Saturday afternoon.

The sun blazed down with a ferocity that seemed almost personal, its rays relentless against the backdrop of an afternoon sky devoid of clouds. Inside, within the four walls of the room where I had spent my years growing from a child into something resembling an adult, I sat hunched over my literature review. The task was simple in theory: memorize one of three essential poems. Yet, as the sunlight fought its way through the window, casting a harsh light on the pages before me, the words seemed to dance and dodge my grasp, refusing to be tamed.

My focus was a blade, dulling with each failed attempt to carve the verses into my memory. The stillness of the room, a stark contrast to the turmoil within me, was punctuated only by the occasional creak of the house settling, as if it too strained under the weight of the heat. The air was thick, the kind of heat that makes the mind sluggish, the body weary. It was as if the entire world outside had paused, holding its breath, while I waged my silent battle within these familiar walls.

Frustration mounted within me, a tide that threatened to breach its banks. I pressed on, the words of the poem blurring before my eyes, each line a testament to my faltering resolve. My mom, ever attuned to my struggles, sensed my distress. Her suggestion to move on was gentle, her words soft, "It's okay, darling, let's skip this one." But to me, they sounded like a verdict, a confirmation of my fears.

At 15, her words did not offer the comfort she intended. Instead, they unleashed the floodgates, and tears streamed down my face, a silent scream of defiance and despair.

  Mom, I can't fail this exam.

I managed through sobs, the words thick in my throat. The room, with its memories and familiar comforts, felt suddenly alien, a witness to my vulnerability. In that moment, the outside heat, the oppressive stillness, and the chaos of my inner turmoil melded into a single, inescapable reality.

Even after securing my place at Hanoi-Amsterdam, my disdain for it grew. The competitive and toxic atmosphere was a far cry from what I expected. It was a battleground for status, with little regard for collaboration or personal growth. My mom, herself an educator, saw the system's failure to nurture curiosity or critical thinking. So, when the chance to study abroad presented itself, I seized it, leaving Vietnam behind.

This decision marked the start of a tumultuous journey within.

Entropy was seemingly first introduced to me in the form of the Canadian education system. The transition from the rigid, rote-learning environment to the more open, discussion-based system in Canada was jarring. The shift from a public school to a private boarding school was equally disorienting. The culture shock was palpable, and the adjustment period was fraught with challenges. I was a stranger in a strange land, a fish out of water, and the chaos of my new reality was overwhelming. I was completely baffled, destroyed, was up to no good (if you knew me you knew what I'm talking about!). But one thing that I have learnt from all the trauma accumulated throughout my experience at Amsterdam, was that, "Mama ain't raised no quitter." Thus, it was not-quite-okay-but-found-a-functional-way-to-survive mental model to persist throughout high school. Then the rest was history.

Seemingly, this untamed curious inner child, still clung to my being, propels me forward. It is that inner chaos that encourage me to embark on this journey of understanding.

The world is a scary place, but I’m learning to cope through it. The Übermensch crossed over the bridge and guided me through the trenches of life.

I'm not sure where I want to go from here.

Writing it down felt like opening a door I had long left shut. Each word was a step deeper into memory I have neatly folded away, not realising how much they still pulsed with life beneath the surface. Each of them felt like a sword, that carved deep into the heart, has a way of prying open the floodgates of emotions long buried.

It's one thing to carry your past quietly within you, another entirely to lay it out for the world—and yourself—to see. Suddenly, the chaos I thought I had managed whispered louder, demanding attention.

Equanimity, that state of calm balance, feels elusive, almost mythical, when you've danced with chaos so intimately. It's as if I've befriended the storm, finding a strange comfort in its unpredictability, its relentless energy. This chaos, it doesn't just disturb; it defines, shaping the contours of who I am, how I see the world. There's a fear in tranquillity, a suspicion of its silence. What does it mean to be at peace when you've grown accustomed to the noise?

Yet, this journey—my journey—isn't about conquering the chaos but learning to live with it, to see its patterns and understand its rhythms. Maybe equanimity isn't about taming the monster but recognizing it as a part of the self, a reflection of the complexities and contradictions that make us human. The pursuit of balance isn't a battle but a negotiation, a conversation with the parts of ourselves we fear and love in equal measure.

Embarking on this exploration of different "entropic phenomena," as I've come to call it, isn't running away. It's a search for understanding, a way to navigate the tumult with eyes wide open. There's beauty in the chaos, lessons in the turbulence. And perhaps, in acknowledging this, I move closer to the equanimity I seek—not as a destination, but as a way of being, fluid and ever-evolving, amidst the storms and stillness alike.

Last but not least, I would leave you, future Aaron, with a few questions that past-Aaron has been longed to find an answer. Let us, the duality of self, partake in a Socratic dialogue, hopefully, through the process, we can find some normalcy within ourself:

Q: who are you trying to become?

A: Perhaps it is less about becoming but more about unravelling the complexities from within. There is a certain naive desire, a childlike curiosity, that propels me towards the unknown, the seas of uncertainty. In embracing this naive desire, I become a vessel of my own making, navigating the complex seas of existence. As it may be, at the moment, I'm trying to protect that child and shield him from the turbulence and chaos we call life.

Q: why can't you move back home?

A: Consider the river and the dam. The river, a living artery, courses from its source with a purpose as clear as its waters. It meanders, shaped by the land it traverses, until it reaches the dam. Here, it lies in a deep réservoir, a body of water in waiting, destined to flow through turbines and continue its journey downstream. This cycle is perpetual: the sun draws the water skyward, and it returns as rain, nourishing the earth on its way back to the river. But the droplets that return are transformed, no longer the same entities that once rested in the dam’s embrace.

The act of leaving one’s home for foreign shores is akin to such journey - a voyage of transformation, of encountering new landscapes, of merging with unfamiliar currents. When one leaves home, they embark on a trajectory vastly different from those who stay. The familiar becomes distant, and upon return, the once-known world feels alienated. You stand apart, changed in the eyes of those who remember you once were. "Home" remains a static concept, a memory preserved in amber, while you, like the river, have been irrevocably altered by your experiences. In other words, this is often known as the theme of displacement

To return home is to face a poignant paradox: the physical space may be unchanged, the same faces may greet you, the house of your childhood may still nestle in its familiar spot, but your perception of it all has shifted. Gone the person you once was; now you have become the confluence of experiences that mold the "now" you, just as the returning water is forever changed by its journey.

Yet, despite these changes, the essence remains. The being of 'aqua', remains unchanged, as the inner child within us persists. It is this unchanging essence that bridges the gap between the person we have become and the place we once called home. The question, then, is not why you cannot move back home, but rather, how can one reconcile the transformed self with a place that is both intimately familiar and strangely foreign, a place etched in memory, unchanged by time yet estranged by the journey’s passage.

Q: what do you want to achieve?

A: I want to achieve a sense of peace, a balance between the chaos and the stillness. Navigating the tumult with grace, and learn to let people in. I want to look back, on what we have went through: the stillness, the moments of joy and sorrow, and know that I have lived fully, embracing the complexities and contradictions, that make me human. I want to settle down, finding a place that you truly found happiness, and found sparing partners that will help you enjoy the journey a lil bit more.

Q: what is next?

Changes are hard, pushes us from the comfort of our well-defined boundaries, daring us to step beyond the familiar. It whispers of growth, of the necessity to stretch our skins beyond the contours of our current selves. This leap, from one domain to another, is fraught with challenge, yet it pulses with the thrill of exploration. Yet, in this era, the drive for transformation often crashes against the shores of economic reality. Monetary values, trickles in sparingly, hardly enough to spark the fires of self-renewal.

Chaos, in its disdain for the stagnant, scoffs at the notion of safety. Safety, a gilded cage, stifles growth, ensuring that within its confines, we remain less than what we might become..

Life, then, poses its eternal riddles: Why does fear of the unknown paralyze us so? How do we stand firm in the belief that we are not solitary wanderers in this vast expanse? The warmth of unseen affections often goes unnoticed, yet in the heart’s quiet moments, we understand that our absence would echo in spaces we have touched.

The world, with its myriad terrors and wonders, unfolds before us, a realm where the overman's gaze might fall upon us. Yet, this overman, this ideal, is but a mask, a collective facade beneath which we all seek refuge.

An unexpected call from a high school friend, a rarity, blooms like a flower in the desert. It’s a testament to the enduring nature of connections, a comforting reminder that amidst the vastness, there are anchors, points of light in the familiarity of shared pasts.

But the immensity of it all can be overwhelming. Life teems with endless possibilities, a ceaseless buzzing that fills the mind with anxiety. The world, too large, our time, too fleeting, and the soul, too eager, finds itself adrift in a sea of potential paths.

In navigating the maze of human expectations, I’ve learned the art of detachment. People, with their inherent unpredictability, often disappoint. By tempering expectations, we shield ourselves from the sting of disillusionment. Camus mused on alienation, a reflection on the distance between the self and the other, a chasm often widened by unmet expectations.

What lies ahead is a question that perpetually dances on the edges of my thoughts, a melody whose tune is both haunting and invigorating. Perhaps the answer to this enigma doesn't reside in a single destination or outcome but rather in the delicate equilibrium between the facets of my being. On one hand, there's the driven Aaron, fueled by curiosity and a relentless pursuit of excellence. This Aaron is a force, a whirlwind of ambition and determination, always pushing forward, always reaching for the next peak to conquer.

On the other hand, there exists another Aaron, one who carries the weight of past hurts and seeks not just to advance but to heal. This Aaron understands that growth isn't solely about personal achievements but also about nurturing and repairing the web of relationships that envelop him. This version of myself is attuned to the quiet, often overlooked work of mending bridges and soothing wounds, both his own and those of the people around him.

The path forward, then, might not be a straight line but a winding road that requires navigating the complexities of these dual identities. It's about recognizing that the quest for achievement and the journey toward healing are not mutually exclusive but are, in fact, complementary forces. By embracing both the drive to excel and the need to heal, I can forge a way forward that honors the entirety of my experiences and aspirations.

In this balance, I might find not just the next step but a deeper understanding of what it means to truly live. It's about making peace with the multifaceted nature of my desires and recognizing that every facet, whether driven by ambition or the need for connection, plays a crucial role in defining who I am and who I aspire to be. The road ahead is one of integration, where the driven and the broken parts of me walk hand in hand, each lending strength to the other as I continue to explore the vast landscape of possibilities that life offers.

With love,

Aaron P.