What I'm thinking about

This page serves as a snapshot of ideas currently orbiting my mental space. Some ideas will develop into essays and others will remain just that, snapshots. Check out the now movement, the inspiration for this page.

Compilers are cool part 2?

Recently I have been learning a lot about MLIR (Multi-Level Intermediate Representation), an open source compiler framework. For the uninitiated, you can check out this post for a quick run down of what a compiler is. Anyway, the more I learn the more I realize we don’t appreciate compiler engineers enough and it’s not just them; there are a lot of unsung heroes in every field that don’t get enough appreciation partly because of our ignorance, and partly, our growing indifference to anything sufficiently complicated and beautiful.

If you had asked me last year: Do you think you can run a 2 hour marathon? I probably would have thought it possible, given a couple months (at the time I also wasn’t aware this was the holy grail for marathon runners). Today, I am sure even if I had a decade I wouldn’t be able to pull it off, and the difference: I have picked up running as a hobby; I don’t think I ever ran more than 10kms last year. Given my new found appreciation, I salute Sabastian Sawe, Eliud Kipchoge and Yomif Kejelcha, they have pushed the boundaries of what’s possible.

Will AI ever become conscious?

It turns out consciousness is a very hard problem to solve; it’s hard to reverse engineer something we don’t understand. I just started reading an essay titled: “The Mythology of Conscious AI” and it’s interesting to say the least. I would like to reflect on it more after digesting it.

Crime and Punishment (currently reading)

This book is long and this is not my first attempt either… But I would highly recommend it to anyone trying to understand the human condition. I am almost done reading and there is a lot to think about; the level of analysis on the human psyche in this book is so deep, it’s shocking and inspiring that it’s possible to write at this level. Dostoevsky is in a class of his own.

I have added The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot to my reading list and hopefully I won’t struggle as much as I have with Crime and Punishment. But I imagine they are also dense with ideas that will take a while to digest.

Zimbabwean Politics

There is a lot happening in this space and much can be said but the most painful thing to witness, for me, is the subversion of our cultural values into something undignified and unholy. When we were kids we were told education was the key to success; the reality today can be surmised as such: How good are you at bootlicking? Even the church, the vanguard of good morals and everything holy, is going to the highest bidder. Thirty pieces of silver… It seems everyone has a price, some things should, however, be priceless.

A parting quote: “Honoured sir, poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is not a virtue, and that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary--never--no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary as I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment