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youtube i love you, but you're bringing me down

in a bastardized interpretation of fitness landscapes, i've recently been thinking about how every decision i make is a step in some direction in an infinite mountain range. in this space, my altitude isn't environmental fitness. it's something more like "personal value" or "amount self-actualized" where you can imagine standing at the peak of a hill in this endless mountain range as being highly satisfied with myself, highly engaged in my life.

the other day i had some fun with poetic justice's less serious cousin

an evil man from new york

once stole a shipment of chalk

he was eventually busted

one could say done and dusted

when the cops caught him on the sidewalk

or

a fraudulent author from wales

faked sales with no paper trail

she was eventually booked

when the law had a look

Say I have a CSV with two columns:

country, users
China, 113
Nicaragua, 29
Jordan, 89

and I want to aggregate these by continent. What's an easy way to do that?

Well I found this country-by-continent dataset by samayo:

[
  {
    "Country": "Afghanistan",
    "Continent": "Asia"
  },
  {
    "Country": "Albania",
    "Continent": "Europe"
  }

So I have everything I need except for a workflow. Let's evaluate some options.

1. ChatGPT
2. nushell
• nushell with polars
3. DuckDB
4. Observable
5. TypeScript with Bun

ChatGPT

I attached the two files and submitted the following prompt to ChatGPT 4o:

yu-gi-oh was so smart. transformers had already proven you could forcibly extract money from parents by pretending your advertisements for children's toys comprised a television show, but hasbro still had to pay for injection moulding. what if they just printed the money instead?

in the yu-gi-oh tv show¹, the main thing that all the characters do is play the card game yu-gi-oh². all disagreements are resolved via dueling³, and even though this is shown to favour the rich, at the end of most episodes the child protagonists justly win and you feel an urge to go to the toy store and purchase yu-gi-oh cards.

a classic thing that happens is someone says "i think the reason is blah" and then another person says "i think it's something else" and then a third person says "it's a bit of both" or "it's somewhere in between" or something like that.

it's such a reliable thing to be able to say and it takes so little effort, yet you can sound quite wise saying it. oh shit! it's both things?

i realised recently that there are at least two ways in which we ask the question "is x a y?"

it was when i asked "is Terminator a monster?" which is the sort of question i like to ask, to get into all the necessary-but-not-sufficients of dumb shit conceptual analysis. does a monster need to be biological, or more fundamentally, not understood? are all monsters morally permissible to kill?

there is a tweet that responded to Chess Is Not A Game by Deborah P. Vossen that i can't find. it said something to extent of "What the author fails to consider is that chess is, in fact, a game." because the other way we ask these sorts of questions is the Family Feud way. if you surveyed one hundred people with "Name a monster" - zero of them would say Terminator. they would say Dracula or Zombie or Frankenstein. and so in that sense, Terminator is not a monster. it is important to be considerate of your friends and realise this, when asking these sorts of questions.

Suppose there were aliens who were sort of sentient plants, okay? And they're coming to visit Earth. Earth was in their tour guide- the tour catalog, because Earth, they know, had rainforests and a huge uh- plant biodiversity. And so they just want to see what's going on here. And these are aliens that live off of sunlight and on their ship they just have lamps that they lay in, and that that's where they get their energy.

What is a crystalisation of the mind?

The gaseous, evanescent process that is thinking, is entirely internal. I don't have to worry about the incoherence of my thoughts if I don't have to communicate them with anyone. But the moment I write, I create the first molecular bond: a dynamic of relations. Me and you.