Giving Thanks

Even gratitude is weird these days

Babel’s library, according to Dürer, according to Nanobanana.

Here are a couple of minor events that gave me pause. The perfect ill-formed thoughts for a Substack post.

1. I was reading some ECOS code (a conic optimization solver written in C), not understanding something. I pasted it into ChatGPT and asked it to explain. It explains everything in one minute, from the mathematical formulation down to low-level pointers. I used to go back to K&R, think, and struggle. Now ChatGPT thinks for me, and I am sincerely afraid that I will become mentally lazy. I used to remember the flags to gcc. Sure, I was always a bad C coder, but at least I tried.

   I remember hunting for information in worn books, spending days in physical libraries. And I remember loving libraries more than any other place because of the hunt—very much like Borges. That was a long time ago. Future me will be deprived of those adventures.

2. I reacted a silly post about Sicily with some equally silly factoids, almost talking to myself (my family is from there). I checked back the next day: 4,000+ likes? How come? It makes no sense. And why do ~50,000 people “follow” me—whatever “following” even means? These weak-but-long-range interactions are not humanly normal.

   I used to spend my summers in Sicily, in a village of ten families, walking the hills with chestnut gatherers who had done this for generations, speaking only a strict Sicilian dialect. Those were the happiest, most magical summers of my life. Future me will be deprived of those adventures.

This feels like having been a time traveler.

Both of my grandmothers died in 1988. They were born in 1900 and remembered an earlier time without cars or world wars—a time of sons dying at age five of pneumonia, when the boundaries of their world ended twenty miles south of their hometown. They died close to ninety, in an era when TCP/IP already existed, with titanium hips in their bodies, those same bodies flown to different continents, hearing foreign languages they did not understand. And I thought: surely I will never witness the same pace of technological evolution. As usual, I was wrong.

Thinking about all of this—or rather, remembering things from the distant past—is truly, deeply disorienting.

I guess this will have to do as a way of giving thanks.