I analyze/lament my native distribution
James Bowden
I haven’t been able to write much lately, but maybe
I just needed concreteness. So begin again: your lips
braced against the cold. There are flowers on the floor!
The office ceiling isn’t closed and smacks of Costco.
There are pipes marked storm drain all over the place. I
suppose you would want a lot of them, if ever it were to
storm. I’m trying to read papers, but my eyelids are heavy
and I think I did get enough sleep. I could fill in my finances
spreadsheet, there’s a couple in front of me tuning their
voices together in passing and hers is glassy in a way that
makes me shiver now, trying to describe it for you. Now
they’ve parted and gone. I’m wide awake writing, though
I know I should be doing something productive. I keep on
using the machine learning I learn to frame my own mess
of a life. For example, lately reading about balancing
the natural, global, realistic distribution over data that a
model learns with optimizing an objective. How to
reconcile optimal with plausible, reasonable? When left to
my own devices I largely write, marinate in thoughts, sip
sadness, write some more, and read books. Walk around.
Inhale flowers, as it were. Now it looks like I’m involved,
though, and must be productive. How can I combine this
with that? Should I? Is everything a question of constructing
something close to natural that can also be useful?
For those of us who are lucky enough to even think
of being natural, I mean. For whom natural and useful
have not been made forcefully inseparable.
Eve keeps telling me she doesn’t like when I bring math analogies into my poetry and I see it. I’m butchering the execution. Probably because what I want to convey is a bit too involved to stick in a poem. Oh well. It pleases me in the moment. The other question that begs (not made explicit in the poem): should I be shifting what is natural toward what is optimal, instead of the other way around? And then that is the source of another one of the poems around here, something about pray there be poetry in my CS PhD. And some blog posts on my substack recently. You really should check it out.