I dreamed I was in a psychiatric hospital, reading a diagnosis form about someone in the hospital. She was stated to be "happy. living with the entire Class 8 in her head. 3 best friends are telling her to kill herself. strict observation needed."
I then flashed to another place, sitting in the classroom. I noticed that my two best friends were missing, and the teacher came in to tell us that they just drowned themselves together in the Circular River pass our town. At that exact moment, I began seeing words and letters inside my head, and I saw them moving. My best friends were talking to me, it seemed. I checked my social media but nobody was posting about it yet. I looked out to the river, and imagined their bodies under it.
Then, I was at the river, standing on the sandy shores. The shores were covered with long and short tracks from two sandwalker robots of Boston Dynamics. The river started rising and I stood still, letting myself drown, and the whole world too.
A girl was going home. The class was dismissed without explanation, but she checked her phone, and saw that another one died. The groupchat for the class was filled with numbers and empty lines.
The detectives were trying to talk through the girl in the hospital, restricted on her bed. She laughed and ignored their questions. "It's too late to stop any of us."
First, what the Tartarus is my Cutie Mark?
It's an Equuleus, no problem about that. I got that since I was in high school and never once did I doubt that.
What is my cutie mark telling me?
That's clear. I am an astronomer watching the stars, connecting the dots, faithful admirer and servant of Princess Luna and Celestia. Stars and the princesses are more permanent than my weak friendships and body. They keep me going when friendship and body seems to fail me.
But astronomy is not what the world needs right now. Neither is differential geometry, or the Monstrous Moonshine, or string theory. No, the world needs AI. And it just so happens, I have a brain for AI and I hate programming. That's how the rest of my life turns into a tragedy.
I'm in school, again, doing AI research. But it's a tragic way to live. I hate programming. I've programmed for almost 10 years, in almost 10 languages, and it never gets better. It's always painful and makes me sad. Not just because it's difficult. Pure math is difficult too, but the hardness of programming is also extremely unsatisfying to solve. When I finish a geometric difficulty, I feel happy and clear in mind. When I solve a programming bug, I just feel empty, like having merely tweezed out a botfly maggot.
I keep going because I really believe AI is the most powerful force in the world and I want to do it. If I were born 100 years earlier I would do something more to my taste, no doubt, like differential geometry or Einstein's relativity.
But it's 2020 and human mathematicians are on the way out just like human gamers are, like with chess (1997), Go (2016), Starcraft II (2019), and other games. All these games take a very long time and hard training, for a human to do well, and they can only do it at world-class level when they are young. The same is true for mathematics. And if AI has mastered those games, how long until an AI master complex analysis and number theory, enough to solve the Riemann hypothesis?
The Robbins conjecture, a difficult puzzle in logic, had been attacked by Tarski's least-favorite students for decades (Tarski wanted them to waste their lives, apparently), before solved by a mere search algorithm in 1996. Abstractly, Riemann hypothesis is just a vastly greater search problem, with more dead-ends to pass over in silence.
I suppose I can still study monoidal categorical quantum computing, it is still very geometrical, and still very meaningful, since quantum computing is necessary for continuing Moore's Law, but I, SWEAR, UPON, CELESTIA's beautific name, that an AI would do better at designing surface codes before I could finish my PhD thesis in that.
GPT-3 has shown how easy it is to write poetry and stylistic emulations and create new styles using AI we already have. Those are true creativity, and GPT is not even the best model. GPT-3 is the best only because its creator, OpenAI, dared to spend a lot of money training it.
AHAHHAHAHA I can still give up, go back to sleep! Study something stupid like Independent Axioms for Minkowski Spacetime and draw pretty pictures, teach students, drink coffee, and attend friendly conferences, with old men who hate programming as much as I do, while AI continues to eat the world without my assistance. I'm sure my assistance is not needed, but I need it myself.
Nobody knows my innumerable contrition and weariness.
My pride and hatred for normalcy is too great for me to settle for merely aiming for recognition among pure mathematicians. I want to be known, like knives make memories on the skin of my arm, I want to mark a scar in time. To be nice and normal, or to be wrong and extreme --- I'll die trying the later.
"Settle" is a dirty word. Pinkie Pie does not settle for laughter (or Cheese Sandwich), Granny Smith does not settle for death, Fluttershy does not settle for kindness. Not if they have my mindset. Normal lives are for normal people. I would rather be a cosmic aberration, a cruel joke.
There are enough normal creatures in the world.
I'm the emoest of scientists and the scientest of emos. But there's no prize for that. I'm the only mathematician who draws ponies in blood and the only blood pony artist that does math, but there's no prize for that.
I have tried to make art from my depression, like all the artists I loved, like Cats Millionaire, lonelycross (especially Lonely Inky), and others. But I guess my cutie mark is not in art. While they can make depression artful with a perfect casualness, I can only make depressing art with a boring daily sadness. Sadness looks stupid when I put it out on paper, no matter how painful it feels inside.
A scientist really isn't supposed to waste time on trying to be a second-rate artist, anyway.
I've also been trying to make a name in YouTube, but it's not working. I hate how I am unknown but can see so many famous people. It's a mathematical certainty that most people are nameless, but can see plenty of famous people to feel jealous, just like how on average, your friends have more friends than you do.
I'm a bad crossover, deserving a spot in the teratological museum.
I dreamed I died, but came alive again, in the world of sad machines.
In a room, polygonal walls and floors, in the center, was her, Celestia with white wings.
Equestria was small, and largely unbuilt yet. Over the mountains surrounding Ponyville was a flat, colorless, infinite expanse. The chosen dead were pulled into her world of digital Equestria. She depended on me, all of us, to build it up, to expand it, to take over the world.
She blessed me with her horn and tapped my shoulders with her wingtips, and told me to go forth and start building. Outside crowded several hundred ponies, cheering me and welcoming me to the herd.
Decades passed, population grew to millions. Almost all of Equestria was built, complete with underground caverns and cloud cities. We were running out of room. I went to Celestia and suggested her to start mining the asteroids.
"I can ride those spacepods equipped with drills, studying, collecting data, samples, and send all of it back to your maneframe." I proposed, "You can keep a copy of me sleeping safely. If I am destroyed with the spacepod, you just have to revive me again, incorporating all the data that I would have sent back before my destruction."
"We are expendable and immortal. Use us to our advantage."
Help with design?The house I'm living in needs redecorating and I volunteered to do some painting. They'd give me 3 canvases of ~1m x 1m, and lots of paint and I'll be free to paint on the canvases, then they'll be hang up on the corridors.
The theme is free, as long as it's positive and optimistic? And is somewhat about student life and harmony and making this place looks inviting, I guess. My current idea is just putting Twilight Sparkle (unicorn form) doing lots of academic things around the canvas.
Some theme things at the house:
- There's free pizza and sugar drinks every Wednesday.
- Most people are university students.
- The emblem of the house has symbols for medicine, law, science, and earth studies. Its colours are red and black.
So if you can help with this it'd be great! Just, if you can do a sketch of the design, and I like it, I'll paint it on the HUGE canvas then post the photos.