24 April 2024

This webpage is an artifact of another me.

This other me wanted an interactive website that would use machine learning to categorize his book highlights–automatically pulled from a Kindle or the iBooks app–because it would help with reading.

This other me then wrote a beautiful integration with Google Appscript to receive some of these quotes in his inbox every day–because that would help with recall.

This old me kept going at it, and integrated semantic search in this webapp, so that he could search for his highlights by topic. And I didn’t stop there! I even made a guide that would easily help other people fall in the sam trap that I fell in.

Everything read had a purpose. It was carefully archived on this website. It was categorized by an algorithm, displayed by another algorithm, and was retrieved by a third algorithm. What a wonderful use of modern technology!

If Ted saw this, he would send me some mail.

This is a gimmick. I’m keeping it alive for this very reason. It’s a cool gimmick, but it’s a living record of the fact that I’m not at all immune to the problem of starting to build something without first asking if it’s useful, or even good.

This webpage is awful. An act of hybris and narcissism. A blind cry for help in an ocean of uncertainty. A delusional try to mechanize art.

I’m against systemization of literature, and yet I spent weeks building and tweaking this webpage. The point of reading these books wasn’t to achieve some meaning or to extract knowledge from them.

The point of reading these books was to read them. The experience was the ultimate goal¹. Analysis of these books must be done by humans. Not by some model made in a lab across the world that I git pulled in my directory.

You might think that this is an overreaction, but this code genuinely disgusts me. It was a mistake to write it out. But here we are.

This webapge is a living tomb of a perverse idea that once engulfed me to the point that I sacrificed time to build it. I’m keeping it alive with the same horror that Victor felt when the creature opened its eyes.