Hypothesis Ichi
Getting the Job
…in hopes to better structure the second hypothesis—what it means to live as a person.
Superlinear Growth of (Personal) Projects
Minecraft. It’s everywhere. Many play it; many watch it. A video gets released online showing some guy developed a whole Minecraft clone in some programming language inspiring many of the audience. On the next day, thousands of Trello board are instantly instantiated somewhere in the internet to organize, plan out, brainstorm, or structure this latest hit project idea. Backlog/backburner; frontburner; WIP/TODO; done; red priority label; pink enhancement🌟 label. Millions of pristine-white bevelled rectangular task cards gets slotted into those Kanban columns with each having meticulously crafted descriptions and expected date of completion. Some of them might even have step-by-step checklists for tasks that are expected to be complex. And the first thing before any code gets touched are linker errors between the source code and GLM or something and spend the entire next week fixing it. Forget about the expected date of completion!
Obviously prior experiences help a lot on the time estimated to complete a project, or even the estimated cost. However, what if there’s a lack of the prior? Actually, one can just substitute the lack of their personal prior with a generative prior like AT-LLMs and call it done. Domain-expert at the fingertip.
The answer was thought to be a bit more longer. However, in hindsight, writing things out in an organized manner does help one find answers that feels comically intuitive from an outsider yet hidden, and tangled, from within.
Ideation
Minecraft. It’s a three-dimensional sandbox game. It is able to mysteriously generate realistic terrain without satellite information or any information based in reality—strictly speaking. How does it work? Would many people be interested? Interested enough to give some monetary value in return? Maybe some people, but obviously not many people. Why? Because it doesn’t serve many people. A project that serves many people is a project that connects with many people. For a project that connects many people, a project must intrinsically be more fundamental to the point where the fundamental object is innately shared—resonates—with many people. Generalize to a more shared experience yet specialize on one specific aspect of the shared experience1.
1 It goes without saying that the generalization and specialization is subjective and the question about Minecraft can definitely be already generalized, and specialized, enough for one’s purpose. Rather, it is an emphasis to redirect the meta question on the shared experience and how one should generalize/specialize based on that.
2 Too lazy to change this (probably wrong also) but it could be anything the majority would like to see changed. Even if it’s some wildest thought that one can only ever dream of. Just as long it’s a shared thought—experience—with many people.
Now, the ultimate project idea would answer the most general aspect of the shared experience. This would include many elephants in the room. However, the path to the ultimate project that serve people is still highly convolved and contorted against the current reality because it suggests to dismantle the circulation of money2. In other words, business entities must exist to serve people for some revenue which would be used to pay people—employers or employees—that need the job because of specialization. At least nowadays it is possible to even envision specializations automated away to let people truly become a specialist in their own respective ways.
If the ultimate project idea can’t realistically be worked on, what can? Staying on the internet looking at primary sources, a shadow of the world, reduced down to text only unveils a problem only in terms of text that would only be solved in terms of text. Going out and touching grass certainly works, but that only unveils a problem only in terms of going out and touching grass that would only be solved in terms of going out and touching grass. A frog at the bottom of the well can only see a small portion of the sky. Hence, the frog can only see problem within the same portion of the sky and solve with only the same portion of the sky (with the well of course.) In other words, an age old problem.
It seems like everything sort of just reduces down to one should be the witness (of the world) instead of following primary sources or be the bird instead of the frog, or countless similiar analogies and discussion in different flavors.
With the prevalence of AT-LLMs (autoregressive-transformer-based LLMs) circulating in the cyberspace (i.e., internet,) text-based problems and solutions could soon be irrelevant, since AT-LLMs would automate all the away. While images, videos, or even Google Map street views would certainly help, the screen quickly becomes a glaring limitation. If a project is to be general, yet specific, towards the shared experience of many people in a new and unseen way, one might as well immerse themself with the world.
Basically touch grass a thousand mile away and let the inspiration room be the world.