Note: This week I’ve been quite busy as I make my way through Blue Dot’s technical AI safety course. I’m working on a post about personal-values alignment tech which should be ready next week. In the meantime, here’s an old journal entry:
Mesmerizingly awake. Seattle is wonderful this morning. Everything’s ok, I say! Yes, take these breaks. The steam billows from a metal tube on the neighbor’s roof, catching the slanting sunlight. And now it stopped. White shoes pierce through the branches from the sidewalk below, the sky an indecisive split — blue overhead, to darkening clouds, then a grey moody strip over the sound. Birds flap hard to soar across the skyline, towards some next tree or meal. The ships honk. Tight pinecones poke up through the starbursts of needles on the sunlit branches below me. Above me, the same branches are dappled, partially in shadow, a smooth transition upward from crackly bark to patchy moss to dinosaurian mohawks of needles. Ahead, a wide square turret of brick is topped with slick grey squishy flooring, evaporating. A mossy chimney stands triumphantly above. Behind, a chaos of thin winter branches, white-grey, clogging the view and obscuring green bushes and brown roofs beyond. The downtown rises above, a light metallic blue, alien ships sitting at port, framed by a ring of the closer trees and branches. Two construction cranes sit idle in the middle. To the right, the highway flows, its steady stream lulled by the branches. The whoosh blends with aircraft noises, forming a constant backdrop to the frequent punctuations of diverse bird calls — twitters, screeches, beeps. The neighborhood feels quiet, even with a man constructing an improvement on the adjacent home. Downtown looks dead still. Even the rushing highway has a quietness to it. All seems still at 9:30AM, sitting in my perch over Seattle.
