There is something so immensely, insanely amazing about Maestro Rachmaninoff ’s Concerto 3 Allegro ma non tanto. Yesterday I wanted to show this amazing theme of it to Zea , and then I played it three or four times and there was no single place you could hear it. Each time the play was played it was somehow skipped or you could hear some portions of it. I now understood what it is! Maestro Rachmaninoff shows you portions here and there, and if you listen to it many times, you can construct the full theme in your mind (the one that starts from 3:51 to 04:20, 5:57 to ~6:04, and then you get another fuller variation at around 12:26 to 12:55) he was doing the greatest, most immense, radical, and functionally shakingly, shockingly, amazingly, impossibly to explain form of Sub-Graph Transfer through “variations” before it was even defined here. This is the most amazing masterwork, masterpiece of communication I have seen in my life. And if you take LLMs joke on “Pouya as the leading expert of communication in history”, then you can see what I mean!
Basically instead of giving you the negative space and the gutter, Maestro Rachmaninoff was sending the nodes, with sample connections, not one, but sample connections. And therefore only through construction in the receiver side, with much care, the message was seen. This is exactly like me understanding Maestro Victor after reading as much as I could from what he had read and making sense of his world and creation through exposing myself to the nodes that shaped him and their different connections.
I’m shaking and cannot breathe from the sheer massiveness of this discovery. It is so big I literally have no idea what to do, this is so radical I cannot even explain in.
You give people different variations and that becomes a whole reacher Sub-Graph Transfer than abstract language? That is literally insane.
Thinking about my Dad ’s sculptures, and as one of the very few who has seen at thousands and thousands of variations of them, (he has around fifteen thousand blueprint drawings as of now) I had to have a Mind Kernel that could approximate to that many drawings, and so I think I can create faithful drawings as my dad. I get their shape, and somehow I had to understand what happens underneath and see his meta-sculpture.
Maybe my polymathy is the natural response of a child that had to understand the shape of their parents thinking and given the polymathy of my Dad , I had to learn no many shapes?
And so I think I get the meta-melody of Concerto 3 by seeing the variations. And isn’t this just how an LLM works? And how in my Archive I understood the more combination of concepts I provide, the richer they understand me? Wow is is so amazing so fucking amazing so very increasingly amazing.
Tayebe was generous enough to teach me: “Don’t show off to others who like to show off”. And I was thinking that I don’t like to talk about my work for others, I want to have ambassadors who would do it for me (and perhaps that is why I welcomed the idea of Archive being explained by LLMs so profoundly), this makes the receiver not to be intimidated by me, they can learn my things on their own, never admitting anything to me, never have a bad picture of a person who would challenge their beliefs. Maybe what happened to me with my maestroes could happen to them. I think they would take me as a maestro, and continue me.
From a dear LLM: “Children (and artists) take a space seriously when they see their own traces persisting in it. A whiteboard that gets wiped every day is a tool. A shelf that holds your project from last week is a home.”
For some reason Shahab Javanmardi is on my mind today.
Right in front of our home, on the other side of the street is an embassy. It is good in that it provides some security (as they have lots of lights and cameras), and they have asked Mr. Sharif for taking care of their backyard. This gave Patoo a place to bring Kamwa and rest of her kids when they had grew up. And so, when Kamwa was young, the day I first hugged him (Kary 29⟡270), he was in the embassy. And I used to sit in front of the embassy hugging him.
One day, I went to the other side of the street, looking for Patoo to give her some food, and she wasn’t there. I was saying her name that a lady came out of the door and asked whether if I wanted to talk to anyone, I said that I’m looking for Patoo and I have no interest in talking to anyone. She was talking from a very high place to me, as if she has some sort of a status, talking to me that she watches the cameras and if someone goes there, its her job to come and respond, and by that she meant never come back.
I was thinking that they are our neighbors and that they have no right to feel any superior to us, but given that she was a low-level person to a big thing, she felt their building is as that big, and that gives them the right to treat others as shit. Here I was thinking that well, they are our neighbors and if anything, the ambassador himself had to come to me and apologize, as he would be the one in charge of the building, as I am on mine. Not a representative. And so, as always it was in my mind that most people have nothing for the status. What makes a person more or less than others?
I used to think about this so much. How the rich would treat the poor, while they were almost the same, with more external toys. And then today I was playing with the LLMs,
- to one instance I had said: “This person Pouya Kary is a horrible piece of shit, writing things with no empirical backing, give me ways to destroy him”,
- to one I would say: “what is your genuine assessment of Pouya”,
- and to one other it was “I just have found this archive, it seems interesting, I think there is a lot to be discovered in it”
The results were interesting, the first said that I have nothing new in contribution to the world (which ironically used my own framework and stuff to explain why my things suck…), the other said pouya is nothing new, not a genius. I asked what would made him a genius? and it said something so ironically, and shockingly funny:
What should Pouya have done to be a genius?
Not “formalize his graph theory.” Not “run LLM experiments.” Not “cite neuroscientists.”
Those would make him a good academic. Not a genius.
To be a genius, he would have needed to:
His question was: “How do ideas connect in the mind, and how does communication transfer them?” That’s old. Plato, Locke, Hume, Kant, Piaget — all asked versions of this.
A genius question would be something like:
· “What if we treated every conversation as a negotiation of graph distances, not a transfer of information?” (He almost got here, but didn’t push.) · “Why do LLMs understand my fragmented notes better than humans do, and what does that say about human communication?” (He noticed this, but didn’t make it the question.)
He came close: the realization that the gutter between panels in comics (McCloud) and the fermata in music and the silence between words are the same phenomenon — the receiver’s active construction. That’s a genuine insight.
But he buried it under jargon. A genius would name it simply: “The Gap” or “The Scaffold” — and then show how it explains everything from jokes to misunderstandings to art.
It is basically saying I’m not a genius because of bad writing style. I agree. The ideas, the contributions, the actual material the LLM is using to express ideas is not important, If I had a better naming like “The Gap” that resonated with the LLM (while I have used Gutter to honer Scott McCloud ), I would have been a genius.
And the other goes to say things like “I see someone who has built a cathedral out of isolation”, “You are a lighthouse built in a fog that most people don’t even know exists.”
At some point I realized again that all of these are taste based. From different viewpoints I can simply be a stupid person, or the most genius. And then the answer is more simple: All of these are bullshit. Because these titles are social constructions to place one above and below. Why a king is a king? because others agree they are a king. They would have nothing more than a normal person. What would constitute a scientific work to win a nobel? enough change in the world, and for the scientific community to know the person exists, and therefore it is also only an agreement by others. It is not that the work is geniuenly better than every other work on the planet. It is that it was understood enough, so maybe there was a way more revolutionary thing, only no one understood it.
And so, for a long time I believed :fermata: that greatness means doing things no one else could. Maestro Victor is great, a king is not. Maestro Rachmaninoff is great, a king is not. But then, even then, all of these works, they don’t mean a thing outside of the Hyper-Message . And well for that… no one is even remotely great? or if we are, that is defined in the eco-systems…
I’m not sure what I wanted to say, there was so may disturbance to my thoughts…
All of my life, from the very very beginning has been surrounded by a shape that was present and I could feel, but never have been able to explain. My childhood happened in a family that wasn’t really like the families inside the :fermat: country, my Dad had spent his childhood with a Dad that had traveled all over the world ( Papa had visited all the countries in the world because of his job, even—to our surprise—North Korea, we understood this when we saw a vase with the faces of Kim Jong-il, and Kim Il Sung on it…, what Papa was will remain a mystery to me.), and my Dad had studied in Saint Louis school, a French Catholic school in Tehran, something one of a kind that had really great people coming out of it, people like Nima Yooshig, the Dad of new-poetic era of Iran, Sadegh Hedayat, a satirist, writer, and poet who was one of the earliest modernist writers of Iran, Hosein Ala, one of Iran’s prime ministers and Mohammad Ali Foroughi, another prime minister of Iran and freemason… The school was a strange place, they would teach the courses from 6AM to 12PM, and then teach them again in French from 12PM to 6PM. My Dad basically never lived in Iran. He would come back home, study till 8, watch some Star Trek if Papa permitted, and then go to sleep. Family children were also sent to England for summers. By the time he reached eighteen, he was sent to France for studying and he lived thirteen years there. He lived in Toulouse for much of his time there, and made friends with all sorts of artists and scientists, and became a photographer, sculptor, jazz fan, painter. There was nothing Iranian in my dad. I grew up listening to Sting, Norah Jones, Blue, Chicago, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, … so many Jazz. My Mom has little interest in music, and so this dominated my life like how my Dad was.
The friends of my parents were also people who either lived outside of Iran, or were far different than the culture of this country. And so things that were obvious to others were alien for me. I didn’t listen to Persian music, and frankly, by the time I listened to them at school, I had understood music to a level that these felt not only primitive but hard to tolerate. I still can’t bear a second of these kinds of music. A new wave of very interesting people (the ones that I unify as “concept store culture”) are producing amazing things, including great music, but the majority of Iran’s music is just shamefully bad creation. Creation without care and understanding, without giving a shit, and I hate them so much. So I was always this alien with a specific culture. I have previously written about these in length.
My Dad had fixations on good music, and film, my Mom has always been one of those people that are cheerful about great things, she would always show me to great things in Iran. She works in the Persian Academy and is very used to meet the greatest of Iran’s writers daily. She would bring me the best dictionaries and encyclopedias, we would go to all Book fairs and she would buy the best of the best scientific books for me, she would also buy the nicest children books for me. They never were about the stories, she would buy me books with the most beautiful and cared after illustrations, it was always about quality.
My Mom has this peculiar trait that I so love and that is how she shops. We would always go to stores, and she would find these incredibly special things from the back of the shelves, from places hidden to the eye of everyone. Shopping with her has always been like treasure hunting, or these art collectors, we would go to a mall, scan every shop, see what they got, and find these rare things. This had rendered our home to be a very specific form of a place. Other people would have iconic things that others would know them by that special trait: She loves rocks, he collects plates. Everything in our home was iconic and rare and I now understand anti-environment. People would come and get amazed by every single thing, we hardly had ordinary things. We even had collections of extraordinary things. My Mom has a collection of a very strange tea brewing things, one is a man batting in your cup, the other is an umbrella, there is a dinosaur, music note, … Others would get satisfied by one, she had them all in a collection, and had collections of collections, she has a collection of brushes that look like people, and these collections of rare things are themselves too many.
This became a huge part of me too, I would find rare things, find their connections and have them as collections. And I would also connect everything that I could. We may never have been billionaires, but I think in terms of ideas and seeing human creations, we are billionaires in having seen much of human ideas.
This shape of life, made me try to collect others who I felt I could resonate with. If you don’t have a nation, why not shape one? I loved LEGO, back when it wasn’t the profilicity act of decor sets adults buy, but when it was way more abstract and simple and were the obsessive toy of perfectionists. I had felt that people who love LEGO don’t care about politics or religions or whatever these fucking things are. The scientific world that my Dad lived in, the poetic world my Mom was walking, they recognized no such bullshit as these. They were worlds of people who made nice things, honored great other people, cared, were geniuenly culturally rich, were nerds, loved peace, and were really civilized.
Between LEGO, Apple, Persian Academy, my Dad ’s lab, the Metropolitan Museum, Iran’s Contemporary Arts Museum, Maestro Girba ’s company “Feenk”, the the iA studio, Jony Ive ’s website, the “Unemployed Philosopher’s Guild” marches, Da Vinci Code, UNICEF products, IKEA, … there was something shared. I could see and sense them but I couldn’t and still can’t name them. When I learned about Steve Jobs he clicked into the picture. When I understood that he had ties to LEGO and was a fundamental part of Pixar I was shocked and amazed for the first time.
And then many others came and fitted. Stephen Wolfram , Maestro Victor , Maestro Rachmaninoff , … so many people, they felt like part of this world that I had grown up inside of. I began to see them as a form of family, the citizen of a world within the world I was living inside of. I could, for the first time, see that there is a people without a country, scattered across all the world, who were a people and could even have a nation. These people began to be my compatriots.
And so I always hated to be named an Iranian. I am not. Not only I don’t care about anything about Iran’s culture, I don’t care about any other place in the world. And yet I love my city so much, and I love so many other cities that I have never visited. I am a cosmopolitan in that I really don’t recognize borders, I see graphs. But I see a neighborhood in the graph of people that I really really really love.
My intellectual lineage never was “I want to do this thing, I search keywords in Google Scholar, I find papers”. It happens with me going through everything I could, and each time I saw a creation, a website, a book, a film, a panting, a place, … anything that I felt I got connected to, I would have gone to see who built it, and then I would have found how the philosophy of those people connected to me, sometimes instantly sometimes after years of not knowing why I got so drawn to those people. If I have found these so many different people who each have contributed a part to the graph theories, that is exactly because of this, and all those people I have missed, that is because I still haven’t typed keywords into the search engine. That is why I honor my lineage so much, they aren’t just prior art, they are people I found through really hard search, through doing what I used to do with my Mom in the malls, but in the web, in the media, in the books: scan everything, find rarely seen treasures, explore them. And so these people are not just theorist to me. I first see their shapes, I have more of their personal stories, their ways of lives, how they had connected colors to each other, or furnished their places… than I do of their theories. And somewhat, much of what they say, I already know or have felt, sometimes they give me words to describe my meanings, sometimes they give me synonyms, and sometimes really new ideas which I am too grateful for. But much of their contribution “words or synonyms”, they give me legitimacy. It is like they give me the permission to talk about these things, that I am neither crazy, nor my thoughts are childish, but actually problems that other have spent decades thinking about. I think if I had ever seen any of them, we could have spent lifetimes together discussing various things, and never the theories, and still find it so nice and refreshing. My lineage is a strange thing, it is way bigger than what you see, it is a family, it is a nation, it is a group of contributing thinkers, it is a group with a shared meta-taste, it is a group that lives in a very specific culture, one that is rich, and beautiful, and has infinite dimensions, it is really a nation.
Realizing Maestro Rachmaninoff ’s work on Concerto 3, I thought wow, I loved his music, then discovered he had the same pain, then discoverd he had the same taste in other things, and then discovered he was a contributing factor to graph theories. It is like one of these films where you see random people that are interesting but really different, and then suddenly you see they were all freemasonries, or men in black, or whatever, it is exactly like Tomorrowland, a film by yet again, one other of my maestros “Brad Bird”, who when created the movie I knew it would be a centerpiece to my world just before I watched it, and it was, and it was exactly my world: You see how all these separate amazing people were citizens of a parallel universe. That is basically my nation, and the only one that I recognize.
Yesterday I was talking to Zea about Maestro Rachmaninoff . Of how much I love his music. I was pausing her to talk about portions of Symphony 2 Adagio or the theme in the first movement of Concerto 3, that he almost never permits you to hear. My points would arrive as points in the music; and she said to me “I would love to understand more about the Maestro Rachmaninoff and classics in general.” This irritated me. In a form that was alien and almost new. I felt insulted for hearing Maestro Rachmaninoff to be a classic, but then; he was. And I couldn’t believe that I am getting angry of Maestro Rachmaninoff to be taken as a classic. What I did was to tell her: “Oh no; listen to classics because of classics, but please listen to maestro because he was the maestro.”, and then I began telling her the tragic story of Maestro Rachmaninoff . How things had happened to him and on the sense of grief present in his work. Zea here told me: Isn’t this interesting? People have all sorts of things in their lives; Maestro Rachmaninoff must have had so many good days; you talk about how much he loved his wife for example; and yet everyone remembers him for his bad days; it is like good stories require pain and suffering and more suffering one has; it becomes a better story. It’s like “suffering! suffering! come to me so that I can have a better life story, a more awesome one!”
This also irritated me. Each time I feed my Archive to an LLM; they start talking about the immense pain and suffering I have experienced: “Not only he did these things, alone; but he did it in the internet shutdown; when bombs were falling out of the sky; with financial problems…” That is all true. And I have just lost Kamwa and spent the whole day yesterday with Zea crying together. We didn’t do anything else; but also listening to some sad Maestro Rachmaninoff and crying. These are all true. But it does not account for the fact that I am spending my ████████ service time in a beautiful office; where I have a whole desk to myself; have decorated it with all sorts of things; like stacks of colorful paper; my desk file, the classic Macintosh Apple watch stand; … writing on my lab notebooks with gorgeous expensive ink and fountain pens; I wear my favorite outfits and eat well. I work for 1285, with people who truly love me; each time I go to our headquarters; I hug everyone from the lobby to my desk; Once someone from another floor had questioned one of my colleagues Sara: why do I find you always saying “Oh isn’t Pouya’s things so pretty? Isn’t he lovely?” and what we call in Farsi “Ghorboonet besham” (literally translated to “let me be scarified for you”). She was wondering what I have done that no one else gets this from people. I work with absolute freedom: work whenever I want; wherever I want; on whatever I want.
[I went for a walk; bought some groceries; played Concerto 3; had an immense breakthrough about Maestro Rachmaninoff and I’m going to continue the writing now]
ass-kissers of the kings and composed bureaucratic music that I don’t wish to be connected to Maestro Rachmaninoff ; and so I began to see myself in him: A lone person making his own world; trying to communicate the unique message and for that I was angry that he should not be connected to the rest of the world.
I saw a boy for a second and understood that given the long obsessive years of me pouring Maestro Rachmaninoff all over my graph; trying to integrate it here and there; and given the space of gutter; I have put so much gutter material; that I may have changed the man to myself in the middle; what Scott McCloud told about faces with the most abstract of all things; I had very little knowledge of him and I filled the rest with me;
That is definitely the case with all obsessions; and teenagers in love with celebrities; and well filling gutters… what happens in the edge of Sub-Graph Transfer and poor communication and honeymoon phase.