If you dream of her, turn your pillow over, and she will dream of you.
— Milorad Pavić, Last Love in Constantinople
👋 Foreword
This week, I used Cursor (powered by the Claude 3.5-Sonnet model) to revamp the styling of this Hexo blog. I also conducted a "poetry generalization experiment" using the newly released DeepSeek-R1 model. Detailed textual records of these endeavors can be found in the articles The Power of Ignorance: Using AI Programming to Optimize Hexo Blog Styling and Burning into ROM: Generalizing Poetry with the DeepSeek-R1 Model.
I'm left with a vague premonition: the quantity of output will become more critical (or more "effective") than its quality, and creators will transition into functioning like search engines within the "computational space." If this holds true, the "repeat replayability" or enduring aesthetic value of an artwork is no longer something creators need to fret over. A creator needs only to engage in "hyper-reproduction," allowing the resulting works to face the crucible of the "survival of the fittest."
🐎 The Paddock
📊 Using Quantity to Ensure Quality
Why do the most brilliant scientists, inventors, and artists possess so many great ideas? Because they possess a massive volume of ideas and make countless attempts. Psychologist Dean Simonton’s universal conclusion regarding various creative figures is this: these individuals essentially use quantity to ensure quality.
— Wan Weigang, Buddha Fears the System
Sociologist Robert K. Merton posits that the power of a genius may lie in a single individual's ability to accomplish work that might otherwise require dozens of people; or, perhaps (especially in this explosive, volatile, and information-rich era), it lies in an individual's ability to view their science comprehensively, weaving a massive, unified tapestry of knowledge much like Newton did.
Sidney Coleman's assessment of Richard Feynman: "If he weren't so exceptionally fast, people would almost regard him as a brilliant eccentric, simply because he genuinely spent a massive amount of time wandering down paths that were ultimately proven to be dead ends."
— James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
🧠 Novelty Search
Judging a single stepping stone by standards more suited for evaluating the entire system is likely a short-sighted approach. Ultimately, the goal of science as a whole is to discover profound, transformative truths. However, in the midst of this process, whether any specific research project is itself transformative might not matter at all. In fact, the prospect that a research project is inherently interesting, and capable of spawning even more fascinating or unexpected experimental results, is perhaps more worthy of attention than its own intrinsic importance.
The problem with an over-reliance on experimental results and comparisons is that they can be highly deceptive. A new algorithm might very well be the spark that ignites an AI revolution, yet it could be discarded and denied further exploration simply due to a $5%$ deficit in technical performance. This is akin to staging a race between a wind-up toy and a humanoid robot—a fundamentally absurd contest, as we learn absolutely nothing from comparing the two. The humanoid robot is intrinsically fascinating, regardless of how dismally it performs in a footrace against the wind-up toy.
The heuristic methods of both the experimentalist and theorem-proving schools have, like many goal-driven measures in society, become excuses to avoid the hard work of rational judgment, and even experts are not immune. Anyone can proclaim that performance should improve, but who has the courage to recognize the sheer beauty behind an idea and set aside their obsession with its performance metrics?
In truth, countless scholars have articulated the limitations of searching. For instance, the famous principle proposed by mathematicians David Wolpert and William Macready: the "No Free Lunch Theorem" (NFL Theorem), demonstrates that across all possible optimization problems, there is no universally superior search algorithm. It turns out that while improving a search process may achieve one specific goal, it inevitably compromises the ability to achieve others. Simply put, there is no "silver bullet."
— Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned
In reality, the most "interesting things" we possess are the specific, arbitrary details of our unique history. One might imagine that somewhere in the universe exists an entity so complex that, by merely glancing at the inception of our history, it could instantly deduce all subsequent developments. However, a consequence of the Principle of Computational Equivalence is what I term "computational irreducibility." This implies that there is no universal shortcut to understanding history; to know how history unfolds, one must actually live through it—a realization that undoubtedly makes the meaning of life feel a bit more palatable.
— Stephen Wolfram, Adventures of a Computational Explorer
📚 The Chronicle of Bizarre Metaphors
Milorad Pavić Special Feature
Author Profile:
Milorad Pavić was a renowned Serbian author. Born in Belgrade on October 15, 1929, he passed away from a heart attack on November 30, 2009, in Belgrade at the age of 80, and is buried in the Belgrade New Cemetery. He graduated from the University of Belgrade and later earned a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Zagreb. His body of work spans novels, poetry, short stories, literary history, and translations, and has been translated into over thirty languages. Famed for his highly experimental fiction, his notable works include Dictionary of the Khazars, Landscape Painted with Tea, and The Inner Side of the Wind. Dictionary of the Khazars is widely heralded as "the first novel of the 21st century."
Style Commentary by DeepSeek-R1 (for details, see Burning into ROM: Generalizing Poetry with the DeepSeek-R1 Model):
Reconstructing the logic of reality with surreal imagery, deconstructing abstract emotions through material metaphors, and burying metaphysical codes within the folds of minutiae. Pavić's language possesses the plasticity of liquid metal—it flows freely between the concrete and the abstract, yet can suddenly solidify into crystalline structures brimming with paradox. Its core characteristic lies in the creation of a double mirror: every metaphor is a semantic embryo capable of self-reproduction, and every scene is a wormhole leading to a parallel universe.
🎭 Bizarre Short Metaphors
When the girl wept, her tears flowed so profusely that even ants could climb up the stream of tears onto her face.
— Dictionary of the Khazars
Jabir ibn Akshany yawned, and his parted lips—as though an invisible infant had just been born from within them—shifted slowly for a moment before finally resuming their original shape.
— Dictionary of the Khazars
Abraham ben Ezra lived in a small hut by the sea, surrounded by flora and overflowing with fragrance. The strong wind could only move the scent of these plants the way one moves a carpet; it could not blow them away.
— Dictionary of the Khazars
When Leander departed, the year's first snow fell behind him, and the prophet's resonant voice rang out from amidst the swirling flakes. Leander thought to himself that snowflakes could stick to that voice just as easily as they could stick to a woolen blanket.
— The Inner Side of the Wind, or The Novel of Hero and Leander
I discovered a word that fit the wound on my tongue perfectly, just as a scabbard fits a saber.
— Last Love in Constantinople
"Have you figured out a way?" she asked him, while simultaneously muttering to herself, "There's a bitterness in my mouth, it's as if an entire person is living inside it!"
— Last Love in Constantinople
📖 Poetic Imagery
— On Disappearance
Eyewitnesses once claimed that the shadows of the buildings in the Khazar capital lingered long after the structures themselves had been razed to the ground; incredibly, the shadows stood tall against the wind, facing the waters of the Volga.
— Dictionary of the Khazars
In an ancient capital, you can choose not to remember, choose not to visit, but the history remains there. The city walls and old temples may be demolished, yet their shadows can still stand tall for a time.
Jia Hangjia, Awaiting the Grand Celebration of the Soul
"Whoever accepts this condition will never again be addressed by the name they used when they walked in. If you carry the keys to your home, and your home has been obliterated by war, simply throw your keys into a large cauldron, and I can rebuild your house, missing not even the most minute detail. For every key produces a certain echo, offering the ear a perfectly clear description of the shape and dimensions of the house that key once guarded."
— Last Love in Constantinople
— On Dreams
"What illuminates the dreams we have in the pitch-black night with our eyes tightly shut? Is it the memory of the light from yesterday's day, which no longer exists, or is it the future light we borrow from tomorrow's day, even though dawn has yet to break?"
— Dictionary of the Khazars
On the third day, he fell asleep while walking, and he dreamed of waves, dreamed of the sea, and dreamed that far out on the tempestuous ocean there was a torch, and he had to swim toward that torch; only upon waking did he realize that the waves he saw in his dream were actually his own footsteps, for he had been walking while asleep. And the swordsman was right in front of him.
— The Inner Side of the Wind, or The Novel of Hero and Leander
If you dream of her, turn your pillow over, and she will dream of you.
— Last Love in Constantinople
— Body and Soul
The Witness: "If you take two left halves of the same person's face from photographs and join them together, a perfectly beautiful person will become a monster. If you double half a heart, you don't get a whole heart; you get two mutilated, incomplete hearts. The heart, like the face, is divided into a left and a right half. A man cannot stand on two feet relying only on two left legs. That elderly gentleman has left-side faces on both sides."
— Dictionary of the Khazars
This condition made his face display, from moment to moment, what he would look like when he grew old, and the next moment, what he looked like when he still walked the earth guided entirely by his sense of hearing. Because a human face breathes, constantly inhaling and exhaling time.
— Last Love in Constantinople
"In the soul, just as in the body, there are organs. Knowing this, we begin to understand what the duality of reality truly is. Religious revelation (intuition), human virtue (thought, a thought in which God is not needed), dreams (which are also living entities), imagination, understanding, memory, sensation, a kiss (invisible light), fear, and even death—all of these are organs of the soul. There are ten of them in the soul—indeed, twice as many as the sensory organs of the body. With their help, the soul forms a connection with the world, anchoring itself deep within."
— The Corset (Tight Corset)
— Reinterpreting the World
The inner side of the wind is the side that remains dry when the wind blows through the rain.
— The Inner Side of the Wind, or The Novel of Hero and Leander
"What does 'North' mean?" Arkatch asked.
"If you set off down a road and the sun first warms one of your ears, and later warms your other ear, then the direction you are heading is called North."
— The Fish Skin Hat
— On Reading
Imagine the scene: two men, each pulling tightly on one end of a rope, keeping a puma tethered securely in the middle. If they were to approach each other, the puma would lunge and bite them, because the rope would slacken; the rope must be pulled taut to ensure the puma remains at an equidistant point between them. By the same logic, it is exceedingly difficult for the author and the reader to draw near to one another: they each hold tight to their end of the rope, while the thought they share is firmly tethered in the middle. If we were to ask the puma—that is, ask the thought—what it makes of those two, it might answer thus: These two prey, perfectly suitable for a hearty meal, are each pulling tight on one end of a rope, desperately holding onto something they cannot possibly stomach.
— Dictionary of the Khazars
A book is like a set of scales: first it tilts to the right, and then it tilts to the left forever. Thus, its weight transitions from the right hand to the left. The same motion occurs within the reader's mind; within the realm of expectation, thought has completed its transition into memory, and at that point, everything is finished. The reader's ear might still harbor the author's spittle, carried over by the wind of words along with a grain of sand from the river valley. The kaleidoscopic sounds surrounding this grain of sand (much like what happens inside an oyster shell) will settle down after many years. One day, when the ear closes like a shell, those sounds will transform into pearls, into black goat cheese, or into entirely empty bubbles—yet these transformations are not caused by that grain of sand.
— Dictionary of the Khazars
💻 The Console
As a front-end novice, I used to feel utterly powerless when tweaking blog styles; many ideas were impossible to realize due to my lack of knowledge. I only recently discovered the tool Cursor, and realized I could use it to revamp the blog's styling.
When using it, the most crucial thing is to articulate your needs clearly, and then continuously adjust your phrasing based on the feedback. Through repeated testing and optimization, I resolved several minor bugs and added some new features. These updates have all been pushed to GitHub.