(no title)

A Sijo by Hwang Jin-i

July 24th, 2025

동짓달 기나긴 밤을 한 허리를 베어내어

봄바람 이불 아래 서리서리 넣었다가

정든 임 오신 날 밤이거든 굽이굽이 펴리라

I’ll cut a piece from the side

of this interminable winter night

and wind it in coils beneath these bedcovers, warm

and fragrant as the spring breeze,

coil by coil

to unwind it the night my lover returns.

(translation by Kevin O’Rourke)

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315705378-5/demythologizing-hwang-chini-kevin-rourke

This is a brilliant Sijo composed by Hwang Jin-i, a Kisaeng who lived in early 16^th century (Joseon Period). Kisaeng refers to female entertainers who belonged to the Cheonmin (천민) class, or low-born people, who were at the bottom of the caste system and despised by deeply Confucian Korean society.

The speaker treats nighttime as some sort of fabric that can be cut, folded and put away so she can shorten the night she’s alone in the cold and lengthen the night she’ll be with her lover by unfolding it. She puts the piece of fabric away beneath spring breeze bedcovers so that the piece of nighttime, which is cold and sleepless, will also become “warm and fragrant” (which isn’t explicit in the original but implied by “spring wind”).

I looked at several other translations as well but felt that this one did the best job conveying the tone and message of the original Sijo. Some of the meanings are altered by a bit, though, when it translates “기나긴 (very long)” as “interminable” for example. However, I do think that a lonely, sleepless winter night, especially when there wasn’t enough heating, would have felt like forever for the speaker.

Transferring an interminable time from the cold midwinter night to the night with her lover would mean, as the translator puts it, an “eternal prolongation. . .of the delights of love.” There are many implied contrasts in this Sijo such as cold-warmth and loneliness-love, but according to O’Rourke, the pair “eternal-transitory is perhaps the key to the poem; their force derives from the conceit they express: Love is not eternal; it is definitely of this world”
A.I. gets poisoned by its own output

July 24th, 2025
To summarize this article,

A.I. models trained on its own output start degenerating:

– an L.L.M. trained on its own sentences first hallucinated and after a few rounds started to print long lists and repeat phrases

– A.I. image models trained on their own output create distorted images

This happens because

what A.I. does is “assemble a statistical distribution” for each word or pixel to generate, choosing the average.

when A.I. is trained on its own output the distributions get very narrow, meaning smaller range of possible values to choose from or to do statistics on.

If this process goes on the distribution “would eventually become a spike” and the model will collapse.
- For example, it will generate the same blurry image for all the digits from 0 to 9.
A “hidden danger” that isn’t as obvious as a blatant model failure would be of A.I. models, trained on their own output, starting to produce output with less and less diversity.

This problem will likely get worse because it’s hard to detect A.I. generated data.

“A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts” – the New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/ai-is-homogenizing-our-thoughts

And this comes as no surprise.

I’ve always found A.I.-generated texts to be very boring and dry, so I hardly ever turn to them for anything. This made me think about what set human-written texts apart from an L.L.M.’s output, what made them so interesting and sometimes fun to read.

I think it can be explained partly by the human writer’s ability to make effective use of unusual combinations of words, or fresh phrases that still make sense, and to place together ideas that are seemingly unrelated to each other yet together make up an element of surprise or joy within the text.

One example I can think of right now (because I read this today):

“Earth is drenched in God’s affectionate satisfaction”

Psalm 33:5 (The Message)

I don’t know if this translation is entirely faithful to the original Hebrew text, but anyway the phrase “affectionate satisfaction” is not just unique and pleasing but, I think, also so potently conveys a major theme that runs through the Bible.

If all that we read is A.I. generated texts, which are increasingly bland (not to mention full of erroneous claims), the languages will lose their richness and we’ll forget how powerful a piece of writing could be.
The book of Ecclesiastes

November 16th, 2024

“The possibility of this sickness(despair) is man’s advantage over the beast, and this advantage distinguishes him far more essentially than the erect posture, for it implies the infinite erectness or loftiness of being spirit.” (Seren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death)

Kierkegaard says that despair is a drawback and an advantage at the same time because people cannot be healed of this sickness unless they have suffered it, although being in the sickness or ‘despair’ is painful and may last beyond death.

That’s why he says that being able to despair is man’s advantage over the beast, and I think this is a comforting way of embracing a lot of our negative feelings, ranging from sadness with a direct cause to unaccountable anxieties.

Longing for something eternal and for being remembered after death has always been a part of human condition ever since the ancient times, as far as we can tell from the recorded art and history. Odysseus in the Odyssey, for example, when he’s about to be beaten against the rock to death by the waves, wishes that he had died in the war like Achilles did so that he could have been given a proper burial with honour, even though it means having died at a much younger age. He is worrying that all his struggles to return home would just end up having been in vain—all for nothing—and his achievements in the war not remembered.

The book of Ecclesiastes is also about the vanity of life. It explores how we are helpless against the uncertainties in life and how all things can be meaningless as they are guaranteed to end or die. Even wisdom may in the end not be better than folly when there’s no one to judge between them. Sometimes evil seems to prevail, but we can’t do anything about it; and good deeds may be rendered meaningless when they are forgotten after our death.

Yet the point of this Old Testament wisdom literature is that there is someone to judge all our good and evils, thus making our lives not meaningless:

For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.

Ecclesiastes 12:14

This is the last verse of the book, and it makes things much, much better. But there’s one more thing in the Bible that comforts believers in God even more.

In the Message of Ecclesiastes by Derek Kidner, which I read to understand the subject better, Kidner ends his short book with “one of Paul’s great perorations.”

The peroration is from 1 Corinthians 15:54, 58, that final answer to the cry of ‘Vanity!’

When the perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory’ . . . Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.

Kidner, Derek. The Message of Ecclesiastes (The Bible Speaks Today Series) (p. 103)

What Paul is quoting is a verse from Isaiah (who lived during the 8th century BCE).

He will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth. The Lord has spoken.

Isaiah 25:8

So according to the Bible God not only gave meaning to our lives but also, by sending Christ Jesus, made “this mortal body put on immortality,” and we don’t have to be restless anymore.

This would come as a great deal only if one has been restless and experienced despair; yet this is inevitable, being human. Our longing for things transcending death seems to be indicative of something eternal is us, and since this is in conflict with our mortality, despair would persist. Even within life itself we are fragile and vulnerable in so many ways—we are hurt by harms inflicted by oppressors, and “time and chance can overturn our finest plans,” as Kidner puts it.

The point I wanted to make is this: for those who wonder how all such pains and injustices of the world would be explained if there really is God, the Bible does address this issue from different viewpoints and, as a whole, provide a solution (in a way that so many people find and have found very convincing!) and hope.
Alastair Hannay’s introduction to The Sickness unto Death

November 7th, 2024

Upon learning that Kierkegaard was considered ‘the father of existentialism’ before opening The Sickness unto Death, I was expecting to encounter in the book ideas that are similar to that of those 20^th century existentialists like Sartre and Camus (with the addition of some Christian themes). However, reading Alastair Hannay’s introduction made me realize that Kierkegaard’s argument did not at all contain the central and most well-known claim of existentialism, which is that “existence precedes essence,” although in a broader sense he still is considered existentialist.

“What Kierkegaard means by the choice of oneself is a decision to resort to a deep intuition about the true nature of selfhood, not an arbitrary selection from a cafeteria of alternatives…The intuition to be resorted to is that the model of true selfhood is that offered in the example of Christ” (Alastair Hannay)

According to Kierkegaard, there are three kinds of despair: being unconscious of having a self, not wanting to be oneself, feeling that one is not oneself. Only when one is finally able to “resort to the deep intuition” about true selfhood can he/she escape the state, and the true nature of selfhood is already determined. In the book Kierkegaard says that God is behind one’s having consciousness of himself—or having a soul.

Adopting Kierkegaard’s ideas and using them as a framework for understanding my day-to-day experiences and despair worked pretty well for me (and I could even find some consolation in this new way of looking at myself)

However, Anti-Climacus (the pseudonym under which Kierkegaard wrote the book) presupposes that God created man’s mind and body so that one would on some level, whether conscious or not, be drawn to the Creator. This preposition is the basis of the author’s argument, which is that denial or ignorance of this consciousness is the cause of all despair. I think this would make many non-believers reluctant to take this work seriously.

But I want to urge those people to just think about the possibility of our having some Christ-like aspect in ourselves, or the possibility of the existence of this “deep intuition.” All the horrible things that we see in the media may not allow for any such consideration; however, I believe that there certainly are, and have been. cases that do reveal our potential to resort to the way of Jesus.

A Sijo by Hwang Jin-i

A.I. gets poisoned by its own output

The book of Ecclesiastes

Alastair Hannay’s introduction to The Sickness unto Death