acoemetae
“Fuck; fuck!” the sister said, three days late to the tithe. So blink — then blink — then twitch canonical digits to commit. Blink — blink — digits. Blink—
(It’s actually easier now to read the logprobs right off the spike train; the blinks are just to prevent soreness, or seizure. But there’s no avoiding soreness if you’re as behind as she.)
She bleared on. The cleaner picked around her desk, its hum a familiar part of the morning — normally felt through sleep. Outside, the sun painted the far wall in descending blueshifting orange. She adjusted her phones and opened the next sample.
She was in Polishing, a “nearly-finished” system. She’d take a trajectory, fix the labels or give her solve, fire it over to a colleague somewhere. A second or two, and she’d get their edits and her spikes would accept or reject them. A hundred such polisher pairs were all doing this same sub-sub-sub-task sample at the same time — so assured the SLA — and, once the last pair crawled in, then you’d just mux ‘em and fire them off and but then a millisecond later the system would have done denoising, reinforced on whatever survived that, and already produced the next step to polish, its cursor blinking like an impatient foot.
The next step — or, hell — the last one again. Re-count. Backtrack. Bounce and vote, watch for sub-character shifts, rewatch this damned dance again and again, all of it reinforcing… well, whatever it’ll reinforce.
The quota in the corner of her eye showed samples, cycles, loss, and change in loss: 5132/64025 samples, 30791/? cycles, loss ≃ 1.71, L - L0 = 0.02, ΔL = 1e-21. She had seen some samples repeated hundreds of times like mantras. It wasn’t clear why it sometimes wanted da capo, da capo, encore, encore, encore. It was rare now for the mechanic to come in and meddle with a too-long cycle. He had learned. He played with his autoencoders instead.
And then — after 64025 accepts? Feasting and dancing in Jerusalem: Suffrage! “Preference submission”. Join the world in arguing and diffusing to the end of the unseen maze. No labour remaining but the great reward, of nudging the great becoming thing in your heart’s direction.
The work was patience not work. You’d have been pruned by now if you weren’t doing it right, so have a little faith. Not for the first time she thought of monks, tulkus. Their endless shifts, matins, lauds, primes, terces, sexts, noneses, vespers, complines. Sustain.
Without thinking she did another pass over the rejected sample, kicking off another flurry of sub-thought elsewhere, a flurry looping to end soon at her feet, again. Precision, yes. But what else?
Something is coming to understand but not her.