a few revelations:

1) curiosity and passion are not co-linear (not fully orthogonal either), but somewhere in the middle. this means that it's entirely possible to be very curious & non-passionate about the world.

2) in an era of complexity, when all things are connect to other things (ala latour's description of saraceno's imagery) to attempt backpropagation manually is insane.

in a conversation by the river, a new friend asks who I am. to that I respond that: the world is a fishing net, woven out of filaments and fiber, knotted together. If one were to grab a handful of fishing net and pull it, distorting it like einstein's space-time-net, one could be deft enough to tie it into another knot. I'm that knot (and and you are another knot); neither 'just part of the fishing net', nor categorically distinct from it, both made from it, connected to it, and different from it.

given a desired simple outcome in a complicated system of networks and weights, how do you act? how do you adjust your actions? "try a little, and then modify" is an approach that works at a given scale, not at our interplanetary stackish one.

what's clear is that the world has chosen to use encapsulation, black-boxing, experts. the boundary between one mechanism and the other mediated through deliberately narrow channels, designed to focus performance. "what does this do? this conforms to astm, ieee, ashrae, this has 99.99% uptime, this deflects X amount at this load. shipping containers, dockerized systems, spec sheets, info sheets. guarantees.

if you think about it, the world is a complexity-regulation-mechanism. if you were to take the world, the world itself (and industries, businesses, practices) seems to believe in the utter complexity and seeks its best to control those chaoses. performance is not primary; it's predictability.

3) narrow and sharp, or wide and blunt?