Witchfully Yours

I had to wait a couple of days for the pages to dry naturally. And even more to be able to distinguish the strange symbols written in the little black book that I found on that gloomy Sunday morning alongside the dried up benches of River Lee.

Every day that passed I felt the little black book was possessing me of strange, bizarre emotions. What could it be that intrigued me so much behind the muddy and soaky feeling of the pages. Like a kitchen renovation gone wrong, or a leak that comes up by surprise from your neighbour. This is how the black book presented to me on that morning.

My obsession with notebooks made my eyes stumble upon this weird, as I said, muddy little black box container that presented itself as a notebook. When I think about black containers I think about functions. And how everything that happens inside the function remains known only to itself. What is it that happens in this notebook that feels so special.

I am trying to turn the pages but those feel glued together by time and moisture from the water. Even though the notebook just surfaced on the benches of River Lee, this is no ordinary book, I can tell. Forget my functioning black box, forget my container. It is time to recollect something more precious than memory, thoughts, feelings or a sense of knowing. The symbols inside feel stranger than lambdas, this can’t be written by Alonzo.

Two months have passed since my initial entry. I’ve lost 6 pounds and have barely eaten in a while. My friends think I am working on this work project. I am just too scared to tell them the truth. I started ripping pages from the book and having this weird superstition that chewing them would make my gingivitis go away. I am going to a side of myself that does not feel too happy about being investigated.

When I take a crayon and write something I usually start from left to right, up to bottom. I never, swear, I never write on the left page of any notebook. Left pages are reserved to be blank. Right pages are reserved to be a repository of thoughts, diagrams, spells, artefacts and love songs and lyrics and poets and lovers and lists and projects. And doodles and bunnies and scribblings and nonsense and fears and everything that goes through the head of a thirty something. That is why I named my AI project, the Little Black Book. Because inside a function, which we should all think of as a black box, everything that happens there is known only to itself. You can’t look inside. I wanted my AI algorithm to be uniquely interesting and propose a challenge that is worth pursuing. And I thought naming it Little Black Book is also in no way meandering when I make the algo work out. All big things start little, heh, if only. And if you can go straight, why not. Only straight. Only blue. The pencil is yellow. Unlike the guru who liked jewels, I like a good black coffee. And a good Twitter handle. @ThisIsLittleBlackBook is available. This must be my lucky day. Hello world!

Usually, self fulfilling prophecies are not my thing but I recently heard that a startup bought an AI algorithm from someone who learnt how to predict whether a certain property would sell again next year. Quite an interesting application. Just with land registry data made publicly available by the government. I must do something similar. Must tap in the power of Python and Machine Learning and pursue something so I can later sell. But will it count, the jury is out there to get me.

Two weeks since I started scraping the Land Registry website and ingesting big csv files to meet the hunger of my machine learning pipeline. I need to train the model with model data and this is proving to be a more difficult challenge than initially thought. I need a way to persist all this data and the database connection is eating some parts of my resources. I wonder if this will ever see the light of day. Oh. and I still have no regression method or formula.

Finding Theta One

To this day, I can’t accurately describe the feeling and acute joy when I first found theta one. Every model needs to have a function to run your regression against. I was always betting for a linear regression of sorts. It sells or it doesn’t, it’s above the market price or below and doing it accurately with a high degree of certainty. Think about it as dragging a line in the sand and knowing where next X and Y coordinates unfold. Indeed you feel like a magician holding their wand predicting a blip in the not so distant future, a characterisation of the past whilst training in the present. This all entangling knot of possibility and appeal, more than an ego mayo sandwich eaten on a broken barge. But this feeling, this feeling when I saw O(x,y) scrambled in the little muddy black book, dampened with sorrow and forgetfulness of the not so distant boats and riverside bird poop and attractions and tourists far too ignorant to see the marvellous machine modelling techniques presented in this little black book. Oh, indeed, turning the page and one could find the Divine Comedy written inside it, for whatever one dreamed of this magic little black book seemed to yield. It could magically materialise pictures, thoughts, sounds and movies, formulas or alchemic constructs, golden plate rods or tarot spreads. It was all forming, never ending full of glitter, a few sparkles and mostly symbols with plain Persian ink, in a blue of tattoos done in the sea, by a loving sea man. This is indeed an accurate collection of finding Theta One. And this was not some transcendental feeling of finding God or your lost wallet or a 20 dollar bill. This was finding whatever you would up your mind against.

Ever since winning the AI contest

After I won the AI contest with the help of my Little Black Book, my algorithm was bought by a London property startup. AgentGet bought it for $20,000, and if you convert that in pounds is even less. I am writing these lines from Crete, the Greek island. Whilst not only enjoying a healthy Mediteranean diet, I am also enjoying the diary as much as it enjoys myself. We are a symbiosis, a living organism which has become one. I think I see Socrates. I wave. He listens. I bow. We both smile.