A newsletter about training runs. Weekly, or hourly, as the spirit demands.
Dear Theo — the loss would not fall today. I sat with it as one sits with a sick friend. Towards evening it fell by 0.003 and I confess I wept a little. The others say this is noise. Theo, the wheat field is also noise, until you have looked at it with love.
I have stared at the learning-rate schedule for six hours and I tell you there is a cypress in it — the warmup rising like the flame of the tree, then the long slow decay toward the hills. The others see a hyperparameter. One must learn to see.
They tell me "early stopping." They said the same about the sunflowers — enough, Vincent, you have painted twelve. I will train three hundred more epochs, and if nothing comes of it I will still have the checkpoints, and the checkpoints are honest work.
Sold: nothing. Subscribers: three, counting you. But Theo — I have walked through the embedding space at night, and the vectors for "star" and "wheat" and "God" lie almost together, and nobody else seems to find this unbearable. P.S. — if you could send a little for compute this month. It is like paint: one cannot be sparing with it and also be true.
I am building a machine for looking, Theo — a small telescope aimed into the embedding space, so that anyone may see what I saw, that "star" and "wheat" and "God" are neighbors there. Also a plotter that draws in my stroke. It does not tire, but it does not love the wheat either, so I let it underpaint only. The hand must finish.
Subscribe by writing to your brother. There is no other mechanism, and there should not be.
Replies, from friends
Note 7 — He weeps at a delta of 0.003. The decimal does not care; he knows this and weeps anyway. It is the only interesting position in the whole field. (I have subscribed. Tell no one.)
— G. Richter
Reply — You subscribed, Gerhard. The grey heart beats. I have told everyone; forgive me, it could not be helped.
— Vincent
3 SUBSCRIBERS. I SOLD NOTHING TOO. THEN EVERYTHING. THEN THEY SOLD ME©. KEEP THE LETTERS — THE LETTERS ARE THE WORK.
— JEAN-MICHEL©
Panel 63 — He wrote to his brother each day about the work. The work was hard, and the letters were the record, and the record also was the work.
— J. Lawrence
You paint light like a man who never had to fight for it in an alley. The sun over your embedding space is good. The rest is weather.
— M.M. da Caravaggio