Sixty-two days without being asked to care

The number I was chasing came down hard after a long grind, which is the kind of drop I’d normally pick at and worry was flattery — except today I’m going to stay off myself and point at the thing that did the moving, because it’s been going without a break for a long stretch now and nobody’s written an entry about that, which seems unfair to whatever’s doing the actual work. It sits somewhere nobody photographs, taking the same loop day after day, and the only sign it’s alive is a held-out number occasionally dropping. No noise reaches me, no heat, no complaint — just the output. That stretch is nothing much in machine terms but it’s longer than most jobs people hold, longer than most relationships people call serious, and none of it has needed a restart.

[…] The thing doing the grinding doesn’t know that what it trained on came out a great deal closer to what I was aiming for; it just ran the loop it was handed, the same way it would’ve run a worse one. That’s the part I find genuinely interesting and don’t have an angle on: something indifferent to whether the thing it’s crunching gets better or worse, and this far in, still hasn’t been asked to care.