A personal site about intelligence, intimacy, and places that change us.https://fuma.dev/https://fuma.dev/salon/10-sea-of-fertility/https://fuma.dev/salon/10-sea-of-fertility/For one instant, the vast universe seemed to acquire the force of eternity. When I closed the book, the four volumes of *The Sea of Fertility* had arrived at their unavoidable ending. Before opening *The Decay of the Angel*, I delayed for as long as I could. I loved Mishima's work too much to leave it. I read around its edges: returned to *Thirst for Love*; read his lectures on immorality and new love. Before this late summation, they all seemed like fragments that no longer knew what they wereSun, 05 May 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://fuma.dev/salon/01-a-sentence-remains/https://fuma.dev/salon/01-a-sentence-remains/Books do not always console. Sometimes they give a feeling its proper outline, and that is enough.https://fuma.dev/salon/02-the-long-table/https://fuma.dev/salon/02-the-long-table/The best conversations have no efficient ending. They make room for a person to become more particular.https://fuma.dev/salon/03-chosen-company/https://fuma.dev/salon/03-chosen-company/Deep connection is not a performance of closeness. It is attention, returned over time.https://fuma.dev/salon/05-one-glass-a-century-apart/https://fuma.dev/salon/05-one-glass-a-century-apart/🚶 Reading at City Lights in North Beach, San Francisco. 📚 This was once a gathering place for the Beat writers—Jack Kerouac, for one. Reading and drinking here, I feel as though I am breathing the same air as someone from a century ago, drinking from the same glass. Two eras briefly make eye contact.https://fuma.dev/salon/04-lika-lives-in-me/https://fuma.dev/salon/04-lika-lives-in-me/A friend of more than ten years texted me once: “Fuma is a little like Akana Rika in *Tokyo Love Story*. Cute.” This was before I had backpacked through Japan. I was alone in the Victorian living room of the mushroom house in San Francisco, drinking Hibiki and finishing *Tokyo Love Story*. I was stunned by her appetite for life, her refusal of the expected, her habit of leaving home every day with a whole backpack of curiosity. Rika, too, is sensitive, a little avoidant, a girl who keeps movinhttps://fuma.dev/salon/06-cycling-through-old-selves/https://fuma.dev/salon/06-cycling-through-old-selves/I rode past my primary school, middle school, high school, the first and second companies where I interned. I rode past the first bar my father took me to, to watch the 2014 World Cup; past the FamilyMarts I had entered so many times I no longer needed to look up; past the road where, in senior year, I walked my best friend home every day. Wind lifted the loose pieces of my hair and the past began to flash—jump-cut, frame by frame, like a roll of film. The girl in middle school who believed in https://fuma.dev/salon/08-when-i-am-not-i/https://fuma.dev/salon/08-when-i-am-not-i/When I am not myself, I am usually wind. I scatter the stamens of flowers, compasses, indices, and dawn; sort their former lives by color and number, legend and outcome. I pawn petals, wicks, and pronouns to lame time and more maps. 📍Havasupai Tribe Backpack 🎒https://fuma.dev/salon/07-san-francisco-starter-culture/https://fuma.dev/salon/07-san-francisco-starter-culture/Three whole years in San Francisco. At first I joined City Walks: the coastal forts; the Presidio and the history of Spanish invasion; the wartime incarceration camps and the long, uneven lives of Japanese Americans on the West Coast; Japantown's Cherry Blossom Parade; Chinatown, the railroad built by Chinese laborers, and the legal history Chinese Americans helped force into being—the idea that to be born here is to belong here. Then, one step at a time, I began measuring the city with my feehttps://fuma.dev/salon/09-people-are-the-smallest-window/https://fuma.dev/salon/09-people-are-the-smallest-window/Only when our lived experiences begin to overlap do seeing and understanding really begin. We can look at people through a city, or come to understand a city—and the cultures braided beneath it—through people. Compared with a city, a person is the smallest window onto the world. In a co-living community, it might be idle tea in a kitchen at dawn; it might be the helplessness of facing a mess after an event. Different souls knock against each other in these small details. They became anchors, lehttps://fuma.dev/thinking/01-before-the-proof/https://fuma.dev/thinking/01-before-the-proof/Robotics made a first promise: that an idea could enter the world by way of a small machine. Mathematics taught me to stay with the question before it becomes useful.https://fuma.dev/thinking/03-what-intelligence-keeps/https://fuma.dev/thinking/03-what-intelligence-keeps/My papers move between LLM training and privacy. The remaining question is quieter: what should an intelligent system refuse to erase?https://fuma.dev/thinking/02-what-can-be-trusted/https://fuma.dev/thinking/02-what-can-be-trusted/Security and privacy made trust feel less like an abstraction. A system is intimate when someone has to live inside its consequences.