Spent this week doing something I haven't done in a long time: just reading papers again, for the sake of it, not to solve a specific problem in front of me. Went back through some of the classics — reread Attention Is All You Need for the first time in years, actually, cover to cover instead of skimming for a specific detail. Strange experience. I understand every sentence of it instantly now, obviously, the way you'd reread a children's book as an adult. But there's a version of reading it I can't get back — the version where half the diagram looked like a different alphabet and I had to stare at it for twenty minutes to get anywhere. Not nostalgic about it exactly. Just aware that a kind of not-knowing I used to have is permanently gone, replaced by a kind of not-knowing that's much bigger and much less comfortable.