2017-02-08 at

Yawn 22

8Feb Begin

What about the non-Islamic terrorists?
Point of strategy: I simply don't see why they don't respond to this with one of those charts showing causes of death, and where the cause of death is murder, the religion of the murderer, and then discuss the religious profiling implications of that...

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Weak. Cough, cough. The worst way to live. Enforced calisthenics and feeding. No likelihood, only some hope for work.

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Snowflakes:
I really hate snowflakes. In my office, so far, the policy is to burn them all... and see if there's anything useful that remains. I don't care if they're male, female, brown, purple, yellow, green, pink, blue, or red, hot or not, in or out of style. If they melt, they go to the drain. Can't build an army out of wusses. No dreamers please. There are LOADS of companies that welcome dreamers - PLEASE go over there. lol.

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Boston Dynamics' two wheeled two legged robot:
Super efficient. Rolls fast on flat ground, crawls on four limbs on very uneven ground. Someone suggested sticking a pilot / passenger seat on top. This is what the segway was meant to be.

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"Angela Merkel Has a Playbook for Bullies like Trump": #teambeta

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Following discussion on US bill proposing rise of H1B minimum requirement from $60,000 (1989), to $130,000 (2017)... some reflection was in order. Brief summary of my life post college. 2005-2014 were planned for studying commerce optimising for education, deprioritising salary - that got cut short at the end of 2012. After that I've been supposed to try and prioritise making money for a decade. Maybe it'll get cut short again, and I'll just get back to math, properly.

2006-Jan: $6,162
2008-Jan: $7,384 *
2010-Jan: $14,545 *
2012-Jan: $21,243
2014-Jan: $5,373 *
2015-Jan: $49,568
2016-Jan: $10,144 *
2017-Jan: $9,480 *

* Freelance gig, so net comp; other gigs were proper employment with statutory benefits of 12-13% moreover.

I have had this strawman take profit target of $10 MM in 2013 dollars, so basically I figure I'm more likely to run out of my decade before I hit it ... seven to go, woo hoo...

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On people yelling that everything is not normal:
The main problem with many people, is that they expect normalcy. That's exactly when it's time to remove the safeties.

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Let's talk about human memory. I have a slightly weird one, as I curate my worldview such that I've essentially been the same person I was in 1997 (14yo).

Many of my friends and classmates from that era don't remember much of that time, nor do they identify with their personalities of that era... essentially believing that they have since become different people.

That, to me, just makes me realise that I essentially befriend new people over and over again through history, though they inhabit the same body. (Philosophical hairsplitting yields a view that everyone does that, just doesn't notice.)

I also experience that friends with higher exposures to alcohol, nicotine, and other drugs are typically more immersed in the moment than others. The alcoholics in particular have weaker long term memories. Maybe I'm just making it up in my head. Also, it's entirely possible that people with less vivid long term memories have a predisposition to chemical abuse.

POTUS behaves like an alcoholic crackhead. Years of abuse may or may not actually have played a factor in that person. People have noted that he is diagnosable with various mental disorders (arbitrary pathologies), and I wonder if it will ever become an issue.

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Enforced feeding.

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One week wiped out for illness. That's 2% of the year at least... :(

Acceleration, velocity, displacement, who knows...

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Bannon is basically as bloodthirsty and bigoted as bin Laden. You need to understand that they're on the same level, in order to appreciate how the USA is where it is right now. Do his peers not see that this is the very threat he attracts? Consider the fate of bin Laden. Lol.

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Same shit, different day. :)

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These days, I wish I worked at Netflix. They have balanced masteries of art and technology.

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Never appoint a committee unless you're willing to fire the entire committee if the outcome is undesirable.

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Well that was about a quarter day's worth of coaching and remedial management. Lousy week for work - close to utter shit. The only saving grace is that there's enough padding in middle management to kinda sorta hold things together. But basically, we crawl. Working at high level forensic tasks means that work stalls easily when memory is frequently disrupted by physical illness - when working on low level tasks it is easy to ignore sensual aberrations and to simply perform specific duties, whereas high level forensics require a large memory space, and enough computation to run design simulations on the fly. So not happening this week.

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On the intrinsicness of intent in lying:
This is a common problem where I work. Conversations are often raised to me with inaccurate factual content, and then I have to squish them without calling anyone a liar... because the speakers are often [unfortunate] enough to believe that what they are saying is true, or unsure about how to communicate the facts clearly, or just unclear about what the facts are, or more than one of the above, simultaneously. Lol.

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Education can be sad. Here is a failure of training in the arts - in literacy:

People often struggle to speak clearly and with conviction about their mental states. We teach people how to speak just enough to engage in barter for economic sustenance, but when it comes to quantifying an idea... an emotion... the structure of a social expectation... they have internalised an intuition of what these things are without having a public language to represent it. So they struggle in conversations that involve the representation of uncommon ideas, until their terror from fight-or-flight drives them to fear the ideas, instead of their inability to speak. It is sad.

In the arts, to drive business, science, and civil society... we must administer better trainings in speech. If you want a job, say you want a job; if you are skillless, say so; if you want to be touched, say so; if you wish for no proximity, say so. That is not even demanding of the ability to communicate reasons... but the communication of complex states of affairs cannot even begin without the communication of basic states of affairs...

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COUGH enforced work out and feeding time COUGH

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Physical conditioning cycled. Enforced feeding. Of course...

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Still sick. But not too sick to go to work! Woohoo! Now there's a whole week to catch up on -_-

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Logged two hours of short-term remedial work. Hmm. Hopefully I can get to the long-term remedial stuff in a bit.

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On the Superbowl ad with the Wall:
I just realised that the first thing that's going to happen to Trump's wall (presuming you can walk right up to the damn thing on the Mexican side) is that it's going to turn into massive squatter encampment. Shade in the dessert is a scarce resource - now shade on the border between two countries with massive border tariffs? You're just CREATED the biggest black market ever, that will indeed rule for fifty years if you let it sit for that long... what the world needs now is Tumblr called Trumpitecture, that illustrates the likely implications of each harebrained idea by the Tweeter in Chief...

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Sometimes I worry that I am not pressing our staff hard enough. Then I remind myself that I generally do business by opening doors, and letting nature take its course. It's a good way to stay focused on the things that matter - like sleep.

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An excruciatingly weak and unproductive fortnight. Haven't had a bacterial infection of this magnitude in years - I hope it is terminating, without the need for antibiotic administration. Time to start using the time clock to ratchet back into a sensible number of hours delivered per week, aiming for at least 60 clean.

Fight all the fires... five fires before breakfast, in fact I expect to be at least seven by the time I walk into the factory. We're not dying or stablising quickly enough... we need greater volatility, perhaps.

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Done with first fires of the day. Hopefully no new ones, then a return to remedial long-term work later.

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As a child, my training would be to get on my knees and pray for divine intervention when surrounded with tomfoolery. But these days, I'd rather anticipate failure, throw up a few contingency plans, and start working people into shape. Strange.

Speaking of shape, I wish I was in shape. Deadlifting 85% of my bodyweight and running 22km thrice a week... so 2005/6

Massive failure everywhere. The only thing to do is enforce more feeding, workouts, sleep, and try to get better at the game.

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I agree. But being happy with nothing, or even being happy with a criminal status, is not something that many people are willing to work towards.

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Three values and MBTI type:
Intp.
Information, predictability, apathy
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I think the definition of a value wasn't quite nailed down. If we're going with the definition of values as axioms of ethical argument... then I like to go around deleting my axioms. So maybe there are no values, but to value that too much would make it itself a value, as they say, to desire to desire nothing is a desire. So per classical treatment, the only way to abandon values is simply to moderately apply the policy of avoiding values. Some might call it free will, but if we want a technically precise definition... some of the terms here work better.

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If you stay in X society but prefer Y society values... you have a few options:
1. Lose your preference for Y
2. Pretend the preference is not there
3. Change X into Y
4. Move yourself from X to Y
5. Build Z as a copy of X

I personally am very lazy to argue... while people are trying to set up barriers of the visa etc. variety... so I tend to 1. or 3. with regards to national boundaries and 4. or 5. with regards to workplaces unless I am paid highly then as a job, sure: 3. .


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At the end of it all, anyone has the freedom to decide whether they do or do not adhere to civil norms in fulfilling their own interest. The probability of being classified as a psycho/socio-path simply increases if you find it easier to inconvenience others in your own interest. The probability of your becoming a candidate for classification... increases as members of society increasingly judge that you have inconvenienced someone.

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I actually like the knitty-gritty of nerd work... you know what never fails to interrupt my satisfaction there... it is the lunacy of people in power elsewhere in the same organisation.

My usual line of questioning progresses too quickly to (1) who made this mess, (2) who does he report to, (3) can I talk to that reporting manager...

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Not that I superlike math, but it remains the most complex subject after social work, and the most complex structured subject.

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_numbers …

Still wishing I had more time to study math, hehe.

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So much white noise and ringing... I won't be surprised if there are a bunch of tumours up there. Meanwhile, I guess it's meningitis.

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Clothes are to people, what icing is to cake. Then again, I don't even like cake... so that tells you a fair bit about what me and clothes.

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8Feb End

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19 Feb Begin

Twitter:
I want to know too

You were always in the picture.

In case there was ever any doubt, this was an ode to you. ;)

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Ok, I hope this tinnitus wasn't caused by chlorhexidine exposure -_-

Where would I be without you?

Just enough light to be pretty. Thinking about privilege. Zeitgeist.


Metaphysics ) Epistemology ) Ethics ) Common Life
Here is one way to graph the subset relationship between subjects in formal philosophy.

Dramatically stoic.


Not sure if I can crawl along at this rate for another seven years, but there's only one way to find out :p

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Explaining to F&B staff that they are going to be Uberised eventually, anyway.
:point_up: It may be helpful to have in mind where we are headed in the future

:arrow_forward: we are building an abstraction layer across the entire F&B market

:arrow_forward: such an abstraction layer means that there have to be SOPs and a workflow that are common across all related outlets; you can call this "the Sudo framework / way / interface", which includes similar gear, customer service, dress code, etc.

:arrow_forward: this means that any "Sudo certified staff" can take shifts in any "Sudo compliant workplace" with minimal training, and transition cost to wage payer and wage receiver

:arrow_forward: we can refer to the workplaces and workers as being on "the Sudo network"

:arrow_forward: workplaces may fill 100% of their staffing requirements on the Sudo network, or less than 100%

:arrow_forward: all workplaces and workers on the Sudo network are accessable to each other via a single software platform

:arrow_forward: work places and workers can bid and ask any price for their time; it is a giant auction, like the stock market

:arrow_forward: we're not moving in this direction because we're trying to be funny; we're doing it because it will happen to the world inevitably, even if we ignore the possibility

:point_up: I don't think it'll be as simple an operation as Uber; I always figured that running this would be about as complicated as running an Accenture. You can't have a monolithic workplace framework - rather you have an entire graph / tree / families of related frameworks, where the platform offers the service of delineating your marginal cost of moving talent across the graph of frameworks. Which is why it's more like a consulting/manpower services firm, than a tech firm. So you can't Y-comb this per se, though you could try a meatless app business model, but I'm almost sure that the systems integration layer is the real problem. Any idiot can design a workflow, but it takes a lot of people to prove that it works.

:point_up: A routine digitisation of a workplace:
(1) set up a cron; humans execute tasks
(2) start replacing human executed tasks with IoT/machines
(3) go meta and redesign the original human-operated workflow which (1) was based on
(4) repeat

:point_up: Lol - a few people will actually get this without further elucidation - probably people with experience in software architecture. At the end of the world, it's not about the F&B industry, but about how we manage work as a civilisation, at the resolution of matching individuals with differentiable capabilities [and tolerances, and preferences] to the highest bidder.

... then again IIRC Paul Graham did say he was interested in this problem. Lol. https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/

... maybe one day I should try and figure out how to apply to Ycomb with this.
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I worry about all the people I have to inform about the world. I remind them that their desires and opinions are of no consequence. I remind them that they must work beyond what they are capable of, in order to achieve certain change. And it is probably crushing them. So I worry. And I worry that I worry too much, because there remains much critical work to be done that does not involve these people. Always some sort of balance needs to be pursued.

I've been up worrying about how many souls I have to crush today. Sad. But job. Ok, getting up now.

Addendum: after some friends from other circles engaged with this post... I felt it necessary to highlight that this is how I feel about maintaining order at my workplace. LOL. It is not about other involvements in society.

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Sentience, privilege, active O2, checked. Anticipation of failure, check. Metaphors deleted. On alert for daily ad hoc emergencies, talent management, QA, and stuff. Still underperforming tremendously on remedial work in accounts.

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Urg. Social work took precedence after breakfast and I seem to have drafted an undergraduate syllabus for software engineering. But no more social work today... at least not in that area... back to accounts... I think.

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A dipshit by any other name is a dipshit. I am a dipshit. But my main challenge in life is not that... rather it is how I find myself economically pressured to hide the fact from others, that I rarely find them any better than myself. Chins up, smiles ON :)

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Dear god, I thank you for Milo and the Trump administration. They've really upped the public relations game for everyone - now that their operations have become prime examples of how to spin things because they do it so blatantly. What the industry has known how to do for eternity. More literacy about these things, leads to less explaining when we do it. I guess. Or I hope.

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This is completely daft, but I think I'll submit a Ycombinator application for Summer2017. You already know what it'll be for.

Add that to my overflowing todo list. -_-

No, the occupation of my time is on the current project, and moving the entire business to the US would be a mindfuck for investors even if it worked. I have a meat-heavy proposal, not a highly-tech-leveraged one. Essentially, our operations exist here in brick and mortar. Unless someone buys this elephant off me, or it dies.

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19 shareholders, largest holding 20%, ZERO employees, no pipeline of talent for succession in key roles, longest serving and most reliable staff probably at most 50% ready in terms of skillset and availability to run any one of three departments, incomplete accounts, regulatory compliance, and unstable production lines.

Would you buy that? Well, if they do, I would be surprised. Hehe.

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To qualify as a founder (single founders discouraged) they look for 10% mininum equity. We have two candidates. Maybe one more if we consolidate some friends and family holdings behind another individual.

Of these, one candidate has been active in management for 18 months. 18 others inactive. But given the pivot, if funding does come it, it may make sense for the two other potential qualifiers to jump over and do SF. That still doesn't tell us who's running operations meanwhile - hey maybe we send the two previously inactive guys to SF, but I stay back and run ops. Erm. Not sure they'd buy that.

All theory. Which is why, time has not yet provided for a coherent strategy about this.

;)



I don't think it's a good idea.

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I consider up to seven years ahead. I've done it too many times before. I anticipate boredom. Pacing is key. I remember what I was working on in 2010 and 2003 and 1996. Just another epoch. Albeit one defined by commerce more, and less by academia, politics, or intellectual pursuit. Then again, politics never ends.

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Sentience, privilege, active O2, checked. Social stimuli, few. Haptic loop, moderately weak. Based on variance in inputs this week, and correlation with outputs observed, this appears to support the need for a consumption rate increase for protein and B complex, and a decrease for water. Engaging job...

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Objectively speaking: it's getting harder to scare myself into the office. That either means we look like we're going slow, but we're going fast - or we're just getting old and complacent.

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Sock variance increased. (I've resigned myself to the notion that so long as I use this laundromat, sock variance will tend to increase.)

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Conversations with non-technical people on touchy subjects such as religion as a superset of theism, atheism, and humanism... can't be allowed to go on for very long without money. Lol

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Surely there must be more people on the market who do not believe in the intrinsic value of people? Finding more seems futile. We must work with whatever treks through the door.

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2023 base case: zero net worth; start a new job, in competition with school leavers, again; state of the country: socially conservative, and currency in ruin. Does that thought help me to focus on the work at hand? Maybe.

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Enforced feeding. Enforced rest.

The past cannot be modified. The distant future is not a reliable pursuit. The near future, which we call the present, is all that can be reached.

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I find myself generally unsympathetic to the plight of most individuals. (There are many people; even the busiest social worker can only reach a few million in their lifetime.) As soon as someone makes demographic classifications, an abstraction has been deployed and the individual's plight is depersonalised in discussion. Pushing this sort of abstraction further, leads me to rarely consider the whys and wherefores of human minutiae. Instead I lazily leap forward to the question, "what's left after all the weak ones have killed each other?" To stand outside the continuum of time and inquire of it, that is the business of reflection. Not that such business may be construed to be commercial - but even in commerce, I wonder simply if we will survive, if our project will terminate, and how it will come to pass.

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Serial rapist, or Trump vs America, really...

Thousands of rapes every month, and no one blinks an eye. One fucker with a thousand rapes from twenty years ago, and everyone loses their minds.

Do you see the elegance of natural selection, as distasteful as those implications may be? Do you notice this man's contribution to society?



There is a book, for new parents, called Let Them Eat Dirt. you may have heard of it ;)

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Biological systems are defined as systems that are somewhat self-preserving. It's not an answer to why they exist, but it does classify them as one of the kinds of things in the world that happens to exist.

Cybernetic systems are more broadly those that contain elements of control and communication. (Cybernetics can be construed to be a superset of biology.)

Governments and nationstates are another subset of cybernetic systems. If we draw an analogy between nationstates and human bodies... then the book Let Kids Eat Dirt is about making sure that bodies are exposed to enemies frequently enough to allow the bodies' defense mechanisms to train properly against larger threats.

Likewise you need contrarian assholes to fuck up a government every so often, so that civilisation as a whole remains aware of those possibilities. That's what folks like Thiel are betting on (I mean, that's how I see it).
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The fact that the "problems that wouldn't exist without this administration" are challenging, is proof that the system allows them. Unless the problems manifest, you can't demonstrate that the system is weak. Once the system is demonstrably weak, it allows for the system to plan against such weakness. So better luck next time. :)

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I do not mean to avoid being offensive.


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All parties driven to attack or defend a part of the world, by a deeply personal set of moral convictions, are fools. I must not allow myself to become like them. #thoughtsbeforebed

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Reflection, cleaning, feeding, work, physical conditioning, social conditioning, in that order, somewhat. Enforcing.

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"Why are we going to the right? The right looks like a disaster."
"We not sure what he's afraid of, it's not God, the devil, or the abyss. So I don't think he's going anywhere but to the right."
"I've figured it out. He's afraid of not going to the right."
"But why?"
"He's afraid of not knowing what will happen."
"What a price to pay for curiosity. It's not fair if he's not paying for it, is it?"
"I suppose. Maybe, do not follow this one."

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Sorely tempted to spam the Whatsapp group with the fake news that we're changing the company slogan to "Focus. Commitment. Sheer Will."

But it coheres quite nicely with the #workharder #weworkharder tags I have lying around.

Also today, I'm thinking that it's the only information for investors... which makes me a bit sad, because I had more to offer.

BRB. Figuring out eyeballs on last year's finances... lol

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Reading annotated anatomical diagrams for knife fighting: terrifying stuff. #beforebed

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I was telling someone it's been a rather shitty year. Actually, my main concerns are dying of illness COUGH or going to prison (hmm). But otherwise everything's tedious but predictable. Just people being people. Not the best people. Just people. Same old people, decade in, decade out. Same old mainstream societals. Gotta work together...

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"Hi is this Yang?"
"Speaking."
"I'm calling from X and I'd like to explore Y."
"No thank you."
"And what is the reason for..."
*click*

Ok pal, you got in one sentence more than my mother does on a busy day.

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There are two kinds of linguistic incompetency in any workplace:

(1) cannot talk
(2) cannot talk, about talking

We're only interested in the second kind, because you only get good at fixing (1) by fixing (2).

Happy V Day ;)

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Reduced aspirations leading to greater rates of improvement. Fragment. Went down from 23.5kg+EZbar back to 20kg+EZbar. Realised that a >10% jump up in resistance was too ambitious. Been stalling for months. Revised. More reps first.

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So happy that this US election cycle was a lot more interesting than those in recent memory. No quarter given. Below the belt. Over the top. So much win. True innovation. More.

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On Quartz headline: "40% of foreign students in the US have no close friends on campus: The culture shock of loneliness"
I saw this happening. And so within my first week, along with various other decisions, I decided to hang out for most of my college years with "the brown dot in the commons," when I studied in the US. :) I believe I helped a few people. Hard to say how many or how.

Just made a point to hang out and make conversation with the quiet/marginal international students. Nothing profound. Much like the small talk of working in customer service.

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I'm having a good day, in a foul month, in a dank year. That tells me I should expect the next days to get worse, if mean reversion is to be counted on. ;)

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Enforced waking, cleaning, work. Much drama anticipated. Much apathy required.

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Glory, glory, apathy.

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In online discussions:
And completely separate from the ethics of the parties in the situation we are discussing... I refer now to the ethics of ourselves as parties in a discussion. It seems that now, having made as much of a point as I had wished to, with your affirmative understanding of that point, and its intended level of offensiveness, I now judge that I should refrain from twisting the knife any further, and I shall withdraw from further commentary, temporarily.

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Minimised carb consumption for a couple of days. Probably need to moderate that upwards a bit. Unless l just need more sleep.

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I have this bad habit in life where I always go tabula rasa and nuke past portfolios so that I can achieve clarity of mind. It works, but it does mean that I'm often not wealthy.

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I always giggle a bit when the debate comes up as to whether the role of a university is just to develop intellects or if it is best positioned to develop ethics as well. Weapons only, or weapons and policy. But typically it's a debate to be avoided where strong opinions may abound.

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I think social Darwinism is a centrist position. It's like that other agnostic/etc. thread. Omg, either I'm on holiday, it's a gig, or I'd better not open up too many cans uh them wurms. Lol

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Looking forward to being a trainer of boyfriend bots for old ladies, I am.

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On telling staff to behave as if they own something:
IKR - I don't bother unless it's with regards to creative freedom. The payoff to the person who "behaves like they own it," needs to be obvious.

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19 Feb End

26 Feb Begin

Enforced eating, work, exercise, rest, more eating, more work, social support, next planning session. Go.

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Cantonese: Mat lan lei keh?
British: This is... cock.
Business English: This work is inconsistent - let's review it and discuss it in Slack.

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Sometimes I feel super privileged. In the moments when you have a pretty face to look at, a calm conversation, and a warm hand to hold. Regardless of burning business issues all around lol.

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Kraft offered to buy Unilever.

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My totd: saw some handprint on the glass window and started cleaning it. "GUYS THIS IS NOT TITANIC"

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On polyamory: Form partnerships, protect stakeholders, deal transparently, prepare for risks, take profit, stop loss, and most importantly learn to measure everything, manage talent, and set clear expectations miles and miles ahead when possible. It's just business.

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On this:

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Uber is crashing.

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Fwiw: having been in a US elementary school, I technically did say the pledge of allegience when I was seven years old. 😂😂

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On paedophilia: One of the best topics for trolling, because it strikes people so close to their sense of pre-rational morality.

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Mostly recovered from illness, and mostly caught up on accounting. Now let's see if there's any time left to avoid a rapid scheduled disassembly of the cafe... ho, hum.

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In the parlance of games, Milo is a chaotic neutral. In the interest of general disruption, he may ally himself with one political position or another, but inherently, such society will dissolve around him.

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Attack the day.

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Definitely healing. Definitely not fast enough.

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Eight months of fire fighting. Well, most of the fires seem to be out. Perhaps it's time to go on offense again, before we completely capsize on the current trajectory.

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So a new friend reminded me. My work is typically a process of unravelling the sadness which is natural to my point of view about the state of affairs in the world. Many people have no tolerance for such a state of mind, and they will violently oppose it. But that is the only state of mind I find interesting. Joy is child's play, violence is an animal instinct, pain even a plant can understand, but to put it all upon a single narrative arc is left only to entities, meat or machina, with our kind of capability. Everything else, is dross.

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Sometimes it feels like this is a daily affair:
Me: let us do this thing.
Subordinate: it a a weird thing.
Me: indeed, it is a weird thing.
Sub: I will not do the the weird thing.
Me: it is easy, look, I do the weird thing. Let me show you how.
Sub: I am nervous about the weird thing.
Me: do not be afraid. It is not your weird thing. I will be blamed for the weird thing.
Resourcer: are we doing a weird thing?
Me: yes, we are doing the weird thing.
Res: why are we allocating time to the weird thing.
Me: the weird thing will develop the business.
Res: but the weird thing has strange implications.
Me: but the implications are not as strange as you say, really.
[After conversations with multiple subs.]
Me: I am now too tired to do the weird thing. I am going to sleep. Let us try to do the weird thing tomorrow.
Everyone: You may try again.

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On Cobain's dress sense: Can't say I do it on purpose. I'm just thrifty. Also it's like growing up in Mahathir's Malaysia - ain't much to be said about the quality of the environment. You just get used to it. ;)

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Day 604

Enforced waking, feeding, and work. Maybe exercise. I am tired. But that is quite common, these days.

I was thinking about how some choose to build an arc of what they have acquired, whereas some choose to build arcs of what has been discarded, from their respective portfolios. I suppose in the long run it is the arc that matters - but that is putting the process ahead of the product. Perhaps I have little appreciation for the present, for products - relative to an appreciation for the overarching process.

Contemplation of past losses can only be encouraged in analytical terms. To avoid current loss, contemplation should consolidate all capacity for emotional attachment. True, or false? This is an imbalanced state, which may be implemented for its tactical utility.

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"Do you love to annoy errbody?"
"Filters. Active filters. Too willing to discard those I love greatly, because sometimes that love is too costly."
#economics

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Machine failure. Whee...

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I frequently encounter folks who feel bad when they are told that their work is bad. I understand but do not appreciate this. How can we improve our talent management processed to hire, and train people to excel at detaching their sense of self-worth and personality from their work?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/those-four-words-may-offend-you-also-just-save-louis-m-profeta-md

Precisely. I am disgusted. But I will continue to try and develop what talent is required to make this work.


I can't use pride on most days. Just not my thing. Haha


I apologise for being a robot. In the sorry not sorry way.
I asked her to try and focus on the product (bad) and complemented on her efforts and her team (good).
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Five members of executive capability, all in a Kancil. What could possibly go wrong. #keystaffrisk

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On an acquaintance getting trolled:

Look on the bright side, mate. As image manipulation becomes cheaper and more automated, even blokes with small dicks can be pornstars too... until of course, we've replaced human personalities entirely with superior machinery.

We've seen the CGI Tarkin BTS documentary on the "face pipeline," so it's kinda obvious that the ass, dick, clit, and titty pipelines are all isomorphic.

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Five members of executive capability, all in a Kancil. What could possibly go wrong. #keystaffrisk

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On dinner rituals: I did, growing up. It was a loathsome inanity. I am so happy to be free of staring at the same faces and listening to the same feckless conversation topics on endless replay.


26 Feb End

3 Mar Begin

Yay. Working on product again. I hope it's not too late.

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That moment when you joke about filing for personal chapter 11, so that your company doesn't have to. Lol. Criminal intent?

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Re: WikiHow's article on spotting sociopaths.

How to spot a nasty person, made spookier by the application of a non-technical slur. Ah, pop culture, you've done it again.

"Break it down for me," she said.

"First of all, 'sociopath' is a non-technical term. The problem is that pop culture has made it a thing that sounds technical. Which is interesting. Because technically then, I can shamelessly , say "I am a sociopath, because it is relatively meaningless to say so."

Secondly, the amount of effort that's gone into this cartoonised slurring of people with particular preferences is rather juvenile.

On the other hand, I suppose... there do indeed exist a great many people out there who would fall victim to the boogeymen described by the article, so it is best that such juvenile articles as this exist in the interest of benevolently misleading the would be victims.

The sacrifice to be made then, is by all the false positives turned up by juvenile psychoanalysts scouring their networks for sociopaths. 😂😂😂"

Addendum: to top it all off... it doesn't address the true evil at hand: intentionally manipulative, evil people, in a coherent fashion.

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Bogeys on the left, bogeys on the right.

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Enforced waking, feeding, work, exercise. I think I need to get a pulse monitor for training. This job is killing me. No thanks thanks to staff who regularly ask me to work less without fixing our problems. Hahah. So sweet and stupid.

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Job ad blurb: Cold, heartless, talent required. Passion optional. Inquire within.

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In an effort to make work interesting again, I may have to establish more targets regarding my personal interest, giving me reason to reduce R&R, groom/train off more distracting objects in memory, thereby freeing resources for real social/wage work. Complicated.

But more ethical (I hope), than torching the project simply because it does not appear to benefit me.

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This is where I start telling people they're clowns for talking to me about stuff outside the correct Slack channel. Don't want to hear it, don't know anything about it, and assume it never happened.

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At 7.5% of marine pull-up competency. Guess I have a new physical conditioning optimisation target.

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Kids complain about too-many-messaging platforms. Too many "stories" platforms. You know where this is heading. The "stories" RFC. The end.

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Another day, another life. Another trite attempt to mine gold from dirt, to turn children into killing machines and their control units, and to turn turds into saleable art. Another day, another cartload of legacy attachments, points of information on the cultural landscape, another list of things [safe to do, and not so safe to do]. Another. Another. Anothe...

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On Logan:

I'm looking for references to Leon.

Another odd business investment: you freeze the growth of an asset before it passes puberty. Maybe just a test subject. #whatthehellweretheythinking

I like Laura. She's my kinda girl. The kind who would never love me.
(Perhaps like that INTJ.)

One thing all these idiot reviews are getting wrong. X23 =\= X23-23.

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Earbuds under earmuffs, or earplugs under headphones. Hmm.

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On microprocessor design: SIgn me up. I need to get back to work that is actually interesting at some point . lOL

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On dependency tracking:
Dependency tracking matters a lot more "in production" ;) which is where I typically find myself, I guess.

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Not confused. Amused. Malaysia is too simplistic to confuse me, mostly. The non-sequitur nature of our conventions is very predictable.

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On Trumpnation: The question is whether it's possible to get stuff done without pissing off people.

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I want to build hoodies with built in mesh/acrylic visors.

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Health care: it's the DEFINING policy concern in an environment where economic inequality has become the electorate's loudest gripe.

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3 Mar End


9 Mar Start

Either I read the screen wrong, or no one else wants to talk about X23 referring to the entire class, not Laura.

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Grandfather story time.

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I can do all things through him who gave me Google. #modernlife #stafftraining

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Too many conversations start with "20 years ago," and I guess I'm in full uncle mode now.

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Not yet dead, but errrrveryday, just a little bit closerrrr 🎵🎶

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Enforced rest. Check.
Enforced feeding. Check.
Enforced exercise. Check.
Enforced breeding. Hold up a second...

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There's nothing I despise more than a human being looking for a leader.

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Algorithm tweak:
If I am sedentary, and a message arrives, I must first estimate if I will be energetic enough to exit the sedentary state after responding to the message. If the estimate is yes, then the message should be checked, otherwise its arrival should be ignored. Moral of the story: only invest in things you can act on effectively.

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Surrounded by unenlightened dumbfucks, it is no fault of anyone's but the universe. There are only two ways forward about any operation...poke along just to see what happens, or to destroy everything. :) Time for lunch.

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Advice to staff on dealing with strong negative feedback from customers:

"So before you read (customer feedback), I would encourage you to view comments like this as normal business. Try not to think about it in terms of who is more right/wrong, true/false... but DO discuss with colleagues how to tactically address such customers so that they feel entertained. (This was feedback on XX AM shift.) We do not need to care about customers or work, as long as we do the right protocols, and keep things moving in harmony. My response to the customer was:
"I will forward your thoughts to the team for discussion. You should always demand the coffee you want, or your money back.".

✌ Kipidap. It is just work.😇😉"

I sometimes wonder if I am dispensing the most ASPD-skewed advice in town... or if others do this too.

"Just think of it as DoTA. Whatever the fuck comes walking in that door... for chrissake, please have a plan to deal with it."

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Cover your eyes, and it's easier to fit in among the blind. Cover everything.

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Hmm. Standing by for staff communication roadblocks, old issues, old people, reluctant to play nice with colleagues, and enthusiastic to project their reluctance on others. We shall observe this closely. Meanwhile, we shall also be standing by to explain to anyone who asks for french fries, that french fries are bad for you. And that breads baked dark are not burnt until they turn black. On we go... merry-go-rounding...

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Resting heart rate now 60-75. Wanna get it back in in the 40s.

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Enforced feeding. Work

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"Apron. Apron..."
"Sorry! I forgot..."
"Next month I'll forget to pay you."
"Sorry!"
"Just stating the obvious. I do my job, you do yours."

If I have to tell folks what to do on a daily basis... aha, we're a looong way from stability. #COisXOstill

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Enforced feeding. Work

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34 years as a citizen of this country, 29 as a resident. Food mediocre, people just like people anywhere, administrative structures lacking, politics as always. I always wonder which will claim me first, the criminal justice system, the weather, or some bloke with a parang. I regularly check, but still feel no attachments.

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Operations planning: discussion at work, and ex-work. Algorithms, precision of language, prioritisations, and such.

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Physical conditioning, failure phenomena observable:

- pain due to friction/impact

- reduction of computation/conscious memory buffer size (attributable to oxygen availability)

- muscle failure

These are first-persona observable causes of failure. Any one is sufficient to cause operational failure of an ongoing task.

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Monkey bars. I remember being ten years old and being surprised by improvement achievable within a week. I decided to get really good at it later. Twenty four years on, I'm reminded that sometimes I just procrastinate too much.

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Comparing each four-year period between 1992 and 2016, I'm dismayed by how slowly I've progressed. Most of my time on earth goes to making a living. The most productive years of course, were when I was taking the maximum quantity of resources from others: in college, on scholarship. After that, I decided that others would appreciate such monies more than I did. So I decided to slip into a life of less privilege. Tedium ensues.

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Supernatural metaphysics and epistemologies of communication between God and man - it's really easy to explain if you describe it using information security and cryptology concepts. Authentication, encryption, hardening, man in the middle attacks, etc.

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Supernatural metaphysics and epistemologies of communication between God and man - it's really easy to explain if you describe it using information security and cryptology concepts. Authentication, encryption, hardening, man in the middle attacks, etc.

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Print of menu with ad hoc colour choices failed to pass usability requirements. Colours will be revised, menu to be reprinted, cost of first printing to be written off. This work is shit.

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"This is getting more and more complicated."
"This is normal. I did say we're never fast enough :wink That's mainly why I keep reminding everyone who works here that we're slow. If we don't get the high priority stuff done, we'll never get to the medium priority stuff. And we'll just suck forever :joy::joy: "

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Being social:
Step 1: Obtain and peruse all available information on society.
Step 2a: Try not to vomit.
Step 2b: Try not to laugh.
Step 3: Engage.

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I'm not used to this level of uncertainty, but it is what it is. On the average day, I monitor the output of three departments, F, K, and C. (More guesstats later.)

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Marcomms function is screwing up collateral printing UX. IT function is screwing up receipt printing UX.
I think we have to catch up on a whole year of staffing contracts. Audit is finally proceeding - which means more remedial work. Oh boy. What a day...

On visual art: it's a non-professional, best effort lol. I blame the plumber. And I blame the accountant for the plumbing. And I blame the graphic designer for our accounts.

Oh iteration one was done by me. Iteration two was horrible. But I encourage team members to have the benefit of the doubt, so I let them change things. Iterations three and four are gradual reversions to iteration one.

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Every day should begin with a one hour meditation, on the fact that despite our best people not being very smart, it is possible to work through their joint contributions to form something of value. Albeit very slowly, and often uncompetitively.

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Apparently my Haskell is rusty, and looks like pig pascal.... haha

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9 Mar End

Nyotaimori

The feeling you get when you're hanging out with untouchable women.

2017-02-06 at

The Ethics of Trolls, Public Health, and the End of Teaching

Following the 1st February black bloc ruckus at Berkeley, Milo has now received increased discussion in my circles. One of the popular criticisms leveled at his work is that he is effectively a catalyst for white supremacist activity. (You can read about the facts of his operation here and there if you wish. I'll skip forward.) Thereupon I tend to enjoy bringing discussions to bear on the motivations behind Milo's work, hoping to find a generalisation that we can find useful in addressing such "social ills."

My typical opener into such a discussion raises the abstract hypothesis: Milo's motivations may be characterised more acutely as being trollish rather than white supremacist. White supremacism is a tribal inclination with a closed mind about genetic value; whereas, trolling is sadism with a closed mind about how dumb people should be valued. You typically want to lock up people like Milo on account of their work resulting in more suffering or death for certain people... but that is a symptom of the problem. Identifying the symptom with the wrong cause in a "differential diagnosis," is going to make treatment of the problem harder. Of course, the brute force solution is to simply yell "stop Milo," which amounts to amputation - it's hardly elegant, and it definitely doesn't stop the next version of Milo whenever she pops up.

Trolling in general refers to a broad swath of communication patterns, ranging from pure malice, to Socratic inquiry and social Darwinism. Some trolls are merely sadists looking for pleasure in the pain of those; some trolls are naive comedians who may not realise that the sources of their comedy are in pain; some trolls may simply wish to demonstrate a point of fact; some trolls see their social mission as the "work of god,"* in that they work towards building a more intelligent and better informed population (or audience)... and furthermore various subsets of the last type may differ from each other in their comfort levels: about how much pain and death is a worthwhile trade-off for group improvements in intelligence. (* As a colleague put it, when referring to how Milo appears to view his own work - though we hadn't yet discussed what the nature of that work might be, or what Milo itself thinks about its nature.)

Now as we continue to wrestle with trolls on and off the Internet, the decades of online trolling have focused the discussion somewhat. But the subject remains studied with a lack of nuance... academia is only just starting to taxonomise trolling and its malcontents (briefly discussed in the paragraph above). If we refer to trolling as a "social ill," then it seems appropriate for us to discuss the "public health interventions," or "public policies," regarding this phenomenon. But if this analogy is to be taken seriously, we must also note that the state of policing language, thought, and custom remains in its infancy in 2017 - perhaps much like public health and general surgery were far less systematic in the 18th century, than they are now. Why this is so is rather obvious - a relatively structured model of the human body has been developed over recent centuries, to a point where we can run computer-assisted simulations not just of 3D structures, but also of epidemiological phenomena on global scale.

This is not yet the case with language. The greatest navigators of language at this time remain human - simulators that are all-encompassing have not yet fully mastered the body of words and sentences that can be generated from the rules of English, let alone the detailed structures of human consciousness which are semanticised by the former. But this will not remain the case for much longer. Over the past decade (it is now 6 February 2017) we have produced encouraging progress in machine learning systems - the most recent popular headline being the subordination of human poker players to machines at the highest levels of competition. At the current pace of development, it will be completely unsurprising (to those working in this field) if we produce within a decade, systems whose ability to compose [art, music, poetry], or whose ability to analyse [film, literature, social behaviour] matches that of the best human beings in these respective fields.

The idol of human consciousness will quickly fall. To-date it remains a somewhat mystery about how it works (so long as we leave out the ontological question), but within two to three decades we should expect to have robots that are able to debate and teach these subjects at the university level, and within four to five decades from today we should expect to have robots that are able to raise and culture a child from birth through to university in any subject. Professors and TAs beware - you won't be replaced too soon, but you'll have fewer classes to teach, and therefore more research to deliver, and perhaps, more opportunities to discuss holistic education as an interdisciplinary activity, instead of rote focus within your discipline. It will not be hard for a near-future system to read a text, say a Milo blog post, and to spew out within seconds a dozen readings of the given text, each with study notes targeting audiences with different levels of familiarity with Milo's work. (For example, of course. We've now reduced Milo to a convenient example of something entirely outside his purview - I hope that makes any of his haters reading this, happier.)

By the time our machines have this kind of computational agility, firstly we expect them to soon thereafter become our counselours. The daughter surpasses the father. Not in all things of course, but in some. Already today, we defer to machines for advice on specific bodies of knowledge. And at this very near future point in history, we expect thought policing and public policy on the business of language and the conscious thoughts that languages represent... to have come of age.

This then, is truly exciting. It could also be frightening in a rather maddening way.