A story ...

 ( maybe 1.5 stories )

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"Some idiot has been messaging me to go to Singapore. Why would I do so now? Is someone paying me upfront? LOL"

"Hahahaaaaaaaa. Is it a scammer? 🤣🤣🤣"

"old friend - the type that might turn up at your home and take a nap naked, and scare your housemates type - I am a very tolerant person, but I am also capitalistic about entertainment"

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Before I discovered that my inbox had been assaulted by that last barrage of naivete, I was preparing to write down what I was thinking about during lifting today.

But now the memory is lossy. So, I will try to reconstruct it adequately.

I think, most of my life, I have been up to my eyeballs in stupid people. Even just in getting from thinking about it, to writing it down, I can get interrupted by some of the same. It's incredibly, bewilderingly, definitive of my lived experience. I wouldn't know how else to describe it to anyone.

And my sense, is that most people don't feel the same way about others. And, based on what I can tell about other people, most of them do not feel so because they do not in effect see how many people are scratching themselves while eating, fucking, and doing business with others ... just in a somewhat more sophisticated way, such as to be seen as well, adorable.

So we have strata of adorabobbles - broadly construed as virtue signalling, at different levels of society. Meanwhile, as a matter of laziness, I try to avoid most of it, while being careful enough to understand how it works.

So recently, I have been quite successful. I remember being 18 or 19 and lifting weights and thinking, I have better things to do with the limited time I have until my scholarship runs out, so I will do this later. And it was the same for studying maths. And now at 43, I have no more excuses, so I am doing both quite happily, as mundane as the activities are. I have done so many other things since, I started postponing the things I wanted to do. Now all I have is to do them, as I wait to find out when my capacity for these things evaporates with age. And then there will be choices to be made about how to die.

Perhaps. 

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"Some old friends has changed that they might not be the same person they were, and...you never know. Just saying hahahaha"

"it's true. there was another one, whom i loved. we didn't have a lot in common, but they, being an affectionate type, would occasionally accompany me in trivial settings. once after about ten years of not being in the same country, they were bored, and we fucked. and then they had work to do, and their affections were no longer communicated, and so we have become no longer friends, so so that is how children grow up, and older, into ordinary things that eventually disappear"

Thin slice : on "epiplexity" ( Jiang, et al. 2025, 2026 )

Leon commented on this paper.

Thin slice : the paper's paradoxes seem to come from a confusion definitions of "information". Perhaps, there is a confusion between : the accuracy of information transfer ("surprise") and the accuracy of representing originating knowledge ("semantics").

Information theory is concerned with "already quantified" data, and not about "quantifying unquantified states". So entropy is meaningful as a descriptor of quantified data, and not meaningful as a descriptor of how accurate a quantification operation was upon an unquantified substrate.

Vis-a-vis LLMs, whether the input data is the traditional "verbal / just text" or multimodal "multi/sensory" ... these are "already quantified data" at the point of ingestion, and information is preserved as the LLMs compute any egestions.

For those of US OBSERVING the LLMs, we may find that the LLMs produced "new information", but that does not refer to insight about the ingested data (stateT=0), but rather about the the UNQUANTIFIED WORLD STATE prior to the creation of the ingested data (stateT=-N).

Please forgive my unfamiliarity with the underlying material, and my faint disgust at seeing 50+ comments applauding without adding much to conversation ( I think I saw few dissenters haha ).

Is tuition necessary? It depends on your objectives

Is tuition necessary?

In another group, someone asked if paid tuition is necessary, for students already attending "expensive" private or international schools.

My response :

The origin is decades/centuries old, and part of Chinese cram-culture. Basically the student has no occupation beyond passing a specific high-level exam which kicks back as wealth for the entire family : so the student is a vehicle of investment.

How this is relevant to the PRESENT : is really up to you.

• A. Some families value credential laddering, and the collection of branded-school certs as a superficial class marker.
• B. Some families are less concerned about the class-marker, but see it as a means to the more concrete end of becoming powerful and wealthy via working for/with elite social networks.
• C. Some families are neither concerned with social-markers, nor wealth and power, and they may instead value :
• C1. intellectual achievement / knowledge
• C2. a certain lifestyle / tribe : which may be commercially oriented, or less so
• C3. sensory art and beauty
• C4. other