A Billion USD to Invest in Asian Startups?

1. Enterprise: Software outsourcing and vertical integration. Squash the stacks. Make developers redundant.

2. Market: Personal data management tools - loads of middleware.

3. For shits: R&D into making indistinguishable robot sex workers.

Underselling Bates College

I had breakfast with some cousins and had to remind everyone that I was probably underselling my college experience - because I tend to be the strange one wherever I go. I think the professors at Bates were a fine bunch, but perhaps not cut out for weirdos like me.

Back in college (2001-2005), I was disappointed by the lack of faculty interest in designing an optimised education syllabus, and as a 32-year-old I pursue questions such as the feasibility of flawless robot prostitution.

Anyway, that's a reflection that reminds me that it's nice to speak in my own voice for a few minutes each week.

AI Logic: Nature vs. Our Implementations

On: "systems of logic designed to help with artificial intelligence," and "tentative reasoning using logic."

Absconding from debates about whether the referent of "logic" is itself (a) a fundamental behaviour of the universal substrate or (b) a self-affirming subset of the universal substrate...

... it would seem that non-artificial ("natural") intelligence is itself a subset of the behaviour that emerges from the complex behaviour of biological systems (oops, bio-"logic"-al?).

Therefore, I think it's more important for you to decide at the level of software architecture... for your AI, if you want the AI's sense of logic (or tentative reasoning) to be axiomatically derived deductively from a specific bit of code ("submodule"), or if you wish for it to emerge from complex behaviour that results from un-(or-semi)-moderated random interactions between bit of code.

Grain of salt, if you will.

Always Be Shopping

If you're already hungry, then you're already too late, and I expect your decisions to be compromised. Fill up that pipeline - the same applies to inventories of ideas, of billings, of metal, and of meat.

The Startup Grind

Just occurred to me that as one so academically inclined, working at a startup is "the grind", and working in a larger corporation just feels like retirement (been there, done that).

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Commercial co-founder: the manager that picks up shit strewn about by rock star subject-matter experts. :)

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All I want right now is a pen, a lot of paper, my maths textbook, and four months. One for housekeeping and three for hobbies.

But it seems more likely that I'll be stuck on the startup grind for a while longer.

:(

Should 18 Year-olds be Trusted to Plan a Life?

TBH, I specifically picked a lib arts degree (2001-2005) because I wanted four years to "figure out what to do," it was a funded gig, so I treated it as a first (and very cushy) job. I spent the first year in the basement of the arts building with an electric guitar, and the second year interviewing professors about why they did what they did. By the end of the second year, it was quite clear that we all had different interests, and I considered just dropping out and joining the workforce - but this was a good "gig," so I finished up the final two years and took the paper.
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My plan when I went to college was to stay away from Malaysia until the end of college for cultural anthropological reasons (I wanted to study Americans in immersion), before returning to Malaysia to plan next steps from the same environment where I had decided to go to college  (to minimise bias, in decision making). During my final two years of school, I decided to seek work in Malaysia, because I felt that I did not under stand Malaysia's political and economic environment. So I came back and ended up spending a coupla years in a government think tank, in a consulting firm, and in a bank. I had also intentionally avoided all commercial studies during college, because I had in mind that the best place to study commerce would be in the workforce.
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The entire period of study from 2001 to 2007 was very satisfying. Then I decided that life was too easy, and that I should learn about small companies. I also wanted to pursue graduate studies without scholarship or payments, so I used the startup/new ventures environment for this in 2007-2012. It was pretty messy, but it only got messier after that, because I'm dedicating 2013-2022 to the game of making money (even though I find it often, incredibly boring compared to reading math). After talking to many people who are "looking to leave their corporate jobs to work in startups," I feel that over 15 years, I've kinda gone the other way, from being more academic to being more corporate. :)
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Life is fun. It gets made up along the way.