2019-12-30 at 4:16 pm
2019-12-26 at 6:30 am
Thesis: on Friendship
Awake, early, 6am-ish. But probably also sleeping too much, because I tire myself with too many distractions. A friend asks me if something is bothering me, and so I think about it, and become more awake (for better or for worse). Perhaps, just the usual tirade from my various sources, reading this and that, and considering the economics of pleasure, companionship, conversation, and sex.
.
Where B = casual sex:
.
I think, I demand a certain degree of intellectual agility from my closest companions, and no one should demand less. I think it's important for [friends to be able to discuss the costs and benefits of casual sex]:1, without [having to depend on sexual activity to make their friendship viable]:2. Too often, I suspect that I lose friends because they are incapable of dissociating point 1, from point 2.
.
Probably, there are too many people in the world who depend on point 2, and that is why many other people are suspicious of point 1, as a strategy to flag abusers of point 2. Meanwhile, there are many practitioners of point 2, who are completely incapable of point 1. Of course, it is also important to note that you can algebraically replace the word 'sex' in points 1, and 2, with any other genre of behaviour, B, and this entire discussion on points 1, and 2, will still hold.
.
For all possible values of B, in general:
.
Here's an anticipated criticism of my thesis. The activity of point 1, may be defined to be a subset of the activities of point 2. For now, deeper discussion of this is left as an exercise for the reader.
.
In general, I hope to meet many more friends who are capable of point 1 without point 2. And, I hope that in general, people who practice point 2 will learn to lose that dependence, until they have performed a thoroughly audited valuation that [whatever their friendships depend on] are priced efficiently.
.
Many are likely to argue that some Bs are central to their preferred definition of friendship. As this once again depends on definitions, the construction of specific arguments about any ordered pair (B, friendship_definition), is also left as an exercise for the reader...
Christmas Presence
Today I met an old friend. More accurately, I was summoned, as is our custom. Once in 52 months is a little overwhelming, I must admit. But I do not think we were too fazed.
We spoke about how we met, and what each of our challenges are in the present, where those might come from, and where they might go. We visited places which were once familiar.
My friend appears to be in good health, on a long break between large projects. I am right in the middle of a long project, myself, taking a breather from what fazedness is inherent in the nature of long projects.
News? Only new events, based on familiar patterns we had discussed before. Each of us seeks different things from our respective companions, each of us values set periods of solitary activity, and each of us is currently committed to specific directions with their own opportunity costs. We each have different beliefs about what our time is worth, and we discuss what we have (and have not) obtained from our respective engagements over the recent years past. Each of our bodies fails differently. Each of our minds fails likewise.
Since today's meeting, I have formed a few questions for our next meeting, so I shall write them down.
Update: we had a short exchange on the last day of the year. It feels indeed like another long silence is upon me. It is very familiar, an anxiety that is brought about by the fear of loss, and I often seek to make it constructive by building things - I suppose the built things are distractions, though they have their own merit. A five-year-old business, for example. Within minutes I reflect further and find that the anxiety disappears if I think only of what it means to love, without expectation of reciprocity. Then, a functional peace falls upon me. I wonder what the next five years will bring in various domains of life. As always, I wonder if there will be another conversation.
More questions:
We spoke about how we met, and what each of our challenges are in the present, where those might come from, and where they might go. We visited places which were once familiar.
My friend appears to be in good health, on a long break between large projects. I am right in the middle of a long project, myself, taking a breather from what fazedness is inherent in the nature of long projects.
News? Only new events, based on familiar patterns we had discussed before. Each of us seeks different things from our respective companions, each of us values set periods of solitary activity, and each of us is currently committed to specific directions with their own opportunity costs. We each have different beliefs about what our time is worth, and we discuss what we have (and have not) obtained from our respective engagements over the recent years past. Each of our bodies fails differently. Each of our minds fails likewise.
Since today's meeting, I have formed a few questions for our next meeting, so I shall write them down.
- How is your health?
- Did you ever give me something, which I did not ask for?
- If you did, which of the commonly discussed reasons did you have, for doing it?
- Did you believe I wanted it?
- Did you not have capability at the time, to tell me it may have been intended for someone else?
- Were you afraid that I would be less useful as a companion, if I did not receive it?
- How are your friendships?
- Have your newest friends served you well?
- What is the market price for friendship these days - what are the acceptable barters, to you, and how do your counterparties react to these terms?
- Costs: Did you form any unexpected perceptions after any transaction?
- Clearly, the demand for my time is low, which is unsurprising. Of the commonly discussed reasons, why is this the case?
- Am I tiresome to read? (From most people I should ask, the answer is probably 'yes'.)
- Do I fail to communicate sufficient appreciation for your time?
- Do we simply meet too infrequently (in general, for logistical reasons), for these conversations to be sufficiently useful?
- How can I improve the quality of service which I deliver in this friendship? (Cursory, but perhaps necessary to eke out an explicit expression.)
- [Insert other hypotheses, and elucidations variously.]
The end, for now.
Update: we had a short exchange on the last day of the year. It feels indeed like another long silence is upon me. It is very familiar, an anxiety that is brought about by the fear of loss, and I often seek to make it constructive by building things - I suppose the built things are distractions, though they have their own merit. A five-year-old business, for example. Within minutes I reflect further and find that the anxiety disappears if I think only of what it means to love, without expectation of reciprocity. Then, a functional peace falls upon me. I wonder what the next five years will bring in various domains of life. As always, I wonder if there will be another conversation.
More questions:
- What is my role in our intermittent conversations?
- I believe the need for that role arises under specific conditions, which we have discussed.
- If that is the case, are there no other roles for me to play, at other times? (Typically in all my social relationships, I focus on the determining the ways in which I am useful - that is enough for me, in general.)
- Is there a pattern to our distance? ~976 days, ~500 days, ~121 days...
2019-12-25 at 2:53 am
Season's Greetings
Christmas is always a good time to talk about values. My wish this year is the same. I hope that civilisation progresses, regardless of the cost to individual people. I hope that brutish characteristics, such as the elevation of empathy, the glorification of sentimental relationships, and the enfeeblement of law, shall gradually be stripped away from our world - these very definitions of evil surround us. And I hope that meanwhile our daily work against a world of moral absolutists shall be minimally troublesome. Merry Christmas everyone. May we receive as good as we can manage, and if we can't manage I hope we soon expire. That is the greatest good.
2019-12-24 at 1:50 am
Reflection: Mapping Neurotransmitter Effects to a Model of Phenomenology
Prior to my current job, which I now serve in my fifth year, I never really had an opportunity to challenge myself on the micro-management of excitation and anxiety*. The reason is, most of my multi-year projects since the 1990s have been carried out in a mode where I recognise an opportunity for personal profit in the world, and then I work against parameters of resistance largely defined by those around me. It's usually been a unilateral assault.
.
Whereas on the current project I am largely in control of which parameters of resistance my teams do and do not work against on a monthly, daily, and minutely basis. So about half my time is spent reminding myself [not to be more than 55% sure about any target on any timeframe (Rule 1)], and the other half of my time is spent being as productive as I can without compromising Rule 1.
.
In my fourth year of working in this role, after several campaigns which set me to all kinds of work with various c*unterparties over that period, I found myself quite disturbed. I think the development of symptoms of borderline personality disorder (perhaps more accurately framed as a general cognitive decoherence) should be expected, given that I work to actively discourage myself of surety about anything whatsoever.
.
I think it's a good time now to spend a few days improving my recognition of excitation versus anxiety on a minutely basis, based on the firm definitions below. Then, once a useful dichotomy has been retrained into my intuition, I should then more closely study the dynamics of that system based on the model below.
.
Update, 2019-12-24:
.
Time to integrate this a little bit with some of my earlier models. Let's look again at the working definition of the dichotomy of states in memory buffers, 'static data' versus 'changing data'. In the mid-2000s, I used to monitor my conscious buffers, and look for those patterns originating from my sensory nervous signals, and I used to try and map them to whatever my motor nervous signals were doing at the time. If efferent/centrifugal/motor signals are not changing, then afferent/centripetal/sensed signals tend to be less dynamic also (tentatively, I associated that with my understanding of what Chinese traditional kinesthesiology might refer to as 'yang' mode); and the converse is true (tentatively, I had previously built a model associating that with the terminology of 'yin' mode).
.
(Note that efferent signals can be sent to the virtual space of the imagination instead of the motor system - but that's a separate pathway for discussion.)
.
So let's attempt integration of the two working languages/models.
.
Category A:
.
Category B:
.
I've not checked this model of integration for coherence, so it'll serve simply as a back of napkin scribble, for now.
.
Whereas on the current project I am largely in control of which parameters of resistance my teams do and do not work against on a monthly, daily, and minutely basis. So about half my time is spent reminding myself [not to be more than 55% sure about any target on any timeframe (Rule 1)], and the other half of my time is spent being as productive as I can without compromising Rule 1.
.
In my fourth year of working in this role, after several campaigns which set me to all kinds of work with various c*unterparties over that period, I found myself quite disturbed. I think the development of symptoms of borderline personality disorder (perhaps more accurately framed as a general cognitive decoherence) should be expected, given that I work to actively discourage myself of surety about anything whatsoever.
.
I think it's a good time now to spend a few days improving my recognition of excitation versus anxiety on a minutely basis, based on the firm definitions below. Then, once a useful dichotomy has been retrained into my intuition, I should then more closely study the dynamics of that system based on the model below.
.
* For the purpose of this post, I'll use the rough model that excitation can be quantified as rates of change in memory buffers for conscious sensation, recognised from the peripheral nervous system, or from imaginative generation (including memory); and anxiety can be quantified as frequency of pausing during any cognitive task - perhaps mappable to dopamine and serotonin respectively..
Update, 2019-12-24:
.
Time to integrate this a little bit with some of my earlier models. Let's look again at the working definition of the dichotomy of states in memory buffers, 'static data' versus 'changing data'. In the mid-2000s, I used to monitor my conscious buffers, and look for those patterns originating from my sensory nervous signals, and I used to try and map them to whatever my motor nervous signals were doing at the time. If efferent/centrifugal/motor signals are not changing, then afferent/centripetal/sensed signals tend to be less dynamic also (tentatively, I associated that with my understanding of what Chinese traditional kinesthesiology might refer to as 'yang' mode); and the converse is true (tentatively, I had previously built a model associating that with the terminology of 'yin' mode).
.
(Note that efferent signals can be sent to the virtual space of the imagination instead of the motor system - but that's a separate pathway for discussion.)
.
So let's attempt integration of the two working languages/models.
.
Category A:
.
- 'excitation',
- 'changes are happening in conscious memory buffers',
- 'dynamic data in field',
- 'high degree of information transfer in the pathway: CNS -> efferent -> afferent -> CNS',
- 'some kinesthesiology traditions may refer to this as "yin" activity'
Category B:
.
- 'anxiety',
- 'conscious memory buffers are not changing',
- 'static data in field',
- 'low degree of information transfer in the pathway: CNS -> efferent -> afferent -> CNS',
- 'some kinesthesiology traditions may refer to this as "yang" activity'
I've not checked this model of integration for coherence, so it'll serve simply as a back of napkin scribble, for now.
2019-12-17 at 10:05 pm
Reflection: on Limits of Speech, Sensitive Demographics, and Safe Spaces
I find the following pattern amusing. Among people, P, who become upset when their preferred norms are not practiced by others... P tend to believe that other people, OP, become upset when OP's preferred norms are not practiced by P.
.
But generally it is the case the OP doesn't really care about P's practices. P may imagine that any reminder of OP's preferences are a reminder that OP are upset... but as OP are not actually upset, it turns out that P are frequently startled by imaginary antagonism.
.
Of course, it may be the case that the reminder of OP's preferred norms are a form of antagonism to P... even if P do not imagine that OP are upset. Within designated safe-spaces, it is a good idea to avoid this form of antagonism to P. But outside of designated safe-spaces, I suppose P must unfortunately deal with reminders that OP are not P, whereas both OP and P exist in the same space.
.
But generally it is the case the OP doesn't really care about P's practices. P may imagine that any reminder of OP's preferences are a reminder that OP are upset... but as OP are not actually upset, it turns out that P are frequently startled by imaginary antagonism.
.
Of course, it may be the case that the reminder of OP's preferred norms are a form of antagonism to P... even if P do not imagine that OP are upset. Within designated safe-spaces, it is a good idea to avoid this form of antagonism to P. But outside of designated safe-spaces, I suppose P must unfortunately deal with reminders that OP are not P, whereas both OP and P exist in the same space.
True Story: Heaven and Hell in the Workplace
A friend of a friend, from a third-world country, joined a firm there. That firm is headquartered in a first-world country, and displays the characteristics of that first-world country even in its third-world office. My friend's friend said, it was like heaven, like no other firm she had worked in before in that third-world country. I too have been working in this third-world country for fifteen years, and I have lived in it for several years more than that. I think, perhaps, my tolerance for employers is lower, and I have simply not experienced the worst of employment in that third-world country, because I never worked in the worst of its firms. However, it could also be the case that people such as myself are the origin of hell for everyone else in these third-world countries. Who knows. More interviews must be conducted.
2019-12-16 at 3:47 am
Reflection: on Engagements between Social and Semantic Activists
I'm almost certain than the semantic police are more annoying than the grammar police. (I, a policer of semantics...)
Thinking about it a bit more, by definition, semantic activists are more concerned with linguistic correctness than with social impact, and social activists are more concerned with social impact than with linguistic correctness. So everybody wins. (I, a semantic activist, trying to morally justify correcting the semantics of social activists.)
Thinking about it a bit more, by definition, semantic activists are more concerned with linguistic correctness than with social impact, and social activists are more concerned with social impact than with linguistic correctness. So everybody wins. (I, a semantic activist, trying to morally justify correcting the semantics of social activists.)
Yawn 57
2019 December 1 - 16
/
/commented/ The MOE is really about knowledge management for the entire nation. I think it's rather naive of [ ... ] to dismiss the breadth of its scope.
/
Capitalists believe that the law of the jungle matters more than sharing everything anyone can get their hands on with everyone else. Marxism the opposite. Both legit religions. Pick a side or a mixture, ho-hum. But in any event, many workers fail to recognise that their meat is the means of production - and they worry about other things like factories, and housing, and food... but that's intellectual privilege talking right there. :)
/
Any day now, all work will go to shit. That is just the nature of the business. Year five proceeds, otherwise...
/
Today's main infrastructural concern is food. Remember to input calories at a more constant rate.
/
It's all about the team, but by that I mean organisational structure and component talent. Maszlee would be a good DPM, but only if the point was helmed by someone more grounded in the rank and file like Muhyiddin. Maszlee would make an interesting PM, if there was a good support system behind him - during posperous peacetimes. But peace is rare in this century. Look at Jokowi and Obama - success comes with compromises when you are surrounded by the mob. Forget UK politics over the last two decades... there is little to learn from a nation in decline. Even bloody Australia is more interesting, but that's probably because their star has been rising, and their bickering leaders ride on good tides. So many other stories from around the world. I still like China's overall approach, whereas the tactical errors they make in PR management are boringly unclely.
/
Cinema / film / the screen is such a medium of aspiration. The power dynamics of each culture have strong influences on the dominant tropes of heroism in each respective tradition. The Americans romanticise their lawmen, the Europeans their monarchs, the Italians their mafia, the Muslims their clergy, the Chinese their warriors, and the Indians their bards. Malaysians and Latinx seem to worship their families. Drama, drama, drama...
/
Ok, hard fail on software architecture. Rolling back to swap out one piece of core tech. #noobing
/
Probably take a couple of days off from software development. Clear up EOM books, payroll, pay annual fees for this and that. For right now, more enforced exercise, feeding, etc.
/
Cleaned up the bad code. No more writing code tonight. Just library research. But first, enforced eating.
/
At the rate at which 2019 was used to dig up and air BN skeletons, I suspect the mood of dilapidation will only lift from Malaysia's economy in 2021. 2021 could be a really interesting year for business.
/
Tomorrow: accounts, and bill paying, and hoping the last fridge doesn't die all of a sudden. -_-
/
Awake again. Feeling ok, but still concerned as I usually am on a daily basis, in these past four years, about the size of the trainwreck which is the current project. Reminding myself that mental agility and physical conditioning must take precedence in good soldiering. And that enlightenment is not an ignorance of terror, but a transcendence from its effects. Being untouchable requires a lot of maintenance, if you make a point to seek greater opposition on a daily basis. However, that is the nature of growth. Train, survive, kill, rebuild, rinse, repeat. #todayscharmoffensive
/
This is true. I think unions are important. I also think general strikes are the expected, and that people need to take it as an ordinary business event. There is no shortage of products on the market, or employers, or staff. Everyone is fundamentally disposable.
/
I spent the day changing a tap and gambling on business development opportunities. Sad.
/
project: serl
objective: port erlang/otp semantics and general developer/user interface to ECMAScript
First items to implement:
- 'Serl' class, which constructs an object based on (erl), representing one runtime system 'node'
- 'pid' class, which constructs an object based on the Erlang 'pid' datatype; remember to specify its toString; maybe specify parsePid as its inverse
- serl.spawn/3 method, which returns the pid of a new 'lightweight process' started on a 'serl' node; the await ES keyword should be used in place of the receive Erlang keyword; use the 'arguments' object to implement arity=3, such that the other arities can be structurally implemente later
- serl.send/2 method, for sending messages; since send/3 doesn't change the position of the first two parameters, we don't have to check for arity here...
- then do a test using the pingpong example in Erlang docs on message passing
/
Need a civil engineer who can tell me how much water I can safely store on the second floor of a two story house.
/
You know what I really hate about the people I read about in the news every day? Appeals to 'humanity' - as if that is something well defined, let alone valuable in and of itself.
/
Automotive failure. Awful day. Not the worst - win some, lose some.
/
Huge day for Pakatan Harapan. So what's the KLCI going to do tomorrow?
/
In my line of work, I'm required to socialise with a variety of different peoples. Due to the locus of my current occupation, most of them are... not so well to do. But what I find most sad about them is that they actually believe that there if they please the right people, and put their time into specific activities, and put their money in the right places, then over a year, or five, or fifty, they will eventually be happy. It is true that this mode of operations works for some people... but I think it becomes delusional when you find that a majority of a population believes it, when in totality, the population does not actually contain a quantum of wealth that can make happiness possible for all its occupants, given their current expectations, and abilities. I find it's telling that people will only ever be as happy as they want to - a lot of people consume a very low quantum of resources, and aspire to consume not much more than they currently do, while reporting a high degree of satisfaction with their states of being. Whereas of course a number of people also consume a great deal more than the mean, while believing that they are greatly suffering. All in, none of these points are new, as entire books have been written about such people. But every time I engage with the dozens of people I am close to, I am reminded, that more often than not, they are still looking for happiness. I only can hope that they will achieve it eventually, before they disappoint themselves.
/
/commented on empowering staff/
.
Lead, follow, or get out of the way. If you (staff) can't do that, I guarantee the company will fail, because we are going out on a limb to take on more pain than the companies we intend to bankrupt, and that's our competitive advantage.
.
Now that's just the entry requirement for someone I'd consider as a good staff. To answer your question, if we already have passed the entry requirements... then there's basically very little for a manager to do. (a) you are doing skills training (b) you are doing life coaching.
.
(a) is pretty straightforward
(b) requires aligning staff personal goals with what they are given to do at work; people can make money anywhere... the reasoning you need to provide them is that there are unique opportunities at the current location, if you want them to stay
.
In terms of retention, we actually want people to leave (this applies to customers as well as staff). For staff, it's what has been called an 'up or out' policy - because the team is so small, people who stop improving (like, their maximum output can never stagnate) eventually get displaced by people whose output grows faster then their own.
.
If the average growth is positive but low, we will be on par with target competition. If average growth is positive and high, we will have a reason to exist as a competing entity.
.
There is no reason to keep a business alive if it is not expected to outlive primary competition. Just kill it.
.
:)
/
I am rather curious to know what happens if I end up doing this for the next seven decades. (This = running a cornershop, and never actually growing.)
/
I hate eating. Ok, I am so happy to share this. (Haha, you were not expecting that.) For the first four years of running my current business I basically lived next to the office in a hotel-sized room - no laundry, no kitchen, nada. Recently I moved to a space with a kitchen... and while I do some R&D for work, personally I don't really like eating. It is like one of those chores that takes up too much time, like sleep, and exercise, and mating, and washing, blah blah. Back to the kitchen... I want to start making hard rations. Like stuff I can just eat without calculating nutritional content for because it's all worked out at the recipe level... then bake maybe a kilo of this every few days and store it. Surely you are thinking of Soylent - but first it doesn't ship en masse to Malaysia, second the price is too high: we need an Asian sized price, as our mininum wage is much lower than the US's where they are currently selling Soylent. Drop your interest in this thread. Thx. Are you doing this already? Do you want to? Would you want to productise it? Buy it? Sell it? Teach me!!
/
Time to get a mobile keyboard for my phone.
/
Not proud of today's follies. Nap.
/
I think I should start networking with women, coders, and entrepreneurs in other timezones since I'm working at all the wrong times for local ones :p
/
OK - R&D deprioritised for a bit while we figure out out to maximise staffing utility in December...
/
/commented on this/ I've been sitting this one out almost entirely since college. While I'm generally disappointed with professional progress in the field, I'm also short of reasons to get involved. But human intelligence, as I see it, has never been too impressive, and its systematic abstraction is not a hard problem. We'll just wait to see who gets there first, I guess.
/
commented on 'Deepfake Porn Is Evolving to Give People Total Control Over Women's Bodies
vice.com'
OK, so this technology is boring to me because I have the sort of visual imagination that lets me do all of this inside my head if I want to. (Perhaps why I don't really watch porn?) I don't think there's an ethical concern about doing this, but there is an ethical concern about knowing the difference between a legal person and a non-legal person. Just write clearer laws. (On the other hand, I am sure that it's absolutely shocking for people who can't do this inside their heads, so yes, I do expect the laws to be somewhat more restrictive/conservative about expression, regardless of whether the subject is a legal person or not. Depictions are almost certainly going to be regulated by many societies...)
/
We literally have a shocking rules card that gets handed out to customers lol
/
So... GraphQL is like protocol buffers for web developers?
/
On this:
Time for history class, kids. I've never been a very close study of literature - but after this documentary, I'm quite tempted to storyboard a movie that tries to avoid all the traditional tropes. I'm sure there's a small canon of such pieces already.
/
I'm spending too much time conversing with housemates. I've been working on systematically reducing this activity, but new issues come up pretty quickly once old ones have been resolved. More attention required. Burn-in phase for this living arrangement is past. After the coming weekend's social, I'll have to review the costs and benefits of the event, and then aggressively apply learnings to the subsequents months of living here. It always been a net benefit for myself, but I am not so sure that this quantity of distraction is helping my work. But then again, so far, the original rationale was that I had to benefit my health in order to benefit my work. So let me see how I can benefit my health, without getting otherwise distracted from work, by the decrepitude of the operations in my vicinity that are not beneficial to my work.
/
Perhaps I've been undernourished versus my recent degree of physical exertion. Checking like hell.
/
I just lost 8.2% of our balance sheet in two months. I don't feel good, but I also don't want to unnecessarily demotivate myself. So, bearing in mind a chunk of that is for repairs that I haven't amortised yet, another chunk is for one relatively unproductive staff, a chunk is due to the softness of the market, and the rest is due purely to my bad judgment on tactical allocation for ad spend... oh well... just gotta get on with it, and hope we don't keep breaking things. :P
/
I really need to stop getting engine oil under my fingernails. #snowflake Also, unrelatedly, being 36-years-old means four years ago, I was old enough to be a legal grandfather. #geezer
/
End of 30hr day. Never purely proud of doing this, but I do quite appreciate the opportunity. Hoping to wake up with just enough rest, during business hours, tomorrow.
/
Need to keep an eye on the speedometer of how fast I move on my todo list. APM is slow these days - I tend to be too relaxed about life in general, since my childhood. Gotta remember that others are naturally a lot more tense. One has to intensify oneself to keep up, for the sake of sport. Business is sport.
/Commented on 'how do you know you've "made it"'?/ In my personal life I made it a long time ago - I figured out how to quantify consciousness.
Business is just a way to spend retirement. My personal challenge is that I'm generally too satisfied with what I have. So I have to make sport of life. Play game. And I forget that others who have a need to prove themselves at the expense of my business, so I move too slowly. Today I am reminding myself to move faster :p. I don't really care about winning the games I play, but I remind myself that the point of the game is to win... then I am reminded to move a little faster.
/
Does anyone have a rain-covered (wall-less should be ok) yard or storage area they'd be comfy sharing? I have some low-priority, but space-intensive activities... basically fridge repair... to work on in the coming months.
/
Yeah, this is what I look forward to. The quantity of manhours this replaces is extreme. A few billion people now can learn a language to near fluency levels just by themselves, if they just don't stop talking. The efficiency improvement is quite staggering. Waiting for mentors, life coaches and technical instructors to be replaced soon.
/
Some of y'all gonna h8 this :) / commented on how artificial intelligence and machine learning can be used to improve safety for women/
.
Build a filter that reads messages from men to women. If it anticipates that the message will put a female into a defensive frame of mind, reject the message and send the anticipated reaction, and suggestions on rewording to the man. A lot of men get pissed off by women who have gone on defense.
.
Once you have developed this feature, consider building the complementary aspect which reads messages from women to men... if it anticipates that the message will put a male into fear, anger, or insecurity, reject the message and send the anticipated reaction, and suggestions on rewording to the man.
.
Admittedly each of the two features above is going to cut both ways, so it makes for a fine thought experiment, I think.
/
Hmm. Sitting down to clear my various inboxes. Ice cream mark 3 was a failure, though mark 2 was a success, in terms of progress. On to mark 4. Since it is already 2am, that means the poolside / potluck / networking gamble is going to be over and done with within 24-hours, and then I can get back to more focused operations. But I need to do this to maximise working knowledge of the new resources recently available to me. I do not think that there will be a great deal of business happening by the pool later today, but I do think that if I focus on exercising the role of facilitator, I will have a reasonable chance of ensuring that people have a good time. And at various levels, that really is the nature of the business which I have been engaged in for a few years already. We build infrastructure.
/
Admittedly, 60% of my time spent on the Internet is just keeping tabs on who's selling what-horseshit in what-way-and-form. About 30% is me trying to keep in touch with a thousand people whom I don't have time to have coffee with, and the other 10% is trying to ensure that whatever I'm selling doesn't look like everyone else's horseshit. Totally reserving judgment on whether what I do sell is actually horseshit... the point is to let the market figure it out. :P
/
/commented/ The MOE is really about knowledge management for the entire nation. I think it's rather naive of [ ... ] to dismiss the breadth of its scope.
/
Capitalists believe that the law of the jungle matters more than sharing everything anyone can get their hands on with everyone else. Marxism the opposite. Both legit religions. Pick a side or a mixture, ho-hum. But in any event, many workers fail to recognise that their meat is the means of production - and they worry about other things like factories, and housing, and food... but that's intellectual privilege talking right there. :)
/
Any day now, all work will go to shit. That is just the nature of the business. Year five proceeds, otherwise...
/
Today's main infrastructural concern is food. Remember to input calories at a more constant rate.
/
It's all about the team, but by that I mean organisational structure and component talent. Maszlee would be a good DPM, but only if the point was helmed by someone more grounded in the rank and file like Muhyiddin. Maszlee would make an interesting PM, if there was a good support system behind him - during posperous peacetimes. But peace is rare in this century. Look at Jokowi and Obama - success comes with compromises when you are surrounded by the mob. Forget UK politics over the last two decades... there is little to learn from a nation in decline. Even bloody Australia is more interesting, but that's probably because their star has been rising, and their bickering leaders ride on good tides. So many other stories from around the world. I still like China's overall approach, whereas the tactical errors they make in PR management are boringly unclely.
/
Cinema / film / the screen is such a medium of aspiration. The power dynamics of each culture have strong influences on the dominant tropes of heroism in each respective tradition. The Americans romanticise their lawmen, the Europeans their monarchs, the Italians their mafia, the Muslims their clergy, the Chinese their warriors, and the Indians their bards. Malaysians and Latinx seem to worship their families. Drama, drama, drama...
/
Ok, hard fail on software architecture. Rolling back to swap out one piece of core tech. #noobing
/
Probably take a couple of days off from software development. Clear up EOM books, payroll, pay annual fees for this and that. For right now, more enforced exercise, feeding, etc.
/
Cleaned up the bad code. No more writing code tonight. Just library research. But first, enforced eating.
/
At the rate at which 2019 was used to dig up and air BN skeletons, I suspect the mood of dilapidation will only lift from Malaysia's economy in 2021. 2021 could be a really interesting year for business.
/
Tomorrow: accounts, and bill paying, and hoping the last fridge doesn't die all of a sudden. -_-
/
Awake again. Feeling ok, but still concerned as I usually am on a daily basis, in these past four years, about the size of the trainwreck which is the current project. Reminding myself that mental agility and physical conditioning must take precedence in good soldiering. And that enlightenment is not an ignorance of terror, but a transcendence from its effects. Being untouchable requires a lot of maintenance, if you make a point to seek greater opposition on a daily basis. However, that is the nature of growth. Train, survive, kill, rebuild, rinse, repeat. #todayscharmoffensive
/
This is true. I think unions are important. I also think general strikes are the expected, and that people need to take it as an ordinary business event. There is no shortage of products on the market, or employers, or staff. Everyone is fundamentally disposable.
/
I spent the day changing a tap and gambling on business development opportunities. Sad.
/
project: serl
objective: port erlang/otp semantics and general developer/user interface to ECMAScript
First items to implement:
- 'Serl' class, which constructs an object based on (erl), representing one runtime system 'node'
- 'pid' class, which constructs an object based on the Erlang 'pid' datatype; remember to specify its toString; maybe specify parsePid as its inverse
- serl.spawn/3 method, which returns the pid of a new 'lightweight process' started on a 'serl' node; the await ES keyword should be used in place of the receive Erlang keyword; use the 'arguments' object to implement arity=3, such that the other arities can be structurally implemente later
- serl.send/2 method, for sending messages; since send/3 doesn't change the position of the first two parameters, we don't have to check for arity here...
- then do a test using the pingpong example in Erlang docs on message passing
/
Need a civil engineer who can tell me how much water I can safely store on the second floor of a two story house.
/
You know what I really hate about the people I read about in the news every day? Appeals to 'humanity' - as if that is something well defined, let alone valuable in and of itself.
/
Automotive failure. Awful day. Not the worst - win some, lose some.
/
Huge day for Pakatan Harapan. So what's the KLCI going to do tomorrow?
/
In my line of work, I'm required to socialise with a variety of different peoples. Due to the locus of my current occupation, most of them are... not so well to do. But what I find most sad about them is that they actually believe that there if they please the right people, and put their time into specific activities, and put their money in the right places, then over a year, or five, or fifty, they will eventually be happy. It is true that this mode of operations works for some people... but I think it becomes delusional when you find that a majority of a population believes it, when in totality, the population does not actually contain a quantum of wealth that can make happiness possible for all its occupants, given their current expectations, and abilities. I find it's telling that people will only ever be as happy as they want to - a lot of people consume a very low quantum of resources, and aspire to consume not much more than they currently do, while reporting a high degree of satisfaction with their states of being. Whereas of course a number of people also consume a great deal more than the mean, while believing that they are greatly suffering. All in, none of these points are new, as entire books have been written about such people. But every time I engage with the dozens of people I am close to, I am reminded, that more often than not, they are still looking for happiness. I only can hope that they will achieve it eventually, before they disappoint themselves.
/
/commented on empowering staff/
.
Lead, follow, or get out of the way. If you (staff) can't do that, I guarantee the company will fail, because we are going out on a limb to take on more pain than the companies we intend to bankrupt, and that's our competitive advantage.
.
Now that's just the entry requirement for someone I'd consider as a good staff. To answer your question, if we already have passed the entry requirements... then there's basically very little for a manager to do. (a) you are doing skills training (b) you are doing life coaching.
.
(a) is pretty straightforward
(b) requires aligning staff personal goals with what they are given to do at work; people can make money anywhere... the reasoning you need to provide them is that there are unique opportunities at the current location, if you want them to stay
.
In terms of retention, we actually want people to leave (this applies to customers as well as staff). For staff, it's what has been called an 'up or out' policy - because the team is so small, people who stop improving (like, their maximum output can never stagnate) eventually get displaced by people whose output grows faster then their own.
.
If the average growth is positive but low, we will be on par with target competition. If average growth is positive and high, we will have a reason to exist as a competing entity.
.
There is no reason to keep a business alive if it is not expected to outlive primary competition. Just kill it.
.
:)
/
I am rather curious to know what happens if I end up doing this for the next seven decades. (This = running a cornershop, and never actually growing.)
/
I hate eating. Ok, I am so happy to share this. (Haha, you were not expecting that.) For the first four years of running my current business I basically lived next to the office in a hotel-sized room - no laundry, no kitchen, nada. Recently I moved to a space with a kitchen... and while I do some R&D for work, personally I don't really like eating. It is like one of those chores that takes up too much time, like sleep, and exercise, and mating, and washing, blah blah. Back to the kitchen... I want to start making hard rations. Like stuff I can just eat without calculating nutritional content for because it's all worked out at the recipe level... then bake maybe a kilo of this every few days and store it. Surely you are thinking of Soylent - but first it doesn't ship en masse to Malaysia, second the price is too high: we need an Asian sized price, as our mininum wage is much lower than the US's where they are currently selling Soylent. Drop your interest in this thread. Thx. Are you doing this already? Do you want to? Would you want to productise it? Buy it? Sell it? Teach me!!
/
Time to get a mobile keyboard for my phone.
/
Not proud of today's follies. Nap.
/
I think I should start networking with women, coders, and entrepreneurs in other timezones since I'm working at all the wrong times for local ones :p
/
OK - R&D deprioritised for a bit while we figure out out to maximise staffing utility in December...
/
/commented on this/ I've been sitting this one out almost entirely since college. While I'm generally disappointed with professional progress in the field, I'm also short of reasons to get involved. But human intelligence, as I see it, has never been too impressive, and its systematic abstraction is not a hard problem. We'll just wait to see who gets there first, I guess.
/
commented on 'Deepfake Porn Is Evolving to Give People Total Control Over Women's Bodies
vice.com'
OK, so this technology is boring to me because I have the sort of visual imagination that lets me do all of this inside my head if I want to. (Perhaps why I don't really watch porn?) I don't think there's an ethical concern about doing this, but there is an ethical concern about knowing the difference between a legal person and a non-legal person. Just write clearer laws. (On the other hand, I am sure that it's absolutely shocking for people who can't do this inside their heads, so yes, I do expect the laws to be somewhat more restrictive/conservative about expression, regardless of whether the subject is a legal person or not. Depictions are almost certainly going to be regulated by many societies...)
/
We literally have a shocking rules card that gets handed out to customers lol
/
So... GraphQL is like protocol buffers for web developers?
/
On this:
Time for history class, kids. I've never been a very close study of literature - but after this documentary, I'm quite tempted to storyboard a movie that tries to avoid all the traditional tropes. I'm sure there's a small canon of such pieces already.
/
I'm spending too much time conversing with housemates. I've been working on systematically reducing this activity, but new issues come up pretty quickly once old ones have been resolved. More attention required. Burn-in phase for this living arrangement is past. After the coming weekend's social, I'll have to review the costs and benefits of the event, and then aggressively apply learnings to the subsequents months of living here. It always been a net benefit for myself, but I am not so sure that this quantity of distraction is helping my work. But then again, so far, the original rationale was that I had to benefit my health in order to benefit my work. So let me see how I can benefit my health, without getting otherwise distracted from work, by the decrepitude of the operations in my vicinity that are not beneficial to my work.
/
Perhaps I've been undernourished versus my recent degree of physical exertion. Checking like hell.
/
I just lost 8.2% of our balance sheet in two months. I don't feel good, but I also don't want to unnecessarily demotivate myself. So, bearing in mind a chunk of that is for repairs that I haven't amortised yet, another chunk is for one relatively unproductive staff, a chunk is due to the softness of the market, and the rest is due purely to my bad judgment on tactical allocation for ad spend... oh well... just gotta get on with it, and hope we don't keep breaking things. :P
/
I really need to stop getting engine oil under my fingernails. #snowflake Also, unrelatedly, being 36-years-old means four years ago, I was old enough to be a legal grandfather. #geezer
/
End of 30hr day. Never purely proud of doing this, but I do quite appreciate the opportunity. Hoping to wake up with just enough rest, during business hours, tomorrow.
/
Need to keep an eye on the speedometer of how fast I move on my todo list. APM is slow these days - I tend to be too relaxed about life in general, since my childhood. Gotta remember that others are naturally a lot more tense. One has to intensify oneself to keep up, for the sake of sport. Business is sport.
/Commented on 'how do you know you've "made it"'?/ In my personal life I made it a long time ago - I figured out how to quantify consciousness.
Business is just a way to spend retirement. My personal challenge is that I'm generally too satisfied with what I have. So I have to make sport of life. Play game. And I forget that others who have a need to prove themselves at the expense of my business, so I move too slowly. Today I am reminding myself to move faster :p. I don't really care about winning the games I play, but I remind myself that the point of the game is to win... then I am reminded to move a little faster.
/
Does anyone have a rain-covered (wall-less should be ok) yard or storage area they'd be comfy sharing? I have some low-priority, but space-intensive activities... basically fridge repair... to work on in the coming months.
/
Yeah, this is what I look forward to. The quantity of manhours this replaces is extreme. A few billion people now can learn a language to near fluency levels just by themselves, if they just don't stop talking. The efficiency improvement is quite staggering. Waiting for mentors, life coaches and technical instructors to be replaced soon.
/
Some of y'all gonna h8 this :) / commented on how artificial intelligence and machine learning can be used to improve safety for women/
.
Build a filter that reads messages from men to women. If it anticipates that the message will put a female into a defensive frame of mind, reject the message and send the anticipated reaction, and suggestions on rewording to the man. A lot of men get pissed off by women who have gone on defense.
.
Once you have developed this feature, consider building the complementary aspect which reads messages from women to men... if it anticipates that the message will put a male into fear, anger, or insecurity, reject the message and send the anticipated reaction, and suggestions on rewording to the man.
.
Admittedly each of the two features above is going to cut both ways, so it makes for a fine thought experiment, I think.
/
Hmm. Sitting down to clear my various inboxes. Ice cream mark 3 was a failure, though mark 2 was a success, in terms of progress. On to mark 4. Since it is already 2am, that means the poolside / potluck / networking gamble is going to be over and done with within 24-hours, and then I can get back to more focused operations. But I need to do this to maximise working knowledge of the new resources recently available to me. I do not think that there will be a great deal of business happening by the pool later today, but I do think that if I focus on exercising the role of facilitator, I will have a reasonable chance of ensuring that people have a good time. And at various levels, that really is the nature of the business which I have been engaged in for a few years already. We build infrastructure.
/
Admittedly, 60% of my time spent on the Internet is just keeping tabs on who's selling what-horseshit in what-way-and-form. About 30% is me trying to keep in touch with a thousand people whom I don't have time to have coffee with, and the other 10% is trying to ensure that whatever I'm selling doesn't look like everyone else's horseshit. Totally reserving judgment on whether what I do sell is actually horseshit... the point is to let the market figure it out. :P
Reflection: how I actually spend Time on Internet Marketing
Admittedly, 60% of my time spent on the Internet is just keeping tabs on who's selling what-horseshit in what-way-and-form. About 30% is me trying to keep in touch with a thousand people whom I don't have time to have coffee with, and the other 10% is trying to ensure that whatever I'm selling doesn't look like everyone else's horseshit. Totally reserving judgment on whether what I do sell is actually horseshit... the point is to let the market figure it out. :P
2019-12-14 at 3:45 am
Comment: R&D in Labour Process Optimisation
This is why I work with in the minimum wage sector. I believe that globally, we're going to have an oversupply of manhours with very limited skillsets. The question then is how to turn an unskilled labourer into a competitive advantage.
Comment: on Building to Flip versus Building to Own
On a couple of these posts.
.
Ok... so my perspective is that I have been basically retired and just killing time since I was about 20. (Not the highly-encashed kind... more the I have no further ambitions kind.) At that time, I had not yet started my commercial career, as I had been postponing it while I was studying. So when I was 21, I started studying commerce, and did (what I considered to be) the normal tour of duty... think tank / consulting firm / bank / startups / freelance... then back to studies. Anyway, started my first business when I was 31... been running it since... now I'm 36.
.
You should be able to tell that I can work on very long horizons... since I have too much time. I find it very amusing that the buzz in these 'startup' groups is all about being the 'fastest-growing', not about other things like being the most resilient, or having the best product, and that's generally motivated by the VC chase, I think, since the hot money by definition is looking for growth, not impact outside of financial metrics. I don't think it's my job to tell people how to run their business, or their lives, but I do enjoy encouraging people to think about non-trendy things, which may be valuable.
To own, or to flip?/commented/ To flip. But I don't want to flip it too easily, or it will be too boring. So building a long-term business, to flip, is more interesting.
.
Ok... so my perspective is that I have been basically retired and just killing time since I was about 20. (Not the highly-encashed kind... more the I have no further ambitions kind.) At that time, I had not yet started my commercial career, as I had been postponing it while I was studying. So when I was 21, I started studying commerce, and did (what I considered to be) the normal tour of duty... think tank / consulting firm / bank / startups / freelance... then back to studies. Anyway, started my first business when I was 31... been running it since... now I'm 36.
.
You should be able to tell that I can work on very long horizons... since I have too much time. I find it very amusing that the buzz in these 'startup' groups is all about being the 'fastest-growing', not about other things like being the most resilient, or having the best product, and that's generally motivated by the VC chase, I think, since the hot money by definition is looking for growth, not impact outside of financial metrics. I don't think it's my job to tell people how to run their business, or their lives, but I do enjoy encouraging people to think about non-trendy things, which may be valuable.
Do we spend too much time hacking for attention?/commented/ I think hacking for attention is 50% of the game. The reason is, I don't actually have a motivation to build a company for the sake of building a company... so I'm only doing it on the off-chance that it'll sell at some point in the future. If I actually cared about the product or customers, then hacking for attention would be 0% of the game (introverted artisanal businesses, relationship/ecosystem welfare oriented businesses), and if I only cared about selling, then hacking for attention would be 100% of the game. I tend to think of it as a management imperative to go right down the middle... but that's a lot of arm waving, I know.
2019-12-13 at 7:44 am
Comment: on the Calibration of Discipline
I don't baby my staff. Even when I think that I don't, people tell me I'm too nice. Constant challenge, really. Better to get rid of weakness in the organisation before it poisons the well. Depending on the population poison is really just defined as whatever stands to kill whomever remains. Game on, mate!
Attempt to rewrite that in 'English' upon request:
Attempt to rewrite that in 'English' upon request:
I prefer not to be too nice, but I am too nice from time to time. The traits we want to remove from an organisation in any iteration N, are the traits which would reduce the efficacy of the remaining individuals in iteration N+1.Second attempt to rewrite that in 'English' upon request:
Perhaps if it's easier to remember, you can just remember 'Jerng's a cunt' and I think we would agree!On the word choice: well, in the questioner's initial question... I was being asked how much of a 'cunt' I'd want to be... no offense intended to women (or other cunt-owners) in general. The questioner appeared to identify as male.
In general, speech is neutral. The risk of speaking any word always includes that death may befall someone, whether it is the listener, or someone else, such as the speaker.
Comment: Burn-outs should be Always Possible, Never Mandatory
Reacting to this headline.
A good workplace protocol should encompass the opportunity to
A good workplace protocol should encompass the opportunity to
- allow managers to select against a specific absolute or value-for-cost performance level
- without forcing staff to burn out
- but with the provision of freedom for fully informed staff to allow themselves to burn out in the name of competition.
Reflection: making Tough Decisions on Mental Health Concerns
How comfortable are you, in advising subordinates, to receive diagnosis from medical professionals, on their workplace behaviour?
I always find it troubling to ask this. Sometimes a staff will go berserk and quit because they cannot deal with the thought of questioning their own sanity.
We must teach people that behavioural patterns are like catching a common cold. Humans often have no control over their conditions. We can only examine, or deny what we see.
I always find it troubling to ask this. Sometimes a staff will go berserk and quit because they cannot deal with the thought of questioning their own sanity.
We must teach people that behavioural patterns are like catching a common cold. Humans often have no control over their conditions. We can only examine, or deny what we see.
Just offered a staff, the opportunity to receive help from the right people, if the staff wants help, on concerns about 'compulsive lying'. Never sure if I'm doing the right thing. But I think, this is help offered on an indeterminate concern - we are not qualified to further diagnose or treat certain symptoms.Perhaps, a better protocol that can be practiced across the entire workforce, should be put into law.
From a RMD point of view, I'm just mitigating the risk of underreacting to indifference. We are throwing the kitchen sink of therapies at this one... short of reducing ourselves to hourly nannies - we can't afford to do that.
I have a very simple model of behavioural bucketing. Non-compliance with any social norm * ... can be attributed to the actor being either lazy, stupid, or evil. Bear with me, for this model is like all models, leaky, but not leaky enough to be useless.
Now based on that model, I can safely say that I generally don't care what the actual reason is... I don't believe it is possible to determine the truth behind the motivations of any private counterparty. So all non-compliance in a counterparty is basically dealt with the same way, with the same penalties and rewards, regardless of motivation in the actor.
However, at the meta-level, it's useful to discuss behaviour. What I am addressing in the post above is purely about how we discuss behaviour, after all the penalties and rewards are said and done.
In the case of this particular individual, I do not think that new therapies will be invoked in time to save their integration into our firm. However, it may benefit the general well-being of the individual due to an improvement in self-understanding, and perhaps in their future opportunities in other firms. I shall keep the group updated on how this all turns out!
(* business norms are a sort of social norm, all the way down to the rules in each organisation, because business is a social activity by definition)
2019-12-11 at 11:53 am
Do Invite Me to Legal Suicides - I will try to make it
Three messages I posted on Facebook.
As a general rule, I avoid most weddings, as they take up far too much time and carry far too little significance in society. However, someone asked me if I would attend their suicide, and so I have decided that yes, if you're committing suicide in a LEGAL fashion, WHERE IT IS LEGAL to do so, yes, please DO invite me, and I will try to make it.
Update: Ok folks, if this account suddenly disappears, it would probably be due to my expressions about the moral virtue of sui**** / sui**** positivity, and my support for the members of communities which hold such views. I have requested review of two posts removed by Facebook (probably flagged by other users). I submit to the rules and mods. But if the account disappears suddenly, you know why! Meanwhile I wonder, how large the actual community is since it faces deplatforming and general castigation from various parties. Every few years, I delete and restart my social media accounts to purge data. Perhaps this time, it'll happen by itself... poof.
As a general rule, I avoid most weddings, as they take up far too much time and carry far too little significance in society. However, someone asked me if I would attend their suicide, and so I have decided that yes, if you're committing suicide in a LEGAL fashion, WHERE IT IS LEGAL to do so, yes, please DO invite me, and I will try to make it.
On suicide: You can't choose to be born. You can choose how to live and die. Suicide is a legitimate tactic in war - there's no reason to discount its utility to the individual. Don't reject it on impulse, as an evil ideology. Be reasonable. Think about it. Then decide. One way or another, freedom is illusory. You are the choices you make. We all are. Some people will never accept suicide as a norm. To others it is normal. Judgey, judgey...
Update: Ok folks, if this account suddenly disappears, it would probably be due to my expressions about the moral virtue of sui**** / sui**** positivity, and my support for the members of communities which hold such views. I have requested review of two posts removed by Facebook (probably flagged by other users). I submit to the rules and mods. But if the account disappears suddenly, you know why! Meanwhile I wonder, how large the actual community is since it faces deplatforming and general castigation from various parties. Every few years, I delete and restart my social media accounts to purge data. Perhaps this time, it'll happen by itself... poof.
Reflection: on Raising Capital as a Slow-growth Technology Investee
I think pitching to tech venture capitalists is tremendously interesting. They have the risk appetite, they have the money, and they have the authority to sign cheques. However, this comes with caveats.
Firstly, often enough, VCs are primarily looking for 'high growth' companies, and they only secondarily look at whether 'tech' is significantly involved - which is to say, it's safer for a general investor to look for viable business investments regardless of what the nature of the investee's competitive advantage is.
Secondly, tech VCs which have a specific mandate to look at technology are not looking at all sorts of technology. To go far left-field on this, for example: businesses which have at their core a practice of industrial engineering and systems engineering may not be considered to derive their competitive advantages from 'technology', as so much of the application of process is to humans and their behaviours in environments outside of software, and outside of software-connected hardware, and outside of software-connected customers.
Personally I work with on technology which primarily affects how human workers interact with each other, and how they interact with hardware and software entities. I am also in no rush to grow my business quickly, as the competitive advantage which I seek is to always focus on developing internal competencies which are pre-trendy on the innovation adoption curve. We would want to exit any area of research which starts to trend.
I am curious about what sort of VCs to approach in the future.
Now in our fifth year of business, I am circling back to spend more time on getting new investors into our very small business. After a bit of ding-dong-chat-chat with folks in another group, I centered myself around (the above) concern.
While I was initially conducting a general question about what sorts of strategies to use when pitching a slow-growth business to new investors... predictably, some folks requested for a templated summary of what the nature of our business is. This is how I replied.
Firstly, often enough, VCs are primarily looking for 'high growth' companies, and they only secondarily look at whether 'tech' is significantly involved - which is to say, it's safer for a general investor to look for viable business investments regardless of what the nature of the investee's competitive advantage is.
Secondly, tech VCs which have a specific mandate to look at technology are not looking at all sorts of technology. To go far left-field on this, for example: businesses which have at their core a practice of industrial engineering and systems engineering may not be considered to derive their competitive advantages from 'technology', as so much of the application of process is to humans and their behaviours in environments outside of software, and outside of software-connected hardware, and outside of software-connected customers.
Personally I work with on technology which primarily affects how human workers interact with each other, and how they interact with hardware and software entities. I am also in no rush to grow my business quickly, as the competitive advantage which I seek is to always focus on developing internal competencies which are pre-trendy on the innovation adoption curve. We would want to exit any area of research which starts to trend.
I am curious about what sort of VCs to approach in the future.
Now in our fifth year of business, I am circling back to spend more time on getting new investors into our very small business. After a bit of ding-dong-chat-chat with folks in another group, I centered myself around (the above) concern.
While I was initially conducting a general question about what sorts of strategies to use when pitching a slow-growth business to new investors... predictably, some folks requested for a templated summary of what the nature of our business is. This is how I replied.
(i) We help [FACILITIES MANAGEMENT BUSINESSES (example: hotel / restaurant / cafe / coworking / coliving / office / gym / laundry / pool / club))]
(ii) that [face a problem] with managing internal staff to execute on [process optimisation, 24-7-365 operations deployment, technical maintenance, industrial design, marketing communications, bookkeeping, regulatory compliance, and brand management; product R&D, retail merchandising ]
(iii) By [sending in our staff to do it, for a fee ]
(iv) Unlike [people who sell advice, or people who pay for advice, whereas neither of these parties prefer to send in the muscle],
(v) [reason why you're better]: it appears that many operations in the market lack the actual acumen to hit all the operational goals that they want to given the resources that they have on hand; we want to provide a white-label solution segmented by (ii) for this the (i) type of business
(vi) As presented by [our continuous operation of one prototype for 4.5 years to-date] (I think this is weak, but it's the main thrust of the argument, so yeah, looking for resources to do more of the same, really)
Comment: on the Struggle of Socialising
Let me adjust the angle of the conversation. We shouldn't just associate "socialising" with introverts, or extroverts. In fact, both will have equal challenges in socialising...
... the reason being that if someone is too noisy, they will piss off the quiet ones, and if someone is too quiet, they will piss off the noisy ones.
I tend to err on the noisy side... testament to this, is the fact that a lot of the people I talk to end up blocking me. And when it comes to corporate communications, even my shareholders don't trust me to manage brand social media, and
I've been banned from telling customers that they are morons under the brand name (so I just do it with my personal accounts instead).
This is struggle for all of us.
If you find that you're not struggling, because you can talk to anyone normal... then the challenge is simply to be equally comfortable talking to people whom you don't consider normal. Try it!
... the reason being that if someone is too noisy, they will piss off the quiet ones, and if someone is too quiet, they will piss off the noisy ones.
I tend to err on the noisy side... testament to this, is the fact that a lot of the people I talk to end up blocking me. And when it comes to corporate communications, even my shareholders don't trust me to manage brand social media, and
I've been banned from telling customers that they are morons under the brand name (so I just do it with my personal accounts instead).
This is struggle for all of us.
If you find that you're not struggling, because you can talk to anyone normal... then the challenge is simply to be equally comfortable talking to people whom you don't consider normal. Try it!
2019-12-09 at 4:06 am
Reflection: on the Organisation of Talent
As the sole executive of a cornershop with a score shareholders and a half-dozen staff, every minute of my day is preoccupied with the arrangement of talent. The preceding sentences describes the layout of my graph... a sort of hourglass, with myself at its waist.
Within my own person, each minute of consciousness tracks the layout of my bones, muscles, and some nerves (I rarely remember them all, but I never forget them all). In the somatic sense modalities, I track the various effects of food, sleep, sex, conversation, entertainment, social studies, and risk taking upon my flesh... heat, pulse, the shape of the sensation referred to as pleasure, the volatility of tone... the shape of signals in the motor nervous system, and the shapes of sounds, smells, sights, pressures, etc. The fundamental substrate of this flesh as it perceives itself is, a seething, rolling boil, of particles lunging through the abyss. Ah, I find that I am a human, and I am here. And now I am the executive of a firm.
On a daily basis, I wake up and find myself challenged in my gamble of how to spend the first few minutes and hours of awakened consciousness... to improve the preparation of the body for work (I manage the mind as a part of the body), or to simply lurch into work? This has changed over the four-point-five-years of our operations. At the beginning, the shape of work was narrow, and cut out, and we only had to go to market, and along the way I had only to build the factory engine, or become the factory engine when the built engines failed. That was so easy. Over the years, various assets were acquired, and certain other assets were let go, resulting in a complexification of our operations. For the last two years, for example, I have progressed daily with urgent reminders to myself that shareholders no longer protect the corporate interest, and so I have to bear the burden of added concern for their recently stated sensitivities on behalf of all of us.
Whereas for the first two years of operations, I would have to consider for each Ringgit spent whether it improved the profitability of our firm or not, in the second two-year period I have added a layer of consideration for each Ringgit spent... I check how much is spent promoting our business, and how much is spent avoiding the promotion of our business in order to preserve the special sensitivities of our people. Despite these gymnastics, I am yet told to my face that I am bad politician... I think, it is not that so much that I have a low degree of skill in politics, but rather that I only strive to achieve political goals which cannot be predictably acquired at my skill-level. In other words, I think, politics is not a bad challenge, and it is quite a part of business in general, so it must be taken seriously. And in order to grow as a small business, we must only attempt challenges - ignoring non-challenges. Success at non-challenges is a non-investment of talent.
Challenges must be welcomed with open arms.
Beyond my own person, I am then tasked with plumbing of motivations and emotions, for the many fleshy objects which constitute our staff. First the talent of each individual must be analysed and understood... and coached to be internally coherent with itself. And then the interface of each individual must be exposed and made coherent with the interfaces of all other individuals in the firm. Some individuals view themselves grandly, whereas their quality of work is objectively poor and measuredly so; others view themselves hardly, but their measurable work is of admirable quality. All of these myths woven around each mind must be tuned to fit the myths of one another... and that is the other challenge I face, beyond the management of my own talents.
In every individual operator in our firm, I must audit the accounts of knowledge past. And then I must hedge against the probabilities of knowledge that will soon be lost to each individual in the future. I may impute upon each one of us the thing which we must remember tomorrow, and if it has never been read it must be read before tomorrow in order to be remembered tomorrow. That is tactical allocation of wits, on a daily basis. We use tools to help us - modern communications provides us with the 'corporate chat app', instant messaging, categorised by project, or business function, or interest group within the firm. We also use larger documents for long-term storage of organisational lore - the manuals for this and that. The engineering diagrams of what goes where. For each visual design we put into the competitive space, we have our draughts and dozen models from before the final art was culled for production. So on, and so forth. Once a year, we do third-party financial audits, which we prepare for with weekly bookkeeping. Once a year also, we report to the government agencies on various aspects of registration and compliance. Every so often, we liaise with external parties, suppliers, and customers, to poll their knowledge and to keep it in synchrony with our own.
A lot of this work is done by myself, as my staff do not typically concern themselves with the depth and breadth of study that I require. And that too is a gamble of talents. Here we are, on we go. These are the thoughts that consume my minutes, and hours, then weeks, and now over four years.
This is a brief meditation on work, through the lens of one business function. To some degree, my religion is to do work, and so pieces like these serve both a personal and professional application.
Talent is a word from antiquity, which refers to a sort of money, in weight, sort of in the way that we throw the word 'kilo' around today, to mean something of value. Through a literature of poverty, the Christian tradition brought into use the word talent to refer to human resources in general. If I'm not mistaken, management consulting brought the phrase 'talent management' into the modern vernacular somewhere around the 1960s, hitting a popularity peak towards 1975, a trough in 1983 (the year I was born, incidentally), followed by a constant climb in popularity towards the present (2019).
Within my own person, each minute of consciousness tracks the layout of my bones, muscles, and some nerves (I rarely remember them all, but I never forget them all). In the somatic sense modalities, I track the various effects of food, sleep, sex, conversation, entertainment, social studies, and risk taking upon my flesh... heat, pulse, the shape of the sensation referred to as pleasure, the volatility of tone... the shape of signals in the motor nervous system, and the shapes of sounds, smells, sights, pressures, etc. The fundamental substrate of this flesh as it perceives itself is, a seething, rolling boil, of particles lunging through the abyss. Ah, I find that I am a human, and I am here. And now I am the executive of a firm.
On a daily basis, I wake up and find myself challenged in my gamble of how to spend the first few minutes and hours of awakened consciousness... to improve the preparation of the body for work (I manage the mind as a part of the body), or to simply lurch into work? This has changed over the four-point-five-years of our operations. At the beginning, the shape of work was narrow, and cut out, and we only had to go to market, and along the way I had only to build the factory engine, or become the factory engine when the built engines failed. That was so easy. Over the years, various assets were acquired, and certain other assets were let go, resulting in a complexification of our operations. For the last two years, for example, I have progressed daily with urgent reminders to myself that shareholders no longer protect the corporate interest, and so I have to bear the burden of added concern for their recently stated sensitivities on behalf of all of us.
Whereas for the first two years of operations, I would have to consider for each Ringgit spent whether it improved the profitability of our firm or not, in the second two-year period I have added a layer of consideration for each Ringgit spent... I check how much is spent promoting our business, and how much is spent avoiding the promotion of our business in order to preserve the special sensitivities of our people. Despite these gymnastics, I am yet told to my face that I am bad politician... I think, it is not that so much that I have a low degree of skill in politics, but rather that I only strive to achieve political goals which cannot be predictably acquired at my skill-level. In other words, I think, politics is not a bad challenge, and it is quite a part of business in general, so it must be taken seriously. And in order to grow as a small business, we must only attempt challenges - ignoring non-challenges. Success at non-challenges is a non-investment of talent.
Challenges must be welcomed with open arms.
Beyond my own person, I am then tasked with plumbing of motivations and emotions, for the many fleshy objects which constitute our staff. First the talent of each individual must be analysed and understood... and coached to be internally coherent with itself. And then the interface of each individual must be exposed and made coherent with the interfaces of all other individuals in the firm. Some individuals view themselves grandly, whereas their quality of work is objectively poor and measuredly so; others view themselves hardly, but their measurable work is of admirable quality. All of these myths woven around each mind must be tuned to fit the myths of one another... and that is the other challenge I face, beyond the management of my own talents.
In every individual operator in our firm, I must audit the accounts of knowledge past. And then I must hedge against the probabilities of knowledge that will soon be lost to each individual in the future. I may impute upon each one of us the thing which we must remember tomorrow, and if it has never been read it must be read before tomorrow in order to be remembered tomorrow. That is tactical allocation of wits, on a daily basis. We use tools to help us - modern communications provides us with the 'corporate chat app', instant messaging, categorised by project, or business function, or interest group within the firm. We also use larger documents for long-term storage of organisational lore - the manuals for this and that. The engineering diagrams of what goes where. For each visual design we put into the competitive space, we have our draughts and dozen models from before the final art was culled for production. So on, and so forth. Once a year, we do third-party financial audits, which we prepare for with weekly bookkeeping. Once a year also, we report to the government agencies on various aspects of registration and compliance. Every so often, we liaise with external parties, suppliers, and customers, to poll their knowledge and to keep it in synchrony with our own.
A lot of this work is done by myself, as my staff do not typically concern themselves with the depth and breadth of study that I require. And that too is a gamble of talents. Here we are, on we go. These are the thoughts that consume my minutes, and hours, then weeks, and now over four years.
This is a brief meditation on work, through the lens of one business function. To some degree, my religion is to do work, and so pieces like these serve both a personal and professional application.
Talent is a word from antiquity, which refers to a sort of money, in weight, sort of in the way that we throw the word 'kilo' around today, to mean something of value. Through a literature of poverty, the Christian tradition brought into use the word talent to refer to human resources in general. If I'm not mistaken, management consulting brought the phrase 'talent management' into the modern vernacular somewhere around the 1960s, hitting a popularity peak towards 1975, a trough in 1983 (the year I was born, incidentally), followed by a constant climb in popularity towards the present (2019).
2019-12-08 at 5:14 pm
Comment: on Entrepreneurs and Deaths
/commented on whether entrepreneurs are born or made/
Evolution proceeds via mass extinctions. Of course, it also proceeds via smaller steps - but someone always has to die, that's the definition of progress. You can be opposed to progress, and that's a legitimate sense of ethics, but that's not going to change the definition of progress. It's not a zero sum game, of course. From the individual's point of view, it's a negative sum game; from the point of view of civilisation, it's a positive sum game. Now, is this nonsense, poetry, or systematic patterning? You'll have to decide based on your choice of language...
Evolution proceeds via mass extinctions. Of course, it also proceeds via smaller steps - but someone always has to die, that's the definition of progress. You can be opposed to progress, and that's a legitimate sense of ethics, but that's not going to change the definition of progress. It's not a zero sum game, of course. From the individual's point of view, it's a negative sum game; from the point of view of civilisation, it's a positive sum game. Now, is this nonsense, poetry, or systematic patterning? You'll have to decide based on your choice of language...
2019-12-06 at 7:03 pm
Opinion: Four Concerns for New Ghost Kitchens
I gave a brief talk yesterday on ghost kitchens. My point of view is that of a cornershop cafe operator, so you can consider it the built-in bias. Here we go!
.
1. If your plan is to be the digital/software layer that bridges ghost kitchens with orders, then you need to aim for 51% share of mind, in a very small geographical location, own it, then get funding , and grow. If you can't obtain and defend that position, you will find it more difficult to raise money. This is purely a market grab opportunity, so your job is pretty cut out... it's basic-B growth hacking, and at any specific level of service and marketing intelligence, the player with the largest marketing budget will win. Your survival will depend on growth, and your growth will depend on funding, and your funding will depend on your ability to hit targets every few months. If this is your play, try to avoid too much capex, and really spend all your money on market dominance.
.
2. If your plan is to be the physical/mechanical layer that builds and rents kitchen spaces, then there are at least two extremes you'll want to consider, and maybe the bits in between. On the high-end, if you want the best tenants in your kitchen, realise that they are cash-rich and probably highly stylised... if their operations take off, they may want to open their own shops with new financing; on the other hand, if they are rushing to market and if they are inexperienced and underfinanced, they will quickly fold - that sort of sudden attrition should be in your risk model. On the low-end, if you want to test an MVP, remember that hawker stalls in Malaysia rent out for only RM20-30 per DAY. If you want skirt regulations and go to market quickly, consider simply renting a cheap residential property with good ventilation, water, and electrical supply (CHECK EVERYTHING) and start marketing kitchen rental to first-time entrepreneurs and students who are looking to test their hand in the cookery business. Of course, the latter is a lower-capex, lower value-at-risk approach! If you spend RM50,000 outfitting a fully regulatorily compliant commercial kitchen, then your cash flow requirements will be quite high, and your Balance Sheet will be as weak as a restaurant's from day one! Don't forget that this is primarily a LANDLORD business, and once space is rented, you are out of stock of space. Just like a coworking business.
.
Of course, you may pick some special blend of 1. and 2. because you believe in your design acumen. But you may want to consider these points for general risk management.
.
Personally both types of businesses are a bit too boring for me, so I wouldn't intentionally get into them. My own office focuses on technology and capability development for the industry.
.
3. Delivery: running a delivery/fulfilment fleet is non-trivial, and it deserves special attention whether you (a) build it yourself, or (b) outsource it. This has been covered in articles by people who run last mile general delivery networks - so you should definitely read into that if you haven't done this before..
.
4. Actual food production: again, this is non-trivial, and you have the (a)/(b) options as in (3.). However this is best addressed by articles on running industrial food production, which already exist. Google for articles on running a restaurant or kitchen!
.
Finally, there are at least three or four distinct ways to manage invoicing, power hierarchies, and business incentives across {delivery people, production people, software operators}. I have written a view on this, about how delivery services can be improved, but that is also a separate document.
.
1. If your plan is to be the digital/software layer that bridges ghost kitchens with orders, then you need to aim for 51% share of mind, in a very small geographical location, own it, then get funding , and grow. If you can't obtain and defend that position, you will find it more difficult to raise money. This is purely a market grab opportunity, so your job is pretty cut out... it's basic-B growth hacking, and at any specific level of service and marketing intelligence, the player with the largest marketing budget will win. Your survival will depend on growth, and your growth will depend on funding, and your funding will depend on your ability to hit targets every few months. If this is your play, try to avoid too much capex, and really spend all your money on market dominance.
.
2. If your plan is to be the physical/mechanical layer that builds and rents kitchen spaces, then there are at least two extremes you'll want to consider, and maybe the bits in between. On the high-end, if you want the best tenants in your kitchen, realise that they are cash-rich and probably highly stylised... if their operations take off, they may want to open their own shops with new financing; on the other hand, if they are rushing to market and if they are inexperienced and underfinanced, they will quickly fold - that sort of sudden attrition should be in your risk model. On the low-end, if you want to test an MVP, remember that hawker stalls in Malaysia rent out for only RM20-30 per DAY. If you want skirt regulations and go to market quickly, consider simply renting a cheap residential property with good ventilation, water, and electrical supply (CHECK EVERYTHING) and start marketing kitchen rental to first-time entrepreneurs and students who are looking to test their hand in the cookery business. Of course, the latter is a lower-capex, lower value-at-risk approach! If you spend RM50,000 outfitting a fully regulatorily compliant commercial kitchen, then your cash flow requirements will be quite high, and your Balance Sheet will be as weak as a restaurant's from day one! Don't forget that this is primarily a LANDLORD business, and once space is rented, you are out of stock of space. Just like a coworking business.
.
Of course, you may pick some special blend of 1. and 2. because you believe in your design acumen. But you may want to consider these points for general risk management.
.
Personally both types of businesses are a bit too boring for me, so I wouldn't intentionally get into them. My own office focuses on technology and capability development for the industry.
.
3. Delivery: running a delivery/fulfilment fleet is non-trivial, and it deserves special attention whether you (a) build it yourself, or (b) outsource it. This has been covered in articles by people who run last mile general delivery networks - so you should definitely read into that if you haven't done this before..
.
4. Actual food production: again, this is non-trivial, and you have the (a)/(b) options as in (3.). However this is best addressed by articles on running industrial food production, which already exist. Google for articles on running a restaurant or kitchen!
.
Finally, there are at least three or four distinct ways to manage invoicing, power hierarchies, and business incentives across {delivery people, production people, software operators}. I have written a view on this, about how delivery services can be improved, but that is also a separate document.
Comment: on how to Value a Company
Initial quip:
If you have a day to study, probably https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/valuation.asp is a good starting point.
But otherwise here are a few simple concepts:
Now the 'professional valuer of companies' is going to consider all the possible buyers on the market, and try to guess the likely actually obtainable sale price in that market, with equal consideration for all the equivalent operations for sale in that market.
But in order to do that, the valuer needs to have market data. Now the amount of market familiarity varies hugely between one valuer and another. You can ask a general unclely accounting firm, a lifetime restauranteur, and a technology VC to value a company, and given their different knowledge, they are going to come back with different models and prices.
If you're looking to sell a / part of a company... as the salesperson, YOU should lead the pitch in determining what the valuation method is.
I have funny stories about my own share sale experiences, but I'll leave that out for now lol. Still grinding...
Ask three accountants, get three answers. Take the average of the reasonings ( not the average of the valuations ). LolWhat I am saying, friend, is that you need to look at the ways the valuation is determined. The fundamental approach, depends on who is reading the valuation...
If you have a day to study, probably https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/valuation.asp is a good starting point.
But otherwise here are a few simple concepts:
- - a buyer who wants the tangible fixed and capital assets of the company will only value the company at Net Tangible Asset value (cash + firesale price of al other items)
- - a buyer who wants to own the business passively may value it as a series of cashflows (dividends) so a prediction model is needed (pandora's box)
- - a buyer who wants to actively grow the whole business is a higher variance version of the last guy... so the prediction models will be crazier (pandora's box, squared)
- - a buyer who wants to extract strategic value from one small part of it will have a secret special high value placed on one piece, but value the remainder like the first guy
Now the 'professional valuer of companies' is going to consider all the possible buyers on the market, and try to guess the likely actually obtainable sale price in that market, with equal consideration for all the equivalent operations for sale in that market.
But in order to do that, the valuer needs to have market data. Now the amount of market familiarity varies hugely between one valuer and another. You can ask a general unclely accounting firm, a lifetime restauranteur, and a technology VC to value a company, and given their different knowledge, they are going to come back with different models and prices.
If you're looking to sell a / part of a company... as the salesperson, YOU should lead the pitch in determining what the valuation method is.
I have funny stories about my own share sale experiences, but I'll leave that out for now lol. Still grinding...
2019-12-03 at 2:00 am
Business Development Note: What are our main areas of Research and Development?
(following the previous post)
In general, we have touched upon:
the strain of running the business this way is very high... but it is the best I can do given the cards I have. :)
In general, we have touched upon:
industrial design
seating and furniture design ergonomics (focusing on knowing how to both make things more, and less comfortable depending on the application)process engineering
we also push the limit on figuring out how low we can staff a shift, so that there is some fresh food available even when only one person runs the shopsupply-chain IT
menu, inventory management, and costing architecture, such that there is a Lego-style menu that customers can use to order anything they want, and combos are just presets on top of that API, and costing is just automatically computed based on the API backend; basically this has let us test a huge menu which we know is infinitely scalable upwards... and if it's scaled down, we know we can deploy a limited set of it in any type of shop with a more limited menu; (pasta shop, ice cream shop, pancake shop, sandwich shop, etc. pretty much overnight)energy consumption in HVACR
earlier in 2019 I started picking up the basics of how to assemble/disassemble our refrigerators and air conditioners; I look forward to a time when we may have a workshop to build more efficient ACs with; why bother? Energy is our largest cost after goods, services, and rent. I have a huge backlog of work here that I have to park, rn as this is more cost-control, and I need to go work on software (see below) to help drive our topline opportunitiesa small digital advertising issue
due to my being banned from social media, I had to develop Google Ads practice in FY3/FY4... we have extensive quantities of ads running, so explaining what goes on here is an entire talk of its own; different segments, targets, and creative work are involved; one of the dumb/interesting things we do is bet against Google's prices on an hourly basis using bots... by default Google only lets you auto-optimise by day, but as we are brick and mortar 24-7, we have to tweak our bids hourly so that our spend is distributed across every hour of the day in precise correlation with available audiences... instead of all our ads showing up during the one hour when ads are cheapestmore software development
right now we've managed to get away from having a website for four years; we use a Google Ads optimised Google site, but I can't do analytics or launch features / apps / much CMS on that... and since we only have about 30 MAN HOURS PER YEAR for software development, I'm trying to set up some software infrastructure that we can use to be productive given the very limited resources. This is another rather huge domain to be talked about.To be honest,
the strain of running the business this way is very high... but it is the best I can do given the cards I have. :)
Business Development Note: What is our Unique Selling Point?
(from a forum comment)
Let me put the B2B stuff on the shelf to answer that, as most of our B2B ops are imaginary / pre-launch.
We're in a class of our own - you can buy two really good coffees for RM16 and spend a practically unlimited amount of time in an air-conditioned space with 400+mbps wifi, cleaned toilets, personal desks, and food nearby... plus we never close. It's 24-7, and we're located at the crossroad of two highways.
For discussion's sake, it's best to talk about our location in two common markets.
(1) We're fundamentally a restaurant. More specifically we're a cafe, and more generally we're a hospitality business.
Back to B2B for a sec, since I do need to sellx3, right?
In a world where the easy way to lead a market is to specialise and partner with other specialists, we focus on vertical AND horizontal integration for hospitality. When we do start to partner with other businesses in the future, we will be experts at facilities management, and we will be treating our clients' various industries as 'practices' where we help deliver specific facilities under each practice.
(conversation continued in this direction)
Let me put the B2B stuff on the shelf to answer that, as most of our B2B ops are imaginary / pre-launch.
B2C
We're in a class of our own - you can buy two really good coffees for RM16 and spend a practically unlimited amount of time in an air-conditioned space with 400+mbps wifi, cleaned toilets, personal desks, and food nearby... plus we never close. It's 24-7, and we're located at the crossroad of two highways.
For discussion's sake, it's best to talk about our location in two common markets.
(1) We're fundamentally a restaurant. More specifically we're a cafe, and more generally we're a hospitality business.
(1a) Within this space we position our coffee quality as artisanal / third-wave service / hipster quality... but we aim right at the bottom of that segment in terms of the materials we trade in, and in the service we provide. However, because that segment is HUGELY more expensive / finicky than the non-hipster coffee market... we basically have great coffee, which hipsters can tolerate but which perhaps two standard deviations (95%) of the population would say is 'good'.(2) We end up taking customers from coworking spaces. We take people who need more flexibility, some who look for better value, and some who simply can't afford most coworking spaces on a daily basis.
(1b) In terms of food, we aim to provide value... our quality of materials traded here aims to be as close as possible to what is considered 'first-world grocery standard, processed, but not ultra-processed' ... i.e. no reconstituted meats, meat is really meat, butter is properly regulated but maybe not top-range French pastry butter; if we put 'pesto' on the menu, it's going to be as close as possible to the proper recipe, no substituting pine nuts for walnuts, etc. Carbonara is raw eggs and parmesan, not some cream sauce thingy (we also have that, but it's just called cream of X). Basically we aim ABOVE Secret Recipe in terms of quality, but at the same or at a lower price.
(1c) In terms of furniture, fittings, and ambience we really spend nearly nothing. Once again we aim at the bottom of the range of 'cool and trendy', but really we don't need to focus on that during the pre-seed stage. Because trendy beautiful fittings are a problem that money can solve later, and problems which can be solved by money are not problems. We have strong competencies in design, but the current design problem is to learn how to do more with less. Also... this is a good segue into the other market we play in...
We've been betting AGAINST charging for space as a revenue model since inception, because we don't see unit economics working out for that (I think the coworking space industry IS consolidating and 2020 will see good price cuts, more closures, but a more mature mode product from Malaysian CWS in 2020 and onwards). I have posted a lot about this elsewhere.In that sense, in the local market, it is a relatively unique business MODEL. The reason it is difficult is that F&B operators typically need to kick users out as quickly as possible to get new ones in. We play the card of never kicking people out if they buy something. But at the same time, ordering something is mandatory. And coworking spaces are trying to keep staffing, regulatory, and inventory costs low by not offering complex food.
This is our CORE VALUE PROPOSITION, though it is not unique.
We're basically a coworking space pretending to be a restaurant; we charge zero for space, but sell you really good food and beverage; our entire revenue model is based on food and beverage sales at this time.
Back to B2B for a sec, since I do need to sellx3, right?
B2B
In a world where the easy way to lead a market is to specialise and partner with other specialists, we focus on vertical AND horizontal integration for hospitality. When we do start to partner with other businesses in the future, we will be experts at facilities management, and we will be treating our clients' various industries as 'practices' where we help deliver specific facilities under each practice.
(conversation continued in this direction)
2019-12-01 at 12:35 am
Yawn: 56
20 October 2019 - 30 November 2019
Pool opens in 43 minutes. Time to cook breakfast, maybe. Probably mutton steak...
/
There are two kinds of worthless ideas.
1. Ideas that can be copied, but can't be licensed.
2. Ideas that can't be copied, but can't be reified.
I generally invest in the second kind.
/
Maleficient spoiler:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
TRANSGOAT
/
/commented on Malaysia's constitutional form, and its historical origins/
Malaysian statesmanship has been weakened by shortcuts from the get go. It's not easy to fix without a lot of political clout. And if you're born the wrong colour, it's not easy to get political clout without a lot of money.
I just focus on making money. I'm Chinese Malaysian. :P
Edit
/
Chores. Chores. Chores. And smacking morons. Then back to chores. Wait. All are chores.
/
on: SoftBank to take control of WeWork: Sources
cnbc.com
If this happens, all SoftBanks investees (e.g. Grab) will rejoice. Capitalism wins again, the big will get bigger, and the question thereafter will be, what sort of public stewardship will SoftBank demonstrate? An applaudable, or a disputable reign? Lol. As a fan of SoftBank since before they invested in We and Grab... I'm just fucking curious. Lol. I used to joke that SoftBank is the answer to any shortage of risk capital...
Extra: link to recent list of TYO#9984's big investments [https://www.businessinsider.com/running-list-softbank-investments-2017-7](https://www.businessinsider.com/running-list-softbank-investments-2017-7)
/
/revision of past training/
My reason for seeking to have this experience was that I thought I needed more experience taking risky bets. I had been training myself in commerce, and I generally found that there [were[ a lot of things people did that I wouldn't be able to judge unless I was able to replicate it. One of those things is to willingly put a lot of money down, and to allow it to float away.
/
comment/
I'm not clear on the accounting of public transportation expenditure. But for some countries, it is a matter of welfare (1) and urban planning (2).
Welfare transfers opportunities for advancement from those who advance and pay tax, to those who cannot or who choose not to advance themselves. Taxes pay for free or cheap transportation.
Urban planning is a separate issue, as it doesn't necessarily prioritise the welfare of all individuals. Let's say we just optimise urban planning to encourage economic inequality... you would still need to moderate the amount of oppression faced by poor people because if you go overboard on that, you end up reducing opportunities for advancement for the rich.
I'm not sure if Malaysia's cabinet has ever taken a stab at this from first-principles. It's my preference that they review this in every term.
/
7km maintenance run. Midday. Ended up with intermittent business development conversations with people I met along the way.
/
Buffalo tongue. Seems to have a very light, almost veal-like flavour. Probably not dry aged, and I have no idea what sort of supply chain this comes from. Costs less than beef chuck from an identifiable supply chain. (India versus Australia.) Goes well with italian herbs and butter, but not garam masala. Perhaps not frozen in the best of ways, but I am not sure about any of this.
/
Caffeine is generally useful as a supplement for inadequate exercise.
/
Brown rice, long-grain, 120g, raw, 444 Cal. (Calibrating breakfast routines.) Counting my calories, and thinking of you. (We count for different reasons.) LOL
/
People, we accidentally discovered how to cook water buffalo tongue.
/
So far, the kimchi experiment is a good reminder that ambient kinesthetic data is boosted by spicy foods affecting the entire GI tract. I need to include this into my routines, systematically. Muscle aches provide AKD boosts, elsewhere.
/
/asking around/ Are you interested in formulating policy as a hobby? I'm not interested in running for elections, but I am starting to have a disordinate amount of policy opinions... might as well compile them into a shadow gov proposal... better still, a club of people who compile shadow gov proposals for fun.
/
Awake. Chase the routines.
/
/commented on how one reads books/
I did most of my reading of books in college... usually we're skimming. That means for me... auralising it in my imagination, and not bothering to remember more than one sentence at a time. Pausing to remember things only on sentences that stand out.
I was surprised as to how fast you can get through a fluff book using this approach (after training).
/
on: Opinion | Pete Buttigieg is punching above his weight
washingtonpost.com
On pressure under fire.
1. I'm pro-Stoic, so Pete's rhetoric gets me interested.
2. Hillary has baited Tulsi, and the latter jumped so it's a public show-up of weakness. I don't think it's a win for the Russians to have Democrats in-fighting. I think it's a win for the Democrats to be able to weed out the stutterers and reactionists.
/
/commented on empathy as a tool for retention/
On my end, I filter and counsel out the staff who are dependent on empathy for well-being. I really want to retain the more independent ones. It's more expensive, but the results are less disruptive to business continuity.
/further comment/
I agree it's a fact that every human will bring their own background to a conversation. I also think that a lot of business opportunities exist because some backgrounds lead to predictable behaviour. Take for example the notion that people are free to pursue happiness - it's illegal and generally discouraged to obtain happiness by suicide, but it's legal and generally encouraged to obtain happiness by candy. This sort of landscape produces very specific business opportunities. It is up to the entrepreneur to design an objective, and to pay the cost of engineering its outcome, despite certain risks. So different brands with different values exist, and there will be different types of employees which exemplify each brand accordingly. Not all brands want to celebrate empathy, some brands may have an outright derision for it, and so their employees will have to be aligned with that. Lol.
/
Why are the majority of headlines hating on Zuckerberg's performance in congress? I thought it got the job done. Lol
/
Sometimes people ask me if the operations I run are branded with too much of myself, and with too little of the corporate brand. I would think it's rather obvious that for a single-founder operation, you simply discard all distractions from allowing the operator to maximise their comparative advantages. Of course, if there is a corporate mandate for branding, then the operator's role is to act in character. But if no corporate mandates exist for specific values, then the corporate values are by definition the operator's values. It's not a matter of choice - it's simply the most efficient mode of operation, to use the tools at hand, rather than to invent new tools. We're not investing in R&D to change our operators to fit some presumed mould of what the world expects. We're investing in R&D to move away from what the market expects, because that's where the competive advantage will be in the future.
.
Yes, I just made that up. It is nevertheless a longstanding modus operandi. Lol
/
We laugh today, and tomorrow the mob destroys us. #everydayinmalaysiasinceiwasborn
/
Everyone here is just doing their respective jobs. The alternative is fisticuffs and screaming. Always be watching.
/
So follow up on an earlier comment. Is diabetes preferable to suicide? What does our public health policy say about that? I think the answers are maybe, and yes, respectively.
/
* see context
.
Wage floors need to be coupled with liquid labour markets. If you can't fire fast, you jeopardise small businesses more than large businesses, and this results in systematic inequality.
.
Perhaps, it's actually easier to have [no minimum wage, but strong job security i.e. making it easy to quit, but hard to fire], and a federally disbursed social security benefits program, and another federal program which facilitates individual enrichment by guiding them up the ladder of opportunity.
.
This also addresses the problem of having a lot of legacy hires in the civil service - where we really need humans (not machines, at least for now) is in education, life coaching, and financial coaching. The SOPs should be tightly drawn, and the ground-level civil service basically functions as a flat (not hierarchical) CRM operation, which pairs each welfare-seeking-citizen with a case officer who walks them up the hierarchy of opportunities, based on an individual gap analysis. Management of the system just focuses on macro-demand and on calibrating the hierarchy of opportunities, on a monthly basis.
.
* Context: Malaysia's Employment Act currently sets a wage floor AND requires a 9-12 month process for the termination of employees. This, and other clauses in the act, encourage workers to seek work as non-employee contractors, because they can collect in cash the cost reductions which businesses save from not retaining employees. Effectively, the EA's attempt to undergird individual welfare results in contradictory results.
/
These days are somewhat troubling. Not more troubling that past days. Neither the people near me, nor the people near them are particularly interesting. It is a good reminder, to pay closer attention to work.
/
'I don't date sexual identities; I date body types.'
.
Is this transphobic?
.
It probably is, if trans people are offended by it. And if it is, then that confers a specific meaning to the definition of the term 'transphobic', and if you accept the meaning, that it is tautologous with what someone else feels, not about what you feel, then you should be okay with being transphobic.
.
Context 1: Sometimes people are not offended by a proposition in and of itself. They are offended by the gall of the person who speaks the proposition without consideration for the state of mind of the the listener - for lack of a better phrase, they are offended by the speaker's lack of empathy, not by the fact described by the proposition. And that expands the scope of discourse about this kind of political discourse. (It may be inoffensive to believe X, but offensive to speak X... you could easily add further qualifications if you don't find this to be a sufficiently accurate model.)
.
Context 2: For states of affairs in the world are empirically verifiable, but propositions about those states can only be assigned a probabilistic truth value and not a binary truth value, unless strict assumptions are placed on the language of the propositions. Epistemic accuracy is inversely correlated with epistemic breadth of scope (abstraction) - that's due to the role of language in epistemology. In general when people discuss states of affairs using binary truth assumptions, without reference to formal definitions, that's where things get really hairy.
.
TLDR:
.
- facts i.e. states of affairs can be verified, only based on formal definitions
.
- people disagree about the formal definitions
.
- avoid arguments with people who don't like formal definitions, unless you are very comfortable with non-binary truth valued propositions (most people are actually quite comfy...)
.
- it's ok to make other people feel uncomfortable, if it protects your own sense of comfort: that is biology, or the program called life which you probably have not yet discarded
.
- at some point you may find yourself making trade-offs: that is politics
/
Testing the good old trick of playing background music as an alternative to social stimuli.
/
Enforced feeding (design of routines): looking to put a floor of 400 calories on the first meal of each day. (Often enough, I don't bother eating before work :P) That amount of gunk is going to need a lot of acid for the washing down. And the optimal amount of coffee is what the body doesn't start to reject...
/
Fark. I think the 'buffalo tongue' was 'buffalo tenderloin' after all. Tesco is just mislabeling items to clear stock kua.
/
/commented on how to expense a billion dollars in a month, no investments will be retained afterwards/
Week 1:
- set up meetings to meet with important sources of information to determine what the opportunities for expenditure are
Week 2:
- start spending on things that take 3 weeks to execute
Week 3:
- etc.
Week 4:
- etc.
.
Example of interesting projects I think might come up:
.
- find a list of markets to crash; some existing contracts will have long-standing effects if you can make something happen or not happen by a certain date... basically decide who you want to make your friend or enemy and attack the relevant market positions; if the leftover friendship is considered an investment, then forget the social equity bit, and just worry about things like triggering economic turmoil in small markets or providing bridge financing for projects that you might want to support
.
- buy a lot of professional services time: researchers, writers, consultants... to put together positions on economic policy and product development... and publish the sum of it by the end of the month;
.
- get introductions to a important people; again if social equity is considered an investment, then get introductions to less important people who can make small to medium sized events happen in short periods of time with moderate incentives; such as triad leaders, headmasters, etc. basically do a bunch of social engineering, with a focus on irreversible effects
.
lol
/
'Please pardon my condition. I'm a bit of a snob.'
- cards I should carry
/
/commented on where I ran into FI/RE people/
Unlike [admin], I have no interest in the lives of my family, or most other people. I am also not particularly concerned about my own death, as I believe every day is a good day to die. This approach basically leaves me untethered to society, and it grants me a huge amount of freedom to effectively... not need to care about money. I spend my remaining time on earth entertaining myself. Some of the projects which have come up in the last few years involve building things - I've been operating a small cafe since 2015, which is the prototype for a broader B2B business which serves the entire HoReCa + coYspace sector. Not a financially rich person, but certainly very independent, and effectively carefree. I spend a lot of time on social media marketing the business, and I ran into the FI/RE talk on some of these Facebook groups, perhaps also on articles that people post around here and there.
/
Turned off subpixel antialiasing on Ubuntu, for this non-Retina LCD, and I'm happier with the result.
/
I helped two people today. No other events of significance passed my desk. It was not a productive day.
/
Enforced business development.
Enforced housekeeping, washing, cooking, and feeding.
.
'Baby, I have bad news.'
'What is it?'
'There's a maggot on your head.'
/
Allocating more time for meditation. Adding caffeine for stimulus. Much work to do.
/
Commerce is a weird and scary thing. Often enough, you'll be able to extract extraordinary value in one way, shape, or form, while exacting an opportunity cost which will remain incommensurable in dimensions other than the former. But that's just the nature of multidimensional life. That's why I think of all relationships as commercial interactions.
.
Recently I've been thinking about a deal that was logistically inefficient four years ago, which recently came back within grasp... just two to three weeks late, as I'd recently begun other engagements. Radio silence now. Pity. I wonder whether that path will be crossed again.
/
/conversation on digital marketing during a grocery run, paraphrased/
x: How are there so many digital marketing agencies?
y: Well, there are a lot of clients...
.
x: But digital marketing is overwhelmingly automated. Who needs an agency?
y: Well, that's precisely what third-party agencies are supposed to be doing... helping clients to automate things, not to do things clients already know how to do, or want to do by themselves.
.
x: Well sometimes clients want to outsource because they can get someone else to do it cheaper.
y: Well you'd be pretty dumb to run an agency for that... if you weren't making a decent profit, you'd be rather deserving of your losses. :)
.
x: Clients can be difficult. Sometimes they ask for really dumb work.
y: Fire the dumb and difficult ones. The money isn't worth your time.
.
x: But you don't deal in that business, I don't think you know how hard it is.
y: I fired all the difficult clients? (For the record, probably the dumb ones too. (Also, probably why I am poor.))
/
Enforced waking. Enforced dietary planning. Enforced stimulus planning: exercise, caffeine, at least. Enforced work. Much to do...
.
I think for a few months, I forgot to remind myself daily that my performance is the critical factor of the success of this operation which I run - because I had received so many issues at work from sources other than myself, that I actually believed my role was less, for a little while. Having recuperated somewhat, I need to get out of holiday mode and remind myself more stringently to focus on my own performance, and not seek comfort from people I contract with, our trading parties, or the people I socialise with outside of business hours.
.
One of the issues with running long projects is that resource allocation needs to be prepped much like cooking ingredients before a shift. I have become used to personal project durations of about four to ten years. Now, I am in my fifth year of this commercial item.
.
First item up. I dedicate five minutes to rumination upon somatic data, before designing what I should eat for work.
/
Animal spanking laws in Malaysia: if they're human, you may if you first obtain consent. If they're non-human, you may if you ensure an absence of cruelty.
/
Fcuk me... 'cayenne pepper powder' in Malaysia is just 'chili powder', and 'chili powder' in Malaysia is (often but not always) the blend of spices used by white walkers.
/
Officially researching foodie FB groups now.
/
There we go. Switchboard goes down. Troubleshooting at 11pm. Still alive. Following this I had a discussion about what is worth dying for. And for all practical purposes, I would maintain that if I had anything else better to do whilst still alive I'd probably be doing that, instead of trying to bootstrap an infrastructure services business. 🙃 I'm generally ready for death, I just hope it will be painless, and I expect to be disappointed.
/
WeWork should just pivot into the CDO business. At least we know how to evaluate those.
/
Awake. Socially stimulated. Need to wash, feed, and address certain demanding issues at work.
/
In other news, wall + DOLPHIN KICKED 12.5+ meters! Strangely, this was arms in side position. Somehow it feels more natural than arrow position, but I guess I have to keep practicing variously.
/
/commented on the 0* Peter Luger review/
People who think that bad reviews are bad for business, are morons. LOL
/
Up next, FY4 audit, and I need to increase my APDay by a lot, I mean like 300%... -_-
/
/commented on B2G agencies/
IMO government agencies need to stop organising lectures for stuff that you can find on youtube.
They need to focus on structural improvements to flows of information. This means setting guidelines, standards, language, conventions, for increasing the quality of B2B and B2VC communicatons... instead of increasing B2G interactions.
On top of that, a lot of PMO / CRM to treat businesses as 'individual with specific ailments / opportunities' - i.e. private tuition, but where the syllabus is a large structured map of best practices, with clearly defined end-points.
/
Stuck in Telawi between meetings, until 7pm. Drop by if you intend to meet up.
/
Social media these days is full of too many noob discussions about how to moderate distributions of wealth. Nice subject of study, but since the levers are mostly out of my hands, I am going to have to postpone involvement on that one. This could be interesting work in the future.
.
Important note: 🤔 Still, I do not enjoy the physiological effects of alcohol, upon my ability to think for a few days after. So now I am going to enforce feeding and see how quickly I can recuperate from social work. Fed, on three eggs, a bag of salt and herbs, and a brick of noodles.
.
I don't celebrate birthdays, for the most part. They carry no obvious significance to me. However, over the years, I have come to treat birthdays as opportunities to engage with the people whom I work with. So I tend to let other people do what makes them happy, and to generally encourage them, and get out of their way in letting it happen. That is social work, among other kinds of social work. And I do believe it builds social structures.
.
My work in general seems to become more challenging by the year. I do not always know if this is a sign of progress, or regress. Of course, I expand the scope of work whenever possible. It was my birthday yesterday, and I spent time with the current partner and with the best friend.
.
Coffee and more fibre from fruit to follow. Also some protein powder, fish oil, and B vitamins. These are first-world designs. I am still grazing on breakfast, and engaging in conversations with new friends. And it is late, in the afternoon, but I am not yet in form.
.
Housekeeping will now continue, nonetheless.
/
I think I've pretty much figured out that if I ever buy one of these Malaysian terrace houses, the entire ground floor is going to be hollowed out and turned into a workshop.
/
For the last 19 or so years, I usually fixed my own clothes. For the last 4-5 years, I've intentionally increased my waste output in order to maximise time and space for work. But I have not addressed the clothes as much. Now I commit to throwing some away, as there is little left to optimise in the short term. #morewaste
/
on: Ministers: Cabinet approves move to ban products with ‘no palm oil’, ‘palm oil-free’ labels | Malay Mail
malaymail.com
/comented/ I am going to put 'Absolutely no Palm Oil' stickers on all our coffee cups until this comes into force of law... well, on the other hand, it's as controversial as putting, 'Jew free supply-chain', stickers on everything. Fun and games in copywriting.
/
6:28am - taking a break from audit prep, to feed.
/
'Is that sex, or making love?'
'All the same to me.'
'Here's a difference analysis.'
'(Reads.) I think I treat all sex as lovemaking. If there's no complexity, I'd rather just masturbate, haha. Also, I think I treat all my commercial work the same way that people treat their loveless sex... and I sign up for decades-long loveless projects... happily.'
/
Just sent out my EOY4 update to shareholders. Audit will soon follow. It's so curious that we made it this far given the sort of making that has unfolded.
/
Enforced feeding. Enforced work.
/
/thot/
How would the following changes, if enacted, change your portfolio strategy?
.
- SST and GST go to zero (all sales taxes)
- real property gains tax does not change
- capital gains tax imposed, progressively, by reclassifying all capital gains as income and using the current income tax rates
/
Haven't done much today, and I'm already exhausted. Well more feeding, I suppose. Time to carboload.
/
I need to spend more money to save more time. Not doing enough of this. Also there is not a lot of money to spend, but that's just a project limitation.
/
So I always thought the Softbank guy was interesting because of the way his bets turned out. I also joked that his funds tend to be the origin of risk capital of last resort for stupidly risky companies, so being interested in high risks we should all be looking for funding from him. Anyway, I could never remember how to say his name. So I ran it through a translator, and it turns out we have almost the same name :P. To make it funnier, let me highlight that his name is analogous to 'X', whereas mine is analogous to 'looking at X'.
/
on : Is It Time to Dezone Knowledge?
insidehighered.com
/commented/ Good headline. Buried at the end of the article is something of actual substance - a note on information theory.
From a technical standpoint, the lens of information theory already provides near comprehensive insight into the process of consciousness (albeit not its reason for existence).
Art is about the activity of communication.
Everything else in the humanities is a matter of history of communications in some mode or another.
I'm not so sure about where the zones are and were, but I think we have all the language needed to quantify the human experience already.
Good luck with work.
/
/commented, not sure if this is fair or acccurate as a comment/
To play devil's advocate, I would push the argument (by X, that you can't discuss this analytically without data and a nuanced economic model) further ... that graduate employment has very little dependence on graduate skillsets.
.
All graduates are unskilled in industrial terms - the only jobs which require special skills are siloed technical roles, which are the sort of job any smart company (and economy) wants to outsource as soon as possible, unless the jobs themselves are of globally leading sophistication.
.
Make no mistake, the jobs available in Malaysia are of a low sophistication... so there is literally a limited supply of jobs for the smartest graduates (masters, PhD) but for the dumbest graduates (bachelors), the problem isn't that the graduates are 'unskilled', but that they are 'unwilling to recognise that they should accept jobs which do not convey a high esteem upon their skills'.
.
This leads to a vicious cycle, where dumb graduates accept jobs which are dumb (as long as the dumb jobs inefficiently reward them excessively) - that leads to inefficient companies, which cannot then allocate resources to smart graduates hiring, leaving the entire economy in a frustrated pre-cum middle income trap...
.
/separate from point above/
Actually in Malaysia we often can't hire graduates because: their secondary school skillset is incomplete (can't blame tertiary educators, it's not their job to do remedial training); students should be pursuing this in their own time, if they are lagging here.
.
The bachelors degree skillsets which are lacking in general (outside of technical silos), are the liberal arts and sciences concerns of (a) ability to form, test, and argue about hypotheses, (b) ability to conduct library research in any given domain given access to a library (read: Internet), and (c) breadth and depth of vocabulary in conceptual lenses. But that is my personal bias as a hiring manager. Huhuhu.
/
Mantra bot: Listened through a half-dozen loops of this yesterday. Definitely helping me remember better. Expecting to listen to a few dozen loops over tonight's work period. Done is when I can recall it verbatim in a few seconds. Not yet done.
/
Summary of discussion a business model for Uber-for-Accounting.
Thanks for attendees and contributions to the conversation. We roughly covered the following points.
1. CUSTOMER SEGMENTS
- companies which don't keep accounts because they aren't pressured by legal penalties if they do not
- companies which do keep accounts for regulatory compliance, but not for management accounting (often, just once a year)
- companies which keep frequent, detailed accounts
2. INCUMBENT SERVICE PROVIDERS
- accounting firms
- company secretary firms, which sell-in accounting services either delivered by their staff or by sub-contractors
- random freelance accountants
3. CORE HYPOTHESIS
- work of the quality delivered by accounting firms, can be delivered at lower cost, if a finely tuned and thoroughly whipped process is used to corral freelances into doing things a certain way
4. BARRIER TO ENTRY
- starting from scratch, a small go-to-market angel financing round would be needed test viability of building up a brand and getting in enough sales to test the model
5. ANTICIPATED RATE OF GROWTH
- assuming the first low-level freelances come in without any background whatsoever, they will need to be coached in detail until they are able to perform bookkeeping
- by the time work on the third client has begun, however, the first staff should be ready to supervise basic work of newer staff who are just now beginning work
6. ALTERNATIVE MODELS
- given the plethora of SaaS-es in existence, for accounting, HR admin, Airtable, etc., it may be easier to simply begin by selling 'SaaS coach as a service' where business owners are simply taught to do things themselves using commonly available free or cheap tools; however this doesn't take deliver the managed-labour layer of the problem, which is the main cultural barrier to adoption of new software, as having a single layer either trained in-house or hired out-sourcers doesn't inspire enough confidence in a business owner
/
Giacomo Casanova wrote a multi-volume memoir about his adventures, many of which involved women. If I wrote a commercially oriented book, I think I would call it Suicide Girls, and it would basically be about the the lives of women who have spoken to me about suicide.
/
Thorns. What a crown? Between admirers whom I do not particularly admire, and antagonists whose criticism I must consider carefully, I wonder... why do so many get so excited by so little, in this world? It is time to rest. Today I played several more reps of the reminders script while attending to duties. Now the lights are off, but bits come around the drawn curtains, glinting off the blades of the ceiling fan as it spins. The fan's silhouette seems one with its shadow upon the ceiling. I tire of my weaknesses, but in this long retirement, there is onky so much to be done unless my fates change. Here, a long path is trodden... it was selected so very long ago.
/
On polish: Some times it is worthwhile, other times it is a miss, but evolution is nothing without expenses. The day begins with a shower, doing the laundry, consumption of fruit and vegetables blended by the housemate, toast, and a test fry-up of some striploin purchased yesterday. Coffee and crowd-sourced remote co-working tests proceed.
.
Between midnight and the time I return to my desk, I have observed one person emotionally volatile from medicative imbalances on the way to work, another who sought validation after being called names and socially castigated by some sort of false friend who turned out to be a social justice warrior with some sort of heartfelt agenda, another who appears to live quite healthily, another who struggles to rebuild what they consider to be a life, and a few others.
.
Basic day. But the reminders are helping me to move faster.
/
Topside. Minced. By hand, because not interested in buying a meat grinder.
/
Fiscal policy levers I'm thinking about:
- wealth taxes (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/wealth-tax.asp)
- quit/parcel rents, assessment tax
- capital gains tax (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/capital_gains_tax.asp)
/
Request for Proposals: 14 December pool-side party in Puchong. I am the dishwasher, that is the only confirmed detail for now. Drop a comment.
/
Beef salting tests commence.
/
Beef salting, test II, initiated.
/
Checking motivations. I gave up on academic ladder-climbing in 2001, and never really got into corporate ladder-climbing. In 2015 I started building a business, and so far, this is the only project I am officially assigned to. Back to work, more thoughts later.
Earlier: while preparing food, it struck me that humour, like empathy, is one of those components of human cognition that I'd be all too happy to see evolve out of existence. Looking to the future.
Later: I'm variously reminded of my privilege. Entering adulthood as someone who takes for granted that he will pass through life being regarded as a fool... availed me of certain freedoms which I have enjoyed now for almost twenty years. I continue to refine my studies.
/
Just one of those days when I'm wondering why we don't write logarithms as left-subscript, since they are the inverse of exponentiation which we write as right-superscript.
/
Sickness behaviour accelerated at 0600 on 15 November. Probably food poisoning. Estimated full recovery at T+96 hours. We are now at T+72. I have been somewhat under-performant for a few days now (work is ok, but calisthenics have been on hold, and weak logistics have limited dark vegetable intake). Possible antagonists: pool water, animal waste, mouldy instant coffee, fermented vegetables, or dirty egg shells. I wonder if taking kimchi with protein powder (protein source, and buffer solution), a low-salt meal, and a lot of coffee (contents complicated)... enabled botulism toxin production in my gut. But I don't suppose it will be easy to test this. I was also chasing a roach around a box with cypermethrin, so I wonder if that was another factor.
/
on: Yogababble 📿 | No Mercy / No Malice
profgalloway.com
/commented Generally I bet very heavily against this.
Civilisation is built on operations that are willing to make gross sacrifices, regardless of uplifting conversations. As soon as the uplifting narratives have more share of voice than operational concerns, I short the operation.
/
Reading on exponential functions before a nap. It is strange, how I came to be here. From itinerant student, to businessman, to sickliness, to convalescence. No JavaScript work was done today.
/
Never really bothered to figure out where Anarchists (as opposed to anarchists) fit into my political worldview. I think Anarchy is built on a broadly defined basis of Humanism... and since I'm not much of a humanist (or Humanist), I suppose I have to deny my support for Anarchy (though perhaps not anarchy).
/
So, there are about 40 stray dogs on the main road where I live. If this were PJ, I could report them via Facebook message, in seconds. But this is Subang Jaya, so a longer reporting process is needed. It is not a priority, but at some point I shall simply submit a daily report. Glhf.
/
Was just reminded about how much trouble I get from people both inside and outside my organisation, about simple compliance with government regulations. Ah well, good to be vigilant. Every day remains a good day to die.
/
Caught up on sleep. Troubled by the magnitude of the tasks at hand. No matter. All things considered, this is a position of relative strength. Things have been much less stable at various points in the past.
/
These days, it seems one of the greatest generators of stress in my daily work... is forgetting to breathe while I am reading/ thinking.
/
Maybe FINAS can start by labelling all the local dramas containing rapey behaviour. So many.
/
Drunk people make the worst company. Ok, depending on how we scope this, my sample size is somewhere between three and three thousand data points. It really doesn't take much to reduce a lucid decently healthy moderately attractive person... to some sort of asexual verbally incoherent toddler. Well, after college, where I met a lot of these, I made a point to expand my understanding of the culture, so I worked in a bar and learnt how to build drinks. There's always more that we can do to engage with society. Now regardless of how judgey I can be able the quality of a drink, I think it stands to reason than most people are not in the business of taste when it comes to pissing themselves.
/
Pangasius hypophthalmus, chunked; carrots, Brassica oleracea var. capitata, white, dash of five spice powder, dash of italian herbs, salt, tiny bit of butter. Soup.
/
An unproductive work day. Many gambles. Progress on business network curation and growth is decent. Progress on the JavaScript framework is slow. I have begun to implement the reactive data store, on top of the decoupled actor message passing infrastructure. I need to revise the touch points, to ensure that decoupling is clean, and that separation of concerns is cogent. I will think about this while falling asleep.
/
Awake. Cognizant of commercial work that needs to be done. Product R&D is going to take a break for a bit.
/
/vacuously commented/
Secondly, the 'tech sector' of all elite people groups does not need taxpayers to fund a PLATFORM for it to 'propose ideas' - that's what new and old media do perfectly well. If MDEC wants to be taken seriously, it needs to provide a PROCESS for any member of the public to formally initiate end-to-end policies and regulation innovations, from ideation, to debate, to expert review, all the way through the levers of parliament, including resource allocation.
[Initially: I think it's pretty daft to ask for innovation on the hot subjects. The point of innovation is to change things you don't think need to be changed. Why bother otherwise?]
/
Done with breakfast. Done with chores. Thinking of heading out for coffee to sketch out some software architecture.
/
Current operations remain unoptimised. Too many volatile people remain unmanaged. Will continue to monitor situation and harass myself, as usual.
/
Housekeeping remains unoptimised. Will add this to the bot mantra soon.
/
Well, got a bunch of chores done this afternoon, but R&D was interrupted by some kitchen nightmare emergency. I don't expect it to happen often, but if it does, I suppose it will give me good reason to write-off the current spacing strategy LOL. Of for a swim. Hopefully fewer emergencies this evening.
/
The FIRST article on 'yolks in whipped eggs' provides test results which indicate that 3 drops of yolk per 100g of egg white renders the mixture unfoamable.
/
Pause software R&D. Pause caffeine compensatory breathing exercises. Off to business development meeting.
/
I am moderately pissed that MDN doesn't refer to PromisesAPlus, where MDN's own documentation on the ECMA Promises implementation (compliant with PromisesAPlus) is incomplete... come on man, you guys are supposed to be good at documentation... (Maybe I just missed the point, and got it all wrong.) Update: I've officially given up trying to make sense of any explanation for 'resolved' outside of the TC39 specification... so I now have to read that to see what the implementation is...
/
Approaching 5 a.m., having fed myself some instant food, it feels like a good moment to reflect upon the day. It has been a moderately productive, mostly cheerful day... on one hand, reminded by the society that I keep, that my abilities and subsequent interests render me rather weird to the mode around me... on the other, I wonder how much I should encourage myself to celebrate my privileged mode, instead of spending hours each day making active attempts to empathise with plebeian sufferings... the mode inability to run realistic simulations of sensory experience, to train oneself out of dependence on this or that experience because they cannot simply recall it in their minds, food, sights, music, touch... ah, we each have different comparative advantages. I have for a long time thought that mine are to provide manual labours as I have very limited opportunity costs. A chap who completely understands the limits of human experience, has very little to ask of the world. One dwells mostly on providing. I plan to revise a few more mathematical concepts before bed - no more software development today... a bit of indulgence in 'things that actually matter in the long run'.
/
Looks like R&D is on hold till late afternoon. Coaching on M&E language use, data analysis of coffee roast history, quality assurance of coffee calibration, scheduling of M&E repairs, and procurement of M&E may take precedence. Also letters of recommendation.
/
It takes 15 minutes to do data entry. But it takes an hour to context-switch into data-entry, without losing track of other contexts, and without losing availability to handle ad hoc contexts that emerge as a result of operational volatility.
LOL
It doesn't take much to context-switch out of data-entry because the latter has no long-term memory requirements.
/
exhaustemundo
/
on: Govt wants BNM to relax rules on home loans
themalaysianreserve.com
/commented/
From a 'development economics' perspective, this finance minister is either a complete moron or he's sold Malaysia out to the 'housing developers' just like his predecessors. There is ZERO value in OWNING a HOME if the cost is LARGE LONG TERM DEBT. The entire value of home ownership originates from reducing perpetuity liabilities (read: rent expenses). If you tell people to feel good, buy a home, and sell 10-15% of your income for forty years to a 'housing developer' who gets cashed out right now, how do you expect to help the citizenry? Instead, the correct policy is to trash the 'development value' of housing - so that people can access housing at a low cost. Just do it. Be a man. Do the right thing.
In all likelihood though, MoF's already coordinated with BNM to be conservative on liquidity, but at the same time MoF goes out and talks shit about BNM's policies to win points with the relevant parties. We'll see what's up eventually.
;)
Note: 'development economics' refer to developing human welfare; 'housing developer' refers to a builder of houses, and 'development value' refers to the market price of a built house - the latter two terms are not directly related to the former term, although they share a common root.
/
Reading ECMA spec docs all day. Today was not a clever day.
/
Sleep as long as you're exhausted. Work as long as you're terrified. Invent something terrifying, if you lack for demons. That is the good life.
/
The only reason I read far-upstream technical documentation, is because I don't trust the technical designer. It's not so much a matter of paranoia, as it is often an explicit incoherence or absence of information at the level of downstream documentation.
.
For example, if you read MDN documentation on how to use (new Promise( executor = (resolve, reject) => {} ), you'll find yourself instructed to call (resolve(value) or reject(reason)) in the function body of (executor), but you don't have any insight into the function body of (resolve) or (reject), nor do you have any insight into the function body of the caller of (executor).
.
I don't know. I feel like a noob because it seems these things don't matter to people... so either everyone else is happy being stupid, or they're smarter than me :P
/
It's not so nice being able to observe the activities of many people barking up the wrong tree, when you're busy barking up another one. Coin flip on success probabilities... but then, I suppose this is part of the cost of being social. One engages with an economy, as a way of engaging with society in general (arguably, these are the same thing). Despite the plethora of bumbling merchants, twangy minstrels, and clumsy artisans... an opportunity to distill progress from all of them presents itself perpetually. One only has to pay the cost of fencing with each of these for minutes upon hours, upon weeks, and upon years... but that's just the nature of business, I suppose.
/
That did not feel like a productive evening. But I guess, it's a few steps forward in R&D.
/
There's a bit of a fuss in one of those wealth-aspirational Facebook groups about how Chris of Cloister House by Formwerkz is spoiling his kids just by building a big house. First of all, it's not that big a house. Secondly, there's no way to know how a kid is raised unless you sit in on family conversations - a house is just a space to have conversations in. Thirdly, I haven't met a lot of rich people that raised kids who didn't know 'how to manage money without getting their hands dirty'. They're consummately boring people... but they get by very well in life, and would never work outside of affluent circles LOL. (Pardon the grammar fails, I didn't edit much.)
/
The art historical styling terminology for the Tesla truck is Brutalism. It's related to this other thing called Futurism, but that's less relevant. The Cybertruck is ironically more Brutalist than Futurist. For an idea of what Futurism looks like, consider SpaceX's Starship instead.
/
While I'm pretty good at visualising patterns, including text, that I'm familiar with... I'm pretty bad at doing the same for simple, but unfamiliar items... such as knots I have not practiced with, or formula that I haven't read a few times. Those are my limitations in this domain. More practice is always needed.
/
5.5 days hiatus from building, to study a language level construct. Back to framework development when the sun rises. Or... in all likelihood...in another 18-36 hours, as I have to do some groceries, payroll, and EOM bookkeeping first...
/
on : Malaysia lacks talents to develop blockchain technology
themalaysianreserve.com
/commented/ The technology is easy to develop. The talent is lacking among policymakers and bureaucrats to create mandates to develop the technology. We used to say this as 'a lack of political will' but the speaker is right in framing it as a lack of talent. He just doesn't make clear that the lack of tech talent is among decision-makers.
You need 'deep cryptography skills' to invent new things to do with blockchain technology - but that's only if you aspire to be an R&D leader (Malaysia is an R&D leader in almost... nothing). On the other hand if you want to simply do systems integration and technology utilisation based on tried and proven technology, then... you don't need deep knowledge, but you do need a minimal quantum of talent (which beyond doubt, we have), and some policy that mandates the talent to develop instead of to do things in other fields lol.
//
/
I think strength-training is now achievable in the pool. Here we go...
/
/commented in a startup group/
As members of the public (paradoxically, we are called the private sector), there are a few things that can be done to change the mindset of the government, to make it more receptive to new technology.
1. Consistent lobbying, by means of communication with (a) your local member of parliament, (b) relevant public agencies, (c) direct pressure on Putrajaya via the mass media (both decentralised and controlled media).
2. Just build a better mousetrap and start selling it. To their shame, they will pick up on it.
Both are hard. Both are our responsibility.
/
Enforced exercise. Then journal maintenance. Then framework development. (Glossing over the fact that cooking has to happen at some point.)
/
Generally, I prefer to speak of responsibilities as being physical facts, not moral imperatives,
Pool opens in 43 minutes. Time to cook breakfast, maybe. Probably mutton steak...
/
There are two kinds of worthless ideas.
1. Ideas that can be copied, but can't be licensed.
2. Ideas that can't be copied, but can't be reified.
I generally invest in the second kind.
/
Maleficient spoiler:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
TRANSGOAT
/
/commented on Malaysia's constitutional form, and its historical origins/
Malaysian statesmanship has been weakened by shortcuts from the get go. It's not easy to fix without a lot of political clout. And if you're born the wrong colour, it's not easy to get political clout without a lot of money.
I just focus on making money. I'm Chinese Malaysian. :P
Edit
/
Chores. Chores. Chores. And smacking morons. Then back to chores. Wait. All are chores.
/
on: SoftBank to take control of WeWork: Sources
cnbc.com
If this happens, all SoftBanks investees (e.g. Grab) will rejoice. Capitalism wins again, the big will get bigger, and the question thereafter will be, what sort of public stewardship will SoftBank demonstrate? An applaudable, or a disputable reign? Lol. As a fan of SoftBank since before they invested in We and Grab... I'm just fucking curious. Lol. I used to joke that SoftBank is the answer to any shortage of risk capital...
Extra: link to recent list of TYO#9984's big investments [https://www.businessinsider.com/running-list-softbank-investments-2017-7](https://www.businessinsider.com/running-list-softbank-investments-2017-7)
/
/revision of past training/
My reason for seeking to have this experience was that I thought I needed more experience taking risky bets. I had been training myself in commerce, and I generally found that there [were[ a lot of things people did that I wouldn't be able to judge unless I was able to replicate it. One of those things is to willingly put a lot of money down, and to allow it to float away.
/
comment/
I'm not clear on the accounting of public transportation expenditure. But for some countries, it is a matter of welfare (1) and urban planning (2).
Welfare transfers opportunities for advancement from those who advance and pay tax, to those who cannot or who choose not to advance themselves. Taxes pay for free or cheap transportation.
Urban planning is a separate issue, as it doesn't necessarily prioritise the welfare of all individuals. Let's say we just optimise urban planning to encourage economic inequality... you would still need to moderate the amount of oppression faced by poor people because if you go overboard on that, you end up reducing opportunities for advancement for the rich.
I'm not sure if Malaysia's cabinet has ever taken a stab at this from first-principles. It's my preference that they review this in every term.
/
7km maintenance run. Midday. Ended up with intermittent business development conversations with people I met along the way.
/
Buffalo tongue. Seems to have a very light, almost veal-like flavour. Probably not dry aged, and I have no idea what sort of supply chain this comes from. Costs less than beef chuck from an identifiable supply chain. (India versus Australia.) Goes well with italian herbs and butter, but not garam masala. Perhaps not frozen in the best of ways, but I am not sure about any of this.
/
Caffeine is generally useful as a supplement for inadequate exercise.
/
Brown rice, long-grain, 120g, raw, 444 Cal. (Calibrating breakfast routines.) Counting my calories, and thinking of you. (We count for different reasons.) LOL
/
People, we accidentally discovered how to cook water buffalo tongue.
/
So far, the kimchi experiment is a good reminder that ambient kinesthetic data is boosted by spicy foods affecting the entire GI tract. I need to include this into my routines, systematically. Muscle aches provide AKD boosts, elsewhere.
/
/asking around/ Are you interested in formulating policy as a hobby? I'm not interested in running for elections, but I am starting to have a disordinate amount of policy opinions... might as well compile them into a shadow gov proposal... better still, a club of people who compile shadow gov proposals for fun.
/
Awake. Chase the routines.
/
/commented on how one reads books/
I did most of my reading of books in college... usually we're skimming. That means for me... auralising it in my imagination, and not bothering to remember more than one sentence at a time. Pausing to remember things only on sentences that stand out.
I was surprised as to how fast you can get through a fluff book using this approach (after training).
/
on: Opinion | Pete Buttigieg is punching above his weight
washingtonpost.com
On pressure under fire.
1. I'm pro-Stoic, so Pete's rhetoric gets me interested.
2. Hillary has baited Tulsi, and the latter jumped so it's a public show-up of weakness. I don't think it's a win for the Russians to have Democrats in-fighting. I think it's a win for the Democrats to be able to weed out the stutterers and reactionists.
/
/commented on empathy as a tool for retention/
On my end, I filter and counsel out the staff who are dependent on empathy for well-being. I really want to retain the more independent ones. It's more expensive, but the results are less disruptive to business continuity.
/further comment/
I agree it's a fact that every human will bring their own background to a conversation. I also think that a lot of business opportunities exist because some backgrounds lead to predictable behaviour. Take for example the notion that people are free to pursue happiness - it's illegal and generally discouraged to obtain happiness by suicide, but it's legal and generally encouraged to obtain happiness by candy. This sort of landscape produces very specific business opportunities. It is up to the entrepreneur to design an objective, and to pay the cost of engineering its outcome, despite certain risks. So different brands with different values exist, and there will be different types of employees which exemplify each brand accordingly. Not all brands want to celebrate empathy, some brands may have an outright derision for it, and so their employees will have to be aligned with that. Lol.
/
Why are the majority of headlines hating on Zuckerberg's performance in congress? I thought it got the job done. Lol
/
Sometimes people ask me if the operations I run are branded with too much of myself, and with too little of the corporate brand. I would think it's rather obvious that for a single-founder operation, you simply discard all distractions from allowing the operator to maximise their comparative advantages. Of course, if there is a corporate mandate for branding, then the operator's role is to act in character. But if no corporate mandates exist for specific values, then the corporate values are by definition the operator's values. It's not a matter of choice - it's simply the most efficient mode of operation, to use the tools at hand, rather than to invent new tools. We're not investing in R&D to change our operators to fit some presumed mould of what the world expects. We're investing in R&D to move away from what the market expects, because that's where the competive advantage will be in the future.
.
Yes, I just made that up. It is nevertheless a longstanding modus operandi. Lol
/
We laugh today, and tomorrow the mob destroys us. #everydayinmalaysiasinceiwasborn
/
Everyone here is just doing their respective jobs. The alternative is fisticuffs and screaming. Always be watching.
/
So follow up on an earlier comment. Is diabetes preferable to suicide? What does our public health policy say about that? I think the answers are maybe, and yes, respectively.
/
* see context
.
Wage floors need to be coupled with liquid labour markets. If you can't fire fast, you jeopardise small businesses more than large businesses, and this results in systematic inequality.
.
Perhaps, it's actually easier to have [no minimum wage, but strong job security i.e. making it easy to quit, but hard to fire], and a federally disbursed social security benefits program, and another federal program which facilitates individual enrichment by guiding them up the ladder of opportunity.
.
This also addresses the problem of having a lot of legacy hires in the civil service - where we really need humans (not machines, at least for now) is in education, life coaching, and financial coaching. The SOPs should be tightly drawn, and the ground-level civil service basically functions as a flat (not hierarchical) CRM operation, which pairs each welfare-seeking-citizen with a case officer who walks them up the hierarchy of opportunities, based on an individual gap analysis. Management of the system just focuses on macro-demand and on calibrating the hierarchy of opportunities, on a monthly basis.
.
* Context: Malaysia's Employment Act currently sets a wage floor AND requires a 9-12 month process for the termination of employees. This, and other clauses in the act, encourage workers to seek work as non-employee contractors, because they can collect in cash the cost reductions which businesses save from not retaining employees. Effectively, the EA's attempt to undergird individual welfare results in contradictory results.
/
These days are somewhat troubling. Not more troubling that past days. Neither the people near me, nor the people near them are particularly interesting. It is a good reminder, to pay closer attention to work.
/
'I don't date sexual identities; I date body types.'
.
Is this transphobic?
.
It probably is, if trans people are offended by it. And if it is, then that confers a specific meaning to the definition of the term 'transphobic', and if you accept the meaning, that it is tautologous with what someone else feels, not about what you feel, then you should be okay with being transphobic.
.
Context 1: Sometimes people are not offended by a proposition in and of itself. They are offended by the gall of the person who speaks the proposition without consideration for the state of mind of the the listener - for lack of a better phrase, they are offended by the speaker's lack of empathy, not by the fact described by the proposition. And that expands the scope of discourse about this kind of political discourse. (It may be inoffensive to believe X, but offensive to speak X... you could easily add further qualifications if you don't find this to be a sufficiently accurate model.)
.
Context 2: For states of affairs in the world are empirically verifiable, but propositions about those states can only be assigned a probabilistic truth value and not a binary truth value, unless strict assumptions are placed on the language of the propositions. Epistemic accuracy is inversely correlated with epistemic breadth of scope (abstraction) - that's due to the role of language in epistemology. In general when people discuss states of affairs using binary truth assumptions, without reference to formal definitions, that's where things get really hairy.
.
TLDR:
.
- facts i.e. states of affairs can be verified, only based on formal definitions
.
- people disagree about the formal definitions
.
- avoid arguments with people who don't like formal definitions, unless you are very comfortable with non-binary truth valued propositions (most people are actually quite comfy...)
.
- it's ok to make other people feel uncomfortable, if it protects your own sense of comfort: that is biology, or the program called life which you probably have not yet discarded
.
- at some point you may find yourself making trade-offs: that is politics
/
Testing the good old trick of playing background music as an alternative to social stimuli.
/
Enforced feeding (design of routines): looking to put a floor of 400 calories on the first meal of each day. (Often enough, I don't bother eating before work :P) That amount of gunk is going to need a lot of acid for the washing down. And the optimal amount of coffee is what the body doesn't start to reject...
/
Fark. I think the 'buffalo tongue' was 'buffalo tenderloin' after all. Tesco is just mislabeling items to clear stock kua.
/
/commented on how to expense a billion dollars in a month, no investments will be retained afterwards/
Week 1:
- set up meetings to meet with important sources of information to determine what the opportunities for expenditure are
Week 2:
- start spending on things that take 3 weeks to execute
Week 3:
- etc.
Week 4:
- etc.
.
Example of interesting projects I think might come up:
.
- find a list of markets to crash; some existing contracts will have long-standing effects if you can make something happen or not happen by a certain date... basically decide who you want to make your friend or enemy and attack the relevant market positions; if the leftover friendship is considered an investment, then forget the social equity bit, and just worry about things like triggering economic turmoil in small markets or providing bridge financing for projects that you might want to support
.
- buy a lot of professional services time: researchers, writers, consultants... to put together positions on economic policy and product development... and publish the sum of it by the end of the month;
.
- get introductions to a important people; again if social equity is considered an investment, then get introductions to less important people who can make small to medium sized events happen in short periods of time with moderate incentives; such as triad leaders, headmasters, etc. basically do a bunch of social engineering, with a focus on irreversible effects
.
lol
/
'Please pardon my condition. I'm a bit of a snob.'
- cards I should carry
/
/commented on where I ran into FI/RE people/
Unlike [admin], I have no interest in the lives of my family, or most other people. I am also not particularly concerned about my own death, as I believe every day is a good day to die. This approach basically leaves me untethered to society, and it grants me a huge amount of freedom to effectively... not need to care about money. I spend my remaining time on earth entertaining myself. Some of the projects which have come up in the last few years involve building things - I've been operating a small cafe since 2015, which is the prototype for a broader B2B business which serves the entire HoReCa + coYspace sector. Not a financially rich person, but certainly very independent, and effectively carefree. I spend a lot of time on social media marketing the business, and I ran into the FI/RE talk on some of these Facebook groups, perhaps also on articles that people post around here and there.
/
Turned off subpixel antialiasing on Ubuntu, for this non-Retina LCD, and I'm happier with the result.
/
I helped two people today. No other events of significance passed my desk. It was not a productive day.
/
Enforced business development.
Enforced housekeeping, washing, cooking, and feeding.
.
'Baby, I have bad news.'
'What is it?'
'There's a maggot on your head.'
/
Allocating more time for meditation. Adding caffeine for stimulus. Much work to do.
/
Commerce is a weird and scary thing. Often enough, you'll be able to extract extraordinary value in one way, shape, or form, while exacting an opportunity cost which will remain incommensurable in dimensions other than the former. But that's just the nature of multidimensional life. That's why I think of all relationships as commercial interactions.
.
Recently I've been thinking about a deal that was logistically inefficient four years ago, which recently came back within grasp... just two to three weeks late, as I'd recently begun other engagements. Radio silence now. Pity. I wonder whether that path will be crossed again.
/
/conversation on digital marketing during a grocery run, paraphrased/
x: How are there so many digital marketing agencies?
y: Well, there are a lot of clients...
.
x: But digital marketing is overwhelmingly automated. Who needs an agency?
y: Well, that's precisely what third-party agencies are supposed to be doing... helping clients to automate things, not to do things clients already know how to do, or want to do by themselves.
.
x: Well sometimes clients want to outsource because they can get someone else to do it cheaper.
y: Well you'd be pretty dumb to run an agency for that... if you weren't making a decent profit, you'd be rather deserving of your losses. :)
.
x: Clients can be difficult. Sometimes they ask for really dumb work.
y: Fire the dumb and difficult ones. The money isn't worth your time.
.
x: But you don't deal in that business, I don't think you know how hard it is.
y: I fired all the difficult clients? (For the record, probably the dumb ones too. (Also, probably why I am poor.))
/
Enforced waking. Enforced dietary planning. Enforced stimulus planning: exercise, caffeine, at least. Enforced work. Much to do...
.
I think for a few months, I forgot to remind myself daily that my performance is the critical factor of the success of this operation which I run - because I had received so many issues at work from sources other than myself, that I actually believed my role was less, for a little while. Having recuperated somewhat, I need to get out of holiday mode and remind myself more stringently to focus on my own performance, and not seek comfort from people I contract with, our trading parties, or the people I socialise with outside of business hours.
.
One of the issues with running long projects is that resource allocation needs to be prepped much like cooking ingredients before a shift. I have become used to personal project durations of about four to ten years. Now, I am in my fifth year of this commercial item.
.
First item up. I dedicate five minutes to rumination upon somatic data, before designing what I should eat for work.
/
Animal spanking laws in Malaysia: if they're human, you may if you first obtain consent. If they're non-human, you may if you ensure an absence of cruelty.
/
Fcuk me... 'cayenne pepper powder' in Malaysia is just 'chili powder', and 'chili powder' in Malaysia is (often but not always) the blend of spices used by white walkers.
/
Officially researching foodie FB groups now.
/
There we go. Switchboard goes down. Troubleshooting at 11pm. Still alive. Following this I had a discussion about what is worth dying for. And for all practical purposes, I would maintain that if I had anything else better to do whilst still alive I'd probably be doing that, instead of trying to bootstrap an infrastructure services business. 🙃 I'm generally ready for death, I just hope it will be painless, and I expect to be disappointed.
/
WeWork should just pivot into the CDO business. At least we know how to evaluate those.
/
Awake. Socially stimulated. Need to wash, feed, and address certain demanding issues at work.
/
In other news, wall + DOLPHIN KICKED 12.5+ meters! Strangely, this was arms in side position. Somehow it feels more natural than arrow position, but I guess I have to keep practicing variously.
/
/commented on the 0* Peter Luger review/
People who think that bad reviews are bad for business, are morons. LOL
/
Up next, FY4 audit, and I need to increase my APDay by a lot, I mean like 300%... -_-
/
/commented on B2G agencies/
IMO government agencies need to stop organising lectures for stuff that you can find on youtube.
They need to focus on structural improvements to flows of information. This means setting guidelines, standards, language, conventions, for increasing the quality of B2B and B2VC communicatons... instead of increasing B2G interactions.
On top of that, a lot of PMO / CRM to treat businesses as 'individual with specific ailments / opportunities' - i.e. private tuition, but where the syllabus is a large structured map of best practices, with clearly defined end-points.
/
Stuck in Telawi between meetings, until 7pm. Drop by if you intend to meet up.
/
Social media these days is full of too many noob discussions about how to moderate distributions of wealth. Nice subject of study, but since the levers are mostly out of my hands, I am going to have to postpone involvement on that one. This could be interesting work in the future.
.
Important note: 🤔 Still, I do not enjoy the physiological effects of alcohol, upon my ability to think for a few days after. So now I am going to enforce feeding and see how quickly I can recuperate from social work. Fed, on three eggs, a bag of salt and herbs, and a brick of noodles.
.
I don't celebrate birthdays, for the most part. They carry no obvious significance to me. However, over the years, I have come to treat birthdays as opportunities to engage with the people whom I work with. So I tend to let other people do what makes them happy, and to generally encourage them, and get out of their way in letting it happen. That is social work, among other kinds of social work. And I do believe it builds social structures.
.
My work in general seems to become more challenging by the year. I do not always know if this is a sign of progress, or regress. Of course, I expand the scope of work whenever possible. It was my birthday yesterday, and I spent time with the current partner and with the best friend.
.
Coffee and more fibre from fruit to follow. Also some protein powder, fish oil, and B vitamins. These are first-world designs. I am still grazing on breakfast, and engaging in conversations with new friends. And it is late, in the afternoon, but I am not yet in form.
.
Housekeeping will now continue, nonetheless.
/
I think I've pretty much figured out that if I ever buy one of these Malaysian terrace houses, the entire ground floor is going to be hollowed out and turned into a workshop.
/
For the last 19 or so years, I usually fixed my own clothes. For the last 4-5 years, I've intentionally increased my waste output in order to maximise time and space for work. But I have not addressed the clothes as much. Now I commit to throwing some away, as there is little left to optimise in the short term. #morewaste
/
on: Ministers: Cabinet approves move to ban products with ‘no palm oil’, ‘palm oil-free’ labels | Malay Mail
malaymail.com
/comented/ I am going to put 'Absolutely no Palm Oil' stickers on all our coffee cups until this comes into force of law... well, on the other hand, it's as controversial as putting, 'Jew free supply-chain', stickers on everything. Fun and games in copywriting.
/
6:28am - taking a break from audit prep, to feed.
/
'Is that sex, or making love?'
'All the same to me.'
'Here's a difference analysis.'
'(Reads.) I think I treat all sex as lovemaking. If there's no complexity, I'd rather just masturbate, haha. Also, I think I treat all my commercial work the same way that people treat their loveless sex... and I sign up for decades-long loveless projects... happily.'
/
Just sent out my EOY4 update to shareholders. Audit will soon follow. It's so curious that we made it this far given the sort of making that has unfolded.
/
Enforced feeding. Enforced work.
/
/thot/
How would the following changes, if enacted, change your portfolio strategy?
.
- SST and GST go to zero (all sales taxes)
- real property gains tax does not change
- capital gains tax imposed, progressively, by reclassifying all capital gains as income and using the current income tax rates
/
Haven't done much today, and I'm already exhausted. Well more feeding, I suppose. Time to carboload.
/
I need to spend more money to save more time. Not doing enough of this. Also there is not a lot of money to spend, but that's just a project limitation.
/
So I always thought the Softbank guy was interesting because of the way his bets turned out. I also joked that his funds tend to be the origin of risk capital of last resort for stupidly risky companies, so being interested in high risks we should all be looking for funding from him. Anyway, I could never remember how to say his name. So I ran it through a translator, and it turns out we have almost the same name :P. To make it funnier, let me highlight that his name is analogous to 'X', whereas mine is analogous to 'looking at X'.
/
on : Is It Time to Dezone Knowledge?
insidehighered.com
/commented/ Good headline. Buried at the end of the article is something of actual substance - a note on information theory.
From a technical standpoint, the lens of information theory already provides near comprehensive insight into the process of consciousness (albeit not its reason for existence).
Art is about the activity of communication.
Everything else in the humanities is a matter of history of communications in some mode or another.
I'm not so sure about where the zones are and were, but I think we have all the language needed to quantify the human experience already.
Good luck with work.
/
/commented, not sure if this is fair or acccurate as a comment/
To play devil's advocate, I would push the argument (by X, that you can't discuss this analytically without data and a nuanced economic model) further ... that graduate employment has very little dependence on graduate skillsets.
.
All graduates are unskilled in industrial terms - the only jobs which require special skills are siloed technical roles, which are the sort of job any smart company (and economy) wants to outsource as soon as possible, unless the jobs themselves are of globally leading sophistication.
.
Make no mistake, the jobs available in Malaysia are of a low sophistication... so there is literally a limited supply of jobs for the smartest graduates (masters, PhD) but for the dumbest graduates (bachelors), the problem isn't that the graduates are 'unskilled', but that they are 'unwilling to recognise that they should accept jobs which do not convey a high esteem upon their skills'.
.
This leads to a vicious cycle, where dumb graduates accept jobs which are dumb (as long as the dumb jobs inefficiently reward them excessively) - that leads to inefficient companies, which cannot then allocate resources to smart graduates hiring, leaving the entire economy in a frustrated pre-cum middle income trap...
.
/separate from point above/
Actually in Malaysia we often can't hire graduates because: their secondary school skillset is incomplete (can't blame tertiary educators, it's not their job to do remedial training); students should be pursuing this in their own time, if they are lagging here.
.
The bachelors degree skillsets which are lacking in general (outside of technical silos), are the liberal arts and sciences concerns of (a) ability to form, test, and argue about hypotheses, (b) ability to conduct library research in any given domain given access to a library (read: Internet), and (c) breadth and depth of vocabulary in conceptual lenses. But that is my personal bias as a hiring manager. Huhuhu.
/
Mantra bot: Listened through a half-dozen loops of this yesterday. Definitely helping me remember better. Expecting to listen to a few dozen loops over tonight's work period. Done is when I can recall it verbatim in a few seconds. Not yet done.
/
Summary of discussion a business model for Uber-for-Accounting.
Thanks for attendees and contributions to the conversation. We roughly covered the following points.
1. CUSTOMER SEGMENTS
- companies which don't keep accounts because they aren't pressured by legal penalties if they do not
- companies which do keep accounts for regulatory compliance, but not for management accounting (often, just once a year)
- companies which keep frequent, detailed accounts
2. INCUMBENT SERVICE PROVIDERS
- accounting firms
- company secretary firms, which sell-in accounting services either delivered by their staff or by sub-contractors
- random freelance accountants
3. CORE HYPOTHESIS
- work of the quality delivered by accounting firms, can be delivered at lower cost, if a finely tuned and thoroughly whipped process is used to corral freelances into doing things a certain way
4. BARRIER TO ENTRY
- starting from scratch, a small go-to-market angel financing round would be needed test viability of building up a brand and getting in enough sales to test the model
5. ANTICIPATED RATE OF GROWTH
- assuming the first low-level freelances come in without any background whatsoever, they will need to be coached in detail until they are able to perform bookkeeping
- by the time work on the third client has begun, however, the first staff should be ready to supervise basic work of newer staff who are just now beginning work
6. ALTERNATIVE MODELS
- given the plethora of SaaS-es in existence, for accounting, HR admin, Airtable, etc., it may be easier to simply begin by selling 'SaaS coach as a service' where business owners are simply taught to do things themselves using commonly available free or cheap tools; however this doesn't take deliver the managed-labour layer of the problem, which is the main cultural barrier to adoption of new software, as having a single layer either trained in-house or hired out-sourcers doesn't inspire enough confidence in a business owner
/
Giacomo Casanova wrote a multi-volume memoir about his adventures, many of which involved women. If I wrote a commercially oriented book, I think I would call it Suicide Girls, and it would basically be about the the lives of women who have spoken to me about suicide.
/
Thorns. What a crown? Between admirers whom I do not particularly admire, and antagonists whose criticism I must consider carefully, I wonder... why do so many get so excited by so little, in this world? It is time to rest. Today I played several more reps of the reminders script while attending to duties. Now the lights are off, but bits come around the drawn curtains, glinting off the blades of the ceiling fan as it spins. The fan's silhouette seems one with its shadow upon the ceiling. I tire of my weaknesses, but in this long retirement, there is onky so much to be done unless my fates change. Here, a long path is trodden... it was selected so very long ago.
/
On polish: Some times it is worthwhile, other times it is a miss, but evolution is nothing without expenses. The day begins with a shower, doing the laundry, consumption of fruit and vegetables blended by the housemate, toast, and a test fry-up of some striploin purchased yesterday. Coffee and crowd-sourced remote co-working tests proceed.
.
Between midnight and the time I return to my desk, I have observed one person emotionally volatile from medicative imbalances on the way to work, another who sought validation after being called names and socially castigated by some sort of false friend who turned out to be a social justice warrior with some sort of heartfelt agenda, another who appears to live quite healthily, another who struggles to rebuild what they consider to be a life, and a few others.
.
Basic day. But the reminders are helping me to move faster.
/
Topside. Minced. By hand, because not interested in buying a meat grinder.
/
Fiscal policy levers I'm thinking about:
- wealth taxes (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/wealth-tax.asp)
- quit/parcel rents, assessment tax
- capital gains tax (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/capital_gains_tax.asp)
/
Request for Proposals: 14 December pool-side party in Puchong. I am the dishwasher, that is the only confirmed detail for now. Drop a comment.
/
Beef salting tests commence.
/
Beef salting, test II, initiated.
/
Checking motivations. I gave up on academic ladder-climbing in 2001, and never really got into corporate ladder-climbing. In 2015 I started building a business, and so far, this is the only project I am officially assigned to. Back to work, more thoughts later.
Earlier: while preparing food, it struck me that humour, like empathy, is one of those components of human cognition that I'd be all too happy to see evolve out of existence. Looking to the future.
Later: I'm variously reminded of my privilege. Entering adulthood as someone who takes for granted that he will pass through life being regarded as a fool... availed me of certain freedoms which I have enjoyed now for almost twenty years. I continue to refine my studies.
/
Just one of those days when I'm wondering why we don't write logarithms as left-subscript, since they are the inverse of exponentiation which we write as right-superscript.
/
Sickness behaviour accelerated at 0600 on 15 November. Probably food poisoning. Estimated full recovery at T+96 hours. We are now at T+72. I have been somewhat under-performant for a few days now (work is ok, but calisthenics have been on hold, and weak logistics have limited dark vegetable intake). Possible antagonists: pool water, animal waste, mouldy instant coffee, fermented vegetables, or dirty egg shells. I wonder if taking kimchi with protein powder (protein source, and buffer solution), a low-salt meal, and a lot of coffee (contents complicated)... enabled botulism toxin production in my gut. But I don't suppose it will be easy to test this. I was also chasing a roach around a box with cypermethrin, so I wonder if that was another factor.
/
on: Yogababble 📿 | No Mercy / No Malice
profgalloway.com
/commented Generally I bet very heavily against this.
Civilisation is built on operations that are willing to make gross sacrifices, regardless of uplifting conversations. As soon as the uplifting narratives have more share of voice than operational concerns, I short the operation.
/
Reading on exponential functions before a nap. It is strange, how I came to be here. From itinerant student, to businessman, to sickliness, to convalescence. No JavaScript work was done today.
/
Never really bothered to figure out where Anarchists (as opposed to anarchists) fit into my political worldview. I think Anarchy is built on a broadly defined basis of Humanism... and since I'm not much of a humanist (or Humanist), I suppose I have to deny my support for Anarchy (though perhaps not anarchy).
/
So, there are about 40 stray dogs on the main road where I live. If this were PJ, I could report them via Facebook message, in seconds. But this is Subang Jaya, so a longer reporting process is needed. It is not a priority, but at some point I shall simply submit a daily report. Glhf.
/
Was just reminded about how much trouble I get from people both inside and outside my organisation, about simple compliance with government regulations. Ah well, good to be vigilant. Every day remains a good day to die.
/
Caught up on sleep. Troubled by the magnitude of the tasks at hand. No matter. All things considered, this is a position of relative strength. Things have been much less stable at various points in the past.
/
These days, it seems one of the greatest generators of stress in my daily work... is forgetting to breathe while I am reading/ thinking.
/
Maybe FINAS can start by labelling all the local dramas containing rapey behaviour. So many.
/
Drunk people make the worst company. Ok, depending on how we scope this, my sample size is somewhere between three and three thousand data points. It really doesn't take much to reduce a lucid decently healthy moderately attractive person... to some sort of asexual verbally incoherent toddler. Well, after college, where I met a lot of these, I made a point to expand my understanding of the culture, so I worked in a bar and learnt how to build drinks. There's always more that we can do to engage with society. Now regardless of how judgey I can be able the quality of a drink, I think it stands to reason than most people are not in the business of taste when it comes to pissing themselves.
/
Pangasius hypophthalmus, chunked; carrots, Brassica oleracea var. capitata, white, dash of five spice powder, dash of italian herbs, salt, tiny bit of butter. Soup.
/
An unproductive work day. Many gambles. Progress on business network curation and growth is decent. Progress on the JavaScript framework is slow. I have begun to implement the reactive data store, on top of the decoupled actor message passing infrastructure. I need to revise the touch points, to ensure that decoupling is clean, and that separation of concerns is cogent. I will think about this while falling asleep.
/
Awake. Cognizant of commercial work that needs to be done. Product R&D is going to take a break for a bit.
/
/vacuously commented/
Secondly, the 'tech sector' of all elite people groups does not need taxpayers to fund a PLATFORM for it to 'propose ideas' - that's what new and old media do perfectly well. If MDEC wants to be taken seriously, it needs to provide a PROCESS for any member of the public to formally initiate end-to-end policies and regulation innovations, from ideation, to debate, to expert review, all the way through the levers of parliament, including resource allocation.
[Initially: I think it's pretty daft to ask for innovation on the hot subjects. The point of innovation is to change things you don't think need to be changed. Why bother otherwise?]
/
Done with breakfast. Done with chores. Thinking of heading out for coffee to sketch out some software architecture.
/
Current operations remain unoptimised. Too many volatile people remain unmanaged. Will continue to monitor situation and harass myself, as usual.
/
Housekeeping remains unoptimised. Will add this to the bot mantra soon.
/
Well, got a bunch of chores done this afternoon, but R&D was interrupted by some kitchen nightmare emergency. I don't expect it to happen often, but if it does, I suppose it will give me good reason to write-off the current spacing strategy LOL. Of for a swim. Hopefully fewer emergencies this evening.
/
The FIRST article on 'yolks in whipped eggs' provides test results which indicate that 3 drops of yolk per 100g of egg white renders the mixture unfoamable.
/
Pause software R&D. Pause caffeine compensatory breathing exercises. Off to business development meeting.
/
I am moderately pissed that MDN doesn't refer to PromisesAPlus, where MDN's own documentation on the ECMA Promises implementation (compliant with PromisesAPlus) is incomplete... come on man, you guys are supposed to be good at documentation... (Maybe I just missed the point, and got it all wrong.) Update: I've officially given up trying to make sense of any explanation for 'resolved' outside of the TC39 specification... so I now have to read that to see what the implementation is...
/
Approaching 5 a.m., having fed myself some instant food, it feels like a good moment to reflect upon the day. It has been a moderately productive, mostly cheerful day... on one hand, reminded by the society that I keep, that my abilities and subsequent interests render me rather weird to the mode around me... on the other, I wonder how much I should encourage myself to celebrate my privileged mode, instead of spending hours each day making active attempts to empathise with plebeian sufferings... the mode inability to run realistic simulations of sensory experience, to train oneself out of dependence on this or that experience because they cannot simply recall it in their minds, food, sights, music, touch... ah, we each have different comparative advantages. I have for a long time thought that mine are to provide manual labours as I have very limited opportunity costs. A chap who completely understands the limits of human experience, has very little to ask of the world. One dwells mostly on providing. I plan to revise a few more mathematical concepts before bed - no more software development today... a bit of indulgence in 'things that actually matter in the long run'.
/
Looks like R&D is on hold till late afternoon. Coaching on M&E language use, data analysis of coffee roast history, quality assurance of coffee calibration, scheduling of M&E repairs, and procurement of M&E may take precedence. Also letters of recommendation.
/
It takes 15 minutes to do data entry. But it takes an hour to context-switch into data-entry, without losing track of other contexts, and without losing availability to handle ad hoc contexts that emerge as a result of operational volatility.
LOL
It doesn't take much to context-switch out of data-entry because the latter has no long-term memory requirements.
/
exhaustemundo
/
on: Govt wants BNM to relax rules on home loans
themalaysianreserve.com
/commented/
From a 'development economics' perspective, this finance minister is either a complete moron or he's sold Malaysia out to the 'housing developers' just like his predecessors. There is ZERO value in OWNING a HOME if the cost is LARGE LONG TERM DEBT. The entire value of home ownership originates from reducing perpetuity liabilities (read: rent expenses). If you tell people to feel good, buy a home, and sell 10-15% of your income for forty years to a 'housing developer' who gets cashed out right now, how do you expect to help the citizenry? Instead, the correct policy is to trash the 'development value' of housing - so that people can access housing at a low cost. Just do it. Be a man. Do the right thing.
In all likelihood though, MoF's already coordinated with BNM to be conservative on liquidity, but at the same time MoF goes out and talks shit about BNM's policies to win points with the relevant parties. We'll see what's up eventually.
;)
Note: 'development economics' refer to developing human welfare; 'housing developer' refers to a builder of houses, and 'development value' refers to the market price of a built house - the latter two terms are not directly related to the former term, although they share a common root.
/
Reading ECMA spec docs all day. Today was not a clever day.
/
Sleep as long as you're exhausted. Work as long as you're terrified. Invent something terrifying, if you lack for demons. That is the good life.
/
The only reason I read far-upstream technical documentation, is because I don't trust the technical designer. It's not so much a matter of paranoia, as it is often an explicit incoherence or absence of information at the level of downstream documentation.
.
For example, if you read MDN documentation on how to use (new Promise( executor = (resolve, reject) => {} ), you'll find yourself instructed to call (resolve(value) or reject(reason)) in the function body of (executor), but you don't have any insight into the function body of (resolve) or (reject), nor do you have any insight into the function body of the caller of (executor).
.
I don't know. I feel like a noob because it seems these things don't matter to people... so either everyone else is happy being stupid, or they're smarter than me :P
/
It's not so nice being able to observe the activities of many people barking up the wrong tree, when you're busy barking up another one. Coin flip on success probabilities... but then, I suppose this is part of the cost of being social. One engages with an economy, as a way of engaging with society in general (arguably, these are the same thing). Despite the plethora of bumbling merchants, twangy minstrels, and clumsy artisans... an opportunity to distill progress from all of them presents itself perpetually. One only has to pay the cost of fencing with each of these for minutes upon hours, upon weeks, and upon years... but that's just the nature of business, I suppose.
/
That did not feel like a productive evening. But I guess, it's a few steps forward in R&D.
/
There's a bit of a fuss in one of those wealth-aspirational Facebook groups about how Chris of Cloister House by Formwerkz is spoiling his kids just by building a big house. First of all, it's not that big a house. Secondly, there's no way to know how a kid is raised unless you sit in on family conversations - a house is just a space to have conversations in. Thirdly, I haven't met a lot of rich people that raised kids who didn't know 'how to manage money without getting their hands dirty'. They're consummately boring people... but they get by very well in life, and would never work outside of affluent circles LOL. (Pardon the grammar fails, I didn't edit much.)
/
The art historical styling terminology for the Tesla truck is Brutalism. It's related to this other thing called Futurism, but that's less relevant. The Cybertruck is ironically more Brutalist than Futurist. For an idea of what Futurism looks like, consider SpaceX's Starship instead.
/
While I'm pretty good at visualising patterns, including text, that I'm familiar with... I'm pretty bad at doing the same for simple, but unfamiliar items... such as knots I have not practiced with, or formula that I haven't read a few times. Those are my limitations in this domain. More practice is always needed.
/
5.5 days hiatus from building, to study a language level construct. Back to framework development when the sun rises. Or... in all likelihood...in another 18-36 hours, as I have to do some groceries, payroll, and EOM bookkeeping first...
/
on : Malaysia lacks talents to develop blockchain technology
themalaysianreserve.com
/commented/ The technology is easy to develop. The talent is lacking among policymakers and bureaucrats to create mandates to develop the technology. We used to say this as 'a lack of political will' but the speaker is right in framing it as a lack of talent. He just doesn't make clear that the lack of tech talent is among decision-makers.
You need 'deep cryptography skills' to invent new things to do with blockchain technology - but that's only if you aspire to be an R&D leader (Malaysia is an R&D leader in almost... nothing). On the other hand if you want to simply do systems integration and technology utilisation based on tried and proven technology, then... you don't need deep knowledge, but you do need a minimal quantum of talent (which beyond doubt, we have), and some policy that mandates the talent to develop instead of to do things in other fields lol.
//
/
I think strength-training is now achievable in the pool. Here we go...
/
/commented in a startup group/
As members of the public (paradoxically, we are called the private sector), there are a few things that can be done to change the mindset of the government, to make it more receptive to new technology.
1. Consistent lobbying, by means of communication with (a) your local member of parliament, (b) relevant public agencies, (c) direct pressure on Putrajaya via the mass media (both decentralised and controlled media).
2. Just build a better mousetrap and start selling it. To their shame, they will pick up on it.
Both are hard. Both are our responsibility.
/
Enforced exercise. Then journal maintenance. Then framework development. (Glossing over the fact that cooking has to happen at some point.)
/
Generally, I prefer to speak of responsibilities as being physical facts, not moral imperatives,
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)