Awake. Today I start loading working memories of my tree map into visual consciousness. It helps, as my subconscious is now not functionally capable of automatically telling me what to do, having been overloaded with writes - rushed writing of this organic substrate results in high degrees of fragmentation, and an absence of organisation according to priority. I do not have the best visual memory, so I cannot simply remember the tree map in toto, at once. Rather, like the traversal of a classically antique memory palace, I recall first the priorities, then their adjacent nodes, and overall structure, an item at a time. What a mess. I signed up for this. On we go.
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Main learning: make attempts to load work into conscious memory before socialising, daily, except during emergencies when the subconscious brain is demonstrating averse reactions to work.
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Current pattern:
- full colour, moderated protein, low starch, breakfast
- desk work
- 13g protein dose
- calisthenics
- starchy meal
- coffee and desk work outside the office
- continuing desk work at the office
- protein, fibre, and sleep
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The joy of movement comes from positive feedback, a cascade of neurotransmission, which follows after centrifugal signalling. All manner of interruptions may occur in this process. One needs to curate high bandwidth here.
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I just realised our menus are PornHub colour themed.
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Some of the biggest interruptions to my day are typically people trying to tell me to do something that I've spent much resources learning how to avoid for competitive reasons. I'm just thankful that it happened so often, I had to write a deck on it, and now I just point to the deck and tell them to read it first. Part and parcel of growing a silly company.
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How do I gauge the degree of effort I need to spend on externally evangelising the core purpose of the company? Well we've got internal affairs relatively sorted, and are now in year four of operations. So if on average I have to spend half my emergency time fixing external views of / issues with our work, then I think it's a good balance.
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Day by day, I hear the woman's cries. Joyful, anguished, deploring, delighted - always clumsy, not a victim, merely weak, caught in the embrace of her classification. Day by day, a young man screams, not out loud, inside his head. When he speaks, I hear him mock out ways, manners, just nearly making him a class over her cries. Inside, he is a seething gully of rage. Day by day, I walk the same street, the faces of the same people, betraying the same tears, rifts in their minds, starchily strung together, a laminate of honour welding madness and agony in chunks and lumps into one seemingly presentable mass, adorned with smiles, and dashes of laughter for public order. The lady who doesn't speak, or shower, her life a barrowing gust of hollows. The old men who do not stir, their timid eyes pretending to cede from sunlight, but it is actually aversion to conversants. Even young children, shamelessly strewing their frustrated fury across ears of all sorts. All sorts of grown men and groaning inbetweens and outbetweens, fluid in their senses, chiding themselves for persecutions, abuses they were never privileged enough to consciously define. Ah, a little world of beauty, there you go. Ah, here, a silly paradise. All is well? Fie, weep, foolish neighbours. Your deceptions are derisible.
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/commented/
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Meta-discussion stuff. I was wondering if there's a "QueerOverflow", or a site/app that works as a knowledge base for domain-specific questions, like what StackOverfllow does for questions about computer coding. Here is a process that seems useful:
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When someone on StackOverflow asks a question that has already been answered, the mods just lock the thread and link to the canonical answer/ readings.
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As an extention, I was just musing on it being used for all sorts of local cultures, to document, curate, and store oral histories. Basically a general "Applicable Local Law"-Overflow site for any company, family, village or social group.
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Post above came after post below:
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In the business of rule-making [for rules about questions], the enforcement of the rules is easier if there is a blacklist of questions or approaches to questioning. This is fwiw, close to a banned-books approach.
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But all societies have speech limitations. A richer culture may have the resources to annotate each banned item on the list with reasons for why it is banned, and links to places which have what the local culture considers to be the canon (historically accepted list of locally relevant readings/answers).
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Enforcement on letters is easier than enforcement on intent, simply because it's very hard to prove intent or the absence of it.
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Complaints about political correctness gone overboard are generally funny. The complainer is usually simply demanding for political correctness in the opposite direction. The universe is silent except for the political entities within it. The universe is silent on whether humans have rights, on whether people should suffer, on whether majorities should control societies, etc. All that remains is for the game to proceed, and for all players to appeal to leverage for survival - and that includes, claims that they do not play the same game.
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Enforced break time. I don't even want to count the number of charitable conversations I've had today. I wonder, when there come to be benefits to the business. Gambles here, and there.
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Every few years my failure to mantain kinesthetic knowledge results in horrible reductions in bandwidth... and then it takes me weeks to retrain my brain to remember how the body works, and to ambiently load centripetal data into consciousness. Is it worth it? What is a life worth anyway? We're just here to punch buttons until the controllers wear out. Then, either we afford new controllers, or we throw the console away.
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First of all, I don't understand people who take sports seriously. Secondly, I don't understand people who hold gender divisioning to be an important divisioning dimension. Thirdly, I kinda blank out during attempts to identify with people who want to be associated with a particular gender, or sport, so I just kinda blink. Sure, do what is empowering to the subjective self. Fight wars for share of voice. Decide on any totems you enjoy. I think it's a fair cause for concern. Blink.
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Gotta rest, and try Socar in...6 hours. Will it be too expensive?
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Time for enforced exercise. But before that, I need to decide on what to do after that. The decision is to add AdGroup Audiences to all Search Campaigns because we can automate the trading of those, unlike the same for Display Campaigns.
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Usually I am controlling my breath consciously, or, my subconscious breathing activity is consciously moderated to produce a minimum quantity of sound. A quantifiable target for being out of breath, is when breath is fully autonomous, and unmistakably audible.
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I also find that my hands are too sensitive, and grip endurance too low. This holds up training on larger muscle groups because they point of contact with resistance fails first in the powertrain. Looking forward to number hands!
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/commented on empathy activism/ After digging into a lot of arguments about this or that morality, I often get their champions to admit that the programs sit upon an intuition that humans should have unpredetermined experiences ("feelings", "intuitions"), that these are inherently useful, and that individuals should recognise these experiences in others ("empathy"). Ok, but hell no. Lol. Unequivocal moral intuitions are juvey AF. I do not prefer these in our future.
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/commented on who seeks to speak derogatorily of demographics/
The ones who benefit from doing so ;);
The ones who seek to inflame;
The ones who enjoy irony, regardless of unpopularity;
The ones who seek to provoke inquiry regardless of any of the above;
The ones who hear and repeat without processing.
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/commented/ Since there appear to be multiple misreadings of my complaint (which you may freely label)... to specify further:
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I think it's far too charitable to men who yell vulgar things, to assume that they actually have the women's state of mind in their considerations.
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A lot of men have zero model of the women's states of mind. In the comments below, you'll find an example of a chap who sort of demonstrates this. He explains that it only took someone to provide him with the woman's point of view, in order for him to change his behaviour.
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/comment/ Copy on write, bro. Your body dies, only the copies persist.
The bridge is, if you do the hookup to the new hardware and do a ship of theseus thing over time, gradually deactivating meat functions, and activating machine computations... you'd kinda get to watch the transition, and I tend to imagine it would be like falling asleep over a few years.
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/commented on why app-face-aging is unneeded, among those who can perform the operation in their heads/
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Oh, the insides of my head are the only freedoms I have. If I find a structure I haven't thought of before, I make a point to meditate upon it thoroughly and to classify the implications. A lot of stuff is therefore tagged "of interest", raised in priority, and given top-shelf storage... specifically because I met someone who was censored, avoidant, concerned, pained, horrified, or otherwise averse to the idea. Lol.
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Then I get in trouble when I forget to filter my own public speech.
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FaceApp concerns are overblown because a lot of people already had much more of your deeper, darker, more personal data, than what FaceApp has now. We just needed FaceApp to go viral so that you would notice. But that isn't enough, because you will soon forget. And on it goes.
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My top Malaysia public policy concerns, ATM:
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1. A commission of information needs to be mandated to seek and destroy information assymmetries between the citizens, industrial players, and government; funny how we used to call it the Kementerian Penerangan (ministry of clarifications). Now it's called the ministry of multimedia and communication, and unfortunately it has tech mandates. (CIO goes here.)
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2. The basic "blue collar" services sector needs to be formalised into trade guilds; before we try to formalise each trade, there needs to be a framework for formalisation of skills; sounds like the job for another... a commission of labour architecture (how all labour in the land is designed to fit a grand design that is coherent, ergonomic for the citizenry, and efficient in converting meat to work - qualities of work can include moral or lifestyle ideals, of course). This affects how higher industries are implemented as a whole, upon foundational ones. It affects class mobility, job security. Really, I think the traditional term is "we need a ministry of industrial organisation".
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3. This is for my customers: the ministry of natural resources already covers minerals and vegetables, so it might as well be the one to cover animals as well. Budgets and programs need to be put in place to implement existing laws which currently have no actionable path towards a self-maintaining ecology. I'm not sure who the department of veterinary services reports to right now, but that would be a good bit of existing structure to look into. (Update: ohmaigod, it's under the ministry of agriculture, fisheries, and food) MESTECC i.e. the mess of technologies ministry needs to cede ecological concerns back into a unit with the natural resources portfolio.
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4. There needs to then be a proper ministry of technology. The government literally has no internal CTO. MDEC currently gets to talk about building technology into industry, MESTECC in theory covers epistemology (though rightfully, the current minister is specialising their effort on environmental cleanups), but who's managing the implementation of technology rollouts in the nervous fibre of the entire country? Can't see it. Needs to happen. I'm not talking about the telecoms portfolio - we already know where that sits, and it's narrow AF in scope.
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5. Someone needs to rewrite the living skills syllabus.
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6. Immigration policy really needs better enforcement. I don't mind wearing a dog tag if everyone has to also, and we manage this more cleanly.
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7. Civil liberties (for humans)? Sure. But I don't particularly appreciate appeals to empathy, and will happily leave those to specialists. Meanwhile the problem with development in Malaysia is an absence of reasonable patterns. If we fix that, civil liberties bubble to the top of the feasibility stew. No one's going to have a change of heart until they're paid right... jk
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Danger. Danger. Danger. Just the normal reminder with every breath, when you're driving a ship of noobs. Now, in piano.
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/commented on the need for alternatives to toxic masculinity/ I thoroughly enjoy being a champion of apathy, and I look forward to a day when I don't have to constantly look over my shoulder in case I'm being mistaken for some egotistical gender affiliated bozo. 🙄
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Theoretically I've probably been clinically depressed for two months to a year and a half. But since I track all my professional stressors meticulously, I know exactly what the problems are, and that I designed a number of them, so I'm not sure if it counts as a problem. I just like hard problems. #totd
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Just had coffee in a copper-themed cafe which had five or six copper-related tones which didn't match. 🤔
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I suppose I value people who are able to modify themselves. Everyone who can't just falls into a civilisational subclass of sorts...; there was a more elaborate conversation around this, but I do not remember what it is, as I am tired, and there are higher priorities in my working memory, apparently.
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People who enjoy travelling and food have no imagination. That is why they require external inputs for stimulus. 🤔 Old thoughts. Just passing my mind rn.
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Executive summary: on why elder-statespersons in Malaysia have been yelling at each other a lot in public, over June/July 2019:
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0. The Constitution of Malaysia specifies that the Prime Minister (PM) must obtain the favour of a majority of Parliamentarians (MPs).
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1. Since May 2018, Mahathir has obtained this favour, by agreement of a Harapan coalition.
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2. Mahathir has also agreed (in 1.) to resign his role as PM, and to give that role to Anwar in the future. (Such a gift is limited nonetheless by 0.)
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3. Anwar is currently head of the PKR, a party to which many MPs belong. This means to some degree, if Anwar tells all his party MPs to support Anwar as PM, they will do so.
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4. Anyone who opposes the notion that Anwar should become PM, can attack either of the factors, 2. or 3. above. It is forgone that civil society will oppose any renegement of 2., as that would mean a promise had been broken. Therefore all forces seeking to prevent Anwar from becoming PM simply have to attack factor 3. In order to succeed, they simply have to cause Anwar Ibrahim to lose the support of PKR MPs by any means necessary. Note that antagonism may come from both inside and outside the coalition 1..
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It is really simple. Often enough, Anwar himself just makes it easier for his enemies. Most of the important news these days is just on "the 10 ways to attack Factor 3."
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A long time ago, I identified 10h/d for sleep and 3h/d for physical conditioning as baseline targets for health. Sometimes I catch up... usually I cannot afford this.
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Places open till 2am. Had to buy a beer. It costs the same as a coffee these days.
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/commented on happy companies being due to happy teams:/
My favourite place to get off on this is: the headline itself is a truism which all competent managers engage with.
A point of controversy is, what are the opportunity costs of obtaining a happy staff? If it's easier to achieve a happy staff by homogenising the company culture, then the trade off is diversity and representation in the workplace - now what are the competitive differences between a diversity=5 and happiness=10 team, versus a diversity=10 and happiness=5 team? And that's only the first issue I can think of.
The second point which tends to be more fun/abusive to discuss is... what is the value of a happy team that recognises its own state of happiness? Then if you go deeper a little, you get to the following concern: what are the competitive differences between a team which is happiness=2ndQuartile, which BELIEVES itself to be happiness=1stQuartile, versus a team which is happiness=1stQuartile, which BELIEVES itself to be happiness=2ndQuartile? (As a tangent to this one, does happiness become a self-fulfilling prophecy, or is it just a crutch?)
Thirdly, though perhaps this is a branch of point two above, how much does happiness play into the company's brand, when it engages with business counterparties (suppliers, partners, customers, talent, investors)?
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I tell staff that being timid is not allowed. If they want to get anywhere, they need to step over me. It's a good filter for weeding out staff that will definitely fail when I start running, and I'm only just walking right now...
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Things to do:
- write on a model of pain
- contextualise the program of empathy within that model
- check for old content persistence in archives
- obtain a library of old music
- pay suppliers (I got everything done except this)
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Awake. Off to tutor. At the tail end of B12 and lighting-enhanced sleep... wondering if it is placebo. Mental APM is back to competitive levels. But can I retain them without the stimulant? There lies the rub.
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Just realised this personal growth milestone recently: sleeping with the lights on to maintain alertness became the norm. For vacation, I spend a few weeks sleeping with the lights off!
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The time to fire someone is when the cost to replace them (and their future selves) is cheaper than the cost to maintain them (and their future selves). It's always a gambit.
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Curiosity kills the cat. I may not be a cat, but curiosity will probably kill me too. After all, it is the only thing keeping me alive, and in society, and in business, and surely what provides has the power to take away. I peer into a fog. The fog looks back. Hello, it says. Hello, I say, we meet again - do you remember how we parted ways? No, said the fog, I bring no such clarity. I remember, I said, I sought less clarity, and then I found you, and when I ceased to see a way forward, I ceased to search for you, and you eventually departed. Ah, yes, said the fog, I did, but we do not know if I will do so this time. Ah, I said, that is why I sought you, and we shall see.
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Babysitting failure: the babies have fallen.
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I am scornful of people who value life, and I live in a society that is largely composed of such types. I am scornful of people who value life without reason, as I have the privilege of reasoning about it. But society is made of mostly people that value life without reason, that that is the current state of society's evolution. May society progress farther. May we disagree violently, and may the ends be satisfied with themselves.
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Attention now returns to our colleague who is least cognizant of workplace requirements. They must daily ask each colleague, "how can I learn faster?" They must be unafraid of fucking up, looking silly, becoming redundant, etc. I tell them that their fear is slowing down their learning ability, while reminding them that we are all subject to the same existential threats. Being afraid of the reasons for your existence is useless, and a waste of resources. No company can save you from yourself.
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She: Does this mean what I think it means... "the unit revenues are below the unit costs,"... they basically don't have a business model.
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He: Yeah, exactly what you think - the startuppity kids call it the "unit economics," and it's not the only thing that matters, but it's pretty foundational. If the unit economics are wrong, a lot of other things will be wrong.
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She: And the excuse they have is that [redacted].
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He: Well, look, it's a big, messy set of products, involving the thousands upon thousands of staff. At that scale, you need to split teams - separate the profitable products from the non-profitable products. So Team A is takes care of the profitable stuff, and they're a low priority concern because if you just deleted Team B, the company would be profitable immediately (excluding fixed costs). Now all your rescue financing is just there to feed Team B - so there's an explicit funding runway... say it's a hundred days, and so you need to put timelines in place where after say, the first ten days, Team B needs to report on what it's going to do for the next twenty days, and then you repeat this thirty-day cycle like three times. I mean, that's the rough idea. Within each cycle things either get fixed or killed.
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Quick recap of the political spectrum in 2019:
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Far-left: I believe each human has inalienable rights, and I hate anyone who doesn't believe this.
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Far-right: I believe each human has no inalienable rights, and I hate anyone who doesn't believe this.
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Centrist: Maybe humans have inalienable rights, and maybe they don't.
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Far-bottom-centrist: I don't believe in static beliefs, and I hate anyone whose beliefs are immobile.
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Far-top-centrist: I believe that all static beliefs are valid, and I hate anyone who has a fluid point of view.
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#shitIJustMadeUp (Is there already an equivalent model using other language? Someone please enlighten me.)
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I saw someone collecting stories of people who have been sexually harassed by their organisational superiors. Is anyone collecting stories of people who have been sexually harassed by their organisational subordinates? LOL
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There was this time I thought we had too many male supervisors, so I tried to balance it out with an all-female executive team. Within six to nine months, from only the ladies, I got one proposition ("she thought I was interested in her"), one event of slander ("she told other staff we were having sex" (false, she was speaking ironically, but who would know?)), multiple events of commentary in chat rooms using phrases like ("strange little man", "probably asphyxiating himself") from one particular lady... and related, but not harassment directed at myself, one incident of someone joking about "praying away the gay."
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I laughed off all the incidents above except the last one; for the last one I had to reply immediately that such speech was not okay. I wasn't aware of any staff who were openly gay, but I thought it was protocol to just shut down the jokes, ironic or otherwise, immediately.
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Looking back, I generally allow myself to remain vulnerable to criticism, in fact I encourage it, however, I suppose criticisms directed at me for "being too nice," are probably worth reviewing from time to time. I think it is difficult to navigate the terrain for a couple of reasons.
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First, engaging directly with ironic comments is a timesuck, and a threat to the tempers of the speakers. Moreover for those cases where someone claims falsehoods, there is no strategic advantage to escalating an unanswered comment to a he-said-she-said conflict, unless the speaker demonstrates a pattern of systematically repeating falsehoods in order to undermine authority or to advance personal branding - and it takes a while to track down these patterns.
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Second, in circumstances where a conversation is initiated on a controversial subject, by conversant X (such as those involving guesses about which person in the room is able to physically lift which other person), the text of the conversation can easily be referred to as harassment upon conversant X by conversant Y, especially if Y's interjection is a criticism of X's propositions. So often it is best for all Ys to consider the worst possible of such conversations, and to avoid engaging with Xs at all. X may not be intentionally baiting Ys. Ys do not need to invoke the Pence-Graham protocol, but Ys do need to be aware of legal minefields.
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Finally, a very broad stroke. A manager or coach always has to consider the pros and cons of communicating via physical touch. To be specific, the "pat on the back," has positive applications, particularly in the treatment of subjects who are experiencing autonomous stress or panic. However, a mistimed or misjudged deployment can increase the subject's trauma instead of alleviating it. So this too requires explicit protocols, such as explicit requests, and explicit consent. When the outcome is uncertain, it is best to enforce a ban on all attempts to comfort subjects by touch, even when their conversational abilities are extremely limited.
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#totd, a strange epiphany in human-computer interaction: Self-aware File Systems, as an implementation paradigm, for artificial intelligence.
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The operating system in most computers functions as a majordomo, or general concierge for human demands. In this way, the OS is analogous to the conscious personality of an organic citizen. But as far as humans go, much of our computation happens subconsciously, and in a fashion that is more tightly aligned with the physical layout of the brain, than aligned with the relatively recently evolved concepts of civil society.
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Our conscious personalities interact with each other to create a network which we think of as society, but the workings of that network have very little in common with those networks which enable us to process information at lower levels... networks whose architectures we also share, somewhat, with dogs, lizards, and flies.
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Currently, FS-es are architectured with very few layers of self-referential meta-data, compared to say, an encyclopedia. We know that historically, this is due to a separation of concerns. A database application, or a knowledge-base built on databases, might be the currently common paradigm of a higher-layered architecture which physically locates culturally related data close together. I'm not sure how, for example, Watson is built, but I presume that considerations such as these have been taken.
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As we move forward in making computers smarter, HCI applications seem to have centered largely on userland apps such as Siri, which are highly abstracted from their device OS and FS. This decoupled architecture is not however efficient, from a spatial perspective. It may seem like a regression to lasagna code, but it seems as if over time we will see more of the following, at least in certain special domains, if not ubiquitously: more and more self-referential meta-data, and operations on that meta-data, will be processed closer to the physical storage layer, "by the FS," so to speak.
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It would eventually be such that every write to a machine would yield an indeterminate outcome, as the code reflects upon the data presented to it, before deciding what to physically write. This may seem stupid from the point of view of a determinist, but that was never the objective of research in AI. The point of AI is to make machines smarter, not more predictable. In fact, all these computations are already being done in machine learning code... they just haven't needed to be pushed to the FS.
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But I look forward to self-aware file systems someday.
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(This thought came up as I was trying to figure out how to efficiently index and post-process a small library of my personal effects collected since 90s. The architecture I've decided to write now in the absence of an off-the-shelf solution, is an indexing application which crawls a file system, and maps each file to a meta-data docstore for post-processing. I'm sure I've read about commercial attempts to provide small-scale Palantir-type services, but I don't seem to have direct access to any on the cheap, right now.)
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Getting back into AWS after some four years. Nervous.
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Today I must consider trade-offs between time and money, at my office. Because my office depends on my own time and money, I have to consider all my own items on the same graph. It is a day for rationalisation. I am not pleased within the scope of the game. However ot remains a game I am pleased to be playing.
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X: Why don't you raise margins, and sell cheaper goods?
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Me: You can make a lot of money doing that. The trick is to take advantage of stupid people. You identify their self-harming tendencies, and charge them for it. They buy your product, encounter a burst of pleasure, followed by anti-productive lethargy, and increasing their long-term incurable disease risk. Moreover, for convenience, you get to wrap the whole thing in single-use plastics.
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X: Right? It's the best.
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Me: But I am too knowledgeable about that product, so I would be a bad salesman. It takes a dumbfuck to tell someone, "boba is good for you." Cold-pressed juices are pretty much the same.
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(I do admit there is a way to do boba in a less poisonous fashion. I'm not sure if you can take the sugar out of juice.)
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Slow, steady, refactoring.
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More machines breaking. Sooo. The next four weeks will be focused on (i) getting monthly reporting out of the way (ii) fixing machines.
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Unless staff fall over again, or something else happens. Well, we shall see.
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## technical study group
In case anyone is interested in technical hobbies or a R&D-oriented study opportunity in Damansara Jaya.
## domains available
* fridge / freezer / air conditioner repair (thermodynamics!)
* automation (motion, temperature sensors, three phase DOL switches)
* electronics repair (oven, fan, light, kettle, etc.)
* software development (we bid on ads with bots; we have a number of digital communications assets to develop)
* analytics (we have a lot of data, and no time to really run it through ML, etc.)
## opportunity
You get access to some technical tools, spare parts, coaching on approaches to fix common problems.
If any appliances are fixed, then I can pay you small bounties but that's going to be no more than the outsider service fee.
Not arriving at any fixes is OK - but at least you should have learnt something about disassembling a machine, and identifying its components.
## cost
Main thing I need from you is if you figure out method or model X, you write it down and we document it properly. E.g. if you manage to fix a fan, we should jointly write a set of notes on what happened.
## Issue
Currently I have a backlog of rudimentary hardware R&D concerns. I have many of the relevant tools available, but I have no time to use them in relevant testing and experimentation.
## organisation
I work on a cafe that's doing a bunch of research on technology and supply chain issues in the hospitality industry. We are learning HOW to repair and build these systems. We are working with basic, not cutting-edge technologies, but we do need to master these basics before we innovate them.
# Thanks for Reading. Send me Questions.
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I had the slightly stressful experience of today, waking up and coaching two staff before breakfast, followed by three clients. Then a protein-deficient breakfast, and two or more individuals in emotional turmoil. Emotional labour is expensive, but work is defined by labours, so on it with.
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I am thinking about how my subconscious (abstraction, intuition) handles urgency. Below a certain state of uncertainty, I am likely to prioritise housekeeping and infrastructure development, whereas above a certain state of uncertainty, tactical issues take precedence.
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Frankly, this remains my ongoing reaction to both:
- the current fad of throwing more computing power at old problems using old algorithms
- ditto, but with regards to humans refusing to consider the opportunity to establish quantified models for human experience
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I suppose the benefit of budgeting ten hours for sleep is that, there's enough fault tolerance built in to sustain twenty questions, thirty minutes of hands-on interference, and a half dozen video calls... over an eleven hour window... from some toddler who's found a new hobby... :P
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Sometimes people ask if I'm on the Autism spectrum. Well, kinda, but probably in a way that enables me to treat it as a superpower (for people who like colourful language, en vogue). The definition of autism is, roughly, a paralising oversensitivity to specific sensory input, conceptual recognition, or emotional output. (Involuntary oversensitivity can be in some dimensions, besides insensitivity in others, versus the population norm for each dimension.) I think if you zoom out, it's just one end of the curve with regards to the general systems anti-pattern of information overload. In my practice, I simply turn off any empathy towards common challenges faced by people in their emotional lives, as I don't see much value in it as a long-term civilisational factor (classist, I know). When I do people work, for example parsing sentences in conversations with staff, or clients, who are not good verbal communicators, I turn off inhibitors to empathy for a few seconds or minutes while I read their skin, muscle, other tissues, tone of voice, etc. - this is basically ETL (extract, transform, load) for social data. Then I turn it back off again, so that I can focus on other work.
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Got three medium-sized things done in the last twenty-four hours. But I am going to tap out an fail on a huge costly issue that's been on hold for two to three months. Instead of raising risk and attempting to repair a number of machines we have, I shall outsource once more. Bye bye, cashflow. Live and learn, I suppose.
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I have powered windows. 🤔
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So I just caved in and bought my second car. Roughly, this is my reflection on how I got to this somewhat rushed decision, which I am not proud of. (The means, are much more interesting than the ends.)
As I write, it is EOM July 2019. My story begins 1.75 years earlier in November 2017. At that time, I was running a profitable business, albeit it being only moderately tuned after 2.05 short years of operations. Let's call this T+0.
Following a dispute with various stakeholders about what constitutes a good brand for the business, I was required to terminate our only effective means of marketing communications. So the brand went almost completely silent overnight.
This was not expected, but it was certainly not surprising given the nature of our enterprise. Given the multitude of available options, adding a large forcing factor was quite helpful in establishing a peaceful state of mind.
We work in a red ocean industry, and by T+0.30-ish years, we then had to remove an entire staff team in order to accommodate our absence of active marketing communications. Most of 2018 was then spent training all remaining staff to run the entire business on a skeleton crew.
Fortunately that remaining crew held themselves together, and I was able to reduce my time spent on training them around T+1.17 years. Thereafter I allocated time to address R&D in M&E.
However, by May 2019, approximately T+1.58 years, a crucial 25-30% of our staff (one person) decided to move on (no other roles were available). Around the same time, a drunk person allowed themselves to destroy my car, a key component of our operational logistics. Also, we had 4.5 HVACR machines dead in the water. And, we had onboarded fresh meat for seasoning.
---
[I had been up for about 22 hours when I started writing this, and at this point I ended the note shortly and went to sleep. It is now 5:20am, and I am at a 24-hour fried chicken chainstore where eat many of my meals. It is a good time to continue the note while digesting breakfast and sipping diet soda.]
On my formal map of working memory, for review at each hour, some 142 items are listed. These include:
- neuromuscular conditioning
- baseline sensory gating
- an abundance of issues to be addressed outside of work, in my social circle
- list of M&A targets
- details of clients' org. dev. concerns
- advertising automation, targeting, budgeting, art, and copy
- electrical, thermodynamic, software, and mechanical automation, and repair
- retail merchandising
- bookkeeping and finance
- regulatory compliance
- staff mental models, motivational, and emotional mechanism which need to be actively operated on
-
The last 0.17 years have been extremely constrained. Between car rentals, taxi fees, a very slow seasoning of new talent, and 5.0 dead HVAC machines... general business considerations continue to absorb my time.
So to alleviate cognitive stress, I started spending money on short-term remedies. Hopefully we can get some of these items fixed soon. That will pave the way for more free time to do R&D instead of incessantly playing defense.
/
Most people who invest are not looking for control over the creation of value. They're just trying to avoid being rendered powerless by economic trends.
.
And it is this motivation by fear of loss, which makes self-identified investors appear to be rather boring people.
/
Planning my day. Eat. Run. Clean sewer. Maybe.
/
On the days that I feel fabulous and identify as a troll, I have passing privilege as a psychopath. In general, I'm often mistaken for having no ability to empathise with other people. This is probably a misapprehension. I'm an ordinarily emotional person. I just go digging at the nature of emotional experience, and I find it's just a lot of data in an information system called yourself. Here's where privilege kicks in: I studied how to count experiences, and so I know how to manage them. Most people aren't thinking about unmanaged experiences as a problem; of those who do, few are approach the problem from the lens of an informatical analysis; of those who do, fewer still appear to be confident that have cracked the problem using this approach. So generally I have not a lot of conversation with other people about mental models at this resolution. Oh well. Might as well relax and quit trying to change the world. If it dies, it dies. :)
/
Haven't woken up with the birds in weeks. Almost feel like a normal person. Time for a jog. Physical conditioning needs help. Food has been mostly protein, this past week, and I fear gout.
/
It'll soon be EOY 2019. I have until EOY 2022, the decade mark of my involvement in commerce, to make something of this business, before I review my risk profile. I could just keep doing this for decades, but it depends on available opportunity cost.
/
Routine reminder on the myth of privacy:
My culture comes from cold war era spycraft - I think privacy is beyond the means of most people. They just don't realise it. :)
So based on the myth of "privacy is cheaply obtainable," people are willing to spend money to try and obtain/protect it. But this is futile. The myth is there the same way the myth of democracy exists... to keep a large body of workers in place.
A side effect of the economic effects of that myth... is that most people build their personal security models all wrong. Instead of focusing on what they are truly in control of, they leave that unmaintained, and they spend money on futile efforts instead.
/
My last quarter now has too much sleep, and not enough waking reflection time. Rebalancing.
/
It is a misstep to manage the following as separate issues:
- corporate governance,
- operations, and
- talent management.
The correct hierarchy is, to recognise that the first two are a subset of the third.
/
Five KPIs for Medium-sized Companies
- Business continuity (aggregate)
- Staff accurate reaction times (individual)
- Stakeholder alignment (individual)
- Team linguistic coherence (aggregate)
- Cash flow (aggregate)
Our social media strategy:
1. Excite
2. Inflame
3. Explode
4. Get shut down by bosses
/
The problem with depth-of-knowledge is that perfect routines take three hours. And any significant advances take eight. This seems to apply to both software development studies, and physical conditioning. I think I'm just stupid.
/
All these rancid dictators... the particularly popular types - I like them, not because believe they are good; nor do I like them, because I believe they are evil. I like them because they are able to place existential terror in the minds of a usually complacent and privileged minority, which believes that being nice is an easily affordable item. When these newly terrified peoples are stirred beyond their petty civility, when they no longer hesitate to plunge fists into the chests of their opponents, drawing out offal with bloodied fingers, to put to rest the dangers imminent, to earn their peace, then, the role of the toy soldiers will be complete. It is but the wheel of time.
/
I have an imbalanced life. My job is hard. My hobbies are also hard. There is much disappointment, merely from a factual perspective. Only one thing is less hard - that thing between my legs. As the Chinese say, sorry didi, your time has not yet come. Not today. On the bright side, it is raining, and while that is bad for business, it is good for sleep. I never know if I'll wake up, when I go to sleep. And I never know what world awaits me if I wake. The only way to find out, is to go to sleep. And it is the same with women, and staff, and shareholders, and counselees, and the roving capitalists, the drunk drivers, the incensed activists, the morally outraged, the self-righteous, the poor, the weary, the narcissists, the loud, the needy, the downtrodden, the weak.
/
/commented/ Between Mechanical Turk, Fiver, and Kaggle... I think you'll see more AI-as-a-two-hour-service opportunities popping up. AMZN already does this with regards to letting coders write plugins/apps for Echo. Welcome to the new bluification of white-collar work.
/
/commented/ Between Mechanical Turk, Fiver, and Kaggle... I think you'll see more AI-as-a-two-hour-service opportunities popping up. AMZN already does this with regards to letting coders write plugins/apps for Echo. Welcome to the new bluification of white-collar work.
/
Imagine if Taiwan had a strange twin island called Taiwonk, where everyone for the last seventy years had come to use Latin characters to spell their Chinese speech. Then one day someone tries to introduce the writing of ideograms to school children, and it becomes a headline issue.
Since the Republic of China is the largest existing body already using ideograms, the loudest debate surrounds the question of whether youth will be corrupted by Chinese soft power. Nevermind that ideograms in Chinese culture precede contemporary state atheism, communism, Marxism, etc.
-
Back to real life.
In terms of cultural appropriation, historically, Islam as a religion appropriated Arabic traditions. (The Islamic account would be that certain Arabic traditions are metaphysically identical to Islam, empirically we do not find Islam being discussed by name, by cultures that preceded Islam's appearance in the canon.)
Later, Islam spread to Southeast Asia, where the practice of Arabic script (in notating spoken Malay) then displaced the practice of Brahmic script then being used in the region (in notating the same, spoken Malay). This became Jawi as we know it.
Later still, the practice of Latin script (predominant in Europe) then displaced the practice of Arabic script, and this became the Romanised Jawi that we currently use as an official language in the Federation of Malaysia.
Whether the Federation is a secular state or not, is besides the point. The study of Arabic scripts in school amounts to a study of the region's history, regardless of which parties around the world or in the region predominantly use Arabic scripts today.
Empirical fact: language is always a turf war.
Normative statement: but in the moderation of conflict, we shouldn't discard history on the whole.
-
Zooming out for a bit.
If we look at the history of Latin script, we find it descends from Etruscan, and became appropriated as the dominant notation for speech... in what we call Italy, today. The ancestors of today's Italians waged war on the rest of Europe, planting the seeds for Latin script's dominance in that continent. As Islam hijacked Arabic culture that preceded it, Christianity hijacked Roman culture which preceded it... and thus Latin script has to be associated with Christianity if we want to admit that Arabic script has to be associated with Islam.
How should Malaysians feel about this? Actually I really only care about what the Malaysians with no Christian or Islamic affiliation think... everyone else was disenfranchised a longer time ago.
/
YIL a category is just a labelled directed graph. :P
/
Hong Kong stands for about 3% of China's GDP. I think China can make the sacrifice, destroy Hong Kong, and still consolidate global soft power around itself. I don't think it should - but it is entirely possible.
/
I have a very limited comprehension of why any state's federal government would not regulate property speculation in great detail. It's 2019... this has been breaking economies for decades lol.
/
/commented/ Without detracting from the key point, let's add a bit of nuance. The visual appeal, including visual sexual appeal, of physiology has a few layers. How a body moves is an entire issue in the temporal dimension. Toss that out, and consider just the spatial factors. Posture, or the control layer of a body, sends out a lot of information. Structure, or the bones, joints, muscles, skin, and hair are the only aspects addressable by cosmetic surgery. Styling, or the accessorising of skin, hair, clothes, etc., provide entire layers of their own.
Plastic surgery affects a tiny component of visual appeal.
/
Leadership is largely defined by will to power. Lots of people know how to get things done. Not everyone cares to get things done.
/
I'm generally skeptical when people speak about "coding" as computer science. "Coding" is computer operations, specifically, it is a LANGUAGE skill like Bahasa Malaysia. We do not refer to the Bahasa Malaysia syllabus as human sciences. Computer science per se is already introduced under the Mathematics syllabus. They really need to get their terminology sorted.
/
I have a long reflection to write down before I forget. I think all the business networking groups I'm in are sick of my rambling, so I will jusy paste it here instead.
/
Because, while I am worthy of many challenges, many of you are snowflakes.
[somequote]
/
I'm spending (more than) a few bucks to indulge in middle-class privilege, while my colleagues till the farm. Paragraphs are now outlined.
Before a brief dinner at the cornershop, I queried a senior intern on-duty, about his priorities for his shift. I helped him to reprioritise, putting first the construction of a report card for twice-weekly peer supervision of a newer colleague. The newer colleague is not an intern, but he is delivering work at a very junior level. So long as this is the case, it discounts the efforts of the entire 24-7 operation by 20-30%. We run a very lean operation and new servers are hot-swapped into production before they are fully patched, hardened, and hooked up to other systems. The week-seven straggler must either be brought up to speed as soon as possible, or discarded in favour of someone who can keep up. We won't hire someone to train at the same time as this chap, because the net margin of the shop is equal to the fee for one server. This one is unfortunately overpaid because his peer-reviewers overscored his performance at the end of week-four. I am neither surprised, not amused.
Over breakfast I was discussing my overall approach to leadership of this business, with a partner from a social venture. She is a much more performant business-person than myself, but also more conservative. I explain that I view my comparative advantage as being listless and nonchalant, therefore being able to shoulder greater risks than most people I know. I was training for solitary confinement when I was in college, and to-date no cause has attracted my attention, and therefore I have raised the stakes for what I am willing to do with my remaining time on the planet. I do not value continued existence - except as a curiosity. She tells me, a droning story, one I have heard all my life. She says I waste my effort, as she views my project as being non-viable. I explain that my project is simply riskier, with a higher potential opportunity in a specific space, than most people would care to attack. For example, I may be in the top ten million sales people on the planet, but it doesn't behoove me to focus on old-business development because I would place myself perhaps in the top ten thousand systems builders on the planet - and therefore my comparative advantage is to deploy strategies which focus on building systems. We have talked about our respective work. I worry that we may not have too much in common, but a superficial need. Then again, all business arises from superficial needs.
I worry also about another partner who has further challenges with internal ruminations. She is topsy-turvy, to say the least. But our social ventures have been productive, and I look forward to continued work on these meandering efforts.
I worry about the poor fools I observe in my business networking platforms. Some place great value on cultivating an altruistic society, and while that is commendable, their frustrations are truly hilarious.
I worry about the quantum of energy wasted by plebeian sods on their political dick-measuring in public over issues of linguistics that neither party seems to properly comprehend. Ah, khat. I think the Cabinet has taken the quickest way out by stopping-loss on a trivial matter, and de-escalating the original policy direction.
I remain content with the addition of value to many poor people, who we train as staff, who we serve at customers, and who hold our shares, in my ongoing commercial venture. But sometimes they are a bit wearisome, and so now I am going to pack up my laptop, turn off my hotspot, and watch Hobbs & Shaw because this is the kind of movie that reminds me of working with people who share my temperament.I su
Omg. They turned FF into an anime with Transformer sound effects and the set from King Kong... Lol
I suppose most people find it hard to brain at least a few things about my outlook on commerce.
First of all, the bit about having no fucks given at the personal level really ticks off counterparties who bring themselves to work. I enjoy contracts. But the person I am who signs contracts isn't interested in much outside of contracts.
Second, the bit about building systems doesn't sit well with folks when they find out I'm building systems in meat for the most part. To many people, systems are not in meat, but in machines - I just happen to come from the privilege of understanding how meat runs on information, which most people seem to lack. So when I do try to build systems, I often ground the architecture in specific human behaviours. I am fool enough to believe I can tear down and rebuild almost any human, or group of humans.
Third, a subsequent but distinct issue from the second, and antecedent in some sense to the first... I don't believe in an intrinsic value of human beings. In terms of consciousness, in the long run, I don't believe that the computers which we build will lack any meaningful rights or abilities when compared with currently legal humans. In fact, it is natural born humans which are handicapped in terms of relative conscious ability, and in terms of absolute ability to modify our own cognitions.
To me, humans are basically trivial events in the universe... and it is with this outlook that I stepped into the world of commerce.
/
The question of what meaning is, is painful for many people. The reason is, that people usually process value subconsciously - the conscious mind plays a submissive role, to the dominant subconscious mind, in the assignment of value. Consciously asking what meaning is: inverts the subjectivity... forcing the conscious mind to acknowledge the object of its submissivity (what the subconscious mind had previously valued without recognition by the conscious mind). This operation is traditionally associated with loss of youth.
/
Off to annual charity event. No, I don't deeeeply care for people here, but I have to pick something to keep my portfolio balanced, right? I always hope, that it's not a complete waste of time.
/
Finally. Google Sheets has groups!
/
Personally, I'm really bad at remembering arbitrary rules... so I prefer to outsource rule tracking to machines. (That's why I'm a bad natural mathematician.) So it really pisses me off when machines don't track rules properly...
/
/comment on the professor's comment/
It really begins with the absence of primary and secondary education in Civics
- Why should you participate in government?
- What happens if you do, what are the org structure and the available roles and responsibilities/levers?
- What happens if you don't, and let others do it for you?
/
There are usually only 2080 (+/- 1000) intelligent working person-hours per-person-per-year. The rest is noise.
/
Shit.
"
(.) :: (b -> c) -> (a -> b) -> a -> c
map :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]
const :: a -> b -> a
(map.) :: (a -> a1 -> b) -> a -> [a1] -> [b]
(.) map :: (a -> a1 -> b) -> a -> [a1] -> [b]
(.const) :: ((b -> a) -> c) -> a -> c
(.) const :: (a -> a1) -> a -> b -> a1
map.const :: b -> [a] -> [b]
(.) map const :: b -> [a] -> [b]
(map.const) 1 :: Num b => [a] -> [b]
(.) map const 1 :: Num b => [a] -> [b]
(map.const) 1 [1,2,3] :: Num b => [b]
(.) map const 1 [1,2,3] :: Num b => [b]
"
/
Today's issue of note: staff training on, line-break preserving, cross-app compilation, of grocery orders.
/
/comment/
Brand A can sell a coffee for $2, and Brand B can sell the same coffee for $12. The difference is a profit-per-sale that can be translated to "brand equity," which is an "intangible asset," on the
"balance sheet." Most people recognise this, but that is not the only problem.
Another problem is the market is full of $3-per-sale brands telling investors that they are GOING TO BE $13-per-sale brands without being able to DEMONSTRATE how they will acquire the same operational structure as any EXISTING $13-per-sale brand.
/
Today's headlines on racial politics in Malaysia can be summarised in a single phrase:
Dong Zhonkir Naik
/
Google cultural protests, internal: Hell? Hardly. Sounds just like a growing business. Obligation to dissent means, obligation to dissent with consequences. I take extra pains to ensure that people quit when they aren't happy with policy - they should stay if they can be happy, and whiny, while delivering at 100% or more of requirements. If whining gets in the way of policy, then obviously whining will have to go. Culture is as culture does.
/
# LOOKING FOR FRIENDS
Maybe this is called property development, I'm not sure.
## It's 2019 and capital is cheap.
* I'm looking for institutional and private investors who want to start a real estate investment business. I'm not sure if the correct vehicle is a REIT, or just a Sdn Bhd which buys/ leases/ manages space.
* Here's a link to REIT regulations in Malaysia: https://www.sc.com.my/api/documentms/download.ashx?id=afacc30c-060e-4cc0-b40f-d4546db74724
* Market is depressed, seems like a good time to go shopping.
## This is exploratory.
* My motivations are, I've been developing a built-environment facilities management business since 2015.
* Related services businesses are expanding, and consolidating, and we're looking for ways to grow faster.
* We want to focus on vertical integration from land titles to consumer services. We have demonstrated various B2C service prototypes, we have some of the necessary B2B skill sets, some R&D in M&E, and a need to grow these areas.
* We are tuned into technology opportunities, with a clear view of where each technology lies on the relevance curve in terms of being premature/ mature/ end-of-life. The most relevant subjects are automation, energy, and logistics.
* We have lots of experience hiring, training, growing, filtering, and tearing down teams for both dry and wet work. We do this fast, and we do it often. We're currently mostly focused on meatworks anyway.
Thanks for reading. Hit me up, or send me leads, please.
/
If I ever figure out how Haskell works, I'm going to need to pick an industrially scalable subset of it, and refactor its Prelude. LOL
/
People who can't state explicit judgments and accept explicit agreement, disagreement, or overruling - just don't hire them... if you've hired them then fix them... and if you can't fix them then lose them as quickly as possible.
/
/commented on a life coach's explanation of what he does for a living/
My blind spot is that I believe every day is a good day to die. Therefore I completely lack the humility to be a professional coach. :D
/
I have no agreement with how Zakir Naik is being treated for his opinions. Malaysian citizens have done far worse to Malaysia. It is not agreeable for Zakir Naik to be used as a scapegoat for distrust among Malaysians. Malaysians, in their mutual animosity, are rotten to the core. Malaysians need to fix themselves, and there should be no need to throw someone else to the lions just because he reminds us of how sick we are as a country. Fuck you, all you blamers. What is wrong with you?
.
You can have Malaysians going at each other all day, "she's loyal to Modi, lah," "this one go back to TongSan lah," and it is OK. "It is OK for Malaysians to be racist to one another," kononnya because Malaysians feel that it is our national culture, our historical pastime, or our identity narrative. But then when some permanent resident says the same thing, everyone goes like, "eh bro, it's Eid this weekend, we need a goat..."
I have held up adding to this comment. Now I will do so.
The problem Malaysia has with Zakir isn't that he doesn't deserve a permanent residency. The problem is that Malaysian foreign policy lacks a cohesive elevator speech.
On one hand we have decades of government-enabled, loose, migrant labour policy, as a method of propping up our own economic weaknesses. Mahathir himself has commented on our pompous aversion to (Wiki:) dirty, difficult, dangerous, and demeaning work.
On the other hand, we rely on arcane Manchurian-Invasion-era attitudes which cripple our own ability to integrate with other countries, by harassing spouses of Malaysians, and their children. As if all these people want to do, is to insidiously recolonise Malaysia. It is a daft hang-up from the racial politics of the early 20th century - curated by Executive policy in the later half of the 20th century in Malaysia.
Both the items come together in decades of Executive policy that takes a reasonable way out on labour supply, but talks about it as if the labour supply is the enemy. (Of course, this conversation resonates differently in various other countries. Not everyone is admitting foreigners primarily for labour, some countries have an explicit policy of care.)
This stream then flows into the river of divisive xenophobic rhetoric. That river begins with Malaysians, who tell other each other to fear and hate other Malaysians, on a daily basis.
I don't know if we will see and end to that pattern, but hopefully Malaysian executives lose these inferiority complexes by the end of this, the 21st century.
/
Also, Muhyiddin for PM please. I've been waiting since 2013.
(Banning myself from posting more on this till 9pm.)
/
I am looking into scrapping my broken Kancil (body is smashed up, but chassis and drive train should be fine). It's probably worth over RM2k in parts, but a scrap yard will likely pay RM250 for it.
I wouldn't mind trying to fix it at home, but I don't currently have a garage/porch to run it as a project.
Anyone want an old car? It'll be sold off soon. Mainly as a matter of interest for anyone who wants to work on it DIY with me - I can pay to have it towed to your location. Otherwise easier for me to sell it. I'm quite busy at work and don't have time to hawk it off piece by piece.
/
I believe that it's ok for people to desire democracy. However, it's unrealistic for people to believe that anyone else will care. So Beijing may not care, and it may tear into HK. But unless the world slaps sanctions on Beijing or something, what's HK going to do? I really would like to know if they have a secret defense mechanism other than protests. Perhaps the HK diaspora will wield its great informational might over the years against Beijing, in the ways that other diasporas have against dominant governments. Look at Kashmir. Look at XYZ... I don't study this area of history much, but I'm sure there are so many deaths and violent atrocities. Expecting a joyful exit to libertarian freedom is ludicrous.
/
Why don't those ****** at MSFT sell Office subscriptions by the hour / minute / second already?
/
/on paid advice/
Opinions are a dime a dozen. So much so that I typically only take free advice, and I dispense advice for free, or cheaply. I literally discount advice that carries a price tag. I generally go into any industry with high-margin knowledge barriers with the intention to destroy the barriers and drop margins for everyone.
Even if you pay for advice, you have to do the same homework to review and vet performance of portfolios based on said paid advice. This is true of consulting, in any domain, from physical development, to business, to money.
Best rubrick I find is to just follow in groups that pool risk. If X says you should do Y, you should see X doing Y. You should also be checking if X has Z difference from you which is the magic factor you lack.
This is true of all contract negotiations.
/
For RENT: RM650/month - master bedroom - balcony, bath, bed, aircon, electricity, water, wifi, all inclusive. Damansara Jaya. Across the street from 24-hour REDACTED cafe with specialty coffee and posh deli food.
/
Awake. I check email: notifications on multiple social media and instant messaging platforms. I listen to the whine of my nervous system, the whir of the air conditioner, a few automotive engines outside. Many things to do. Bookkeeping for a small business. New business developments involving three-party crossbillings. Cloud storage accessed via CLI. Research language platforms to learn and untangle. Print menus to overhaul. Trash to address. An insurance claim. A new social partner. I am unsure. Which places me roughly where I want to be, outside my comfort zone.
/
"Did you just throw an ant?!"
"It's not an animal."
"..."
/
[revenue] Traffic report - trend inversion, finally. I find it's pretty hard to keep track of how soft the market is without monitoring some sort of mid-term mean...
/
Hmm. Google Docs now auto exports to DOCX when you do a bulk export. I did not know this.
/
Kekeke - on record: I am generally fine with this. My friends are terrified. But we may change our minds later.
> Maszlee's 2016 Muslim Brotherhood whitepaper
/
"I am going to run to an island in retirement. It is a strategy I learnt from a Germen citizen who ran to the Gobi desert during World War II. Nobody wants to go there. It is safe."
.
"Dude, pretty much why I'm in Malaysia... it's boring and I have papers here."
/
/commented on computer science and the humanities /
I'm stuck in the middle. I understand the humanities quite well, but I am of the view that all human experience is quantifiable.
/
Many people understand that computation is simply the mapping of symbols to symbols. Qualia ARE symbols. Some people can recognise it as experience proceeds, and hack the train of experience. Others can't, so they believe qualia are not symbols because they can't recognise what the references are - to them, qualia are irreducible special knick-knacks.
.
As for a rudimentary framework to the quantification of qualia -
.
(1) it's just math: the less controversial sense modalities are sight and sound... as we can demonstrate mappings between those experiences to qualia geometries (read: MP4).
.
(2) All the somatic senses are basically the likewise... intuitively a natural language user may find that heat and cold, etc. are irreducibly different. But an analytical phenomenologist will begin to look first at the separation between the qualia from the specific stimulus and its nervous pathway, followed by the qualia which from the body's reaction (e.g. the sensation of heat, and the sensation of muscles clenching in response are completely separate). Getting all the musculoskeletal-sourced data out of the way is a big deal - somatic senses make up a huge fraction of our lives.
.
(3) After that the most fun qualia to analyse is smell. From one would look at individual sensations abstracted from musculoskeletal interference. The one approach I tend to refer to is a Vedantic insight that "everything is like a sound." Studying the qualia of signals as they are processed by different parts of our bodies... superduper fun. It's all about the data structures.
.
Throughout history, AI engineering worries about operations on data, but always fudges over the underlying data structures that are being operated on. Once they fix the data structures to map more closely to human consciousness, gg lah. Turing/Immortality tests can go to hell.
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