Yawn 57

2019 December 1 - 16

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/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.

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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. :)

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Any day now, all work will go to shit. That is just the nature of the business. Year five proceeds, otherwise...

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Today's main infrastructural concern is food. Remember to input calories at a more constant rate.

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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.

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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...

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Ok, hard fail on software architecture. Rolling back to swap out one piece of core tech. #noobing

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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.

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Cleaned up the bad code. No more writing code tonight. Just library research. But first, enforced eating.

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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.

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Tomorrow: accounts, and bill paying, and hoping the last fridge doesn't die all of a sudden. -_-

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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

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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.

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I spent the day changing a tap and gambling on business development opportunities. Sad.

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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

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Need a civil engineer who can tell me how much water I can safely store on the second floor of a two story house.

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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.

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Automotive failure. Awful day. Not the worst - win some, lose some.

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Huge day for Pakatan Harapan. So what's the KLCI going to do tomorrow?

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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.

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/commented on empowering staff/
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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.
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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.
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(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
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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.
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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.
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There is no reason to keep a business alive if it is not expected to outlive primary competition. Just kill it.
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:)

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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.)

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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!!

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Time to get a mobile keyboard for my phone.

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Not proud of today's follies. Nap.

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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

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OK - R&D deprioritised for a bit while we figure out out to maximise staffing utility in December...

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/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.

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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...)

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We literally have a shocking rules card that gets handed out to customers lol

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So... GraphQL is like protocol buffers for web developers?

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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.

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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.

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Perhaps I've been undernourished versus my recent degree of physical exertion. Checking like hell.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Some of y'all gonna h8 this :) / commented on how artificial intelligence and machine learning can be used to improve safety for women/
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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.
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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.
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Admittedly each of the two features above is going to cut both ways, so it makes for a fine thought experiment, I think.

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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.

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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