So here are some of my daily challenges for the past few years. If I [eat, sleep, exercise, recreate, and socialise] carefully, then I worry that I am being irresponsible with regards to the quantity of my time spent at work. If instead I ignore [the listed items], then instead I worry that the quality of my time spent at work is suboptimal. If we ignore the inputs, and judge my work solely on its output, then the sum of my work is quite a turd. My shareholders have received no dividends in over four years, my customers are happy but not happy enough to send our business to effortless profitability, our staff is a mixed bag of extraordinary achievements and ordinary failings, we lost two thirds of our operating founders within a month of starting work, and have added none since, and we have never raised financing since inception, even though we spent most of our first round of financing within FY1. Operationally, I am just now catching up with bookkeeping from seven months ago, we have several broken machines taking up space on our production floor and limiting our topline, I have a ban on using social media so we spend exorbitant amounts on advertising instead, I have outstanding regulatory compliance concerns, and I have yet to completely write a web framework that I trust before I care to invest in web development for our digital product and content launches - subsequent priorities will be an update to the menu, lots of hardtalk on B2B offerings, more public cloud integration, some share sales, and an eventual resumption of HVACR manipulation. Ok that's it, I think I have a balanced portfolio. Just need to take stock of it from time to time.
2019-10-25 at 11:52 am
Comment: 'Nihilism' Considered Ambiguous
(I was discussing this note * with a pundit.)
I think you can say, we share a sentiment that people may or may not be valuable (a) simply for existing, (b) because they achieve a minimum level of (bi) intelligence or (bii) economic fungibility, (c) implicit or explicit participation in some form of social contract.
Now all (a, b, c) are debateable. So for example, I am strongly opposed to (a), amenable to (b), and I tend to l prefer (cii). So in practice I am a sort of nazi because I would encourage selective execution (or simply resource exclusion) for certain types of individuals based on their abilities (b: ablism) or willingness to engage in protocol (c: legalism).
You on the other hand, seem to have assumed position (a). Which is all well and good. I think you want to avoid terms like nihilism which lack a specific reference definition.
If we must talk about zero allocations of value, it is quite possible I would just press the button and nuke all of civilisation as we know it, if I had the opportunity. But that is quite fantastic as a hypothesis, can will be difficult to prove or disprove. If we must talk about provable participation in policy, I have a very basic approach to citizenship at this time: I have never voted in a government election, and I have never bought a special insurance policy for my health or disability (outside from some SMS driven thing my cellphone provider once sent me). On the other hand, I find it useful to kill time that I have left alive in building things.
So I don't think life as a whole is valuable. But I do think, that given a state of life, it is amusing to see what we can get done, just for shits. :)
* The note:
I think you can say, we share a sentiment that people may or may not be valuable (a) simply for existing, (b) because they achieve a minimum level of (bi) intelligence or (bii) economic fungibility, (c) implicit or explicit participation in some form of social contract.
Now all (a, b, c) are debateable. So for example, I am strongly opposed to (a), amenable to (b), and I tend to l prefer (cii). So in practice I am a sort of nazi because I would encourage selective execution (or simply resource exclusion) for certain types of individuals based on their abilities (b: ablism) or willingness to engage in protocol (c: legalism).
You on the other hand, seem to have assumed position (a). Which is all well and good. I think you want to avoid terms like nihilism which lack a specific reference definition.
If we must talk about zero allocations of value, it is quite possible I would just press the button and nuke all of civilisation as we know it, if I had the opportunity. But that is quite fantastic as a hypothesis, can will be difficult to prove or disprove. If we must talk about provable participation in policy, I have a very basic approach to citizenship at this time: I have never voted in a government election, and I have never bought a special insurance policy for my health or disability (outside from some SMS driven thing my cellphone provider once sent me). On the other hand, I find it useful to kill time that I have left alive in building things.
So I don't think life as a whole is valuable. But I do think, that given a state of life, it is amusing to see what we can get done, just for shits. :)
* The note:
/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.
2019-10-22 at 7:43 am
Curiosity: Housing Economics - Buyers' or Sellers' Market?
/question on housing economics, from a group/
Co-living is a new word for an old thing. Go through synonyms such as loft housing, communes, etc.
Most residences are residences of convenience. If someone wants to make money off an industry of convenience as a seller, they'd better damn well know what conveniences are needed by the buyers.
Residential rent:
It's a seller's market if wages are rising across the economy, because there's always something 'more convenient' for a buyer to upgrade to.
In an economy where growth is near zero, therefore wage growth is near zero or negative, it seems that buyers (i.e. tenants, the personal finance bit) can always choose to reduce convenience to generate cash.
Curious.
Co-living is a new word for an old thing. Go through synonyms such as loft housing, communes, etc.
Most residences are residences of convenience. If someone wants to make money off an industry of convenience as a seller, they'd better damn well know what conveniences are needed by the buyers.
Residential rent:
It's a seller's market if wages are rising across the economy, because there's always something 'more convenient' for a buyer to upgrade to.
In an economy where growth is near zero, therefore wage growth is near zero or negative, it seems that buyers (i.e. tenants, the personal finance bit) can always choose to reduce convenience to generate cash.
Curious.
2019-10-21 at 5:46 am
Comment: Why you might Hide Earnings Before an IPO
/from a group chat/
AirBNB recently reported 2Q2019 earnings, and it was lossy. In 2017 and 2018, however, they reported positive EBITDA.
(1) You want to liquidate your position, and cash out.
(2) You want to raise money for the company, which goes to the company, not you, to grow the company's operations.
(3) You have some arbitrary business target to meet, due to promises you've made in the past (e.g. two years ago, you promised someone that you would IPO in two years, in exchange for something).
As the pre-IPO team, you have (comparatively) deep insight into the past, present, and future quarters of the company's performance, as well as the performance of your competitors in general. So you can kinda see which way things will go. Now the question is whether you are motivated by (1, 2, or 3)?
If you are aiming at (3.) it can be complicated, depending on the agreement. Perhaps there are further targets you have been given to hit specific stock prices at T=IPO+1Q or T=IPO+2Y, etc.
If you are aiming to max out opportunity (1. or 2.) then you have to ask if you are looking for a one-time event, and or a series of subsequent events. E.g. if you want (1.) do you want to sell all at once, or sell a bit at IPO, then more at IPO+1Y, then more at IPOD+2Y, etc. The same question arises if you are looking to raise money (2.) for operational and capital expenditure.
If you are looking for a one-time event, then the usual tactic is to pump and dump the stock. So yes, you would hide losses, announce earnings, and sell, then fuck everyone else over. This is generally not preferred - although when it happens, a lot of people tend to ENVY this practice. I do not, mostly. I mean, I would do it tactically, but I would not currently design an economy or my life to allow events like this in general lol.
If you are aiming for a series of events, then you want to manage your track record of not losing money, so that future buyers of the stock would want to pay a higher price for it.
-
Endnote:
In 2015, I did a mini-IPO of sorts, by crowdfunding a stock sale in a restaurant before the SC started to regulate ECF. I sold the stock at par, meaning that under motivation (2.) I was valuing the company as low as I possibly could. Yet to-date we are losing money on paper, and there has never been enough old or new investor confidence to raise more money. TLDR, it's just business, roll with it. Your mileage may vary.
I am still looking for new cofounders, to grow this business:
(a) a COO to take over product R&D and operations management under my guidance (guessing this is harder to find)
(b) a CFO to take over bookkeeping, quantitative QA, old investor management, new investor grandstanding (guessing this is easier to find)
AirBNB recently reported 2Q2019 earnings, and it was lossy. In 2017 and 2018, however, they reported positive EBITDA.
Me: If they're actually doing OK, a safe strategy is to under-report earnings (hide it), then IPO, then realise value in quarters after that.If you are the team that owns 100% of the pre-IPO stock, you are seeking to IPO for one of a few reasons. (I have done this before in a small way, so I would say I may have a personal bias... see endnote.)
X (paraphrased): Why would they reduce their IPO price?
(1) You want to liquidate your position, and cash out.
(2) You want to raise money for the company, which goes to the company, not you, to grow the company's operations.
(3) You have some arbitrary business target to meet, due to promises you've made in the past (e.g. two years ago, you promised someone that you would IPO in two years, in exchange for something).
As the pre-IPO team, you have (comparatively) deep insight into the past, present, and future quarters of the company's performance, as well as the performance of your competitors in general. So you can kinda see which way things will go. Now the question is whether you are motivated by (1, 2, or 3)?
If you are aiming at (3.) it can be complicated, depending on the agreement. Perhaps there are further targets you have been given to hit specific stock prices at T=IPO+1Q or T=IPO+2Y, etc.
If you are aiming to max out opportunity (1. or 2.) then you have to ask if you are looking for a one-time event, and or a series of subsequent events. E.g. if you want (1.) do you want to sell all at once, or sell a bit at IPO, then more at IPO+1Y, then more at IPOD+2Y, etc. The same question arises if you are looking to raise money (2.) for operational and capital expenditure.
If you are looking for a one-time event, then the usual tactic is to pump and dump the stock. So yes, you would hide losses, announce earnings, and sell, then fuck everyone else over. This is generally not preferred - although when it happens, a lot of people tend to ENVY this practice. I do not, mostly. I mean, I would do it tactically, but I would not currently design an economy or my life to allow events like this in general lol.
If you are aiming for a series of events, then you want to manage your track record of not losing money, so that future buyers of the stock would want to pay a higher price for it.
-
Endnote:
In 2015, I did a mini-IPO of sorts, by crowdfunding a stock sale in a restaurant before the SC started to regulate ECF. I sold the stock at par, meaning that under motivation (2.) I was valuing the company as low as I possibly could. Yet to-date we are losing money on paper, and there has never been enough old or new investor confidence to raise more money. TLDR, it's just business, roll with it. Your mileage may vary.
I am still looking for new cofounders, to grow this business:
(a) a COO to take over product R&D and operations management under my guidance (guessing this is harder to find)
(b) a CFO to take over bookkeeping, quantitative QA, old investor management, new investor grandstanding (guessing this is easier to find)
Throwback: Personal Finances in 2009
/posted in a personal finance group/
#throwback 2009. What were your personal finances like in 2009?
#throwback 2009. What were your personal finances like in 2009?
- -I got my first job as a bartender in 2008
- - - I had previously worked at a government think tank, a management consulting firm, and in investment management, but I found the opportunities there to be limited (dumb people, low Malaysian market sophistication, highly paid colleagues were ladder climbers, deep local knowledge and domain mastery, but no intricate technical expertise, and no global perspective, etc.).
- - - I had paid off my student debt, put myself on sabbatical, finally got around to prioritising getting laid over studying, and helped a small team of trainers to sell their company to a local newspaper (lol?).
- - Minimum wage was RM500/month
- - - It's going to be RM1200/month on 1 Jan 2020, and people are still complaining. I am always rolling my eyes.
- - Taxis cost something like RM2.00/2km + RM0.10/150m (2005 -> ?)
- - - I felt public transport was actually worth my money; I don't anymore
- - - I would sometimes cycle to work from Section 5 in PJ to Changkat Bukit Bintang
- - - Sometimes cycling home at 3am, I'd see broken cars with bloodied windows on the Federal Highway
- - I had just laid out my 5+year plan for graduate studies (self-guided)
- - - I practiced tracking and categorising every sen of personal expenditure for a year.
- - - I spent most of 2009 helping to set up a web-application product company, and learning how to perform back-end web-development, use Linux, and virtual machines.
- - - Got paid about RM4,000/month freelance, with a stock grant. I have no idea whether I'll ever see cash on that stock. I get paid less at my current job in 2019 - but I run the company, even if I don't control it.
- - - I lived in a house, which was our office, near Telawi in Bangsar. I paid rent. I got a girlfriend. We moved out.
- - - Then it was 2010.
Observation: Foreign Worker Visa Statuses in Malaysia
Was talking to the security guards in my area. SIC. Foreign workers in Malaysia. Here are the various visa statuses stories I have been told (truth, myths, and legends - I'm not sure which is which).
And all I ask is for someone high enough in Putrajaya... to design a more transparent system from scratch. And to deploy it with fireworks in the near future.
- - Real Visa, obtained Over The Table, via a Publicly Known Method (mode 1a), working with the officially linked business (mode x)
- - Real Visa, obtained Over The Table, via a Publicly Known Method (mode 1a), working with some non-officially linked business (mode y)
- - Real Visa, obtained Over The Table, via a Method Hidden to the Public (mode 1b) (modes x, y)
- - Real Visa, obtained Under The Table (mode 2) (modes x, y)
- - Fake Visa
- - any Real Visa (expired), Real Visa-Extension-Application-In-Progress Documents, (modes 1a, 1b, 2)
- - any Real Visa (expired), NO Real Visa-Extension-Application-In-Progress Documents, instead some 'receipt of payment' issued by a broker, agent, or such
And all I ask is for someone high enough in Putrajaya... to design a more transparent system from scratch. And to deploy it with fireworks in the near future.
2019-10-20 at 2:27 am
Yawn 55
August 21 - October 20
Pig is awake. Now to chase down lost work. As always. #slowpoke
/
Quite a few things come to mind. I write this beside one snoring body and an itinerant cat. I'm in a strange place, but it is pretty, and the company seems cheerful.
It's a bit of a risk, allowing so many distractions into my schedule, but optimisations are the name of the game. Perhaps after 3-point-5 years of living in a cheap hotel room, it'll be cheaper still to move somewhere that has its own washer, dryer, fridge, and stovetop. I'm still not sure if I'm being irresponsible, as the new commute is a 35-to-40 kilometer round-trip and that reduces time-to-office significantly during rush-hours.
The past three months have been largely consumed by remedial housekeeping. Physical and mental conditioning, housekeeping of old projects, housekeeping of emergency projects, talent management of weak staff, adjustment of digital marketing campaigns, et cetera. This is almost done, but not quite. I hope we don't crash along the way, as I will be likely to blame myself for the luxury of taking an in-place vacation.
Earlier today, while cleaning up digital assets, I came across some old planning documents. I shared these with one of the Facebook groups which constitute my business networking fora on this job. I have yet to fully appreciate the feedback I'm getting there. Someone raised the lens of a "success matrix," but I'm not sure I read the correct documentation on that.
Overall I find myself still improbably privileged, and risk loving. Most of the people I deal with on a day-to-day basis have absolutely zero comprehension of how my priorities are organised. Pottering around me with their fears of death and dismemberment, sickness, poverty, and shame... I really don't know what to do with them. But of course, as civilians we accept those who differ from us and attempt to build a civilisation with them.
I find myself inadequate as a leader, despite the various commercial developments I have embarked on in my social life. However, there are terms for that which frame each self-deprecating individual as the norm. In any event, I hope to put more time into all the following by the end of the year.
(i) More cleanups of personal effects (real estate, inboxes, social media monitoring, insurance claims, lovers who speak uncertainly to me, tax amendments...)
(ii) More corporate developments (menu updates, possibly rolled together with a long-overdue website launch, perhaps more consulting, or a new job which supplements the ongoing business, more guerilla social media campaigns to supplement the ban on my usage of social media under our flagship brand, perhaps changes in the cap table, HVACR repairs, who knows...)
(iii) Diversification in depth of pursuit of endeavours outside of the workplace, which people so often ask me about which I have no answer to. Software, math, and stats, studies have been greatly procrastinated... or so it feels, despite having done much detailed work on these since 2009.
One can only hope...
/
Down to the three-digit-inbox. Back to zero tonight, I hope.
/
Outraged Malaysians vs. criminal paedophile... I smell prejudice
/
Fatty Crab: junkfood level salt levels. Lol. No surprises. No complaints.
/
I have an extremely casual relationship with the notions of: mental health, religion, dying, cultural extremism, social contracts, and other such taboos. As such, my ablist self is likely to trivialise the difficulties that less able people have in coming to terms with these things. My father worked as a religious teacher after he worked as a teacher of organic chemistry, my mother worked as a counsellor after she worked as a medical doctor. Our maid hanged herself when I was six. I trained to lead clinics in therapeutic religious meditation, and held such office in clubs and societies as a child. My friends and I are very serious trivialisers of death, often discussing the shallowness of our concern for life, and often discussing ways in which people can terminate their own existences, and the impact it has on their neighbours. Two of my friends actively seek professional therapy for mental health concerns, and discuss it with me. Innumerable others do not discuss it with me. I was just reminding a third friend, "as for stigma about mental illness - perhaps best to run rough-shod over any luddite tendencies. You have to make it clear to listeners that mental health is a domain of professional inquiry... like civil engineering. You don't ask housewives and marketing directors to evaluate the soundness of a building or how to fix it. I.e. professional psychiatry is a good idea. It's a public health service."
/
Ok what. I only measure my wealth in terms of what I know, because the entire investment strategy for all my time sits on the knowledge of how to be happy without anything else.
The RESULTS of that investment strategy is that I own some pretty nutty things, in my head, as well as outside...
/
I'm not amused. I'm taking time out of high-risk projects to read about unrelated companies just to figure out how they buried the lede in a new product launch. It's as if there isn't enough to do already :P
/
Always amusing when problematic people ask about why problems exist.
/
I'm reading up on JavaScript web client frameworks after a few years out of that industry. I'm glad they figured out the separation of stores and views (models and views), however, the way view code is written appears to conflate data and operations on data. I may be mistaken. Reminds me a bit of some Erlang framework I wrote as an exercise in 2012. Maybe I'm just remembering how other people wrote frameworks...
/
"event bus" is a misnomer. This thing is a data bus. LOL... #changemymind
/
I tend to think about web software applications in the same way that I think about civil engineering systems. There are various media, like cement, steel, plastic, HTML, shadow DOMs, CSS... there are various systems like electrical, HVACR, plumbing, business logic, UI flow... and there needs to be some clear separation of concerns between the proximity of media, and the systems implemented in those media at each location. Just because two things are next to each other, it doesn't imply that we should link them together.
/
It's hard to train people who are naturally empathetic to just stop doing emotional labour for other people. But that's what we have to do, in order to progress as a business. So on with it. :)
/
Talent management and organisational culture - are you fighting to build a flat organisation, or a hierarchical one?
/
What I think about the concept of a Virtual DOM after a few minutes of revising the concept in detail:
(1) It requires a lot of meat computation to save a quantum of metal computation... that probably wouldn't affect most people writing shitty little apps with just a few dozen items on the screen. So it is a performance optimisation tool that encourages both: premature optimisation for small teams... and inefficient architectures which are swept under the rug by... dum dum dum... general performance gains.
(2) The Virtual Dom is like coffee. It probably makes individuals less wholesome providers to themselves, but the net macro effect of making a large chunk of the population more specialised then feeds back via a trade mechanism to incentivise individual to pursue the optimisation.
/
## Update:
I wanted to use Hyperapp(1), which uses a virtualDOM, with Hyperx(2) templates which required a transpilation step on the server-side (which I want to avoid). I have bad things to say about virtualDOM, but that aside, it seems Googlers already came up with an alternative framework, lit-html(3), which uses neither virtualDOMs nor server-side transpilation, sooo I am happy.
(1)
* [https://hackernoon.com/introducing-hyperapp-1-0-dbf4229abfef](https://hackernoon.com/introducing-hyperapp-1-0-dbf4229abfef)
* https://medium.com/hyperapp/hyperapp-for-redux-refugees-2507c9dd1ddc
(2)
* [https://github.com/lukejacksonn/hyperapp-wiki/blob/master/docs/hyperx.md](https://github.com/lukejacksonn/hyperapp-wiki/blob/master/docs/hyperx.md)
(3)
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io6JjgckHbg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io6JjgckHbg)
## Previously;
eval() is evil. OK. Yet, has anyone decided to run their build-steps in the browser, using eval() ?
/
I still don't know what the big deal is, but for formality's sake: Happy birthday, Malaysia.
/
"Do you miss me when you don't see me? 🙂"
"A bit because I know you miss me. Less if I don't empathise. I'm not super attached to your person, perhaps, more thinking about our relationship as a part of my work and trying to figure out how to optimise the whole thing.☝🏼Offensive? Groceries: I am thinking milk and fruit. Maybe more nuts also. Not sure what else can fit for now... unless I go and get the microwave/oven first?"
/
Malaysia (roughly):
- real poverty rate 10-20%
- nominal poverty rate 0%
- [GPD/capita]/[USA's GDP/capita] pretty stagnant for twenty years at 20%-30%
- automotive industrialisation projects: mostly failed to stimulate local enterprise
- research & technology: little to speak of
- government: tribal
- borders: leaky
- citizenry: whiney
- birthdays: 62
/
Humans are prototypes of androids. You can only scale the intelligence of a human so much in the vertical axis before hitting systematic limitations (it's probably quite a lot actually). But an android, can be vertically scaled by a greater factor, so civilisation ends with androids, not humans. Or is it the case? The main reason ideas can't ditch meat for metal is because meat, so far, is a more flexible foraging mechanism for energy. Plants are the main capture vector, and meat eats plants. You can replace meat with metal, ultimately, only when that entire supply chain of energy has been replaced with something more evolutionarily competitive. Until then, we're going to plateau at meat-metal hybrids. When that's the norm, I wonder how rites of passage will be. Will certain cultures only provide digital network interfaces to children when they hit puberty? Deploy. Rollback. Change the culture, the build results are unstable. Whee.
/
Decaf instant coffee is my new favourite thing. #desking
/
/commented on "it's not always ok to... agree to disagree" - with the intention to illustrate the superficiality of the statement; the base case for all social interactions is anarchy, not society... society is just what we end up with, no matter how much you hate the other people in it/
.
I agree. I've been on both side of the fence... sometimes I just do what I want regardless of other people's opinions... in which case it is quite efficient to not ask them anyway.
.
Likewise I presume that they will take similar liberties with my resources.
.
So to summarise, the base case presumption I take going into any project is the good'ol "ok lads, this is going to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short... eh, wait, so now what do we do?"
/
/commented/
In order for the Syariah judiciaries (and they are, after all, a branch of state governments), to govern the Company's actions on Islamic affairs among Muslims, the courts claimed that [the Muslim directors' actions] in directing the Company to act on Islamic affairs among Muslims... was criminal via [the subjugation of Muslims in Malaysia to Syariah law].... and transitively, the Syariah judiciaries are claiming power of governance over such corporate activities.
.
Without normative statements on what laws Malaysia should have, the judge in this case is correct.
/
Designing workspace in larger built environments, and deciding that HVAC really needs to apply to small subsets of the larger space. The question then is, how do we design subsets to work transparently with larger spaces, and the answer probably involves a lot of glass.
/
- project age: 4.17 years
- corporate developments in the last 0.35 years: near zero
- current R&D: software assets
.
I do not feel productive, but I have had the privilege of being surrounded by fairly kind and generous people. So I am going to remain focused on studies and corporate development.
/
Gender categories, in sports, and in general: I agree with the deletion of empirically unfalsifiable ontologies.
/
It is a privilege to have access to the knowledge of how personality supervenes upon meat. Others less privileged, have no access to such ontologies.
.
In general, I find myself wondering if it is more ethical to encourage stratified classism, by enabling accessible ontologies at all levels of knowledge... or to encourage hegemony of the privileged view.
.
I think the answer I prefer for now, is a common one. Hegemony of paradigms should be proposed but not enforced. If people want to live in a bubble, or if they cannot help BUT to live in a bubble, that should be allowed.
.
Among paradigms of society, the lowest common denominator is a contract that arbitrarily excludes some people... whom we refer to as the criminals, and the ill. This is the definition of a society under economic conditions. The question of who gets to be included, or excluded, is the gist of social studies.
/
I wonder how many people believe that I use social media this extensively for reasons other than to promote my business. LOL
/
Two in One: best executed chap fan. buy this stock.
/
/commented/ My target for AI has always been:
- it replaces developers of humans, from kindergarten teachers to life coaches and physics TAs
- it outperforms creative professionals in generating work for commercial briefs
- it produces art that the mode citizen can appreciate, as well as art that can be informed by existing traditions such that an art historian would find it insightful
- sex bots (just as the penultimate example of xyz bots)
.
.
.
All in all, it's been obvious to me that human experience and thought processes are quantifiable. But the only way to make many people believe it is to simply demonstrate it to them. It may break their spirits, but if that's what it takes, too bad.
/
HK is now going to turn into New Paris or New Bosnia... -_-... I'd like to see the former, but the cards on the table say the latter will emerge.
/
It smells like death at the office.
It smells like poop at home.
Back to work.
/
x: "Why is it a big deal that people should be demonstrably trivial?"
i: "Where did I say it's a big deal? I just said that it is what it is."
x: "You seem to spend a lot of time working on that hypothesis."
i: "I just like pissing people off."
x: "Have fun, then."
i: "I do, for the most part."
.
Disclaimer: I'm going to have to qualify that... I just like pissing people off when they come at me with some notion that people should be assigned value.
/
/commented/ I think virtue signalling is a necessary component of social communication. No one should be villified just for being farther up or farther down the distribution of any particular behaviour.
The only test of what counts as good or bad messaging is the final effect, so only the future outcomes inform us on who was too quiet and who was too loud. Some messages and messengers will persist and others will die, that is the nature of progress.
The whole point of testing new hypotheses is to ensure that mutation does not stagnate. When it does, the overall civilisation dies.
/
Isomorphic rendering and server-side rendering in general: after ALL THIS TIME of web development, they're trying to RECOUPLE the server-client dichotomy?! :P
/
Reflux's unidirectional data-flow through actions (controllers), stores (models), views (views)... "The main function of Reflux is to introduce a more functional programming style architecture by eschewing MVC like pattern and adopting a single data flow pattern." #FFS
/
TL;DR: Can you guys tell me about programs which:
1. implement "events" and "event listeners" ...
2. ... on web clients... (not servers)
3. ... outside of the the DOM (events are not attached to DOM elements)
?
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I just found a bug in common web applications. This has been bugging me for some time, and I'm relieved to have nailed it finally (I think). Caveat emptor: this is an architectural bug that is expansive throughout the web application ecosystem, so it may not be easily viewed as a bug.
The DOM is supposed to be a document, not a business processor. But for quite a few years now, people have been using DOM events & event-handlers as business processors, instead of as mere documents. This has royally fucked up the separation of concerns between the DOM tree, Web Application APIs (Javascript), and Rendering (CSS, etc.).
It just so happens that usually, the only place to plant event listeners, and the only place to trigger events, is on DOM elements. So what happened is that in pursuit of writing event-driven business processes into code, people have been writing event-driven business processes into the DOM.
The data structure of a web application is NOT supposed to depend on a DOM tree. Therefore close-coupling between [data models in a web application] (read in 2019 as "stores"), and [specific node trees in a DOM] is an anti-pattern.
But isn't the DOM supposed to mediate such user-interface actions as receiving input from the user, and sending feedback to the user, you might ask? Yes, of course, these can be modelled as events, and the DOM provides us data structures pertaining to those events, as well as ways to operate on those structures (listeners).
But that does NOT mean that the DOM is also supposed to handle traffic control for events throughout an entire web application. A web application should have an eventable control centre which lies OUTSIDE the DOM. (That is, outside any light, shadow, or virtual DOM, in case it wasn't clear). We generally know how to do this on the server, since NodeJS lit the rage on this. But web applications are not always supposed to run on the server - often times we want a web application to run robustly on the client side, and to depend on servers only for federated data stores. So how do we go about writing web application CLIENTS that have EVENT-driven traffic control OUTSIDE the DOM?
With that in mind, I searched for implementations of event listeners outside the DOM, and was pointed to the Reactor pattern* by this thread (preview).
I look forward to examining it more closely, perhaps with your input.
* https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/web_development/9781783287314/1/ch01lvl1sec09/the-reactor-pattern
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Option 1. Hand-rolled reactor pattern.
Option 2. Add event listeners to the window object. This seems less crufty.
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I don't know why people want to work in the tech department of Grab, the product is not sophisticated. The place is a bank. The risk management and finance departments would be so much more interesting, presuming they're doing it right.
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I think the first version of this dependency graph tracker written in JavaScript should utilise a minimum number of JavaScript's object-oriented programming capabilities, such as to be written in really dumb imperative code.
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I find myself in a race to innovate against multiple industry trends, before the morons who dictate what I am and am not allowed to do... change the rules again, and before the market destroys us.
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A moment of reflection allows for preparation before the day's work. Hopefully it is a productive day. Many days in these past few years are like this. It remains a good game. But this is not agreeable to all. That is the nature of the problem.
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I must compose myself adequate, daily, in order to have a fighting chance. That is the nature of meditation, in terms of organising the mental workplace, before using the mental workplace.
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Negotiations: Always take a market's point of view! I hate arguing with petty traders :P and generally, I don't.
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Horribly unproductive day. Why am I building a house? I'm not supposed to be this affluent for another fifteen to thirty years.
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/commented on "WTF is a cloud kitchen?"/
Updated:
In computer server terms, a "private cloud" is a group of servers that one company manages internally and uses internally. A "public cloud" is a group of servers that many companies uses internally, whilst it is managed by a single external provider.
If we consider that kitchen operations are analogous to computer server operations, and that computer server operations depend on built-environment infrastructure such as space and electricity, then I think:
- "A shared kitchen for multiple companies", is closer to a B2B IaaS
- "Online discovery and ordering for shops", is a B2C PaaS
- Personally... in the interest of market liquidity - I'd want an API where any restaurant or household could order some widget/dish from another restaurant or household, with very stringent specifications, logistical, and price variables. That's the sort of thing that interests me, and I think of it as an API for building a C2C / B2B internet of artisanal goods.
:)
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/commented/ Poor debt regulation on mortgages and mortgage derivatives... led to equity crashes... which let to loose money via bail outs and quantitative easing... which led to... the technical debt, of debt. So meta.
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I could spend the rest of my life debating constitutional legalese, but I'm not paid to do that. I do however, have time for the occasional snarky Facebook comment on the same.
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Finally started to write code after a week of reading. Good to be starting. Off to bed.
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Awake. To the grind. #yearfive
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It's not very efficient to be doing technology R&D, as the CEO etc. of a real-time services small business, because the amount of short- and long-term memory which can be devoted to learning new things is quite limited. However, on with it. (I literally spend half my study time worrying about what the hell is going on at the office.)
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I look forward to a world with no sentimental people. I am not of the belief that I will live to see it. :)
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I spend a lot of time every day, on tactical observations of my neighbours in society. Many enjoy the activity of giving things to their peers, but others see it as a sort of duty. It is the second group which endlessly amuses me. A portion of these have rationalised operations around contracts. The remaining ones... adopt conventions and then are annoyed when others do not adopt them. But that is the nature of the world, isn't it? The jungle does not amuse everyone.
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There are two common uses for the word, 'taste'. One is as a technical term of chemoreceptivity. The other is a synonym for intelligence. Taste is a synonym of intelligence. Brain that, classists. :)
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Major overhaul of my punctuation policy - I have been using US punctuation with UK spelling, for fifteen years. Going to migrate completely to UK for the time being. [Update: MHRA, actually.]
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1. "The Ministry of Education decides what courses universities offer rather than market forces. This is where the mismatches are coming from."
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2. "Serving people isn’t natural to this group and those who try to work in a restaurant or shop usually only last a few days and give up."
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Myanmar dude at the 24-hour branded convenience store:
- July sales were down 15-20% (previous staff have told me they make 80-120k/month sales)
- workers all along the street have lower wages
- workers all along the street face increased goods prices
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Anyone got a tow truck service that can haul a Kancil from Damansara Jaya to Taman Perindustrian Puchong for RM50-80?
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It's always difficult to find companies that aren't interested in selling horseshit to dung beetles. Most companies seem to do this naturally... first of all. a customer base of unintelligent suckers is selected, then a device is created to take their money, and then financing is raised from people who enjoy taking money from suckers. And to side-step the whole thing, you have to begin by removing all the unintelligent suckers from your customer base. And that, is the real challenge that I face in doing business.
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Too many things to do. At least, the JavaScript framework has hobbled out. But it will probably need a rewrite to Promises. Meanwhile, trying not to fall asleep at work. Lots of miscellany to catch up on.
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Unit online.
Power, underwhelming.
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/commented on advice that it's never too late to pay off a mountain of debt/
I have the same approach to business. Almost never had an issue with having too little money for myself - my personal life doesn't care. As for business, it's like a game that's meant to be played on nightmare mode... and I'm sure other people have had it worse because they didn't have existential carelessness as insurance. People suffer when they fear loss. Embrace loss, never suffer, then you're left with a lot of spare time to invest in random shizzle.
Caveat: this is a gross abstraction of my economic calculus
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I think people who drink alcohol regularly have a disability. I mean, I think people who like to burn petrol for fun, and people who smoke, and people who need the affirmation of their peers, and people whose Tinder profiles consist of "eat, sleep, travel," and people who believe in piety, or undefined loyalties, are similarly disabled. But then I guess that my interest in math looks like a disability to other people too. So in conclusion, I propose that we consider to be useful, the model of society as the sum of our collective disabilities.
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/ Commented on "People leave toxic work cultures." / Precisely why you have to design the right toxins to get the right ecology. Pick your poisons.
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/commented on Blue Apron/
I tell all my pre-seed shareholders to hold equity till IPO because we're pre-series A, and basically it's really too early to get any value out of the business with an exit at this time.
But then I have to tell future investors that they hold till IPO+5y in order for the investment hierarchy to make sense.
Which is to say, if you're serious about building a business, don't have an exit strategy.
Exits are for traders.
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/ commented on a civil engineer's complaint that innovation is limited due to risk /
Innovation is the resolution of today's problems, using methods unavailable to yesterday's designers. Innovation never dies, in fact it's the status quo, because if it stopped... we'd all just die from yesterday's design flaws.
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Kampar morning market is so smalltown milfy.
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Trying to model the thought process. I don't know how else to classify it. Do the ah sohs wake up on Saturday morning, put on their lipstick, get their kids up in their x-day best, trot them out, and be all like, 'come dear, we go eat fishball!'?
I much prefer watching the ladies in fitted clothes who wear masks, actually, as it leaves more to the imagination. Only works if they're also moving 'fit', I guess.
(In case you haven't noticed: this is one way I can keep myself awake when hanging out with foodies. I don't get so excited about most food options.)
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"So many old people."
"This only works because the area hasn't gentrified. Wherever new trade comes in, prices go up, and walking space reduces, and the old people become stuck at home."
#urbanplanning #undesign #unplanning
Update: we later concluded that the Kampar market is a local tourist location for the countryside surrounding it.
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/commented on a legless beggar/ Of course I'm not going to give him money. Look, there are loads more people in more trouble than this guy. There's no barrier to sending them help instead. Do you help this guy more just because you can see him? Yes? Then you are weak. Fix a better problem.
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/commented on someone looking for business+personal relationship success stories/
I am going to assume that we are defining success as personal happiness, not as what society views it to be, i.e. in this rubrick a contented mass-murderer would be more successful than a celebrity social worker who sleeps with regret.
From end-2015 to mid-2019 I lived in a sort of hotel room directly across the street from my office, in order to bootstrap a new company. During this time I slept completely different hours each day, and spent most of my time on this one project. The project was set up with the requirement that I would be paid sufficiently to not have to seek outside income, but once you account for outsourced rent + food + laundry, there wasn't really much cash left in my pocket on a monthly basis.
Yet this period was rather productive for me as a whole. My priority has always been to put work first, and so I was able to spend a maximum amount of time on work. However, in order to do that one has to periodically disengage the brain from the office, in order to allow for repair and mutation - generally called Rest & Recreation.
Having limited cash and time for recreation in general, I focused most of my recreational efforts on dating. Social networks for intimacy such as Tinder, OKCupid, and Coffee Meets Bagel have been my main sources for lead generation - for better or for worse, to some degree I also met people offline through the nature of my work. (In general I avoid taking dates to the office.)
Now in year-four, my business is more mature than where it was when we started. My social life has been rewarding, and I am happy to have added the people I met to my general catalog of experiences.
I would say it has been a good time. I wish had managed to keep my mind and body in better shape with exercises during this period, but I suppose any loss in health is a cost to be written off at this time. I look forward to improving further the balance in my portfolio of activities.
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Brutal dictatorships: I almost always reserve an amount of disdain for people who don't think about these things.
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I hate my job :P - not the parts that don't work, just the sheer volume of moving parts. But I designed it that way, so we're going to keep moving or die on it. #dogfooding
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Disappointed with myself. This is the healthiest state of mind. (Satisfaction is the easiest to achieve. :P)
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x: "Look, the strays are eating. Someone has been feeding them."
y: "People want to help them, but it is not good for the strays."
x: "It helps them live longer, but a longer life may not be a good thing."
y: "You know, that makes me think of stray farming - a farm for strays. You put all the strays in one place, and they can have happy, free, lives. Then when they are old, you can serve their meat to zoo animals."
x: "Why don't you just serve the old stray meat to the young strays? Anyway, unless you can demonstrate cash-flow positivity, you still have a bottleneck at the federal funding level."
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"I read that dissociation is considered a mental illness."
"Yes it is, if you're not the one who turns it on."
"Maybe you're just ill, after all."
"Well, it took a lot of training to get this way. Anyone who thinks it's an accident can fuck off."
"But why would you want to make yourself ill?"
"Illness is after all, defined by the majority. I happen to think that people who cannot dissociate are less able?"
LOL #arguingwithplebes #notarguingwithplebes
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/commented on all leaders sharing the trait of emotional intelligence/ Leaders are masters of people. Rough earth calls for sharp instruments. Ain't no mystery abatit...
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Sometimes I wonder about all the people whose feelings I've hurt. I don't mind hurting their feelings, or if they ultimately self-destruct as a result of it. But I think there will always be arguments about whether I, as a member of their society, had a direct legal liability for their demise.
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Moderation: I have to say I would care about some of them, but definitely not all!
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/commented/ I have this bloke who joined in June. Around July he was telling us he'd figured out everything at his job when he clearly had nearly nothing figured out. Nevermind the personal insults he heaped on his colleagues. By August he was basically demoted (per contract), and was looking to leave. Colleagues persuaded him to stick around (I told them they could fire him any time). He generally isn't motivated, but we do what we can to help him. I already offered to pay another ex-staff to be his instant messenger friend - cue conversation, "what would my job be actually?" / "be his father". I'm quite sure there's only one thing I need to do: crush his notion that the job is going to be an easy one.
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Caught up with June-September data entry for power consumption. Looking forward to an automatic logger in the future. -_-
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Update: that was half done; now it's done
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/commented/ This depends on the use-case. You can here, analyse "design" and "architecture" as DSLs. One is oriented about local, short-term optimisations, and the other is a language which is expected to useful outside short-term concerns. Short-term here refers to 1-5 years. Go figure.
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Stallman's fall: /commented/ I read the whole article. Think he played all his cards right. Didn't back down on a stance unless persuaded. Remained open to persuasion. Didn't make loud noises in public demanding to be persuaded. Someone leaked private conversations with xyz context, his organisation comes under political pressure, he resigns to protect the organisation. Sounds all good to me. We can quibble about the bits of the article now. Lol
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I think deplatforming of controversial opinions demonstrates an unwillingness to let nature take its course in the destruction of life. Sure, the act of deplatforming is itself an act of destruction. I guess censorship is indeed, a double-edged sword. Generally when I find myself under consideration for a controversial opinion, I encourage detractors to speak more clearly. But typically, I think, people are afraid of being criticised in public. They are ashamed, and fearful of material and immaterial loss, alike. So, I think in conclusion, we should be aware of censorship in all the forms it takes, and to be aware of how to launch such attacks, as well as to defend against them. That is the disciplinary skillset - the tooling. Tools are morally agnostic. I wish for a world with fewer people who are unwilling to negotiate their moral convictions. But well, if no one will give it to me, I must make the world as I wish it to be. And that is what we all tell our children: grow up, fix things. We just won't always agree on what needs fixing.
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I don't like being responsible for so many things at once. It doesn't sit easily in my brain. And I never feel like I'm acting responsibly. Brief review before bed:
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- 24-hour factory operations
- retail merchandising, from art and decor, to recipes
- brand, including coordination of external threats, with internal weaknesses in corporate governance
- technology maintenance and R&D, from HVACR to adtech, to websites
- psych-ops on a half dozen operational meat nodes
- psych-ops on one-and-a-half dozen non-operational meat nodes
- bookkeeping, financial control, and audit
- regulatory compliance (million)
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Ad Astra: it's basically 'Freud Gattaca: 2019', or 'Kant with Spaceships'. But in any event, it reminds me of my own work. I actually want to function like the father, but I believe I currently work more like the son. Also the script is a bit rough and rushy at parts. Almost a great movie. Bit of an Aesop's Fable.
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Spent a chunk of the day networking with ex-colleagues from my time in a startup incubator. It was pretty clear what the problems were from the get-go, and I only accepted the gig as a money job. I was hired to rationalise technology, but I spent most of my efforts rationalising leadership. I don't think I was viewed as a hatchet man, but that's what the job felt like from day one. Some problems just need sunlight, and then nature takes care of the execution. When in doubt, remove the head. In less than a year, it went pretty much as predicted. Not that I ever predict singular futures... I usually bet on probability distributions.
I'm still working a money job these days, but here I own a few shares.
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Sometimes I don't know why the smog bugs people. Then I remember, most people don't accept work in smokey bars.
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Distributor portals which have price ranges: I can't brain this website's information hiding. It's so easy to just pick up the phone and call 2-3 suppliers in ten minutes. But I'm sure it's novel for many buyers.
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Nutritional supplementation reinitiated. Universal mode soldier revert. Lol
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/commented on #millenialretirement/
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1983, age:0 - birth registered
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2001, age:18 - got into college, didn't find interesting people, decided to call it early retirement; was able to learn how to reduce demand for extended life to zero, therefore all time remaining is treated as a luxury
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2005, age:22 - very retired; graduated; returned to Malaysia to study local politics and commerce in general
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2015, age:32 - still very retired; started a business to kill more time;
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2019, age36 - still working on it; work is good; keeps me busy; sometimes I get in trouble but who doesn't?
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I think IFTTT is going to save me from having no authority to post on social media.
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I've come to the conclusion that I don't indulge in sex for pleasure as much as I engage in sex as a productivity booster because the body behaves in a healthier manner with moderate amounts of sex. Which leads me to wonder if I should start experimenting with chemical castration.
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Dream journal: several days ago, cuddled and made out with a girl I worry about, who has been in some ways the love of my life. She seemed to enjoy the time in our dream. After the dream, I told her over instant messenger, I know dreams are not reflective of the people which inspire them. Classification: wish fulfilment.
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Dream journal: a few days ago, one of those where a mosquito inserts a worm beneath the skin, you try to swat the parasite as it swims around, visibly black on light flesh, beneath skin. Classification: nightmare, or just curiosity/concern.
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Comment to present partner: (Anyone's) self-loathing is kinda pointless. I think looking for a forever person is a bad use of (my) time, so (I) don't. But (anyone) might find a forever person even if (they are) not looking!
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Mental conditioning:
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I notice that I may be experiencing some depression symptoms as a direct result of overfiltering sense stimuli. When I notice a sensation (initiated either from the peripheral nervous system, or from memory: both passing through the imagination), I typically push it to one of two buckets...
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(a) marked for deletion (and monitoring until deletion), or
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(b) marked for integration into main working memory (and monitoring until integration).
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This is a trained response, for improving SNR in working memory. This is how one learns to delete dreams and other relatively useless ideas from working memory.
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When noise filters are too aggressive, nearly nothing gets admitted to working memory. This is good when there is a lot of heavy processing to be done. But this is bad if you're not very awake, at the beginning of the conscious day, or if your working memory had slowed down mid-day due to overuse of a repetitive process - these are periods when the absence of new ideas for integration actually results in lethargy.
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So as I woke up today and observed this in my thoughts, I made a point to recalibrate my integration filters. In order to ease the process of waking up, daily, I have to configure my filter into the opposite mode of what it does when I ignore distractions in order to help myself to fall asleep. It seems insufficient to let the subconscious decide what to integrate upon waking - if the subconscious is so used to being told to ignore all distractions, it continues to do so when one is supposed to wake up.
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This is a good learning. It is a significant one. In college many years ago, I taught myself to forget dreams, as they occurred, to increase working memory. Perhaps now I shall have to dwell on dreams a little, if it helps me wake up when i want to. I have been studying this pattern for a couple of years now.
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Normally (in these years) I only enjoyed the stimulus of conscious (lucid?) dreaming after many hours of sleep, during periods of sleep which have had a lower priority, say from hours 9-14. Supplementation of the diet with B12, caffeine, protein, etc. makes it more likely for lucid (we shall just call it this, for now) in earlier sleep hours... particularly during naps. For several years I have studied the experience of REM sleep to see if can be appreciated consciously. I am not sure if this is REM sleep, but I have enjoyed the process of closing my eyes, and relaxing the muscles which control my eye movements, so that the eyeballs thrash around, somewhat, while the nerves in those muscles experience the same sort of pleasure the larger skeletal muscles receive from light exertion, or rest after heavy exertion. Unsurprising, as the eye muscles do so much fine tactical work.
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/commented on hoarding among the poor/
This is just logistics... you can optimise for space, or time, or money, or something else. If you have more money, you have more options.
If you aren't very clever, you'll always be a mess.
A rich person can afford to live a high-waste lifestyle by discarding everything after a single use, or after a non-use when things are bought before they are needed. This is why zero-waste practices are trending among the rich... they have a lot of room for optimisation, but in order to do so they would have to purchase less in general, purchase more reusables (deoptimising for space, and time, and money).
Zero-waste is just a economic necessity among the poor. Pagpag didn't become a thing because of some hipsters. :)
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Kampung Baru: They should REIT it. Go see how other countries handle indigenous land allocations.
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On chemical castration: I guess in the little leagues, self-medication with topical tea tree oil and a high-soy diet might get the ball rolling.
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Put in an hour of software development after a few hours of data entry. Off to bed, before masonry work tomorrow.
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ECMAScript 2015 on proxies: 'Hey guys, we know how much you like monkey patching your objects, so we monkey patched a specification to the standard so that you can monkey patch your objects according to a standard monkey patching specification.'
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I know I'm a bit behind the curve... but doesn't this smell like a security vulnerability? (Proxies are transparent... but I am still reading.) Not like function overriding was every any safer though... definitely not experienced enough to know the pitfalls of all this.
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Why do we need a special language feature that somewhat replicates the functionality of subclass extension? Specifically, class syntax is just sugar over [a complicated pattern for using prototype inheritance], and prototype inheritance is itself continuously complexified by new language features... so we have a new language feature which is basically syntactic sugar for [a peculiar use case, of syntactic sugar which itself exists due to [a peculiar use case, of [a moving target]]]. SIC I know, the relation of Proxy to prototypes is on the same order as the relationship of 'class' to prototypes, an not an even higher order concern. I'm just waxing lyrical. (Update: everything after the SIC is wrong - Proxies are exotic objects without prototypes... it's a clusterfuck.)
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Recurring thought: 'JavaScript is turning into PHP.'
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/commented/ I think empathy is a possible but not a necessary design pattern. :) My problem of course, is that I think of civilisation as a thing to be designed whereas [it is the sort of thing that tends to be discovered].
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/commented on whether we need new job market matching startups/
If you want to solve this properly, just work on GAI.
It's a labour intensive process, so the key problem is to automate conversational labour.
Same reason I work in cafe, on the hospitality industry, but the killer app is to get all the humans out of the frontlines eventually and leave frontline work to machines.
(Malaysia, foolishly, thinks frontline work is best done by locals... if you look at immigration policy, it prevents foreign workers from working on the front... which is stupid. You can automate conversation and personality a lot easier than product design :P. So [that being said,] locals get the dumbest jobs, like entertaining customers.)
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Lam Soon's HomeSoy is a great product. Long overdue.
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Missing an old friend, who no longer speaks to me. Perhaps, I shall stop miss her less in another fifteen years, which is about how long it took to stop missing the other old friends who stopped talking to me. Ah, women, ah, me.
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/Tweet/ Missing old friends, women I loved. I suppose, from their point of view, I am either too tiresome, or a jerk. It takes about fifteen years to stop missing old friends, I find.
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Demarcating Households: An Integrated Income and Consumption Analysis
krinstitute.org
TLDR:
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(2014)
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You have ten Malaysian households (unknown number of members per household).
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2 households: make MYR 1,196 per household at most
5 households: make MYR 3,015 per household at most
3 households: make more per household
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(2017)
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... RM2,700 per household. A living wage is defined as the income level needed for a household to afford a minimally acceptable living standard, which includes the ability to participate in society, the opportunity for personal and family development, and freedom from severe financial stress.
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(2019, page 125)
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MYR 0 - 1,049 : households in the 0%-17% are worried about (many things)
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MYR 1,050 - 2,638 : households in the 18%-66% are still worried about the cost of rice and potatoes, slippers
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MYR 1,196 - 3,015 : households in the 24%-72% are worried about the cost of mobile phone charges, sex, mamak stall food
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MYR 1,637 - 4,155 : households in the 40% - 80% are worried about the cost of fresh milk, beer, furniture, tuition
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MYR 2,399 - 6,780 : households in the 63% - 95% are worried about the cost of (paying other people to save their time), computers, insurance premiums
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/on the middle-class/ This is a side point, but generally I find myself somewhat disdainful of people who are looking for ways to have passive income. Haha. Mea culpa. But it is so true.
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The clinical definition of depression probably refers to someone who intuitively WANTS to stay alive, but who faces great tactical DIFFICULTIES in doing so.
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What do you call the folks who DON'T really want to be alive, but who do so out of pure EUPHORIA? Wankers? I don't know, but I'm certainly more the latter than the former, and I wonder what my place is in the world. :P (Mania... I think the clinical term is mania...)
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Exhausted. Unproductive (at work). Keeping up the grind. But first, sleep.
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Incremental improvements to work.
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I swear this is the most hipster campaign I have run in my life. It appears to be some mad walk between the modes of rough-cut and baroque.
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Well, done for the day, on that. I need food...
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Just yesterday I was thinking, while doing at 3 a.m. grocery run, as I contemplated the stories of old friends about their marriages and divorces and unanticipated personal meanderings: 'eternity is worth less than the sum of its parts'.
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Usually this week, I have woken around 2:00 p.m. and slept around 7:00 a.m.Today, social activities resulted in the total abortion of work, and I took an early nap around midnight - it is just past 5:20 a.m. and I am awake from that nap. The streetlamps shine through uncurtained slivers of window... each sliver makes three or four columns of light upon the walls. The grills, horizontal, also pattern these patches of light. I have contemplated spatial optimisations between some unrepaired appliances at the office, and my residence... unamused by the lack of space, I find myself more motivated to fix and sell this equipment, without shifting it around somemore. Before that becomes a priority, I have many bookkeeping items to attend to... additionally, new software is being developed that provides a constant distraction, and continuous business development (both in terms of B2C marketing and B2B grandstanding) keep me somewhat on edge, with inflexible memory for tactical innovation. That is my lot in this business. On we go...
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First it usually has claws, and fur, and stoic eyes. Then when its fluff is old, it cleans itself in place. And then the cleaning mechanism itself is serviced, resulting in a retching, wheezing, fur bundle, which pees and poops in a safe place, yet deposits mucosal boluses of fluff at random locations. That, is a house cat.
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Enforced feeding time.
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Re: grooming of a peer network to vouch for your good character while you are actually a fiend.
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Everyone (who knows anything) already knows how to do this, and knows that other people know how to do this. Therefore political equity always comes with the discount - that it is rendered ineffectual on a whim. Therefore, don't invest in whims.
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/commented on activist posts in Malaysia/
I think social media posts won't work much because the point would be to encourage people to harass their local representatives.
There is a generally a very low conversion rate between public outrage and harassing of public servants. I think, it would be more effective to focus on designing systems that increase the conversion rate between private conversations and the harassment of public servants.
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/comment on communism and capitalism being false poles/
I offer an alternative lens.
Both models are "free market" and not "communist" (this is endlessly redefinable sic).
Actually what you had at the beginning is a decentralised computation setup, where computation is biased towards high performing nodes (towards managers, with respect to their proven ability to achieve minimum displacement from top in the local game ladder.)
In the latter, the computation is biased towards the nodes who are at the highest velocity towards the top of the game ladder (fast risers).
Velocity along given axes, defined by local game rules, is a tool. That tool is one element of the overall organisational design toolkit... the job of the cyberneticists (definition: communication and control designers, a.k.a. steerspeople).
/
Wrist-watch reattached. Urgency has increased. Creatine monohydrate dosing resumed. Go go brain.
/
Premature optimisations.
.
For a few months I've been trying to execute runtime directly from long-term memory. This has failed as LTM has a really low resolution, and the correct process is to pull from LTM to STM, run a few corrective simulations in STM, and then only execute runtime from STM. That's point one.
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Point two. The probability of long-term success is always lower than the probability of short-term success. (Project risk is always greater than task risk.) Therefore, it is inefficient to execute tasks under the expected failure rate of the project. Tasks need to be executed with greater optimism than projects. The risk profiles are different.
/
/
My friend and I were working on a task. My friend raised a point of order, and I responded to the argument with a rudimentary explanation, but in doing so, I lost interest in the task. My friend, saying that the answer was not important, reminded me that harmony has been valued more highly (by my friend). I reminded my friend, that harmony has been a near bottom priority for myself, and that is why when my friend seeks harmony over correctness, on point of policy I will tend to shove my friend aside.
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Ah, that is the gist of a difference in values, is it not? As for myself, I value people who are comfortable with themselves. Whether they are in a fur farm or at a PETA meeting, at a strip club or in a church taking communion, whether they are suited for parliament or nude on a beach, the key, is comfort.
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One should be unconcerned by being called a nazi. What matters more is whether one is actually a nazi or not (and there are too many interpretations to this turn of phrase).
/
Anyone want to finance a lakeside cafe project in Puchong? I don't know how long we can hold the tenancy, but the rent is only RM500, including utilities, and there isn't much renovation to do, and there is furniture on site. I shit you not - it's the clubhouse for 700 houses, and there are daily visitors (non-zero) to the facilities. Just check the guestbook.
/
Deploy. Deploy deploy deplop....
/
Joker movie: it's as well-paced as the trailer.
.
1. Looks like they'll bag best actor just on execution.
2. Trigger warning: probably a horrible movie for people who are uncomfortable with ubiquitous absurdity.
3. I need someone else to look and tell me if the locks on the mailboxes are too shiny because the props-team forgot to age them.
.
[On accusations of incel triggering:] Hardly covers incel triggers. Gotham as a trope is inherently a play on class structures, so it'll feel relevant to HK/Occupy and all that. It isn't a masterful script on a line by line basis. But overall it is very nicely paced. Imho
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As an origin story, it does a better job telling you why Joker likes to laugh, versus say, the SilenceOfTheLambs movies never really telling you why Hannibal likes to eat.
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TLDR: go see it if you like character studies. And Mick Szal... OMG Mick Szal - I am just going to fanboy for a few days now.
/
"She's 178cm, and mongolian-portuguese. Reminds me of Kurylenko."
"What are you doing?!"
"Googling."
"That is so immature. Are you in high-school?"
"How else am I supposed to relate to pop-culture? Give me something I can care for! If you can like furballs, I can like models..."
/
X: Tell me when any other operation becomes more important than this one.
Me: You'll find out really fast. I think it'll be pretty obvious, because that'll mean I'd be spending more time over there.
.
Y: I believe in universally valid notions of what certain words mean.
Me: I'll call dogshit on that, and excuse myself ASAP. :)
.
Z: It is always best to allow other people to decide how much they get to collect from you.
Me: Sure, if you like being collected from.
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W: People have a basic tendency to care about others, knowing when they will be hurt, and relying on that to not hurt one another.
Me: While I fully appreciate that as the current mode of human development, I think you know that my preference is otherwise. What you describe is called empathy, and reliance on empathy is one of those talking points that I vocally oppose. There's very little I hate more than being responsible for other people's unspoken feelings, and so I simply don't do it. I will trample over any non-explicit preferences that people have. If you don't want to miss a report on anything, set up an explicit trigger.
/
/commented on people who think co-working spaces are a new business model/
You may want to distinguish the revenue model from the customer value proposition.
Cafes have been co-working spaces for hundreds of years. Whether they charge in units of space is a separate question.
You can model this in different ways. For example, you can call a coffee an edible ticket for space, with an implicit consensus-driven expiry period.
//
Updated from further comments:
//
In general, it refers to the management of communal spaces, and it is an architectural concern.
//
The best co-working spaces have basically rolled in co-living into the RM400-899 monthly price point.
- 24-hour access (sleep under your desk)
- pool and shower facilities (exercise & shower there, and outsource laundry)
- pantry facilities (no deep-frying unless there is a hob)
- lockers (keeps things tidy and presentable)
No one who is serious about work needs anything else, really.
/
/
/commented on why people may need to earn more and more money/ This is pretty straightforward.
.
1. If you are competitive in ambition, then you always want more just to be a 'winner' in the abstract sense - you have insecurities about being known as otherwise. This is plain neuroticism, and accounts for a tiny minority.
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2. Alternatively, and this is much more common - you live in a pro-capitalism regulatory environment which confers competitive advantages in proportion to the amount of financial assets one has. In this case you are actually doing it for survival... because the system is set up such that you, as an individual, are under constant threat, unless you continuously compete to remain in the upper-class of wealth and therefore competitiveness. The system basically says, 'look, the losers are going to die first... so if you want to live, be a winner... now, we're going to have tryouts'. Not all regulatory environments are set up this way, but many are.
/
Letters to a friend (excerpts):
'... compete in your area of competitive advantage; don't compete in areas where you are at a comparative disadvantage...'
'... you can't gain the interest of someone who wants to be disinterested, by being more interested; you have to be more disinterested, instead...' (/dɪsˈɪnt(ə)rɪstɪd/ 1.not influenced by considerations of personal advantage. 2.having or feeling no interest in something; uninterested.)
'... unilateral terms aren't referred to as relationships, in the narrow sense. But unilateral stances are relationships, in the broad sense. Use the same word for both, at your peril...'
'... avoid counterparties who continuously allow themselves to be inconvenienced...'
/
/
OK, time to revive that 2012 working pattern of leaving Bloomberg Live TV on the whole work day - since I don't have access to co-working spaces here.
/
/
Iterated. Gotta iterate faster.
/
Quite often, I've seen this.
/
Paper books are disgusting. But I think it's fine if they work for you. Ok. Bed.
/
In the beginning, the laud dawg sat in the cage. And the floor was without form, and void; and the dawg said, let there be shit, and the dawg shat. And the laud dawg saw the shat shit, that it was good: and what was shat was then eateth.
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I'm giving myself until my staff sends in the new dataset, to write basic code that implements this:
evaluation : () => DSLQuery('some DSL query syntax which refers to data UIDs'),
/* We have to write the query function.
*
* The query should not need to check if dependencies have
* changed.
*
* In order for it to avoid doing that, the
* implemented Datum will have to store a
* cacheValid boolean. Each 'provider' datum (as
* opposed to 'dependent') should (send
* messages which) invalidate
* the caches of all its dependents whenever
* the provider's value is reevaluated.
*
* When a Datum's cacheInvalidated event is
* triggered, it may (subject to some logical
* delay to avoid oversensitivity) recompute
* and recache its new value.
*
* Following a reevaluation event, a Datum should
* dispatch rerendering events to the pertinent
* ViewNodes, and invalidation events to the
* pertinent Datums.
*
* */
/
/commented to friend/
I get worried when people think that I need to take care of them, or when they think they need to take care of me. In general, I do this with all other people - but it shouldn't be a critical dependency in an interpersonal relationship.
/related reminder to self, on personal maintenance/
My only close friends are my past/present intimate partners (ring 1). Outside of that, I would consider business partners in another ring (ring 2), and beyond that, everyone else including family is in the same ‘everyone I may or may not have met’ bucket (ring 3).
Sometimes ring 2 takes precedence over ring 1, of course, given that if I had to dispose of one ring forever, it would probably be ring 1, not ring 2. I only put ring 1 closer to myself than ring 2 in the context of intimacy; in the context of disposable priority, ring 2 is currently more important than ring 1.
/
I tend to think that I do a pretty crappy job of developing my business. However, I find comfort in the crass job that my government appears to doing in the development of the nation. I don't think it's ideal to have slow development - but misery loves company.
/
I wake up worrying about the low probability of success from having one person do the accounts, the QA, the CRM (without social media, it is harder, but less complex), the software R&D, the hardware. Then I remind myself that worrying doesn't get much done. Which is why we do work. Not to build a better society, but simply to avoid an absence of amusement.
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Later comment elsewhere: I just like watching people/businesses fight and die. It is interesting to watch the gameplay. Game on! As for inspiration, I believe in its annihilation.
/
Contrary to popular accounts, I thought we have society in order to compete - we don't compete in order to have friends and family. :P
.
ALL DAY I listen to people saying that the purpose of life is to be happy and to form relationships, but how often do these actually lead to competitive dominance in any sphere? (The success rates are pretty high, but not always, if you look it up.) A famous leader said, the good life is, 'to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their (-)men'.
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No really, now, I want to open a ramen shop called Lamentations...
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/commented on 'wave-riding' strategies/
I tend to avoid anything that 'swarths of startups / people / investors are looking into' - simply because I'm too lazy to compete. Give me a cold dead sector any day, and watch me have fun trying to squeeze value out of it.
/
/commented/ I might actually laugh, as a bullet is a horrible demotivator - I practice a habit of readiness for expiry. But meanwhile, finding interesting and weird forcing-factors is one of the bigger motivators for my work, I think.
/
👉24" monitor
👉3 columns / screen-width
👉80 characters / column
👉100 lines / screen-height
👉font chosen
👉font size tested at (zoom level) and (zoom level - 1)
👉terminal colour scheme tested
#calibrationtoday
/
Basically a question of whether you should/not have Nazis at the dinner table.
/
1. Malay Dignity Congress (5000 participants)
2. FoodPanda riders go on strike (hundreds)
3. Utusan Group shuts down (800 laid off)
4. 'Joker' grosses $300,000,000 worldwide
5. Youth minister asks for $1,500,000,0000 to create 350,000 jobs over 5 years
.
Are you ready, for things to get, a little crazy?
/
Tesco Decaf Classic (instant coffee) review: about the same price as Nescafe Decaf but a lot blander. Avoid.
/
Looking forward to societies where people (most emphathically) don't depend on each other out of desperation, and where everyone is confident about their death and means of dying. Not gonna happen anytime soon, but it will happen eventually - or everyone will die getting there - that much, is inevitable.
/
> Google Ads: Super excited to share this because I just figured out that there is a positive correlation between our sales and adspend... after eyeballing our super long-winded several-month-long process of data collection... literally flipping our Search and Display budgets up and down, to generate information/SNR for Sales as an output variable.
TBH: as with most things I post on the Internet, I don't know if anyone will really understand what I think I understand about it, but here goes nothing
/
Wondering about how to design a high-rise animal farm that completely contains/recycles the shit output. (Intentionally ignoring all the issues with animal cruelty, water consumption, etc.)
/
On dopamine fasting:
'Time is money' isn't as accurate a financial model as 'USABLE time is money' - and usable time is a function of various mental processes. For example, if you think twice as fast, you actually get twice as many operations done in the same amount of time. This is a measurable, actionable aspect of personal finance - as personal finance is itself fundamentally about trading 'futures contracts on personal time'. Here's an article on mental conditioning to help you get more out of your time.
/
Can any policy economists tell me if this has been done, and if it has, how it turned out for the subjected population?
.
/model proposed: from a discussion on rent control and capital gains tax/
.
Rent collected by yourself, on assets which you in turn rent from another party, should be taxed as normal income. But rent collected on assets which you own, should be taxed on a progressively higher rate - a rate determined by the unrealised capital appreciation of the owned property, which is itself determined by the valuation, V, of a public auditor. When you pay tax based on unrealised capital appreciation, you also receive a conditional tax credit. If you finally sell your asset at a value below V, you can claim some tax credits. If you finally sell your asset at V or higher, your tax credits are worthless.
/
OK, I finally got around to digging up my (unsorted, incomplete, variously formatted) journals from 2004-2012. If you want a copy, just ping me. Someone asked for it recently, so I yanked it out of my archive for them. If you're looking for 2013-2019 stuff it's already on the current blog. There isn't enough time in the world to get things done. Oh well.
/
Time once more, to put my inadequacies away. It's bedtime at 6:42am, about an hour earlier than usual. Recently I have built a small business, several research programs within it, much antagonism from internal parties, a few supportive intimates, and as usual, a larger number of other studies put on ice for the gamble of commerce. When I awake, shortly after your lunch time, my inadequacies will be waiting for me. And regardless of what people say about them, I will do my best to avoid becoming adequate for the mere sake of adequacy. Good morning to you.
/
/reflection/
I've been pretty much the same person since I was 14.
Along the way, I just acquired new skill-sets, and it broadened my social circles. Like tech stuff - I did a lot of it in 1996-1998, then a lot less, then I dug back in 2009...
.
1992: started out in science; wanted to do more math, but opportunities were not as available;
.
1998: maxed out on local opportunities for computing, there weren't many I was aware of;
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2000: that would have been the last time I took math and science seriously, before halting work there to focus on braining the humanities, which I figured was a larger deficit in my knowledge; opportunities to study computing were also sparse; so (I) this was the first major postponement of exploration in my area of expertise;
.
2005: began study of commerce and government; I knew the only jobs I cared for would be BOD-type things, and I generally don't trust people who haven't executed domains which they judge on, so I focused on developing operational expertise; (II) this was the second postponement of exploration in my area of expertise, as the subject of the first postponement had been exhaustively reviewed (you may laugh);
.
2009: got back into technology studies, a bit more; this was a resumption of what I let go of at (I), without really ceasing to work on (II);
.
2015: invested in my first business; still working on it; this is really a continuous development of (II).
/
/
1. E-wallet RM30/citizen thing is going to be gamed to pieces. Can you imagine the number of people signing up for e-wallets using their relatives and friends contacts... who will subsequently never use the wallets ?
2. Foreigners now buying RM600k properties, so GG affordable housing. Have fun you guys.
/
50:50
Tesco decaf classic: Nescafe gold
This is quite drinkable, hot or cold.
/
On metric-dropping of other ministries' actual budget announcements.
So was the Sports minister sub-tweeting this for link juice? OMG
Hack: 'we will ask for 6B for 350,000 graduate jobs'
Actual: '6.5B will be allocated to replace 350,000 migrant worker jobs'
/
Generally I see a lot of short-term incentives in the Budget 2020. But I get the feeling that I won't be taking up a bunch of them because it's too disruptive to my long-term concerns. :( I don't expect there's much to discuss haha. Mostly I work on contributions to the process of others, and I find few parties interested in contributing to my process. :)
/
/
B12 online
Creatine online
Fish oil online
Caffeine... back online again... this should be interesting.
/
On men needing to lean 'out':
This is the correct analysis! However, I typically find that most people around me are too timid for my tastes and I absolutely dread them. And I think that's ok as long as we agree on explicit non-empathy oriented conventions that achieve social justice targets. We can arrive at the targets by vote. Meanwhile I tend to believe that preferences for low-context, low-empathy, communication are something I take a lot of (yes, too much) pride in. LOL
/
I'd like to fight XXD, not because I dislike him - I do like his project - but because, as a skinny bloke, I just wanna learn how to fight bigger fatter blokes and win.
/
Storing wine in smaller glass bottles. Why did I never think of that before?
/
At the moment, I'm of the view that the US exit from Syria was bait for Erdogan to cross lines. If that plays out, the US will whack him around a bit more in the future. If not, pity.
/
As a result of today's research, I now know the cost of diesel generator rentals, refrigerated truck rentals, and dry ice consumption ratios for refrigeration... -_-
/
Had a brief networking chat with a bloke who enjoys arguing for the disenchantment of theistic beliefs. I have a lot less interest in that subject, I guess... I prefer to study the construction of societies as machines. I'm much more interested in arguing for the disenchantment of human significance.
/
Awake. First third of the day, remove distractions. Eat the things, socialise with the things, wash the things, exercise the things. Hopefully, the second third is relatively undisturbed.
/
/
No, I do not think they are on the wrong foot - I think ASEAN venture capitalists are doing great. ASEAN investees are a different kettle of fish from the pickings available to VCs in other locations. Each sector/region's VCs are going to have to build out their own risk-reward envelopes based on local conditions.
Instead of blaming buyers for not wanting to buy your product (shares), I would recommend pitching the product to different buyers (VCs 'not from ASEAN', if you truly believe ASEAN VCs are not interested... though that has yet to be proven :) ).
Secondly, you could simply adjust your product (shares) to be what the local market is looking for (assuming again, that you are right about the local market, for the purposes of discussion).
It has always been easier to raise money for traditional business models in environments where there are few un-traditional business model success stories.
For example, I raised some money to build a restaurant. However I run the restaurant as the go-to-market strategy for a business which I wouldn't otherwise have been able to get funding for with the same amount of ease. As long as I deliver the restaurant, I am on-mandate for my existing investors... regardless of whether they making a quick buck or making nothing at all, we have, by the letter of the agreement, done what is necessary. At the same time, that doesn't limit me as an entrepreneur from driving the business towards a a higher risk target with higher possible returns... that's my privilege as an executive.
Of course, I can be fired on any day of the week, or the company shut down by investors, but that's just business. Deal with it.
/
/
On Malaysia trying to win as a VC:
/commented/
I think it'll be quite funny if Malaysian stock-pickers turn out to be better economists than Malaysian civil servants, and the country gets fat and famous on trading stocks.
There's a certain people group that's famous for fitting that stereotype, and it's not yet the Malaysians... cunning, you say?
/
Done with data entry. Fortunate catch of a quality regression. Off to bed soon. Waiting for laundry also done. Last business of the day is probably reviewing prenup drafts, which will probably be rejected anyway, but oh well, due diligence. Probably get in before 23 hours up. (Ended up closer to 23.5. Beddy bye-bye, bitches.)
/
/commented/ All illnesses are personal weaknesses, by definition. But we do have public policies and social contracts which value affirmative action for persons with weaknesses.
Well, I could be wrong. We'd just have to define illness as a statistical distance from an average... where the average is a fiction which we refer to as normalcy, and therefore anyone believing in that fiction is delusional. In which case being 'mentally ill' is just being different, and not a weakness, whereas referring to anyone else as 'mentally normal' indicates that the speaker suffers from a weakness of self-actualisation... oh we could go on indefinitely, what's the point?
/
/
Capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, democracy, blah-blah-blah... these are religious abstractions. Stop using these words. Discuss concrete policies. It'll make you a better person. Drop the idols.
/
/commented on calisthenics for neuroplasticity/ I only work on things I don't really know how to do. If I think I have figured something out, I switch targets.
In high school the targets would be like, 'understand the culture of this weird people group' or 'get into college'.
In college the targets would be like, 'fall in and out of love with any X (one of the initial targets was an apple)', 'determine the quantification parameters for conscious experience in general', 'determine the origin and architecture of the university's syllabus as a whole'.
In commerce the targets would be like, 'understand how business people talk', 'understand how Malaysian politics work', 'run a company'.
/
/commented on the nature of work in ops/
I prefer BOD jobs. Ops is just collecting CV. [In the context of running a business, this means hitting milestones for grandstanding to future investors in the business.]
IP is forever. I don't really invest in anything else haha. To put that into the context of ops, the key is to learn how to build the best operation, not to build the best operation. The latter is not as good a product as the former. But the risk of failure is higher, and the timeline for payback is longer.
/
'If animals are not allowed in restaurants by the Ministry of Health, how do pet cafes do it?'
'Maybe they have special legislation which I'm not aware of. It doesn't benefit us to shut them down, so I haven't looked into it.'
/
At this rate of work, in about ten years, I should be able to compile my Facebook posts into a complete proposal for public policy in a small third-world nation...
/
/comment on 'financial independent'/
It boils down to how you achieve 100% saturation of demand.
Traditionally, as we all know, the ascetic approach is simply to reduce demand until it's really low.
Most financial blogs teach people to try to move supply until it is in excess of demand, but this will always be an uphill battle with no backstop.
I would argue the any attempt to move supply must be rooted in an ability to adjust demand, otherwise the former is futile.
/
Just set up an agreement with someone which bars my general exchange of personal sexual information, flirting, sexual teasing, etc. with other people - I think that means I will just write more things about myself in public, and redirect individuals to read my public posts. :P
/
This Tulsi Hillary thing is amusing.
/
- buy bonds for low vol
- buy US equities and (EU, EM) bonds for growth
- stay tf away from CN's supply chain (lol)
/
/commented on the perks and challenges of fnb retail in MY/
I'm building a platform as a service (wetware, hardware, software) for hospitality businesses in general (hotel, restaurant, cafe, coworking, coliving, offices, facilities management). I'm not sure what you mean by perks... but in terms of challenges, here are the concerns I think the industry in Malaysia faces, which can be fixed:
- manpower :
- - (1) Malaysian hiring employment is messier for small businesses, (1a) for low wage staff; the reason is that the law (EA 1955) actually incentivises everyone to ask for 'freelance independent contracts for service' instead of 'employee contracts of service'... now most small business owners don't read law, so they don't know how to properly navigate this, and they end up working without contracts, and staff are often confused about their rights and obligations; (1b) this is compounded by loose immigration policy and very weak enforcement around foreign labourers, due in part to rampant corruption at the top tiers of government - which has distorted the competitive landscape quite severely. All of this can be fixed with proper redesign at the policy level in parliament, but there is a lack of political will to do so. One of the ways we want to fix this is to stay abreast of policy issues, and to keep churning out proposals to feed lobbies.
- - (2) professional ethics; possibly antagonised by the issues above, workers are often unable to communicate transparently (whether they are stupid, evil, or lazy, is open to interpretation), but you may frequently receive unexpected shortfalls in labour. One of the ways we want to fix this is to establish 'workflow frameworks' which abstract away the differences between different shop floors, so that we can then effectively fire up 'uber for horeca', based on staff who are trained to interface with clear conventions, and workplaces which are set up using the same conventions.
- service vendors
- - (3) mechanical and electrical engineering: Malaysia is DECADES behind more developed economies where there are organised regulations for all small tradesmen who work on electrical, plumbing, HVACR, construction, etc. This makes it difficult to hire reliably 'off the street', and everyone uses this dumb-as-shit method of 'based on recommendations' just for rudimentary jobs (granted: hyperbole). Platforms such as a Kaodim and Recommend will attempt to federate the recommendations, but they still fail to address the underlying problem: lack of explicit codes and standards for enforcement in detail. One of the efforts we have made towards fixing this is to in-house all minor service and repairs. Once we have a better grasp of what the M&E substrates are, we would want to set up codes and guidelines for common trade. We could shop these around as an industry standard, but the big win would be to shop it to Putrajaya for establishment at the federal level. Sure, someday some crony company might make a few bucks as the 'designated standards organisation', but that's actually worth it if they fix this problem nationally.
- - (4) inventory and durables: startups such as FoodMarketHub, Dropee, and SupplyBunny are zooming in on this. Talk to them. On our end we just focus on developing heuristics for risk management, which can be easily taught to client grunts, and implemented on free software.
Well, that's just for starters... I'm typing on a piece of glass with one hand while trying to eat a piece of curry chicken with the other, so if you need more points, just yell, but I'll pause now.
/
Oh, perks... revenue trigger for SST is one point five million Ringgit per year for restaurants (it's five hundred thousand for everyone else)? There is a loop hole also where non-F&B revenue is non-SSTaxable... which means, I think, and I have not tested this... that if you restructure every receipt to 20% charge for F&B and 80% charge for service then, you may minimise tax even further.
/
Pig is awake. Now to chase down lost work. As always. #slowpoke
/
Quite a few things come to mind. I write this beside one snoring body and an itinerant cat. I'm in a strange place, but it is pretty, and the company seems cheerful.
It's a bit of a risk, allowing so many distractions into my schedule, but optimisations are the name of the game. Perhaps after 3-point-5 years of living in a cheap hotel room, it'll be cheaper still to move somewhere that has its own washer, dryer, fridge, and stovetop. I'm still not sure if I'm being irresponsible, as the new commute is a 35-to-40 kilometer round-trip and that reduces time-to-office significantly during rush-hours.
The past three months have been largely consumed by remedial housekeeping. Physical and mental conditioning, housekeeping of old projects, housekeeping of emergency projects, talent management of weak staff, adjustment of digital marketing campaigns, et cetera. This is almost done, but not quite. I hope we don't crash along the way, as I will be likely to blame myself for the luxury of taking an in-place vacation.
Earlier today, while cleaning up digital assets, I came across some old planning documents. I shared these with one of the Facebook groups which constitute my business networking fora on this job. I have yet to fully appreciate the feedback I'm getting there. Someone raised the lens of a "success matrix," but I'm not sure I read the correct documentation on that.
Overall I find myself still improbably privileged, and risk loving. Most of the people I deal with on a day-to-day basis have absolutely zero comprehension of how my priorities are organised. Pottering around me with their fears of death and dismemberment, sickness, poverty, and shame... I really don't know what to do with them. But of course, as civilians we accept those who differ from us and attempt to build a civilisation with them.
I find myself inadequate as a leader, despite the various commercial developments I have embarked on in my social life. However, there are terms for that which frame each self-deprecating individual as the norm. In any event, I hope to put more time into all the following by the end of the year.
(i) More cleanups of personal effects (real estate, inboxes, social media monitoring, insurance claims, lovers who speak uncertainly to me, tax amendments...)
(ii) More corporate developments (menu updates, possibly rolled together with a long-overdue website launch, perhaps more consulting, or a new job which supplements the ongoing business, more guerilla social media campaigns to supplement the ban on my usage of social media under our flagship brand, perhaps changes in the cap table, HVACR repairs, who knows...)
(iii) Diversification in depth of pursuit of endeavours outside of the workplace, which people so often ask me about which I have no answer to. Software, math, and stats, studies have been greatly procrastinated... or so it feels, despite having done much detailed work on these since 2009.
One can only hope...
/
Down to the three-digit-inbox. Back to zero tonight, I hope.
/
Outraged Malaysians vs. criminal paedophile... I smell prejudice
/
Fatty Crab: junkfood level salt levels. Lol. No surprises. No complaints.
/
I have an extremely casual relationship with the notions of: mental health, religion, dying, cultural extremism, social contracts, and other such taboos. As such, my ablist self is likely to trivialise the difficulties that less able people have in coming to terms with these things. My father worked as a religious teacher after he worked as a teacher of organic chemistry, my mother worked as a counsellor after she worked as a medical doctor. Our maid hanged herself when I was six. I trained to lead clinics in therapeutic religious meditation, and held such office in clubs and societies as a child. My friends and I are very serious trivialisers of death, often discussing the shallowness of our concern for life, and often discussing ways in which people can terminate their own existences, and the impact it has on their neighbours. Two of my friends actively seek professional therapy for mental health concerns, and discuss it with me. Innumerable others do not discuss it with me. I was just reminding a third friend, "as for stigma about mental illness - perhaps best to run rough-shod over any luddite tendencies. You have to make it clear to listeners that mental health is a domain of professional inquiry... like civil engineering. You don't ask housewives and marketing directors to evaluate the soundness of a building or how to fix it. I.e. professional psychiatry is a good idea. It's a public health service."
/
Ok what. I only measure my wealth in terms of what I know, because the entire investment strategy for all my time sits on the knowledge of how to be happy without anything else.
The RESULTS of that investment strategy is that I own some pretty nutty things, in my head, as well as outside...
/
I'm not amused. I'm taking time out of high-risk projects to read about unrelated companies just to figure out how they buried the lede in a new product launch. It's as if there isn't enough to do already :P
/
Always amusing when problematic people ask about why problems exist.
/
I'm reading up on JavaScript web client frameworks after a few years out of that industry. I'm glad they figured out the separation of stores and views (models and views), however, the way view code is written appears to conflate data and operations on data. I may be mistaken. Reminds me a bit of some Erlang framework I wrote as an exercise in 2012. Maybe I'm just remembering how other people wrote frameworks...
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"event bus" is a misnomer. This thing is a data bus. LOL... #changemymind
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I tend to think about web software applications in the same way that I think about civil engineering systems. There are various media, like cement, steel, plastic, HTML, shadow DOMs, CSS... there are various systems like electrical, HVACR, plumbing, business logic, UI flow... and there needs to be some clear separation of concerns between the proximity of media, and the systems implemented in those media at each location. Just because two things are next to each other, it doesn't imply that we should link them together.
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It's hard to train people who are naturally empathetic to just stop doing emotional labour for other people. But that's what we have to do, in order to progress as a business. So on with it. :)
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Talent management and organisational culture - are you fighting to build a flat organisation, or a hierarchical one?
/
What I think about the concept of a Virtual DOM after a few minutes of revising the concept in detail:
(1) It requires a lot of meat computation to save a quantum of metal computation... that probably wouldn't affect most people writing shitty little apps with just a few dozen items on the screen. So it is a performance optimisation tool that encourages both: premature optimisation for small teams... and inefficient architectures which are swept under the rug by... dum dum dum... general performance gains.
(2) The Virtual Dom is like coffee. It probably makes individuals less wholesome providers to themselves, but the net macro effect of making a large chunk of the population more specialised then feeds back via a trade mechanism to incentivise individual to pursue the optimisation.
/
## Update:
I wanted to use Hyperapp(1), which uses a virtualDOM, with Hyperx(2) templates which required a transpilation step on the server-side (which I want to avoid). I have bad things to say about virtualDOM, but that aside, it seems Googlers already came up with an alternative framework, lit-html(3), which uses neither virtualDOMs nor server-side transpilation, sooo I am happy.
(1)
* [https://hackernoon.com/introducing-hyperapp-1-0-dbf4229abfef](https://hackernoon.com/introducing-hyperapp-1-0-dbf4229abfef)
* https://medium.com/hyperapp/hyperapp-for-redux-refugees-2507c9dd1ddc
(2)
* [https://github.com/lukejacksonn/hyperapp-wiki/blob/master/docs/hyperx.md](https://github.com/lukejacksonn/hyperapp-wiki/blob/master/docs/hyperx.md)
(3)
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io6JjgckHbg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io6JjgckHbg)
## Previously;
eval() is evil. OK. Yet, has anyone decided to run their build-steps in the browser, using eval() ?
/
I still don't know what the big deal is, but for formality's sake: Happy birthday, Malaysia.
/
"Do you miss me when you don't see me? 🙂"
"A bit because I know you miss me. Less if I don't empathise. I'm not super attached to your person, perhaps, more thinking about our relationship as a part of my work and trying to figure out how to optimise the whole thing.☝🏼Offensive? Groceries: I am thinking milk and fruit. Maybe more nuts also. Not sure what else can fit for now... unless I go and get the microwave/oven first?"
/
Malaysia (roughly):
- real poverty rate 10-20%
- nominal poverty rate 0%
- [GPD/capita]/[USA's GDP/capita] pretty stagnant for twenty years at 20%-30%
- automotive industrialisation projects: mostly failed to stimulate local enterprise
- research & technology: little to speak of
- government: tribal
- borders: leaky
- citizenry: whiney
- birthdays: 62
/
Humans are prototypes of androids. You can only scale the intelligence of a human so much in the vertical axis before hitting systematic limitations (it's probably quite a lot actually). But an android, can be vertically scaled by a greater factor, so civilisation ends with androids, not humans. Or is it the case? The main reason ideas can't ditch meat for metal is because meat, so far, is a more flexible foraging mechanism for energy. Plants are the main capture vector, and meat eats plants. You can replace meat with metal, ultimately, only when that entire supply chain of energy has been replaced with something more evolutionarily competitive. Until then, we're going to plateau at meat-metal hybrids. When that's the norm, I wonder how rites of passage will be. Will certain cultures only provide digital network interfaces to children when they hit puberty? Deploy. Rollback. Change the culture, the build results are unstable. Whee.
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Decaf instant coffee is my new favourite thing. #desking
/
/commented on "it's not always ok to... agree to disagree" - with the intention to illustrate the superficiality of the statement; the base case for all social interactions is anarchy, not society... society is just what we end up with, no matter how much you hate the other people in it/
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I agree. I've been on both side of the fence... sometimes I just do what I want regardless of other people's opinions... in which case it is quite efficient to not ask them anyway.
.
Likewise I presume that they will take similar liberties with my resources.
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So to summarise, the base case presumption I take going into any project is the good'ol "ok lads, this is going to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short... eh, wait, so now what do we do?"
/
Marina Mahathir: SIS court ruling means Shariah law applicable to all companies with Muslim directors | Malay MailMarina Mahathir is wrong. (With specific reference to the headline which paraphrases her statement - I have not fact-checked the headline for accuracy.)
malaymail.com
/commented/
In order for the Syariah judiciaries (and they are, after all, a branch of state governments), to govern the Company's actions on Islamic affairs among Muslims, the courts claimed that [the Muslim directors' actions] in directing the Company to act on Islamic affairs among Muslims... was criminal via [the subjugation of Muslims in Malaysia to Syariah law].... and transitively, the Syariah judiciaries are claiming power of governance over such corporate activities.
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Without normative statements on what laws Malaysia should have, the judge in this case is correct.
/
Designing workspace in larger built environments, and deciding that HVAC really needs to apply to small subsets of the larger space. The question then is, how do we design subsets to work transparently with larger spaces, and the answer probably involves a lot of glass.
/
- project age: 4.17 years
- corporate developments in the last 0.35 years: near zero
- current R&D: software assets
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I do not feel productive, but I have had the privilege of being surrounded by fairly kind and generous people. So I am going to remain focused on studies and corporate development.
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Gender categories, in sports, and in general: I agree with the deletion of empirically unfalsifiable ontologies.
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It is a privilege to have access to the knowledge of how personality supervenes upon meat. Others less privileged, have no access to such ontologies.
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In general, I find myself wondering if it is more ethical to encourage stratified classism, by enabling accessible ontologies at all levels of knowledge... or to encourage hegemony of the privileged view.
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I think the answer I prefer for now, is a common one. Hegemony of paradigms should be proposed but not enforced. If people want to live in a bubble, or if they cannot help BUT to live in a bubble, that should be allowed.
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Among paradigms of society, the lowest common denominator is a contract that arbitrarily excludes some people... whom we refer to as the criminals, and the ill. This is the definition of a society under economic conditions. The question of who gets to be included, or excluded, is the gist of social studies.
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I wonder how many people believe that I use social media this extensively for reasons other than to promote my business. LOL
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Two in One: best executed chap fan. buy this stock.
/
/commented/ My target for AI has always been:
- it replaces developers of humans, from kindergarten teachers to life coaches and physics TAs
- it outperforms creative professionals in generating work for commercial briefs
- it produces art that the mode citizen can appreciate, as well as art that can be informed by existing traditions such that an art historian would find it insightful
- sex bots (just as the penultimate example of xyz bots)
.
.
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All in all, it's been obvious to me that human experience and thought processes are quantifiable. But the only way to make many people believe it is to simply demonstrate it to them. It may break their spirits, but if that's what it takes, too bad.
/
HK is now going to turn into New Paris or New Bosnia... -_-... I'd like to see the former, but the cards on the table say the latter will emerge.
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It smells like death at the office.
It smells like poop at home.
Back to work.
/
x: "Why is it a big deal that people should be demonstrably trivial?"
i: "Where did I say it's a big deal? I just said that it is what it is."
x: "You seem to spend a lot of time working on that hypothesis."
i: "I just like pissing people off."
x: "Have fun, then."
i: "I do, for the most part."
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Disclaimer: I'm going to have to qualify that... I just like pissing people off when they come at me with some notion that people should be assigned value.
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/commented/ I think virtue signalling is a necessary component of social communication. No one should be villified just for being farther up or farther down the distribution of any particular behaviour.
The only test of what counts as good or bad messaging is the final effect, so only the future outcomes inform us on who was too quiet and who was too loud. Some messages and messengers will persist and others will die, that is the nature of progress.
The whole point of testing new hypotheses is to ensure that mutation does not stagnate. When it does, the overall civilisation dies.
/
Isomorphic rendering and server-side rendering in general: after ALL THIS TIME of web development, they're trying to RECOUPLE the server-client dichotomy?! :P
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Reflux's unidirectional data-flow through actions (controllers), stores (models), views (views)... "The main function of Reflux is to introduce a more functional programming style architecture by eschewing MVC like pattern and adopting a single data flow pattern." #FFS
/
TL;DR: Can you guys tell me about programs which:
1. implement "events" and "event listeners" ...
2. ... on web clients... (not servers)
3. ... outside of the the DOM (events are not attached to DOM elements)
?
---
I just found a bug in common web applications. This has been bugging me for some time, and I'm relieved to have nailed it finally (I think). Caveat emptor: this is an architectural bug that is expansive throughout the web application ecosystem, so it may not be easily viewed as a bug.
The DOM is supposed to be a document, not a business processor. But for quite a few years now, people have been using DOM events & event-handlers as business processors, instead of as mere documents. This has royally fucked up the separation of concerns between the DOM tree, Web Application APIs (Javascript), and Rendering (CSS, etc.).
It just so happens that usually, the only place to plant event listeners, and the only place to trigger events, is on DOM elements. So what happened is that in pursuit of writing event-driven business processes into code, people have been writing event-driven business processes into the DOM.
The data structure of a web application is NOT supposed to depend on a DOM tree. Therefore close-coupling between [data models in a web application] (read in 2019 as "stores"), and [specific node trees in a DOM] is an anti-pattern.
But isn't the DOM supposed to mediate such user-interface actions as receiving input from the user, and sending feedback to the user, you might ask? Yes, of course, these can be modelled as events, and the DOM provides us data structures pertaining to those events, as well as ways to operate on those structures (listeners).
But that does NOT mean that the DOM is also supposed to handle traffic control for events throughout an entire web application. A web application should have an eventable control centre which lies OUTSIDE the DOM. (That is, outside any light, shadow, or virtual DOM, in case it wasn't clear). We generally know how to do this on the server, since NodeJS lit the rage on this. But web applications are not always supposed to run on the server - often times we want a web application to run robustly on the client side, and to depend on servers only for federated data stores. So how do we go about writing web application CLIENTS that have EVENT-driven traffic control OUTSIDE the DOM?
With that in mind, I searched for implementations of event listeners outside the DOM, and was pointed to the Reactor pattern* by this thread (preview).
I look forward to examining it more closely, perhaps with your input.
* https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/web_development/9781783287314/1/ch01lvl1sec09/the-reactor-pattern
/
Option 1. Hand-rolled reactor pattern.
Option 2. Add event listeners to the window object. This seems less crufty.
/
I don't know why people want to work in the tech department of Grab, the product is not sophisticated. The place is a bank. The risk management and finance departments would be so much more interesting, presuming they're doing it right.
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I think the first version of this dependency graph tracker written in JavaScript should utilise a minimum number of JavaScript's object-oriented programming capabilities, such as to be written in really dumb imperative code.
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I find myself in a race to innovate against multiple industry trends, before the morons who dictate what I am and am not allowed to do... change the rules again, and before the market destroys us.
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A moment of reflection allows for preparation before the day's work. Hopefully it is a productive day. Many days in these past few years are like this. It remains a good game. But this is not agreeable to all. That is the nature of the problem.
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I must compose myself adequate, daily, in order to have a fighting chance. That is the nature of meditation, in terms of organising the mental workplace, before using the mental workplace.
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Negotiations: Always take a market's point of view! I hate arguing with petty traders :P and generally, I don't.
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Horribly unproductive day. Why am I building a house? I'm not supposed to be this affluent for another fifteen to thirty years.
/
/commented on "WTF is a cloud kitchen?"/
Updated:
In computer server terms, a "private cloud" is a group of servers that one company manages internally and uses internally. A "public cloud" is a group of servers that many companies uses internally, whilst it is managed by a single external provider.
If we consider that kitchen operations are analogous to computer server operations, and that computer server operations depend on built-environment infrastructure such as space and electricity, then I think:
- "A shared kitchen for multiple companies", is closer to a B2B IaaS
- "Online discovery and ordering for shops", is a B2C PaaS
- Personally... in the interest of market liquidity - I'd want an API where any restaurant or household could order some widget/dish from another restaurant or household, with very stringent specifications, logistical, and price variables. That's the sort of thing that interests me, and I think of it as an API for building a C2C / B2B internet of artisanal goods.
:)
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/commented/ Poor debt regulation on mortgages and mortgage derivatives... led to equity crashes... which let to loose money via bail outs and quantitative easing... which led to... the technical debt, of debt. So meta.
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I could spend the rest of my life debating constitutional legalese, but I'm not paid to do that. I do however, have time for the occasional snarky Facebook comment on the same.
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Finally started to write code after a week of reading. Good to be starting. Off to bed.
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Awake. To the grind. #yearfive
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It's not very efficient to be doing technology R&D, as the CEO etc. of a real-time services small business, because the amount of short- and long-term memory which can be devoted to learning new things is quite limited. However, on with it. (I literally spend half my study time worrying about what the hell is going on at the office.)
/
I look forward to a world with no sentimental people. I am not of the belief that I will live to see it. :)
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I spend a lot of time every day, on tactical observations of my neighbours in society. Many enjoy the activity of giving things to their peers, but others see it as a sort of duty. It is the second group which endlessly amuses me. A portion of these have rationalised operations around contracts. The remaining ones... adopt conventions and then are annoyed when others do not adopt them. But that is the nature of the world, isn't it? The jungle does not amuse everyone.
/
There are two common uses for the word, 'taste'. One is as a technical term of chemoreceptivity. The other is a synonym for intelligence. Taste is a synonym of intelligence. Brain that, classists. :)
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Major overhaul of my punctuation policy - I have been using US punctuation with UK spelling, for fifteen years. Going to migrate completely to UK for the time being. [Update: MHRA, actually.]
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Malaysia faces youth unemployment crisis — Murray Hunter | Malay MailSuck it up?
malaymail.com
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1. "The Ministry of Education decides what courses universities offer rather than market forces. This is where the mismatches are coming from."
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2. "Serving people isn’t natural to this group and those who try to work in a restaurant or shop usually only last a few days and give up."
/
Myanmar dude at the 24-hour branded convenience store:
- July sales were down 15-20% (previous staff have told me they make 80-120k/month sales)
- workers all along the street have lower wages
- workers all along the street face increased goods prices
/
Anyone got a tow truck service that can haul a Kancil from Damansara Jaya to Taman Perindustrian Puchong for RM50-80?
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It's always difficult to find companies that aren't interested in selling horseshit to dung beetles. Most companies seem to do this naturally... first of all. a customer base of unintelligent suckers is selected, then a device is created to take their money, and then financing is raised from people who enjoy taking money from suckers. And to side-step the whole thing, you have to begin by removing all the unintelligent suckers from your customer base. And that, is the real challenge that I face in doing business.
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Too many things to do. At least, the JavaScript framework has hobbled out. But it will probably need a rewrite to Promises. Meanwhile, trying not to fall asleep at work. Lots of miscellany to catch up on.
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Unit online.
Power, underwhelming.
/
/commented on advice that it's never too late to pay off a mountain of debt/
I have the same approach to business. Almost never had an issue with having too little money for myself - my personal life doesn't care. As for business, it's like a game that's meant to be played on nightmare mode... and I'm sure other people have had it worse because they didn't have existential carelessness as insurance. People suffer when they fear loss. Embrace loss, never suffer, then you're left with a lot of spare time to invest in random shizzle.
Caveat: this is a gross abstraction of my economic calculus
/
I think people who drink alcohol regularly have a disability. I mean, I think people who like to burn petrol for fun, and people who smoke, and people who need the affirmation of their peers, and people whose Tinder profiles consist of "eat, sleep, travel," and people who believe in piety, or undefined loyalties, are similarly disabled. But then I guess that my interest in math looks like a disability to other people too. So in conclusion, I propose that we consider to be useful, the model of society as the sum of our collective disabilities.
/
/ Commented on "People leave toxic work cultures." / Precisely why you have to design the right toxins to get the right ecology. Pick your poisons.
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/commented on Blue Apron/
I tell all my pre-seed shareholders to hold equity till IPO because we're pre-series A, and basically it's really too early to get any value out of the business with an exit at this time.
But then I have to tell future investors that they hold till IPO+5y in order for the investment hierarchy to make sense.
Which is to say, if you're serious about building a business, don't have an exit strategy.
Exits are for traders.
/
/ commented on a civil engineer's complaint that innovation is limited due to risk /
Innovation is the resolution of today's problems, using methods unavailable to yesterday's designers. Innovation never dies, in fact it's the status quo, because if it stopped... we'd all just die from yesterday's design flaws.
/
Kampar morning market is so smalltown milfy.
/
Trying to model the thought process. I don't know how else to classify it. Do the ah sohs wake up on Saturday morning, put on their lipstick, get their kids up in their x-day best, trot them out, and be all like, 'come dear, we go eat fishball!'?
I much prefer watching the ladies in fitted clothes who wear masks, actually, as it leaves more to the imagination. Only works if they're also moving 'fit', I guess.
(In case you haven't noticed: this is one way I can keep myself awake when hanging out with foodies. I don't get so excited about most food options.)
/
"So many old people."
"This only works because the area hasn't gentrified. Wherever new trade comes in, prices go up, and walking space reduces, and the old people become stuck at home."
#urbanplanning #undesign #unplanning
Update: we later concluded that the Kampar market is a local tourist location for the countryside surrounding it.
/
/commented on a legless beggar/ Of course I'm not going to give him money. Look, there are loads more people in more trouble than this guy. There's no barrier to sending them help instead. Do you help this guy more just because you can see him? Yes? Then you are weak. Fix a better problem.
/
/commented on someone looking for business+personal relationship success stories/
I am going to assume that we are defining success as personal happiness, not as what society views it to be, i.e. in this rubrick a contented mass-murderer would be more successful than a celebrity social worker who sleeps with regret.
From end-2015 to mid-2019 I lived in a sort of hotel room directly across the street from my office, in order to bootstrap a new company. During this time I slept completely different hours each day, and spent most of my time on this one project. The project was set up with the requirement that I would be paid sufficiently to not have to seek outside income, but once you account for outsourced rent + food + laundry, there wasn't really much cash left in my pocket on a monthly basis.
Yet this period was rather productive for me as a whole. My priority has always been to put work first, and so I was able to spend a maximum amount of time on work. However, in order to do that one has to periodically disengage the brain from the office, in order to allow for repair and mutation - generally called Rest & Recreation.
Having limited cash and time for recreation in general, I focused most of my recreational efforts on dating. Social networks for intimacy such as Tinder, OKCupid, and Coffee Meets Bagel have been my main sources for lead generation - for better or for worse, to some degree I also met people offline through the nature of my work. (In general I avoid taking dates to the office.)
Now in year-four, my business is more mature than where it was when we started. My social life has been rewarding, and I am happy to have added the people I met to my general catalog of experiences.
I would say it has been a good time. I wish had managed to keep my mind and body in better shape with exercises during this period, but I suppose any loss in health is a cost to be written off at this time. I look forward to improving further the balance in my portfolio of activities.
/
Brutal dictatorships: I almost always reserve an amount of disdain for people who don't think about these things.
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I hate my job :P - not the parts that don't work, just the sheer volume of moving parts. But I designed it that way, so we're going to keep moving or die on it. #dogfooding
/
Disappointed with myself. This is the healthiest state of mind. (Satisfaction is the easiest to achieve. :P)
/
x: "Look, the strays are eating. Someone has been feeding them."
y: "People want to help them, but it is not good for the strays."
x: "It helps them live longer, but a longer life may not be a good thing."
y: "You know, that makes me think of stray farming - a farm for strays. You put all the strays in one place, and they can have happy, free, lives. Then when they are old, you can serve their meat to zoo animals."
x: "Why don't you just serve the old stray meat to the young strays? Anyway, unless you can demonstrate cash-flow positivity, you still have a bottleneck at the federal funding level."
/
"I read that dissociation is considered a mental illness."
"Yes it is, if you're not the one who turns it on."
"Maybe you're just ill, after all."
"Well, it took a lot of training to get this way. Anyone who thinks it's an accident can fuck off."
"But why would you want to make yourself ill?"
"Illness is after all, defined by the majority. I happen to think that people who cannot dissociate are less able?"
LOL #arguingwithplebes #notarguingwithplebes
/
/commented on all leaders sharing the trait of emotional intelligence/ Leaders are masters of people. Rough earth calls for sharp instruments. Ain't no mystery abatit...
/
Sometimes I wonder about all the people whose feelings I've hurt. I don't mind hurting their feelings, or if they ultimately self-destruct as a result of it. But I think there will always be arguments about whether I, as a member of their society, had a direct legal liability for their demise.
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Moderation: I have to say I would care about some of them, but definitely not all!
/
/commented/ I have this bloke who joined in June. Around July he was telling us he'd figured out everything at his job when he clearly had nearly nothing figured out. Nevermind the personal insults he heaped on his colleagues. By August he was basically demoted (per contract), and was looking to leave. Colleagues persuaded him to stick around (I told them they could fire him any time). He generally isn't motivated, but we do what we can to help him. I already offered to pay another ex-staff to be his instant messenger friend - cue conversation, "what would my job be actually?" / "be his father". I'm quite sure there's only one thing I need to do: crush his notion that the job is going to be an easy one.
/
Caught up with June-September data entry for power consumption. Looking forward to an automatic logger in the future. -_-
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Update: that was half done; now it's done
/
/commented/ This depends on the use-case. You can here, analyse "design" and "architecture" as DSLs. One is oriented about local, short-term optimisations, and the other is a language which is expected to useful outside short-term concerns. Short-term here refers to 1-5 years. Go figure.
/
The holy grail of marketing is when people look at you and say "thank you".This is why I prefer selling products of last resort.
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Stallman's fall: /commented/ I read the whole article. Think he played all his cards right. Didn't back down on a stance unless persuaded. Remained open to persuasion. Didn't make loud noises in public demanding to be persuaded. Someone leaked private conversations with xyz context, his organisation comes under political pressure, he resigns to protect the organisation. Sounds all good to me. We can quibble about the bits of the article now. Lol
/
I think deplatforming of controversial opinions demonstrates an unwillingness to let nature take its course in the destruction of life. Sure, the act of deplatforming is itself an act of destruction. I guess censorship is indeed, a double-edged sword. Generally when I find myself under consideration for a controversial opinion, I encourage detractors to speak more clearly. But typically, I think, people are afraid of being criticised in public. They are ashamed, and fearful of material and immaterial loss, alike. So, I think in conclusion, we should be aware of censorship in all the forms it takes, and to be aware of how to launch such attacks, as well as to defend against them. That is the disciplinary skillset - the tooling. Tools are morally agnostic. I wish for a world with fewer people who are unwilling to negotiate their moral convictions. But well, if no one will give it to me, I must make the world as I wish it to be. And that is what we all tell our children: grow up, fix things. We just won't always agree on what needs fixing.
/
I don't like being responsible for so many things at once. It doesn't sit easily in my brain. And I never feel like I'm acting responsibly. Brief review before bed:
.
- 24-hour factory operations
- retail merchandising, from art and decor, to recipes
- brand, including coordination of external threats, with internal weaknesses in corporate governance
- technology maintenance and R&D, from HVACR to adtech, to websites
- psych-ops on a half dozen operational meat nodes
- psych-ops on one-and-a-half dozen non-operational meat nodes
- bookkeeping, financial control, and audit
- regulatory compliance (million)
/
Ad Astra: it's basically 'Freud Gattaca: 2019', or 'Kant with Spaceships'. But in any event, it reminds me of my own work. I actually want to function like the father, but I believe I currently work more like the son. Also the script is a bit rough and rushy at parts. Almost a great movie. Bit of an Aesop's Fable.
/
Spent a chunk of the day networking with ex-colleagues from my time in a startup incubator. It was pretty clear what the problems were from the get-go, and I only accepted the gig as a money job. I was hired to rationalise technology, but I spent most of my efforts rationalising leadership. I don't think I was viewed as a hatchet man, but that's what the job felt like from day one. Some problems just need sunlight, and then nature takes care of the execution. When in doubt, remove the head. In less than a year, it went pretty much as predicted. Not that I ever predict singular futures... I usually bet on probability distributions.
I'm still working a money job these days, but here I own a few shares.
/
Sometimes I don't know why the smog bugs people. Then I remember, most people don't accept work in smokey bars.
/
Distributor portals which have price ranges: I can't brain this website's information hiding. It's so easy to just pick up the phone and call 2-3 suppliers in ten minutes. But I'm sure it's novel for many buyers.
/
Nutritional supplementation reinitiated. Universal mode soldier revert. Lol
/
/commented on #millenialretirement/
.
1983, age:0 - birth registered
.
2001, age:18 - got into college, didn't find interesting people, decided to call it early retirement; was able to learn how to reduce demand for extended life to zero, therefore all time remaining is treated as a luxury
.
2005, age:22 - very retired; graduated; returned to Malaysia to study local politics and commerce in general
.
2015, age:32 - still very retired; started a business to kill more time;
.
2019, age36 - still working on it; work is good; keeps me busy; sometimes I get in trouble but who doesn't?
/
I think IFTTT is going to save me from having no authority to post on social media.
/
I've come to the conclusion that I don't indulge in sex for pleasure as much as I engage in sex as a productivity booster because the body behaves in a healthier manner with moderate amounts of sex. Which leads me to wonder if I should start experimenting with chemical castration.
/
Dream journal: several days ago, cuddled and made out with a girl I worry about, who has been in some ways the love of my life. She seemed to enjoy the time in our dream. After the dream, I told her over instant messenger, I know dreams are not reflective of the people which inspire them. Classification: wish fulfilment.
.
Dream journal: a few days ago, one of those where a mosquito inserts a worm beneath the skin, you try to swat the parasite as it swims around, visibly black on light flesh, beneath skin. Classification: nightmare, or just curiosity/concern.
.
Comment to present partner: (Anyone's) self-loathing is kinda pointless. I think looking for a forever person is a bad use of (my) time, so (I) don't. But (anyone) might find a forever person even if (they are) not looking!
.
.
Mental conditioning:
.
I notice that I may be experiencing some depression symptoms as a direct result of overfiltering sense stimuli. When I notice a sensation (initiated either from the peripheral nervous system, or from memory: both passing through the imagination), I typically push it to one of two buckets...
.
(a) marked for deletion (and monitoring until deletion), or
.
(b) marked for integration into main working memory (and monitoring until integration).
.
This is a trained response, for improving SNR in working memory. This is how one learns to delete dreams and other relatively useless ideas from working memory.
.
When noise filters are too aggressive, nearly nothing gets admitted to working memory. This is good when there is a lot of heavy processing to be done. But this is bad if you're not very awake, at the beginning of the conscious day, or if your working memory had slowed down mid-day due to overuse of a repetitive process - these are periods when the absence of new ideas for integration actually results in lethargy.
.
So as I woke up today and observed this in my thoughts, I made a point to recalibrate my integration filters. In order to ease the process of waking up, daily, I have to configure my filter into the opposite mode of what it does when I ignore distractions in order to help myself to fall asleep. It seems insufficient to let the subconscious decide what to integrate upon waking - if the subconscious is so used to being told to ignore all distractions, it continues to do so when one is supposed to wake up.
.
This is a good learning. It is a significant one. In college many years ago, I taught myself to forget dreams, as they occurred, to increase working memory. Perhaps now I shall have to dwell on dreams a little, if it helps me wake up when i want to. I have been studying this pattern for a couple of years now.
.
Normally (in these years) I only enjoyed the stimulus of conscious (lucid?) dreaming after many hours of sleep, during periods of sleep which have had a lower priority, say from hours 9-14. Supplementation of the diet with B12, caffeine, protein, etc. makes it more likely for lucid (we shall just call it this, for now) in earlier sleep hours... particularly during naps. For several years I have studied the experience of REM sleep to see if can be appreciated consciously. I am not sure if this is REM sleep, but I have enjoyed the process of closing my eyes, and relaxing the muscles which control my eye movements, so that the eyeballs thrash around, somewhat, while the nerves in those muscles experience the same sort of pleasure the larger skeletal muscles receive from light exertion, or rest after heavy exertion. Unsurprising, as the eye muscles do so much fine tactical work.
/
/commented on hoarding among the poor/
This is just logistics... you can optimise for space, or time, or money, or something else. If you have more money, you have more options.
If you aren't very clever, you'll always be a mess.
A rich person can afford to live a high-waste lifestyle by discarding everything after a single use, or after a non-use when things are bought before they are needed. This is why zero-waste practices are trending among the rich... they have a lot of room for optimisation, but in order to do so they would have to purchase less in general, purchase more reusables (deoptimising for space, and time, and money).
Zero-waste is just a economic necessity among the poor. Pagpag didn't become a thing because of some hipsters. :)
/
Kampung Baru: They should REIT it. Go see how other countries handle indigenous land allocations.
/
On chemical castration: I guess in the little leagues, self-medication with topical tea tree oil and a high-soy diet might get the ball rolling.
/
Put in an hour of software development after a few hours of data entry. Off to bed, before masonry work tomorrow.
/
ECMAScript 2015 on proxies: 'Hey guys, we know how much you like monkey patching your objects, so we monkey patched a specification to the standard so that you can monkey patch your objects according to a standard monkey patching specification.'
.
I know I'm a bit behind the curve... but doesn't this smell like a security vulnerability? (Proxies are transparent... but I am still reading.) Not like function overriding was every any safer though... definitely not experienced enough to know the pitfalls of all this.
.
Why do we need a special language feature that somewhat replicates the functionality of subclass extension? Specifically, class syntax is just sugar over [a complicated pattern for using prototype inheritance], and prototype inheritance is itself continuously complexified by new language features... so we have a new language feature which is basically syntactic sugar for [a peculiar use case, of syntactic sugar which itself exists due to [a peculiar use case, of [a moving target]]]. SIC I know, the relation of Proxy to prototypes is on the same order as the relationship of 'class' to prototypes, an not an even higher order concern. I'm just waxing lyrical. (Update: everything after the SIC is wrong - Proxies are exotic objects without prototypes... it's a clusterfuck.)
.
Recurring thought: 'JavaScript is turning into PHP.'
/
/commented/ I think empathy is a possible but not a necessary design pattern. :) My problem of course, is that I think of civilisation as a thing to be designed whereas [it is the sort of thing that tends to be discovered].
/
/commented on whether we need new job market matching startups/
If you want to solve this properly, just work on GAI.
It's a labour intensive process, so the key problem is to automate conversational labour.
Same reason I work in cafe, on the hospitality industry, but the killer app is to get all the humans out of the frontlines eventually and leave frontline work to machines.
(Malaysia, foolishly, thinks frontline work is best done by locals... if you look at immigration policy, it prevents foreign workers from working on the front... which is stupid. You can automate conversation and personality a lot easier than product design :P. So [that being said,] locals get the dumbest jobs, like entertaining customers.)
/
Lam Soon's HomeSoy is a great product. Long overdue.
/
Missing an old friend, who no longer speaks to me. Perhaps, I shall stop miss her less in another fifteen years, which is about how long it took to stop missing the other old friends who stopped talking to me. Ah, women, ah, me.
.
/Tweet/ Missing old friends, women I loved. I suppose, from their point of view, I am either too tiresome, or a jerk. It takes about fifteen years to stop missing old friends, I find.
/
Demarcating Households: An Integrated Income and Consumption Analysis
krinstitute.org
TLDR:
.
(2014)
.
You have ten Malaysian households (unknown number of members per household).
.
2 households: make MYR 1,196 per household at most
5 households: make MYR 3,015 per household at most
3 households: make more per household
.
(2017)
.
... RM2,700 per household. A living wage is defined as the income level needed for a household to afford a minimally acceptable living standard, which includes the ability to participate in society, the opportunity for personal and family development, and freedom from severe financial stress.
.
(2019, page 125)
.
MYR 0 - 1,049 : households in the 0%-17% are worried about (many things)
.
MYR 1,050 - 2,638 : households in the 18%-66% are still worried about the cost of rice and potatoes, slippers
.
MYR 1,196 - 3,015 : households in the 24%-72% are worried about the cost of mobile phone charges, sex, mamak stall food
.
MYR 1,637 - 4,155 : households in the 40% - 80% are worried about the cost of fresh milk, beer, furniture, tuition
.
MYR 2,399 - 6,780 : households in the 63% - 95% are worried about the cost of (paying other people to save their time), computers, insurance premiums
/
/on the middle-class/ This is a side point, but generally I find myself somewhat disdainful of people who are looking for ways to have passive income. Haha. Mea culpa. But it is so true.
/
The clinical definition of depression probably refers to someone who intuitively WANTS to stay alive, but who faces great tactical DIFFICULTIES in doing so.
.
What do you call the folks who DON'T really want to be alive, but who do so out of pure EUPHORIA? Wankers? I don't know, but I'm certainly more the latter than the former, and I wonder what my place is in the world. :P (Mania... I think the clinical term is mania...)
/
Exhausted. Unproductive (at work). Keeping up the grind. But first, sleep.
/
Incremental improvements to work.
/
I swear this is the most hipster campaign I have run in my life. It appears to be some mad walk between the modes of rough-cut and baroque.
.
Well, done for the day, on that. I need food...
.
Just yesterday I was thinking, while doing at 3 a.m. grocery run, as I contemplated the stories of old friends about their marriages and divorces and unanticipated personal meanderings: 'eternity is worth less than the sum of its parts'.
/
Usually this week, I have woken around 2:00 p.m. and slept around 7:00 a.m.Today, social activities resulted in the total abortion of work, and I took an early nap around midnight - it is just past 5:20 a.m. and I am awake from that nap. The streetlamps shine through uncurtained slivers of window... each sliver makes three or four columns of light upon the walls. The grills, horizontal, also pattern these patches of light. I have contemplated spatial optimisations between some unrepaired appliances at the office, and my residence... unamused by the lack of space, I find myself more motivated to fix and sell this equipment, without shifting it around somemore. Before that becomes a priority, I have many bookkeeping items to attend to... additionally, new software is being developed that provides a constant distraction, and continuous business development (both in terms of B2C marketing and B2B grandstanding) keep me somewhat on edge, with inflexible memory for tactical innovation. That is my lot in this business. On we go...
/
First it usually has claws, and fur, and stoic eyes. Then when its fluff is old, it cleans itself in place. And then the cleaning mechanism itself is serviced, resulting in a retching, wheezing, fur bundle, which pees and poops in a safe place, yet deposits mucosal boluses of fluff at random locations. That, is a house cat.
/
Enforced feeding time.
/
Re: grooming of a peer network to vouch for your good character while you are actually a fiend.
.
Everyone (who knows anything) already knows how to do this, and knows that other people know how to do this. Therefore political equity always comes with the discount - that it is rendered ineffectual on a whim. Therefore, don't invest in whims.
/
/commented on activist posts in Malaysia/
I think social media posts won't work much because the point would be to encourage people to harass their local representatives.
There is a generally a very low conversion rate between public outrage and harassing of public servants. I think, it would be more effective to focus on designing systems that increase the conversion rate between private conversations and the harassment of public servants.
/
/comment on communism and capitalism being false poles/
I offer an alternative lens.
Both models are "free market" and not "communist" (this is endlessly redefinable sic).
Actually what you had at the beginning is a decentralised computation setup, where computation is biased towards high performing nodes (towards managers, with respect to their proven ability to achieve minimum displacement from top in the local game ladder.)
In the latter, the computation is biased towards the nodes who are at the highest velocity towards the top of the game ladder (fast risers).
Velocity along given axes, defined by local game rules, is a tool. That tool is one element of the overall organisational design toolkit... the job of the cyberneticists (definition: communication and control designers, a.k.a. steerspeople).
/
Wrist-watch reattached. Urgency has increased. Creatine monohydrate dosing resumed. Go go brain.
/
Premature optimisations.
.
For a few months I've been trying to execute runtime directly from long-term memory. This has failed as LTM has a really low resolution, and the correct process is to pull from LTM to STM, run a few corrective simulations in STM, and then only execute runtime from STM. That's point one.
.
Point two. The probability of long-term success is always lower than the probability of short-term success. (Project risk is always greater than task risk.) Therefore, it is inefficient to execute tasks under the expected failure rate of the project. Tasks need to be executed with greater optimism than projects. The risk profiles are different.
/
‘At What Point Does Malfeasance Become Fraud?’: NYU Biz-School Professor Scott Galloway on WeWorkI ask this of myself every day. But that's business.
/
My friend and I were working on a task. My friend raised a point of order, and I responded to the argument with a rudimentary explanation, but in doing so, I lost interest in the task. My friend, saying that the answer was not important, reminded me that harmony has been valued more highly (by my friend). I reminded my friend, that harmony has been a near bottom priority for myself, and that is why when my friend seeks harmony over correctness, on point of policy I will tend to shove my friend aside.
.
Ah, that is the gist of a difference in values, is it not? As for myself, I value people who are comfortable with themselves. Whether they are in a fur farm or at a PETA meeting, at a strip club or in a church taking communion, whether they are suited for parliament or nude on a beach, the key, is comfort.
.
One should be unconcerned by being called a nazi. What matters more is whether one is actually a nazi or not (and there are too many interpretations to this turn of phrase).
/
Anyone want to finance a lakeside cafe project in Puchong? I don't know how long we can hold the tenancy, but the rent is only RM500, including utilities, and there isn't much renovation to do, and there is furniture on site. I shit you not - it's the clubhouse for 700 houses, and there are daily visitors (non-zero) to the facilities. Just check the guestbook.
/
Deploy. Deploy deploy deplop....
/
Joker movie: it's as well-paced as the trailer.
.
1. Looks like they'll bag best actor just on execution.
2. Trigger warning: probably a horrible movie for people who are uncomfortable with ubiquitous absurdity.
3. I need someone else to look and tell me if the locks on the mailboxes are too shiny because the props-team forgot to age them.
.
[On accusations of incel triggering:] Hardly covers incel triggers. Gotham as a trope is inherently a play on class structures, so it'll feel relevant to HK/Occupy and all that. It isn't a masterful script on a line by line basis. But overall it is very nicely paced. Imho
.
As an origin story, it does a better job telling you why Joker likes to laugh, versus say, the SilenceOfTheLambs movies never really telling you why Hannibal likes to eat.
.
TLDR: go see it if you like character studies. And Mick Szal... OMG Mick Szal - I am just going to fanboy for a few days now.
/
"She's 178cm, and mongolian-portuguese. Reminds me of Kurylenko."
"What are you doing?!"
"Googling."
"That is so immature. Are you in high-school?"
"How else am I supposed to relate to pop-culture? Give me something I can care for! If you can like furballs, I can like models..."
/
X: Tell me when any other operation becomes more important than this one.
Me: You'll find out really fast. I think it'll be pretty obvious, because that'll mean I'd be spending more time over there.
.
Y: I believe in universally valid notions of what certain words mean.
Me: I'll call dogshit on that, and excuse myself ASAP. :)
.
Z: It is always best to allow other people to decide how much they get to collect from you.
Me: Sure, if you like being collected from.
.
W: People have a basic tendency to care about others, knowing when they will be hurt, and relying on that to not hurt one another.
Me: While I fully appreciate that as the current mode of human development, I think you know that my preference is otherwise. What you describe is called empathy, and reliance on empathy is one of those talking points that I vocally oppose. There's very little I hate more than being responsible for other people's unspoken feelings, and so I simply don't do it. I will trample over any non-explicit preferences that people have. If you don't want to miss a report on anything, set up an explicit trigger.
/
/commented on people who think co-working spaces are a new business model/
You may want to distinguish the revenue model from the customer value proposition.
Cafes have been co-working spaces for hundreds of years. Whether they charge in units of space is a separate question.
You can model this in different ways. For example, you can call a coffee an edible ticket for space, with an implicit consensus-driven expiry period.
//
Updated from further comments:
//
In general, it refers to the management of communal spaces, and it is an architectural concern.
//
The best co-working spaces have basically rolled in co-living into the RM400-899 monthly price point.
- 24-hour access (sleep under your desk)
- pool and shower facilities (exercise & shower there, and outsource laundry)
- pantry facilities (no deep-frying unless there is a hob)
- lockers (keeps things tidy and presentable)
No one who is serious about work needs anything else, really.
/
Our experiments taught us why people trollThere are a few useful functions. Typically the main concern is to determine where your counterparty's cognitive limits break down.
theconversation.com
/
/commented on why people may need to earn more and more money/ This is pretty straightforward.
.
1. If you are competitive in ambition, then you always want more just to be a 'winner' in the abstract sense - you have insecurities about being known as otherwise. This is plain neuroticism, and accounts for a tiny minority.
.
2. Alternatively, and this is much more common - you live in a pro-capitalism regulatory environment which confers competitive advantages in proportion to the amount of financial assets one has. In this case you are actually doing it for survival... because the system is set up such that you, as an individual, are under constant threat, unless you continuously compete to remain in the upper-class of wealth and therefore competitiveness. The system basically says, 'look, the losers are going to die first... so if you want to live, be a winner... now, we're going to have tryouts'. Not all regulatory environments are set up this way, but many are.
/
Letters to a friend (excerpts):
'... compete in your area of competitive advantage; don't compete in areas where you are at a comparative disadvantage...'
'... you can't gain the interest of someone who wants to be disinterested, by being more interested; you have to be more disinterested, instead...' (/dɪsˈɪnt(ə)rɪstɪd/ 1.not influenced by considerations of personal advantage. 2.having or feeling no interest in something; uninterested.)
'... unilateral terms aren't referred to as relationships, in the narrow sense. But unilateral stances are relationships, in the broad sense. Use the same word for both, at your peril...'
'... avoid counterparties who continuously allow themselves to be inconvenienced...'
/
Photos capture hermits who have escaped society to live peacefully in the wildHow about hermits who escaped society to live peacefully in rhe city?
theplaidzebra.com
/
OK, time to revive that 2012 working pattern of leaving Bloomberg Live TV on the whole work day - since I don't have access to co-working spaces here.
/
Quantum vacuum: Less than zero energyHey, I'm all up for sound-pumps to make rooms quieter, like how heat-pumps are ubiquitous rn... not sure if it works that way though
phys.org
/
Iterated. Gotta iterate faster.
/
Quite often, I've seen this.
/
Paper books are disgusting. But I think it's fine if they work for you. Ok. Bed.
/
In the beginning, the laud dawg sat in the cage. And the floor was without form, and void; and the dawg said, let there be shit, and the dawg shat. And the laud dawg saw the shat shit, that it was good: and what was shat was then eateth.
/
I'm giving myself until my staff sends in the new dataset, to write basic code that implements this:
evaluation : () => DSLQuery('some DSL query syntax which refers to data UIDs'),
/* We have to write the query function.
*
* The query should not need to check if dependencies have
* changed.
*
* In order for it to avoid doing that, the
* implemented Datum will have to store a
* cacheValid boolean. Each 'provider' datum (as
* opposed to 'dependent') should (send
* messages which) invalidate
* the caches of all its dependents whenever
* the provider's value is reevaluated.
*
* When a Datum's cacheInvalidated event is
* triggered, it may (subject to some logical
* delay to avoid oversensitivity) recompute
* and recache its new value.
*
* Following a reevaluation event, a Datum should
* dispatch rerendering events to the pertinent
* ViewNodes, and invalidation events to the
* pertinent Datums.
*
* */
/
/commented to friend/
I get worried when people think that I need to take care of them, or when they think they need to take care of me. In general, I do this with all other people - but it shouldn't be a critical dependency in an interpersonal relationship.
/related reminder to self, on personal maintenance/
My only close friends are my past/present intimate partners (ring 1). Outside of that, I would consider business partners in another ring (ring 2), and beyond that, everyone else including family is in the same ‘everyone I may or may not have met’ bucket (ring 3).
Sometimes ring 2 takes precedence over ring 1, of course, given that if I had to dispose of one ring forever, it would probably be ring 1, not ring 2. I only put ring 1 closer to myself than ring 2 in the context of intimacy; in the context of disposable priority, ring 2 is currently more important than ring 1.
/
I tend to think that I do a pretty crappy job of developing my business. However, I find comfort in the crass job that my government appears to doing in the development of the nation. I don't think it's ideal to have slow development - but misery loves company.
/
I wake up worrying about the low probability of success from having one person do the accounts, the QA, the CRM (without social media, it is harder, but less complex), the software R&D, the hardware. Then I remind myself that worrying doesn't get much done. Which is why we do work. Not to build a better society, but simply to avoid an absence of amusement.
.
Later comment elsewhere: I just like watching people/businesses fight and die. It is interesting to watch the gameplay. Game on! As for inspiration, I believe in its annihilation.
/
Contrary to popular accounts, I thought we have society in order to compete - we don't compete in order to have friends and family. :P
.
ALL DAY I listen to people saying that the purpose of life is to be happy and to form relationships, but how often do these actually lead to competitive dominance in any sphere? (The success rates are pretty high, but not always, if you look it up.) A famous leader said, the good life is, 'to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their (-)men'.
.
No really, now, I want to open a ramen shop called Lamentations...
/
/commented on 'wave-riding' strategies/
I tend to avoid anything that 'swarths of startups / people / investors are looking into' - simply because I'm too lazy to compete. Give me a cold dead sector any day, and watch me have fun trying to squeeze value out of it.
/
/commented/ I might actually laugh, as a bullet is a horrible demotivator - I practice a habit of readiness for expiry. But meanwhile, finding interesting and weird forcing-factors is one of the bigger motivators for my work, I think.
/
👉24" monitor
👉3 columns / screen-width
👉80 characters / column
👉100 lines / screen-height
👉font chosen
👉font size tested at (zoom level) and (zoom level - 1)
👉terminal colour scheme tested
#calibrationtoday
/
Basically a question of whether you should/not have Nazis at the dinner table.
/
1. Malay Dignity Congress (5000 participants)
2. FoodPanda riders go on strike (hundreds)
3. Utusan Group shuts down (800 laid off)
4. 'Joker' grosses $300,000,000 worldwide
5. Youth minister asks for $1,500,000,0000 to create 350,000 jobs over 5 years
.
Are you ready, for things to get, a little crazy?
/
Tesco Decaf Classic (instant coffee) review: about the same price as Nescafe Decaf but a lot blander. Avoid.
/
Looking forward to societies where people (most emphathically) don't depend on each other out of desperation, and where everyone is confident about their death and means of dying. Not gonna happen anytime soon, but it will happen eventually - or everyone will die getting there - that much, is inevitable.
/
> Google Ads: Super excited to share this because I just figured out that there is a positive correlation between our sales and adspend... after eyeballing our super long-winded several-month-long process of data collection... literally flipping our Search and Display budgets up and down, to generate information/SNR for Sales as an output variable.
TBH: as with most things I post on the Internet, I don't know if anyone will really understand what I think I understand about it, but here goes nothing
/
Wondering about how to design a high-rise animal farm that completely contains/recycles the shit output. (Intentionally ignoring all the issues with animal cruelty, water consumption, etc.)
/
On dopamine fasting:
'Time is money' isn't as accurate a financial model as 'USABLE time is money' - and usable time is a function of various mental processes. For example, if you think twice as fast, you actually get twice as many operations done in the same amount of time. This is a measurable, actionable aspect of personal finance - as personal finance is itself fundamentally about trading 'futures contracts on personal time'. Here's an article on mental conditioning to help you get more out of your time.
/
Can any policy economists tell me if this has been done, and if it has, how it turned out for the subjected population?
.
/model proposed: from a discussion on rent control and capital gains tax/
.
Rent collected by yourself, on assets which you in turn rent from another party, should be taxed as normal income. But rent collected on assets which you own, should be taxed on a progressively higher rate - a rate determined by the unrealised capital appreciation of the owned property, which is itself determined by the valuation, V, of a public auditor. When you pay tax based on unrealised capital appreciation, you also receive a conditional tax credit. If you finally sell your asset at a value below V, you can claim some tax credits. If you finally sell your asset at V or higher, your tax credits are worthless.
/
OK, I finally got around to digging up my (unsorted, incomplete, variously formatted) journals from 2004-2012. If you want a copy, just ping me. Someone asked for it recently, so I yanked it out of my archive for them. If you're looking for 2013-2019 stuff it's already on the current blog. There isn't enough time in the world to get things done. Oh well.
/
Time once more, to put my inadequacies away. It's bedtime at 6:42am, about an hour earlier than usual. Recently I have built a small business, several research programs within it, much antagonism from internal parties, a few supportive intimates, and as usual, a larger number of other studies put on ice for the gamble of commerce. When I awake, shortly after your lunch time, my inadequacies will be waiting for me. And regardless of what people say about them, I will do my best to avoid becoming adequate for the mere sake of adequacy. Good morning to you.
/
/reflection/
I've been pretty much the same person since I was 14.
Along the way, I just acquired new skill-sets, and it broadened my social circles. Like tech stuff - I did a lot of it in 1996-1998, then a lot less, then I dug back in 2009...
.
1992: started out in science; wanted to do more math, but opportunities were not as available;
.
1998: maxed out on local opportunities for computing, there weren't many I was aware of;
.
2000: that would have been the last time I took math and science seriously, before halting work there to focus on braining the humanities, which I figured was a larger deficit in my knowledge; opportunities to study computing were also sparse; so (I) this was the first major postponement of exploration in my area of expertise;
.
2005: began study of commerce and government; I knew the only jobs I cared for would be BOD-type things, and I generally don't trust people who haven't executed domains which they judge on, so I focused on developing operational expertise; (II) this was the second postponement of exploration in my area of expertise, as the subject of the first postponement had been exhaustively reviewed (you may laugh);
.
2009: got back into technology studies, a bit more; this was a resumption of what I let go of at (I), without really ceasing to work on (II);
.
2015: invested in my first business; still working on it; this is really a continuous development of (II).
/
Subsidise public transport, not fuel, Jomo urges govtThis is a horrible public statement, because public transport has been highly subsidised for the longest time. But subsidies have been ineffective because of a lack of URBAN PLANNING with regards to the architecture of how citizens are supposed to operate throughout theirs days / weeks / year.
malaysiakini.com
/
1. E-wallet RM30/citizen thing is going to be gamed to pieces. Can you imagine the number of people signing up for e-wallets using their relatives and friends contacts... who will subsequently never use the wallets ?
2. Foreigners now buying RM600k properties, so GG affordable housing. Have fun you guys.
/
50:50
Tesco decaf classic: Nescafe gold
This is quite drinkable, hot or cold.
/
On metric-dropping of other ministries' actual budget announcements.
So was the Sports minister sub-tweeting this for link juice? OMG
Hack: 'we will ask for 6B for 350,000 graduate jobs'
Actual: '6.5B will be allocated to replace 350,000 migrant worker jobs'
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Generally I see a lot of short-term incentives in the Budget 2020. But I get the feeling that I won't be taking up a bunch of them because it's too disruptive to my long-term concerns. :( I don't expect there's much to discuss haha. Mostly I work on contributions to the process of others, and I find few parties interested in contributing to my process. :)
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"And keep in mind that Peter Lugar still does not accept credit cards."- I suppose we can use them as a role model
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B12 online
Creatine online
Fish oil online
Caffeine... back online again... this should be interesting.
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On men needing to lean 'out':
This is the correct analysis! However, I typically find that most people around me are too timid for my tastes and I absolutely dread them. And I think that's ok as long as we agree on explicit non-empathy oriented conventions that achieve social justice targets. We can arrive at the targets by vote. Meanwhile I tend to believe that preferences for low-context, low-empathy, communication are something I take a lot of (yes, too much) pride in. LOL
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I'd like to fight XXD, not because I dislike him - I do like his project - but because, as a skinny bloke, I just wanna learn how to fight bigger fatter blokes and win.
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Storing wine in smaller glass bottles. Why did I never think of that before?
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At the moment, I'm of the view that the US exit from Syria was bait for Erdogan to cross lines. If that plays out, the US will whack him around a bit more in the future. If not, pity.
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As a result of today's research, I now know the cost of diesel generator rentals, refrigerated truck rentals, and dry ice consumption ratios for refrigeration... -_-
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Had a brief networking chat with a bloke who enjoys arguing for the disenchantment of theistic beliefs. I have a lot less interest in that subject, I guess... I prefer to study the construction of societies as machines. I'm much more interested in arguing for the disenchantment of human significance.
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Awake. First third of the day, remove distractions. Eat the things, socialise with the things, wash the things, exercise the things. Hopefully, the second third is relatively undisturbed.
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10 Ways to Retire, From Awesome to Depressing - Ringgit Oh Ringgit/commented/ At work till the day I die, hopefully. Not sure why people do otherwise lol. A career #9-er for the past decade and a half. I think retirement means you stop worrying about money, and derive your happiness from internal sources. But this makes zero sense to people without that privilege, so I can see why it's 'not retirement', to them. Heheh
ringgitohringgit.com
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Are Early Stage ASEAN VCs Valuing Start-Ups Wrongly?Just for shits, I am going to take issue with the thesis of the post.
medium.com
/commented/
No, I do not think they are on the wrong foot - I think ASEAN venture capitalists are doing great. ASEAN investees are a different kettle of fish from the pickings available to VCs in other locations. Each sector/region's VCs are going to have to build out their own risk-reward envelopes based on local conditions.
Instead of blaming buyers for not wanting to buy your product (shares), I would recommend pitching the product to different buyers (VCs 'not from ASEAN', if you truly believe ASEAN VCs are not interested... though that has yet to be proven :) ).
Secondly, you could simply adjust your product (shares) to be what the local market is looking for (assuming again, that you are right about the local market, for the purposes of discussion).
It has always been easier to raise money for traditional business models in environments where there are few un-traditional business model success stories.
For example, I raised some money to build a restaurant. However I run the restaurant as the go-to-market strategy for a business which I wouldn't otherwise have been able to get funding for with the same amount of ease. As long as I deliver the restaurant, I am on-mandate for my existing investors... regardless of whether they making a quick buck or making nothing at all, we have, by the letter of the agreement, done what is necessary. At the same time, that doesn't limit me as an entrepreneur from driving the business towards a a higher risk target with higher possible returns... that's my privilege as an executive.
Of course, I can be fired on any day of the week, or the company shut down by investors, but that's just business. Deal with it.
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China would rather see Hong Kong lose its economic role than cede controlDoes anyone have counter-points to this view? Because I can't find strong arguments against it. Admittedly, I've done zero research, so I'll be posting Quora links here if I find any.
scmp.com
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On Malaysia trying to win as a VC:
/commented/
I think it'll be quite funny if Malaysian stock-pickers turn out to be better economists than Malaysian civil servants, and the country gets fat and famous on trading stocks.
There's a certain people group that's famous for fitting that stereotype, and it's not yet the Malaysians... cunning, you say?
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Done with data entry. Fortunate catch of a quality regression. Off to bed soon. Waiting for laundry also done. Last business of the day is probably reviewing prenup drafts, which will probably be rejected anyway, but oh well, due diligence. Probably get in before 23 hours up. (Ended up closer to 23.5. Beddy bye-bye, bitches.)
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/commented/ All illnesses are personal weaknesses, by definition. But we do have public policies and social contracts which value affirmative action for persons with weaknesses.
Well, I could be wrong. We'd just have to define illness as a statistical distance from an average... where the average is a fiction which we refer to as normalcy, and therefore anyone believing in that fiction is delusional. In which case being 'mentally ill' is just being different, and not a weakness, whereas referring to anyone else as 'mentally normal' indicates that the speaker suffers from a weakness of self-actualisation... oh we could go on indefinitely, what's the point?
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China has banned exports of black clothing to Hong Kong, including undiesYou think this is funny? Think like a Trump. Actually this is very good PR game. China is showing off how lenient they can be before destroying the secessionist movement.
shanghaiist.com
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Capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, democracy, blah-blah-blah... these are religious abstractions. Stop using these words. Discuss concrete policies. It'll make you a better person. Drop the idols.
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/commented on calisthenics for neuroplasticity/ I only work on things I don't really know how to do. If I think I have figured something out, I switch targets.
In high school the targets would be like, 'understand the culture of this weird people group' or 'get into college'.
In college the targets would be like, 'fall in and out of love with any X (one of the initial targets was an apple)', 'determine the quantification parameters for conscious experience in general', 'determine the origin and architecture of the university's syllabus as a whole'.
In commerce the targets would be like, 'understand how business people talk', 'understand how Malaysian politics work', 'run a company'.
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/commented on the nature of work in ops/
I prefer BOD jobs. Ops is just collecting CV. [In the context of running a business, this means hitting milestones for grandstanding to future investors in the business.]
IP is forever. I don't really invest in anything else haha. To put that into the context of ops, the key is to learn how to build the best operation, not to build the best operation. The latter is not as good a product as the former. But the risk of failure is higher, and the timeline for payback is longer.
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'If animals are not allowed in restaurants by the Ministry of Health, how do pet cafes do it?'
'Maybe they have special legislation which I'm not aware of. It doesn't benefit us to shut them down, so I haven't looked into it.'
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At this rate of work, in about ten years, I should be able to compile my Facebook posts into a complete proposal for public policy in a small third-world nation...
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/comment on 'financial independent'/
It boils down to how you achieve 100% saturation of demand.
Traditionally, as we all know, the ascetic approach is simply to reduce demand until it's really low.
Most financial blogs teach people to try to move supply until it is in excess of demand, but this will always be an uphill battle with no backstop.
I would argue the any attempt to move supply must be rooted in an ability to adjust demand, otherwise the former is futile.
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Just set up an agreement with someone which bars my general exchange of personal sexual information, flirting, sexual teasing, etc. with other people - I think that means I will just write more things about myself in public, and redirect individuals to read my public posts. :P
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This Tulsi Hillary thing is amusing.
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Global investment outlook 2019 - Insights | BlackRockTLDR:
blackrock.com
- buy bonds for low vol
- buy US equities and (EU, EM) bonds for growth
- stay tf away from CN's supply chain (lol)
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/commented on the perks and challenges of fnb retail in MY/
I'm building a platform as a service (wetware, hardware, software) for hospitality businesses in general (hotel, restaurant, cafe, coworking, coliving, offices, facilities management). I'm not sure what you mean by perks... but in terms of challenges, here are the concerns I think the industry in Malaysia faces, which can be fixed:
- manpower :
- - (1) Malaysian hiring employment is messier for small businesses, (1a) for low wage staff; the reason is that the law (EA 1955) actually incentivises everyone to ask for 'freelance independent contracts for service' instead of 'employee contracts of service'... now most small business owners don't read law, so they don't know how to properly navigate this, and they end up working without contracts, and staff are often confused about their rights and obligations; (1b) this is compounded by loose immigration policy and very weak enforcement around foreign labourers, due in part to rampant corruption at the top tiers of government - which has distorted the competitive landscape quite severely. All of this can be fixed with proper redesign at the policy level in parliament, but there is a lack of political will to do so. One of the ways we want to fix this is to stay abreast of policy issues, and to keep churning out proposals to feed lobbies.
- - (2) professional ethics; possibly antagonised by the issues above, workers are often unable to communicate transparently (whether they are stupid, evil, or lazy, is open to interpretation), but you may frequently receive unexpected shortfalls in labour. One of the ways we want to fix this is to establish 'workflow frameworks' which abstract away the differences between different shop floors, so that we can then effectively fire up 'uber for horeca', based on staff who are trained to interface with clear conventions, and workplaces which are set up using the same conventions.
- service vendors
- - (3) mechanical and electrical engineering: Malaysia is DECADES behind more developed economies where there are organised regulations for all small tradesmen who work on electrical, plumbing, HVACR, construction, etc. This makes it difficult to hire reliably 'off the street', and everyone uses this dumb-as-shit method of 'based on recommendations' just for rudimentary jobs (granted: hyperbole). Platforms such as a Kaodim and Recommend will attempt to federate the recommendations, but they still fail to address the underlying problem: lack of explicit codes and standards for enforcement in detail. One of the efforts we have made towards fixing this is to in-house all minor service and repairs. Once we have a better grasp of what the M&E substrates are, we would want to set up codes and guidelines for common trade. We could shop these around as an industry standard, but the big win would be to shop it to Putrajaya for establishment at the federal level. Sure, someday some crony company might make a few bucks as the 'designated standards organisation', but that's actually worth it if they fix this problem nationally.
- - (4) inventory and durables: startups such as FoodMarketHub, Dropee, and SupplyBunny are zooming in on this. Talk to them. On our end we just focus on developing heuristics for risk management, which can be easily taught to client grunts, and implemented on free software.
Well, that's just for starters... I'm typing on a piece of glass with one hand while trying to eat a piece of curry chicken with the other, so if you need more points, just yell, but I'll pause now.
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Oh, perks... revenue trigger for SST is one point five million Ringgit per year for restaurants (it's five hundred thousand for everyone else)? There is a loop hole also where non-F&B revenue is non-SSTaxable... which means, I think, and I have not tested this... that if you restructure every receipt to 20% charge for F&B and 80% charge for service then, you may minimise tax even further.
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