2020-06-14 at

Yawn #62

Apr 27 - Jun 14 

Target acquired. I hate the software ecosystem - it's such a mess. But hey, it's like government - the best thing on the table. Just do it.
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Time to remind myself of my responsibilities, and the ever-looming mortality of the enterprise which is entrusted to me. It's a restful day - it's a good time for reminders. Gotta buck up.
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Time to make a monster slide. But first, a bit of fruit.
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#legalese #ontology I think a fun argument is that the Pandemic is definitely 'force majeure', but any government action is less easily classified as such. The former is more akin to a volcano, the latter is more akin to a change in public policy which is subsequent to the former. What are your thoughts on this?
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Enforce waking, grooming, eating, lifting. Todo: * test flexibility of clientside flow vs Cognito-JWTAuth * test tag-limited roles in IAM * test CRUD scaffolding in Lambda-DynamoDB
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Today's distraction: time to circle back to stuff I postponed in college - macroeconomic terminology. One of a dozen areas I deprioritised for other studies. Well, it's time, bitch. #upgradeJerng
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Hm. I'm not really clear on how people expect to use software these days. (a) it just works (b) your documentation is complete (c) I might as well write my own?
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Moderately productive day. Still rather disappointed with vendors. Oh well. Obliterate these concerns and proceed with what can be done. Time to clean up and sleep.
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Awake. Half a night's sleep, or a third's. Time to enforce eating. Probably will get a little work done. Not optimistic about progress. On par with the mood of the past 42 months. Oblivion is a fine friend.
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OK, no mysteries for the next few hours. Just a lot of clerical typing ...
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Another day, another opportunity to disappoint myself. Also looking forward to getting sick after lockdown, since my immune system has been largely sitting on its ass for two months. Wimp.
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CORS problem. Back to studying how DNS works. . (Apparently I haven't logged into CloudFlare since 2015 when we bought this domain name. Nor have we used this domain name ... ) . TIL fully-qualified domain names end with a '.'. Disconnecting CloudFlare for the time being. Moving nameserver management to AWS Route 53, which we've been paying for but which I still don't really brain. One less third-party to worry about. More foo, less mess. On we go ... CloudFront required next. . staging scripts -> s3fs -> S3 -> CloudFront -> [DOMAIN] -> Internet -> [DOMAIN] -> API Gateway Custom Domain -> HTTP API -> Lambda . Ofmg ... are we done yet. I hate web development. :P . Scratch that. . Now we're just going to put the staging code on Lambda as well. . Now we're done. For the day. What a detour.
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I have decided, that whenever people tell me that they have expectations, I will tell them, 'what a strange reaction you have.' Because that seems a lot less expecting of them, than asking 'why are you angry?' :)
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Time to rest. Monday is a race day. Whee.
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Good morning. Another day begins.
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I'm so stressed.
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Off to PJ to fix a tap ... PM said can mah ...
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About ... seven people have whinged at me about "employers having to pay for employee costs" if they fall sick. 1. To some degree, this is nothing new. Read the Employment Act. 1. Don't let people scare you. It's the favourite tactic of parties shoving responsibility away from themselves. Governments do it all the time. 1. Get a lawyer. Even if the minister himself comes to your office and says you owe money, you can take him to court. Be very clear about what your obligations are. Likewise be prepared to pay for any consequences of your decisions. That is situational awareness.
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Seasonal humanitarian crises are a painful distraction. Some people will spend their time establishing equality and happiness for all conscious beings. It placates their sense of anxiety about the suffering of other people. Other people will focus on other things, because they are not predisposed to the same anxieties. We can argue about the morality of either tribe, but ultimately all tribes are only human. And humanity is a temporary affair. So my hope is that, in all their trade in anxieties, whether they favour empathy or ignorance, each party will succeed in fulfilling their own ambitions for existence. It is also an ambition to have no ambitions, but in order to achieve that, one has to be truly careless about existing. So in this season, I hope for more careless people.
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Not yet a productive day. Most of my challenges in machine wrangling come from having to overcome myself. More training required. Hours later, this is still a lot of (first-world) pain. On with work. Still a shitty day for productivity. Enforced feeding then.
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U turn. Back to R&D.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVC8b7R9BKQ&feature=youtu.be #backtowork #stafftraining Here is something fun, fashionable, and functional. (a) see if you can make your own masks and headgear for work; wash it every day (b) watch this video on shemagh usage, methods {1,4,5,6,7,9,11,12,15}
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I've come to realise that on its own (say I don't keep checking against clock time) my brain doesn't alert me to performance reductions. However performance is strongly correlated with nutrition, and I always forget to eat. So, I guess I need to schedule more eating.
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Aside: How long does it take an [128MB AWS Lambda function] to clear a needle through a blacklist of 50,000 UUIDs? "4.472409600019455 ms was the average time of 10 iterations."
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/Today we are complaining about banks in Malaysia. Here was my contribution to a thread./ I know I'm a tiny shit customer, but seriously what is wrong with the product knowledge of the branch staff? Is the training program designed to turn away tiny customers like myself? Just tell me what to do, already. Today, I go to, a "classy" Singaporean bank, where my business has held an account for five years. I ask how to apply for a credit card terminal and they are confused. Someone gives me a form, and a business card. I say, I have questions about the product. They say, to write the questions at the back of the form as they are only letterboxing it for me. I ask if the card belongs to the contact person at this branch. They say, no, they are only letterboxing. (Why give me a card?) I confirm that the person talking to me is the owner of the card. She tells me to give the documents to the counter. Later when I do so,the document counter asks where my signature is. I say, my signature is not approving any purchase I have incomplete information on. I show her the questions. She asks me who is going to answer my questions. I tell her to tell her people to call me. She looks confused. I do not think she knows anyone on the receiving end of the forms. And they probably told her never to accept application forms without a signature. Lmao. Update: sohai tetap sohai. And I mean this without specific assumptions about the sex or gender of all parties involved.
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Wondering if it's the right time to switch back to doing accounting. Haven't touched it in two months, but the world is moving on.
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A familiar blip on the threat radar. Staying course. Alerts up.
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Is there a SaaS that spins up a passive chatbot, which I can add to multiple Whatsapp
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Telegram
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Discord
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Twitter feeds and have the bot just consolidate a report on channel activity for me? ## Here is another product I would like to pay money for. (I am not sure how much, but would like to see someone develop a SaaS for this.)
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Inadvertently learning Express.
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2:43am. Done trying to learn new things for the day. Time to do work.
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 Get back to work, all of you. Embrace sickness and death.
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Need to convert cookie to header. Reverse proxy means ... we need a CloudFront distribution ... bleurgh. Oh no, ELB ... ( bleurgh, no ALBs are under EC2, not ELB ... ) I just created a CIDR, and I have no idea what it means. I want to die. :P And it's a wash. ALBs cannot front API Gateways.
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While I'm a proponent of eugenics and social Darwinism in general, I don't believe that my ideals are the ones which are more likely to survive. Look, I don't even intend to reproduce. But I do spend a lot of time talking about the state of the world as I prefer it. Sometimes I actually kick shit into place, but otherwise no, I do not think I am destined to have a great impact on the world. But one spends the grand sum of so many minutes of one's life on earth amusing oneself by making it more the way one prefers it to be.
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I don't mind complexity. I do mind when complexity doesn't pay me. So what I've gathered from poking at AWS is that there's a space for an agile serverless IaaS. I just don't know yet if it should be written ON AWS, or if it should be done entirely separately.
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2010: I'm appalled that Facebook loads 1MB and a hundred requests per refresh. 2020: We're looking at 993 requests and 15.2 MB. Fuck off - but then hey, I'm sure it makes Mac lovers happy. :) Update: NEW FACEBOOK, 2020: We're seeing 245 requests, and 2.8MB
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Don't blame the WHO. Or individual governments. Zeitgeist lah. Economic cycle is going through a phase of high inequality, due to overleverage. Inequality causes a lack of trust in public institutions. That's the crux of the voice war.
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Argh. Time to finally get back to accounts for a bit. At least now I know I have sessions and persistence, so the rest of the work to get CRUD scaffolding up is going to be pretty pedestrian.
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The day begins with pasta. Then coffee and reading for future work.
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Accounts, counselling of friends, a bit of database design.
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Time to rest.
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Looking forward to find out how all the suckers paying RM7500 for a whitelabel "food delivery mobile app and webhosting service" are going to fare. May you thrive.
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Good morning. Another dreary day, full of metaphorical scorpians and mildew. As it has been, for much of these five years. Is no one working late today?
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OK, I am very tired, and I want to sleep. Today was not so annoying - fewer dumb conversations than the day before.
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Good software is like a knife. It's transparent. You can adjust it every so often, and use it every day, and it'll last for quite a while. Popular software is like a car - costs a ton to make, makes loud noises, and just like a knife ... it too is a depreciating asset from day one of ownership.
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Awake. Time to reload social obligations into memory after a few hours of ignorance. Planning to see how I can try to avoid disappointing myself, while taking the expectations of others into consideration. A daily affair. My best friend asks me if it is her fault she is angry with her friends, and I tell her it is always the fault of the angry person.
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I'm just happy that after 10 years we can call Web DOM APIs without resorting to an abstraction layer over browsers.
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rachelbythebay rachelbythebay.com This is a really good blog (sysadmin). Posts since 2011.
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So back to what we were discussing in February ... ARE YOU READY FOR A GENERAL ELECTION?!? YEAH BABI. YEAH.
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I haven't used a legit IDE since DreamWeaver in 200x. Since GitHub Codespaces was trending ... I decided to check out AWS's Cloud9. It seems quite spiffy, as I am quite comfy with the Ubuntu
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Vim setup. However, I had this issue which seems common, but weird, and generally it has no public answers. If anyone knows what's up, please tell me what "VFS" is.
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CTOS is giving out free reports. Head to their website if you like. Limited time only. This is your CREDIT SCORE. Mine is only 587, and I have "no" income since March. /CRAI
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I hate web development. But let's do what we have to, to get this show on the road ...
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Awake. Let's make a pasta. Then let's build a middleware library for AWS Lambda ...
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Oh. NodeJS allows manual GC. This is good for FaaS bill management. - Also supports WebAssembly. Hmm. So my clients can throw blobs at the server for execution? (Nothing new, I know, but cute.) - Also supports process UIDs, meaning maybe we can track Lamba execution contexts by ID (!!). . Shit, I forgot how to read binary. LMAO "10" IT'S a TWO. Ok, carrying on. I think my 14-year-old computer quiz prize-winning self would be disappointed - but maybe not, in light of other events. . Updated list of things I should know but don't need to remember today (probably studied it before, but discarded the memory): common image blending operations, matrix-manipulation of images; unicode terminology, lexicographical mereological terms; OSI, CIDR, network masks; . Going for coffee with bestie. Not too long, as I have tons of work outstanding. But it's time to increase the probability of dying. . A middling day, with business interruptions, no structural progress. I will attempt to debug a performance measuring tool before bed.
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mould: A normal expectation for housekeepers. A shock to people who have their houses kept for them.
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Looks like a 28 hr day. Most people take 10 years to get from graduation to mid-career. Before I graduated, I had figured I was going to be 10 years late, because I had strategically deprioritised careering before graduation. So I had figured it would take me 20-years from graduation, to get to mid-career gait. I'm not disappointed that I missed monetising the COVID crash, because I'm only 15 years out on a 20-year trajectory. This is the second crash I've seen post-graduation (and as a student of commerce, since I avoided studying commerce before graduation). Time to "makans".
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Barely got any middleware done. But this is useful. And good enough to park.
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Anyone WTB a 2.5-storey shoplot in Damansara Jaya? Cheep cheep. RM 3.0 million, comes with free 24-h cafe, good brand, fully staffed, assholes not included (but available for hire should the need arise). Ok. Sebarkan. Money is cheap. Go into debt. Change the world. Do the right thing. (I can't do it for you.) Addendum: hoi, why are so many cognitively bankrupt people asking me what will happen to the tenant? This is not an issue that is different from any day of any tenancy. Go find your own answers
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Awake. Not yet dead. Checking up on people. Back to work, after food.
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The next unheeded warning will be a loss of data connectivity across the global Internet infrastructure. Some will call it a black swan when it happens. You should not be one of those people. What would your family and your business feel to be disconnected from the Internet without warning, for three months, starting today?
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Finding bugs in people's Cloud Computing setups is fun. I think I will start offering this as a service. The most common bugs are over-provisioning where people pay for 10,000% of what they are actually using. Secondly, not even taking advantage of basic financial instruments like "minimum commitment $10/year" to get 15-30% discounts.
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Customers are calling me to open the shop. State government doesn't allow it yet. Come on, state.
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Awake. ☠☠ Back to all the normal risks of business failure, ☠☠ after 50-some days of abnormal government risk. ☠☠
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Ah yes, as expected, after a two-month holiday, people have forgotten how to execute duties, so retraining shall commence.
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/Bantering about how my business direction specialises in dirty, difficult, demeaning, dangerous, and repetitive ...
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I just consider myself lucky to not worry about money, as an individual. Downside of being an intellectual snob: not a lot of friends in the business world. Hee
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Geez. I understand this a lot better than the other examples I got ... maybe it's because I ?curried? the data? IDK. Need to read terminology ALL_MIDDLEWARES.reduce ( ( DATA, CURRENT_MIDDLEWARE ) => CURRENT_MIDDLEWARE ( DATA ) , data )
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Time for physical QA. I am going out to a cafe for coffee at 6:30am. I don't even love coffee. Haha.
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A new friend from AWS spoke to me on the presumption that I'm trying to help build AWS-oriented user communities. I was sorry to be disappointing - the main reasons I'm in all these groups are (1) the HQ-issued documentation and product discoverability design suck, so I'm just as lost as all the other fuckers who live in those groups (2) I'm promoting a cafe which I'm not allowed to speak about directly. So boring.
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Due to mitigating circumstances, I have managed to reduce my phone plan to a target of RM15/month :P 
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Sales: OK - if we can maintain this daily growth rate for a fortnight, we will be ok.
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Promise.resolve() versus async IIFE ...
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People who commit more than 20% of their portfolios to a single asset class or stock will always be confused by people who never commit more than 20% to any individual asset class or stock. A high degree of interest is the 300% difference between 5% and 20%, for some, for others it is the 300% difference between 25% and 100%. Generally I don't bother trying to change people. Each person should do what makes them happy.
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Time to pick myself off the bed, to do WORK. Roll right, fall on hands, pushups. Because sleepy. And indisciplined. So stimulus required.
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It's a daily thought as a food service operator. I still eat chap fan. More about maximising freedoms within regulatory frameworks, and being ready for one's doom one way or another. In honour of governments. Lol
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I think Malaysian governments should just draft essential services into the civil service. (And move staff from non-essential, to essential services.) Civil service already functions as a price anchor - but whether work is efficiently delegated is a separate question. (Avoiding comment on the foreign workers; can leave that for another post. :P)
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Contact Tracing: just sharing our method - we only record phone numbers, no names or other identifying information. Every entry is timestamped and must be verified by miss-call from a landline by staff before entry is permitted.
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Non-stop stress. But that's the nature of solo work.
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I guess I never related much to people who expected to thrive early in life, decelerate in growth, and then suffer. I preferred in my late teens to aim for a lifetime of concurrent suffering and asset accumulation. I'm not sure if you'd call it a work ethic, or just a gambling strategy.
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Time for proper food ... at 3pm. I'm so ready to hook up Lambda to CodeCommit ...
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Too much anxiety - probably a dietary issue. Less creatine, perhaps.
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Surrounded by weaklings, it takes about 20 seconds of every minute to watch over them. Another 20 seconds to context switch back to my own work. And then, a fraction of that to be useful. Every hour, every day, for years. That is the plan. Such is society.
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Need to do housekeeping and delete more distractions. Hmm. Must look harder for people who can contribute to my wellbeing. Shun pestilence.
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Make the world an easier place to live in, or die trying. Because there's really no better way to kill time ...
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Time to feed. A break, and then a shower, then maybe more work, or at least a nap.
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Quality of work today: shit. Hopefully it's just serotonin withdrawal, and evens out eventually. Lol
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I want to just vomit and die. But given the quantum of complaints I have today, APM is probably a little higher than usual. Goodish news.
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Why am I writing a fucking MVC framework? Probably because I haven't managed to come up with an alternative to the standard pattern.
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Seriously, if I didn't think X market was trash, why would I want to work in it? If there's nothing to fix, why trouble yourself in any industry? And the same goes with talent management - you have a limited set of resources, and a very small chance of surviving in any business. Why would you not cherry pick the most advantageous options from the talent pool? I really do wish someone else would fix all these problems. At the end of the game, I just want more time to do math. :p
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Awake. Surrounded by whining. A lot of things to address. Shall first lend a physical presence to our meat nodes, for bonding purposes. Then, I must provide a negative outlook.
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Alright. Time to go full retard. The entire MVC framework is going inside one (1) Lambda function.
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TIL - always write the goddamn router before writing any prototype business logic.
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Almost fuckin done. But it's time to sleep.
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I was passing a character on a motorcycle just now. Or yesterday. It made me think it would be fun to draw a Judge Dredd styled comic of non-science fiction Malaysian characters.
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Year 1: Go-to-market. Staff paid well. Discipline repugnant. Year 2: Optimisation. Staff upskilled. Discipline imposed. Quality improves. Debt begins to accumulate. Steady profits, until ... Year 3: Shareholder revolt. Marketing funnels chopped. Staff size halved to accommodate. The second great upskilling. Year 4: Optimisation. The second peace. Technical R&D begins in earnest. Year 5: Staff learn to manage talent management of subordinates - we are full-cycle with Y1 at this point. Closure for pandemic. Reopened for business. Hours will now be halved. And we go on ...
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Extremely stressed. Probably too much insulin. Nap time. I think I can debug this hunka junk by tonight, but my brain needs to get past lunch.
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I can't find any interest in people who profess the merits of proven business models. What do we learn from those? Once proven, they teach us little, and are good only for the provision of jobs to business administrators. Hmm. I must study these people more, to understand why they care so much about making money.
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/commented/ I think the business environment is lubricated by more standardised contracts. So please succeed at putting some standard contracts on a public immutable ledger, and getting the government to endorse such workflows!
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Body isn't ready for work. But one more coffee, and back we go anyway!
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TLDR: Muhy has been a team player throughout his career, but he is not above being butthurt when slighted. Planning for PN began in January 2020.
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Well, today I've heard it all. A food delivery platform executive complaining that restaurants provide bad customer service. Whomever is downstream (i.e. closer to the customer) is responsible for customer service. As a discovery platform, you are not a delivery service, you are choosing to run a downstream retailer, so you can't blame the upstream factory in the long term. Fire the bad factories - it's your job to find better factories. There is no shortage of good factories. Earn your right to sell products. Saying "I am responsible for moving things from point A to point B," is not a value proposition. Any monkey can do that ... so it doesn't work if you want to be an apex brand, and take less than primary responsibility for customer service. Your end customer is not the restaurant, it is the consumer.
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Early to bed, and early to rise, a sixteen hour daily shift will make you sleepy, tired, and easily surprised. (Sorry, couldn't think of anything else to rhyme with.)
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OK, fam. Most useless post of today - I've drafted the end-to-end request-response lifecycle for this framework. It follows a boring traditional M/V/C separation of concerns. And all of it sits inside a ** single AWS Lambda NodeJS function **. It's stateless of course - you just pass routes in via /APP-PATH/?ruthenium=ROUTE for the time being. There is no documentation, but with some ingenuity you can import the .csv test data which should render the page below. Cookies and sessions are not yet fully implemented, but the framework for adding the middlewares which do things like that is pretty much there. I think. For added whathefuckery, I've also drafted a design (not yet included in repository, but described here) that stores virtual 2D tables ("grids" ... though maybe they should be "desks") in DynamoDB. The 1y-partition key is gridID such that all cells in a grid should be stored near each other, the 1y-sort key is rowID; it has one GSI, with a partition key rowID, and a sort key columnID_value so you can yank entire rows by {gridID?,rowID?}, yank entire columns or obtain rowIDs by searching {gridID?, ?columnID_value?} ... which should take only 2x storage, while being sufficiently performant for Small Data CRUD app prototyping, though I shan't be surprised if it slurps RCUs in a ridiculous fashion. We shall have to see. Later ...
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Highly stressed. Key short term goal: approach work in a more cavalier fashion.
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You're all going to die. Get used to it. Then we can all get back to work and hurry up with the dying.
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OK - we've downstaffed, tactically, so I'll be sitting at the factory all day to assist in case of emergencies. You know where to find me if you need (anything) the (tuition fee) is (one cup of coffee).
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Zoom would probably make a ton of money if consumer use was charged on a prepaid model. :warning: Your 40-minute free trial is ending in :three: minutes .. click to charge your card $0.10 to extend :two: minutes .. click to charge your card $0.10 to extend :one: minutes.. click to charge your card $0.10 to extend
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Nadella complaining that IRL meetups are necessary because people don't have waterfountain meetups over remote work. Someone needs to teach this boomer how to slide into them DMs
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Stop everything. Picking a cloud provider? Forget the American companies. Someone tells me that famous Chinese cloud assigns an ABG account exec to every plebe, and she will call you regularly. #gangsta
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TL:DR - this is just something I am thinking about, and it is not any sort of preference or proposal. I am thinking about how the politicising of wage gaps and illegal expats in Malaysia is related to our government's policies (official, or hidden) on how wealth should be distributed across Malaysians (more equal, or less equal). My view on managing illegal expat labour in Malaysia has developed slightly. Nothing has changed in terms of the hypothesis that, "a hard close of borders and a ejection of undocumented workers will cause essential goods prices to rise, ASSUMING that welfare policies for Malaysian citizens stays the same, and citizens generally remain incentivised to not-work for minimum wage". * However, in "the scenario above", I now see this as a public policy which would redistribute wealth from richer citizens to poorer ones. (I am saying that this change is "implied", by the policy of blocking foreign workers from taking all the cheap jobs - not my preference.) Effectively, the policy of flooding the market with lower wage demand hurts poor Malaysians more than it hurts rich Malaysians. And it enrichens rich Malaysians more than it enrichens poor Malaysians. The political trick is this, and it is classic: the rich Malaysians are incentivised to encourage the poor Malaysians to be angry at the expats, instead of letting the poor Malaysians discover that the true cause of the hurt to poor Malaysians is rich Malaysians who support the illegal expat phenomenon. Aside: (* We can separately discuss the branch where welfare policy changes, reducing welfare budgets, and increasing incentives for the poorest citizens to work at existing minimum wage rates, hereby increasing inequality.)
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National paid maternity leave. There's really no other way it makes sense. Just look at the Employment Act 1967. Private sector paying for individual differences in lifestyle preference makes no sense - if I have to give moms 6 months pay, I have to give all staff the same to be fair. So it is a bad law. :)
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People who want to discuss business without discussing the law are like people who want to talk about football without talking about referees and managers. It's completely sophomoric. If there were no rules I'd just break your arm and light a cigarette while strolling over to the goal post with the ball in my hand. The limits of your language are the limits of your world. I think this is the first time I managed to cover PPE in one post ...
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Back to the factory. First order of business, remedial training. Second order of business, bookkeeping. I'll be in all day - feel free to drop by for advice on (anything), the price will be (one cup of coffee).
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AWS Lambda: Something tells me we're going to ditch this platform if the billing isn't 10x more granular.
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End of day ish.
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Not a great day. Kinda ok. That's work. Otherwise I should probably pay more attention to sex life, as the last two years just kinda let it slip. Hmm. The decade is going ok. I am happy with my career. Unnecessary detail: this is less about the people I've been with, and more about the condition I've kept my dong in. Lol
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Oh good lord ... AWS parked authentication and session assignment inside ... the LOAD BALANCERS ...
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/conversations on AI/ Personally I just think of computers as little dumb people. I have been quite persuaded since many years ago that it is possible to model and implement human behaviour. Most traits considered idiosyncratic to humans are (a) randomness and (b) emotion, and we have very good models of both - at the cultural level, in terms of what a system expects, and its reactions, the latter is called the canon of the humanities, and the reason why current computers lack "humanlike behaviour" is simply a matter of robot-builders failing to educate robots. So I see education for humans and programming robots as the same problem. It's a cultural problem.
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All sorts of context switches today. - fixed a procurement shitshow - added comms coaching notes - addressed workflow issues affecting customer service levels - electrical wiring project - addressed emergency refrigeration issues - added comms coaching notes - addressed beverage production quality issue - added comms coaching notes - independently addressed procurement of hardware - accounts on hold - later, to idependently address software development . And that's just work. Not even the people I have to manage outside haha. Not much help, and no wages for a few months, so just gotta work harder and make fewer mistakes :p
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1. Hipster food is not an essential good. 2. Except for hipsters. 3. Hipsters are by definition a minority. 4. I hope you knew this if you decided to brand yourself as a hipster food place.
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Small epiphany : all work should revolve around a routine checklist of tasks (old); checklist should include a self-healing feedback mechanism (new). Staff that can't fulfill a process that is self-healing will select themselves out of the team.
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Sick of Lambda not having seamless Git integration? Fixed it. . This is NOT the CLEANEST workflow. But it is possibly the LAZIEST. It commits the deployment package (/var/task/*) to GitHub during the initialization phase of the Lambda function. . Here is a rough guide. You can try reading the comments, and looking at the Linux shell commands. . (Please ignore the surrounding application/nodeJS-specific code. Ruthenium is just the name of the surrounding app - please ignore that too.) . https://github.com/jerng-org/ruthenium/blob/b6f1c5f/modules/gitCommit.js
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Ok, definitely an issue due to deficiency of running.
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Car AC: Dodged a $130 bill. For now. Only reporting because I have a ton of other stuff that isn't working out yet. HAH
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Just unearthed some operational debt I took out in 2015. Good learning experience - 90% of the tasks provided to staff were returned to me with insufficient quality. So next time, I am just going to focus on quality, and run a revolving door instead of trying to lead by example.
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/ on helping people buy access to degrees
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I can coach him on IT etc. But cashwise I'm underwater myself. :) I think the gift of a degree is a gift of class. Education is something else. As for the environment I have ready, we are currently open daily 7am-10pm, and Internet is fast. I can make it free for him. Most of my time here is spent coaching PATIs on acquiring class markers, so he is welcome if he likes.
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Exhausted, scared, and ... still managing to maintain a policy of general detachment, so, back to work. :)
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Off to deliver moral support.
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Finally set up the Xeon workstation at the office. $0.0019/hr, accessed from an Atom board I bought around 2011 ... 
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I lied. Mansplaining for fun and profit is going back to work after eating a grapefruit and making a cup of instant coffee. Endless trivial tasks, this thing they call software development.
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70% of my social life consists of explaining structures to peons. But I suppose that is a calling. No use hoping for an easier environment if you're not willing to make one. I'm probably underestimating. It's probably up in the 85% - 98% range. Back to work. Enforced feeding.
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SS1 ADUN and ranting dog shelter operators :
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comment 1
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Oh dear. I have faced challenges in implementing laws on stray dog movements. I can't be specific in this medium, but of course, without specifics, I must highlight as I always do that one of the main challenges in implementing law and order in the treatment of strays in Malaysia ... is the absence of a Federal budget for programs which implements the laws written to protect animal welfare. Laws written without resource allocations are fairly flaccid. I will reiterate this line of thought whenever I see public discussions on this topic, in the hope that the systematic legislative and executive action will result in federal budget allocations and comprehensive policies which are actually capable of completing the execution of such laws regarding animal welfare. Meanwhile, I wish you all the best in dealing with public outrage.
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comment 2
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Wow, I have been on social media for two decades ... and this sort of he-said-she-said is quite common. I would advise both your parties to get proper legal representation. Otherwise it just sounds like an angry dispute without formal recourse.
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comment 3
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Arguing on social media is a trap. Do not do it. Simply make statements. VERY CAREFULLY WRITTEN STATEMENTS. I am happy to lend advice on this, in terms of communications management, but only if you want another nosy bugger giving you unsolicited opinions. 🙂
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Current forecast: CMCO extended till 9 July.
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Interesting: - foot traffic today was basically on par with a quiet day pre-lockdown - the main issue is still, that we can't operate at night : and the bulk of our revenue previously came from 9pm-2am business due to the nature of our brand - so we will just be pottering around in survival mode until I can get e-payments to work - same as every other year, really ... !
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I'm a slooww poke, I'm a slowwwww poke. I have no friends because I'm a sllllllloowwwwww poke ... (About six hours later : right, I'd like to get more work done, but it's time to enforce rest.) (About ten hours later : enforced waking, feeding, work.)
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OK. Miscellaneous community engagement done for the day. No more social work for now. Back to product development.
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Oh how our senses of time vary. I've been pretty much living in the same year every year since 1997, so it is strange to hear people say, "(something in 2012), oh that was so long ago".
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Need to remember to eat more for 72 hours after social drinking. Repair brain.
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Most people seem to think that working with raw materials at 10% cash cost means you aim to sell a product at 10% quality. This is hardy the case - it just means you have to spend 1000% time cost upgrading the materials.
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HIIT resumed, so time to start juicing, I guess. Also, hopefully less R&D today, and more just stamping out features. // That's it. I'm fucking pissed. (Not more than usual - but today, I have a special announcement.) I am now putting on my to-do list a rewrite of the protocol set { HTML, CSS, HTTP } and to demonstrate how to implement a simpler but fully-featured replacement ... and who cares if it's not broadly adopted ... I'll just have to show how it's going to be more performant even if we tunnel it through the old protocol set ... ! (Addendum: have iceboxed todos from earlier in life ... I also don't agree with the general mathematical notation for exponents vs logs (could be my fault), as the notation doesn't reflect the symmetry of the function pair. I also think that physics should be taught beginning with spherical coordinates, instead of cartesian ones. I don't expect to accomplish any of these things - but it would be nice to some day. Haha. Finding standards I disagree with - pretty much what my brain does on its own.)
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Aside - talking about cafe business models. I suppose now that offices have been deprecated, and everyone works from home ... now the third-place will be promoted and become the second-place. At least for the white-collar class. That's how it's always been for the non-working class anyway. Rich people wake up at home, rich people go to cafes, rich people go home.
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Enforced rest.
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People who care about their businesses don't deserve to keep them. Risk on.
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I had to train myself to discard wealth. To set money on fire. It is not something you want to get external funding for, and it would not work as you would not value the funds anyway. Emotional resiliance in risk-taking can only be achieved with your own time and money. After you achieve it, you may become a different sort of person. Sometimes by accident, sometimes by design. I miss my solitary training days 2001-2005 and 2012. Recently I have spent most of my time around less hardy people. Awake, again, and off to the office.
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Brief objective for maintaining productivity. Clear paperwork. Set up schedule draft. Get out of office and back to other office.
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Rather fatigued this week. More food required. My brain is failing me at work, so, it seems, today is mostly written off for housekeeping.
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It's one kind of evil to be prejudiced, another kind to be negligent, and yet another kind ... to design a program where you pick out a group of people, and infect them with a deadly disease, so that you gain political leverage by running a campaign about how disease ridden that group of people are. Speaking about no country in particular :P
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Figured out a standard style for encapsulating DOM event handler data under event emitted elements. Now if I can get that slide up to brain Web Components, then this will have been not a horrible day. Done, and doner. OK, I feel better. Enforced rest.
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Awake. Enforced feeding. Planning to rush work cleanup at station 1, then return to station 2 ASAP.
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Common issue I face in training staff: teaching them that being sorry is not a helpful protocol, they should never say apologise until a problem has been fixed.
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Just did a bad manglish impression of Hisham's daily case counts: but about sausages. Can forward you the Whatsapp message if you need a laugh.
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Awake. Time to feed. Then time to push paper.
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/comment on accounting saas/ Whatever you do, for this kind of thing, don't spend more than 100 development hours without seeing at least 10 people willing to use it for free, for six months. The cycles are very long because people are used to doing accounts once a year. The tech is very low sophistication so you should pay for cheap, predictable tech development. The main challenge is getting people to pay for the service, so if they will at LEAST use it while it is free, you have some useful growth. Otherwise it's overinvestment without tangible return. I run a cafe. We do all accounts internally, weekly or monthly. Outsource only for audit, tax. Xero based. Happy to JV with you on a feeless basis to develop this platform. However, I must say, I have spoken to a lot of people who can see the opportunity, but are afraid of low margins, masses of dumb clients, and years of hard work. Well we specialise in all of that - we are a cafe. :) Also we are building out our software stack to address all dirty, difficult, dangerous, demeaning, and repetitive task industries. And that definitely includes business administration. Lol
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While it is regretable that human lives are often considered cheap and disposable, it remains a fact that this is a present point of view. In taking advantage of sensitivities which crowds have for the birth of children and the maternal romance, sometimes a job entails that one deploy motherhood in a long campaign to draw attention away from other issues. I find it a fascinating study.
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Quite stressed today. More food required, perhaps.
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I think it's a good indicator that style matters more than substance in a nation's politics ... when the Treasury is dispensing health advice on its prime social media assets.
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Going to drop a cheque at the office. Anyone wanna hang out? Otherwise I'm headed home for work after.
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Next task. Evaluate. Take a deep breath. Oxygenate. Think. Start swatting ...
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/comments on the notion that price and value are correlated, in the labour market/ [citizen workers (vs expat workers)] faster, stronger, more cooperative? Or exoskeletons and telepathic head sets? The latter doesn't work, as if the productivity gains are tech, they can just be augmented to the cheaper meat. The main issue in [MY, SG] governments is that they are unwilling to transparently discuss the economics of importing cheaper meat factors. . I work in a manual labour industry. We consistently find that measurable performance per hour and year is higher per person, skewed in the favour of expats vs citizens. There are systematic reasons for this, in fact, it is tautologous with why labour imports exist at all. If you replace 1 expat, you therefore predict to require (1+F) citizens. Cost in units of heads already goes up. If you factor in price per head, it the increase is even steeper in acceleration. Lol
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Hopefully done fixing pinheads for the day. Time to return to my own stupid work, hopefully. . Two hours later. Setup complete. Time for a nap. Then to proceed with processing.
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Valid reasons for interstate travel in Malaysia: ☑ gotta job to do ☑ someone is dying ☑ someone needs drugs ☑ married; and about to commit adultery ❎ if you're single, go fuck yourself
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Breaking from metadevelopment, to return to development.
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HTML form validation attributes - wow, HTML is so smart now :P #obviouslyHaventWorkedSince2011 . element.dataset is also very nifty!
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In other news I've concluded that ESJS is the best way to refer to JavaScript.
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Awake. Enforced feeding. Supply runs. Morale checks. Then back to solitary work.
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back to regex
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Who's going to make a million dollars selling AntiFacistFacistClub tShirts?
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Time to nap.

Validation: /^((?!###)[^A-Z\[\]\n\r])+(\[((?!###)[^A-Z\[\]\n\r])+\])*(###\d+###)*(\[((?!###)[^A-Z\[\]\n\r])+\])*$/

Demarcation: /(?<head>^((?!###)[^A-Z\[\]\n\r])+)|(\[(?<asIs>(?!###)[^A-Z\[\]\n\r]+)\]+?)|(?<toArray>###\d+###)/g

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Awake. Produce.

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(on video of black people telling their younguns to find a better way to fight racism)
Sorry #triggerwarning but I think this is relevant to writing software (and whatever buttf*** frameworks) also ... btw I'm 37, and I don't actually like working in software development because I think the state of the art is full of shabby tooling. But I gotta do it for work anyway. 📷 So please make things better for the future.

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Generally terrified. More discipline required. I should tell my computer to start reading the operational mantra, again. Sometimes after months of working, minute by minute, for hours each day, alone ... I begin to doubt my own capacity to self-moderate. Perhaps for a few minutes or hours, while I work, the social part of my brain will run on a side thread a replay of various troublesome parties which have been processed by my threat radar at work, along with various fearful studies of people I've lost, and more whom I may lose in the future outside of work. But this is normal. At the end of the hour, another cup of coffee helps to kill off most imaginations (along, unfortunately, with most creative impulses), and being sufficiently drugged up, I return to work in a simpler fashion, albeit relieved of my greater qualities. But that is the nature of work. It must be done. The alternative, is nothing. Thirty-seven years is about a third of a possible lifespan; five years is a small project; three years of work with an arm and a leg missing, that is a good challenge. I must remind myself, that the persistence of the project is sufficient reason for its continuation. Altogether, to the end. :) The absolute worst part of this is dealing with peons who waste my time by telling me to do something else. It's as if, they imagine they are being helpful.


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Generally I am fairly confident about my prospects in life. And then I find myself surrounded by helpless people at every turn, and so as optimistic as I am about my own chances, I find it reasonable to doubt that any of the people I am aware of in my daily life will ever contribute much to society at large. But we all value different things, I suppose. One man's civilisation is another's living nightmare.


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Time for a nap.

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I think, I need to stop letting my own ineptitude get to me. The active selection of a mean 51% success rate means, sometimes the local success rate is going to be near zero for a sustained period of time. So I just need to get my thoughts in order, and proceed with ordinary business.

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/commented/ I am not interested in software development as a creative industry - my complaints are that it isn't sufficiently centrally designed, and when it is it is often badly designed.

This is not a problem if we argue that it is still allowed to mutate randomly because we gain the evolutionary benefits of trait mutation.

But if we take that argument, then we will agree that the field is immature.

Personally I need software to be so good that it makes all but a few programmers redundant. And I will probably be writing software and complaining until that happens ... which is to, till the day my body expires. Maybe longer if I have cloned my traits to bots which outlive me 

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Tired streak. Just gonna fix this one regex issue today, do payroll, and sleep.

Brazilian? So Sam is ACTUALLY black? Awesome possum.

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OK - I should take the rest of the day off, and do payroll, and update our accounts. This was a bit of a pain, but I think it's settled for the forseeable future until JSON / nested objects go out of fahhshen. I actually can't remember the last time I was sufficiently tired and alert enough to prefer a day off.


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Wow, we actually made enough to pay May wages! Except mine of course. :p


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Now that I've done payroll, I have a bunch of free memory, and I don't want the rest of my day off! Much to do. Maybe a bit of design analysis before the next nap.

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Another day begins. Update: need to spend more time in rest.

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Chamath:I like this guy. He thinks like me. Haha. We all want to privatise social welfare. Our difference is probably ... that he really wants to win, and I don't really care who wins: I'm morally ambiguous, and the cause for that is that I'm lazy. The thing I'm probably a step ahead on, is treating social apps as a farm - probably a generational thing. LOL

Every so often it's nice to be reminded that there are still smart people doing reasonably interesting things in the world at large.

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(facebook tab RAM usage) Disgusting, in this day and age. I don't know how they live with themselves. LOL

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Housekeeping day

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People who pay for degrees in an environment where anyone can pay for a degree are often disappointed when degrees do not translate to wealth. Anything that is common, is quickly outclassed. The point of class laddering is "don't be common," it's the exact opposite of "do the common thing."

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So far in 37 years I haven't designed my job searches with the intention of maximising current income. I wonder if I ever will. I always figured I'd do it in middle-age, but not before

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1. Pengetatan sempadan, baik.
2. Pengawalan pergerakan individu tanpa system electronik, buruk.
3. Dasar-dasar yang dikemukakan hanya sebaik pengawalan. Malaysia selalunya terlalu longgar dari segi pengawalan, menjadikan dasar-dasar berpuluh tahunlalu hanya wujud dari segi kesukaan sahaja.

Boleh diperbaiki ni.

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"Entrepreneurs seem to feel quite entitled."
"They may not feel entitled. But ranting may be profitable."

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Enforced tea break.

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Super stressy. Plan: eat, nap, go back to office for data entry. Forget about mountains of software development for a bit.

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OK, I've decided that forms are first-class data categories. Everytime (API) asks a web server for a form to fill out, to manipulate a donkey, (API) request should be of the (syntax) "give me a form about donkeys", not "I want to manipulate a donkey". #explicitOverImplicit

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New Facebook web UI is so laggy.

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Award winning travel video by Malaysia? Ok. But it needs more brown, round, and frowny, people.

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So much to do. I grew up with an interest in technology, but always found that the problems with squeezing value out of technology always have to do with technology's interaction with human layers. Later in my studies, I figured out almost in entirety how the individual human cognitive apparatus is structured as a information system. Over the last two decades I've moved back and forth across the divide ... twice, tech to art, then tech to art ... for tactical reasons on the secular timeframe. It's always been about patching up my deficiencies of knowledge on one end, while leveraging what I've learnt on the other. This past year I've been back to tech again - very specific, very tactical reasons, just trying to get a small business to grow on a single executive input. I look forward to the next ten years, and to the ten after that ... I wonder if I will ever catch up in basic competency, or if other people will have figured out the things I thought they would ... or if, as it often happens, I get bored of waiting, and just go take swings at it on my own.


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On bloody, lymph, metabolic rates, toxin clearance in the brainI find this coherent with my practice - if you study yourself closely, you can observe correlations between rates of metabolism in specific muscle groups, rates of circulation and breathing, and rates of conscious sensation in various sense modalities.


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Prioritisation - today I must work on more automation. I.e. code generators. /barf OK. But first ... after an hour-long fiasco afternoon ... I need to insert a global try/catch.

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Memory dynamics today:
- identified the landscape for a URL builder in JS; demarcated points of concern, and commited notes;
- pausing software development work;
- driving to office at 0645 to do data entry because I'm always late on bookkeeping these days;
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Different strokes for different folks I guess. Some people associate humanity with sentiment, and some associate humanity with reason. I associate humanity with ... folly ...

Let's try and do a little RFC diving before bed ...

OK, bed time. Hopefully I don't wake up. But that's HIGHLY UNLIKELY 


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"So what do I get?"
"You ... we'll make you head of Petronas."
"Petronas already a head. What are you gonna do with him?"
"Oh ... hm. Hm. I have just the thing."

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This is most inefficient but I am going to get up and force myself to do an hour of bookkeeping. Some is better than none.

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/comment/ One pattern I think they should implement:
- continuous clustering of content
- continuous clustering of threats
- when there's a correlation between contentClusterN and threatClusterM, there should be an auto-escalating moratorium on freedoms / distribution of N
- and then an exponential backoff style mechanism to de-escalate moratoriums

That's a basic pattern that could be useful ... as infra. Just an automated process to get it all going.

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Talk talk talk. That's what a businessman must do.

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Vagus study. Parasympathy.

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Please tell me Selangor is not going to keep everything closed at 10pm. FFS ... have the curfew in the day time when everyone is trying to get out. We're a tropical country ... it's more energy efficient to operate at night.

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/comment/

A bit too broad. It's like saying working in medicine is highly valued. In some countries, the payscale between surgeons and nurses is highly unequal, in some countries it is more equal.

I think most of the listed items are basic skills. Anyone who is good at a basic skill can monetise it by turning that skill into content. To some degree the content marketing skills referred to are thus valuable. Traditionally this is referred to as the discipline of Rhetoric. This is the author's main point of view.

The author is also aware of finance and technology, but not aware of how it works. So the tech items listed are also super vague. Of course, if you are good at AI deployments you can make money. But anyone can learn basic unsupervised learning deployment - you are not actually designing the algorithms, just running other people's work using CPU time like petrol in the gas guzzling engines of the 1950-1970s. In the future the pivot will be to building energy efficient engines, then there is no running from supervised learning R&D, which is frankly very similar to human pedagogy/training. So again we are back at Rhetoric.

It's all great if you have some understanding of how human minds are structured in great detail. Maybe you could make money as an "expert meditator"? Hey, I'm an expert meditator - and let me tell you, it's way easier to con people into a false sense of wellbeing through ritualistic practices, when they have developed few hard skills which allow them to systematically gain a uneven advantage in competitive spaces.

:)

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Semantic alternatives to whitelist/blacklist:
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- greenlist/redlist (will be obsolete in 50-100 years)
- passlist/faillist ("ill" is hard to read)
- grantlist/blocklist (four consonents per vowel, a bit chewy)
- goodlist/badlist (almost too trite)
- oks/noks (I like this one)
- letlist/banlist (i like banlist, but can't find a short prefix that opposes it; letlist is a bit twisty)
- prolist/conlist (i like the morphology, but it may have classist overtones)
- haraplist/ikatlist (jkjk)
- rightlist/wronglist (too easily confused with leftlist)
- allows/denies (IPTables inspired)
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Segue from a conversation in the computer language enthusiasts in Malaysia Telegram group.

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/comment/ This is a popular topic. Your writer's position is a well-accepted but incorrect one : companies like xyzFood are not obliged to be a "neutral platform". It is not in their reason for existing, it is not in their contracts with partners, it is not in their government regulatory requirements, it is not in their investor mandate, and so it probably is also not in their management strategies or operational procedures.

You can make a change by building a different company.

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At the office for bookkeeping.


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Jom study Malay :)
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/comment/

When there is enough money to pay people, delegation is the way to go. But delegating quality assuarance doesn't work unless the qualities demanded are rigid.

The alternative to delegation of course, is to work very slowly. In my current company, I have been working very slowly for the 2nd to 5th year. The first year was basically delegation and the second was wholey about cleaning up an absence of quality.

It seems unacceptable to most people, but I am happy to move slowly in order to get quality locked into place. After the second year (after one year of delegation, and one year of cleanup after that), I have gotten used to the notion that things I might normally do in one year by myself, now will take ten years to execute in a corporate setting, because the talent pool basically needs to be trained from a very low level to a very high one, manually.

As for R&D, even that will move slowly even though I am the only person working on it. It is just a matter of context switches. On days I do accounts, I forget how to write software; on days I write software, I forget how to speak English; on days I work on visual design, I forget how to fix fridges; when I am welding fridges, I have no memory of how business development works. It is just a good old heavy context-switching cost.

:)

I think if we remain in this mode, I too will increase in capability and the context switches will cost less over time. Nor betting on it, but it seems likely.

Other switches: when I'm unclogging sewers, I don't remember how electronics work; when I'm training staff I definitely don't want to be distracted by anything except the staff's cognitive model. Most of the time, if a business function stops adding value, it gets tossed. I used to write long and detailed updates for investor relations; but investors generally seem disinterested in anything more detailed than a P&L and how their names sound in the newspapers, so I have deprioritised shooting emails into the void. I used to put a super low priority on monitoring social groups, but then one of those groups got to my team and effectively shut down our social media operations for three years - now I make it a point of discipline to monitor every local causus I can get direct access to, and then some.


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Alright. Awake. 15 inboxes mostly clear (nowadays that's social networking apps I use for business). Time to feed. Regroup thoughts. Do work. Update all threat radars with new information, and have them in the corner while work is in progress.

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I was writing about what I do on my current job, and it got me thinking about my own developmental process. I've been fairly consistent in my approach by working on projects which are expected to take years and years to expire. Here's how it began. An old story, nothing new.

When I was five or six-years-old, the year before primary education would begin, my folks asked me whether I would prefer to attend a Chinese or a Malay school. Malay schools in Malaysia are the default, and require two languages; Chinese schools here require three. Having been exposed to the horrors of homework in kindergarten, I was quite adament about going to a Malay school where I would have less homework. My parents took this into account, but sent me to a Chinese school anyway. I readied myself for six years of pain and was not disappointed. This pattern was to repeat itself in two years, in six years, and in eleven years, from whence it began.

I ended up spending five years, not six, in the Chinese school, and got really good at using dictionaries, navigating bureaucracy, deploying political camouflage, cultural anthropology, and pursuing independent intellectual life under an umbrella of general resentment for my peers.

Same shit, different day, I suppose. I'm just doing what's easy for me, given my training. :)

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MySejahtera's sign-up and log-in process: what a piece of junk. Lol

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Promo post: Ivess was my seating partner for Std 5+6. As you can see, I was spoilt with good company from very early on in life. Anyway, she has two kids to feed, and she's selling USANA stuff now. If you want USANA healthcare products, please check out her profile and ask about it. /kthx :D

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I keep forgetting to stablise my core while desking, then my shoulders start to fuck up.

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SOGI / racial / national / cultural / tribal / subcultural language identity is something I may rarely empathise with. But living among people who live in such matrices, you play their games or they kill you. I'm mostly offended by people who believe in human rights, humanism, anything where there's some precept about what humans should do. Fie on you, and your prejudices. LMAO

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On Grab's B2B ERP apps: Here it comess ... going to be on the receiving end of 50 dungu questions a year about why we wouldn't bother using it (presuming we stay on course LOL). Probably about five-years in the making, based on what we know about the industry. The end game here is to try and glue everything together into an ERP / SAP for microenterprises.

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OK, I could do more coding, but it has been an interesting day, and I should rest.


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/comment/

1. Generally I avoid environments where i have to make and defend claims, so I shield myself from most causes of imposter syndrome where people make claims they are not sure they can defend. Different risk appetite. :)

2. "Move fast and break things," is a fun game. But usually I feel like I am only breaking myself.

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Up and at work. Who's up? Let's get coffee.

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Not much done yet, today. But that's the pace of work in a slow company. Time for a nap.

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It's story time. (I took a nap. Now I have stories.) I used to have a pattern of dating people who were leaving the country for one reason or another. I think there were three in a row. I'm never surprised, as I don't think much of being in Malaysia myself. Since 2005 I've been here because I've wanted a low-pressure life (read: no visa competition), not because I thought the environment would help me achieve great things. I just happen to have papers here, and I capitalise fully on that privilege without assuming it will last forever. I'll just enjoy my citizenship while it lasts, thank you very much.

So in 2015, there was someone I loved (still love), and we saw each other knowing it was going to splinter in like six months. Day one: the partner was sad, I was sad; day 1xx: we let it go, fairly quietly. I had a small chunk of savings from a project at that point ... about $15,000 ... which I know, is going to sound like a lot to people who make half of that each year, but it's also going to aound like nothing to the kind of people I'm used to listening to. For comparison, it's a month's salary for an early-mid career banker or consultant. Anyway, I've never been one to optimise for High Street jobs since that wasn't my comparative advantage upon graduation, so I've never bothered to make or save a lot of money (causally this all probably stems from me having not much of a priority on living long or being wealthy).

Now at the point we separated, I had already made the curated decision to not spend my savings on an extended business trip to the partner's destination city where I could probably have hunkered down and made a living doing remote work. Software development even in 2011 was fairly straightforward, you could learn things for 18 months, and then start billing $4000/month right after that based purely on new skills just acquired. Anyway, I didn't chase the partner. I figured they needed to meet more people anyway, and I should probably try to build a sort of sustainable cash cow.

So shortly before we broke up, I capitalised on a real estate opportunity and opened a cafe. It was fairly encouraging because a ton of equity ended up being sold via crowdfunding before I even got started. Everyone knows these folks are fairly unhappy because I've still not turned the company around since our go-to-market. No one's ever seen a cent of return, and we're barely making it through the SARS-COV-2 post-lockdown recovery.

What we do have going for us is a lot of optimisation and a team with enviably high morale. I wonder why our staff still want to work for us, but they still do, even with capacity chopped to 40% of the norm (where the norm was about 33% of our peak sales during GTM). Optimisations mainly accumulated in the study of industry-wide cost factors, and we've pretty much gotten into bits of everything from manpower, to product, to service, to hardware and software R&D. Forcing factors have been weird: no more debt, and no social media for three years ... and we're a brick and mortar business. Did I mention it's been five years already.

Anyway, enough with the boring businessy stuff. This is supposed to be a love story. Both that partner and I dated widely over the past period. The partner's long project ended, and we met up once for a chat and dinner. We both found ourselves no further forward in our respective careers, than we were five years ago, and we're each hyper-focused on digging ourselves out of whatever holes we've imagined our respective selves to be in. So on it goes, our paths diverged.

I never know if we will ever see each other again. I get a note every now and then, and then an epoch of silence. I don't think it's a mature treatment, but that's just who the counterparty is. I sometimes hear about them from mutual friends, otherwise I've been told not to reach out, only to be reached for. It is a relationship I am fond of.

But work must go on, so now that I'm done writing this, I am going to buy a bag of rice, among other effects. Work, work, work. :)

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Got your daily dose of fatalism?

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/poll on imposter syndrome/ Posting here after I commented on this in a "developers" group, and was basically told to f-off because I wasn't considered a developer and thus was not qualified to have Developer Imposter Syndrome. So now I am wondering about Entrepreneur Imposter Syndrome. ;)

Wow, them voices real! Maybe this is ... Imposter Syndrome Squared.

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A cheerful match, they trade high-fives and mockery intermittently.

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Too many people confuse emotion with intention. Emotions are complex data structures - intention is fuckin basic.

Moving on, too many people confuse emotion with self-awareness. This one is a funner example - do you identify with your emotions? If you do, then congratulations, you are fully justified if you also believe that self-awareness is hard to nail down - unless of course, you also believe that you can easily nail down the causes and effects of your emotions. However if you simply don't identify with the parts of your brain which produce and process emotional activity, what's left is also fuckin basic.

It really pisses me off to listen to people meander on and on about the difficult of building computational models for consciousness. I probably disagree with half of them (or more) about the model they are trying to implement.

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Long ass talky-talk shop kinda day.


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Swske. Enforced feeding. Enforced work. Can head out for coffee later if there is demand. Keep me posted. Will depend on traffic also.

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Once and for all, let's settle this issue of people who live in (or move back to) their parents homes. This is straight up corporate finance with regards to long-term capital allocation. The opportunity cost of real estate purchases was far lower in a previous era. The opportunity cost of time today is far higher than it was back then, due to to technological advances which allow individuals to co... See More

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Data structure and data operation design. Bleaurgh. Usually my favourite thing, but right now this is way too slow. But it must be done.

/

Rowlings TERF stuff:Incredibly sensitive topic, of course. A fundamental anchor for discussions in this space to distinguish between (a) arguments about how we police bodies and (b) arguments about how we police language. Because, while both are relevant, solutions to one or the other CAN IN PRACTICE be sensibly decoupled from the other. However, as one must always place disclaimers on things, it is FULLY COHERENT for anyone to demand a solutions to both (a, b) at once, and to deny a solution that doesn't solve both at the same time. I don't think it's necessary to link the two, but no one is forbidden from linking them. Oh well, that is the reason why this is complicated, is it not?

/

Exhausting day. Loads of threats on radar. I expect to fuck up a lot. :) First order of business, conclude computationally intensive tasks - so staying home, and working on software design. Maybe I should have just been a game developer. The stakes might be a little smaller. Nope, just a lot of foo. Lack of planning. Erasing everything.
/* Rewrite pseudocode for entire section.
*/
Standing by for five more years of biting the curb.

/

B12 + protein + toast + coffee => on to the second half of the day ...
later: time for a break.

/

Things I regret in this life.
1. Knowing too much about the human condition, in particular the structure of consciousness.
2. Talking about it at all.
3. Not having any interest in proving it to anyone, and therefore having few friends because most people who can think about things like this tend to be competitive bastards who can't relate to people who have nothing to prove.

/
Need to put major focus on my parasympathetic nervous system. Studies of this back in 2005-2007 were not as structured as I'd like them to have been.

/

1716 hours : wow this code is so pretty.
1717 hours : well, no one is going to read it. **deletes block**
1718 hours : begins Nth rewrite.

Attempting to implement a declarative syntax for nested document validation was probably the worst tactical decision I've made all month.

/

YES. SUBTLE MALAYSIAN TRAITS has a Discord server ... that means loads of people congregating, and I don't have to curate the space. Probably going to delete the Coworking Space server later ... actually no, the SMT server is not worky at all.

/

Two days of poor design work. Isomorphism was off by one degree. Need to fix that and rewrite.

But chores are getting done.

I need to maintain focus on sorting out PSNS / SNS balancing. Caffeine and running perhaps needs to be positioned more antagonistically.

/
For the same price, the imported labourer is of a higher quality than the local labourer. This is just business. But politicians will pretend it is anything else, and that is bad business - it is unfair to buy the superior product, then turn around and tell people "the product was no good, it was bad, smelly, dirty, stole jobs, contaminated our lives" when in fact the imported product is imported BECAUSE it was better. Politicians who act in good faith must address this issue directly, for what it is.


/
/limits on price increases for Polisi ini tidak wajar. Selain daripada kos pembelian barang baru, kos pengendalian barang baru (pemakaian, pembuangan, dan geseran masa akibat penggunaan barang baru) juga mesti dikemukakan dalam caj tambahan.

/

Hmm. Quite stressed this week. Unable to perform, and should probably pull back on the number of dumbfucks addressed on a daily basis. Need to consolidate efforts.

Later I am thinking perhaps implementation complexities are down to one badly named data structure field, leading to ambiguous control. So again we run into one of the two hard problems.

Nap. Shower. Feed. Another sprint. Can't wait to be done fixing this.

Redrafted. Break time.

10 hours after 0th edit : nested document validator, stablised.

/

"Do I need to understand math to be a computer programmer?" Well that depends, do you want to assemble the car, or design the engine?

/

I think the future of gig labourers is live streams. Hey watch me work, oops, got a call - going offline now, gotta make some money - oh wait, client said we can cast this. Go go.

Hey, don't get me wrong. I don't think this is a new thing. After all ... I was only brave enough to open a cafe because I completely understood social media. It is a competitive advantage that non-performers have no access to.


/

It's a rather strange period in my life.

"do only what is necessary" => completely familiarise myself with an entire programming language and its idioms and common implementations

"do what will add value to the business (one year ago)" => learn how to build a fridge

"rest and recreate" => collect and organise pricing data from AWS

"go to work" => make coffee; complain about coffee; data entry

"go to market" => go to Facebook

"hang out with friend" => make potato puns

"a good day at work" => staff learnt how to name an SKU correctly; didn't regress on any other points of learning; the lights turn on and off automatically at the right time of day



/

Errands:
- financial reporting
- push some creative work to GitHub for copyright purposes
- review electronic payment rates per vendor
- back to coding

/

There are two types of people. Useful, and not useful. Be useful.

/
Done with chores. Back to coding. After a break.

/

First let me say the presenter's concept of a "fast broadcast" was new / a good reminder (sometimes I never know if I'm thinking about something for the first time, because it sounds kinda familiar).

Overall I think the presenter's on the right track. The work where I have more depth in myself is in delineating the specific aesthetic (sense data) structure of fuzzy humanistic natural language words like agony, sadness, joy, etc. That's what I worked on in college. (I jotted down a model little while back, which you may find interesting if you like the video, [http://jerng.github.io/jenaime/pseudocode.html](http://jerng.github.io/jenaime/pseudocode.html) )

Anyway, you may want to watch this at 2x speed. Feel free to look us up for further discussion, DM, or in the comments. Remember to scope questions as narrowly as possible to maximise usefulness. 

/

The focus of this group is more towards history of philosophy, than philosophy. But this is a pretty good recovery of activity vs the complete obliteration of such academic departments in Malaysia in past decades. I'm told the organisation is linked to MOE. They have a LOT of videos where different people present, and they often get like 1k views. So this is an interesting barometer for what some Malaysians (a niche) are thinking about, in Malay.






^((?!###)[^A-Z\[\]\n\r])+)|(\[(?(?!###)[^A-Z\[\]\n\r]+)\]+?)|(?###\d+###)/g / Awake. Produce. / /video on how black civil rights needs restrategising/ Sorry #triggerwarning but I think this is relevant to writing software (and whatever buttf*** frameworks) also ... btw I'm 37, and I don't actually like working in software development because I think the state of the art is full of shabby tooling. But I gotta do it for work anyway. 📷 So please make things better for the future. / Generally terrified. More discipline required. I should tell my computer to start reading the operational mantra, again. Sometimes after months of working, minute by minute, for hours each day, alone ... I begin to doubt my own capacity to self-moderate. Perhaps for a few minutes or hours, while I work, the social part of my brain will run on a side thread a replay of various troublesome parties which have been processed by my threat radar at work, along with various fearful studies of people I've lost, and more whom I may lose in the future outside of work. But this is normal. At the end of the hour, another cup of coffee helps to kill off most imaginations (along, unfortunately, with most creative impulses), and being sufficiently drugged up, I return to work in a simpler fashion, albeit relieved of my greater qualities. But that is the nature of work. It must be done. The alternative, is nothing. Thirty-seven years is about a third of a possible lifespan; five years is a small project; three years of work with an arm and a leg missing, that is a good challenge. I must remind myself, that the persistence of the project is sufficient reason for its continuation. Altogether, to the end. :) The absolute worst part of this is dealing with peons who waste my time by telling me to do something else. It's as if, they imagine they are being helpful. / Generally I am fairly confident about my prospects in life. And then I find myself surrounded by helpless people at every turn, and so as optimistic as I am about my own chances, I find it reasonable to doubt that any of the people I am aware of in my daily life will ever contribute much to society at large. But we all value different things, I suppose. One man's civilisation is another's living nightmare. / Time for a nap. / I think, I need to stop letting my own ineptitude get to me. The active selection of a mean 51% success rate means, sometimes the local success rate is going to be near zero for a sustained period of time. So I just need to get my thoughts in order, and proceed with ordinary business. / /commented/ I am not interested in software development as a creative industry - my complaints are that it isn't sufficiently centrally designed, and when it is it is often badly designed. This is not a problem if we argue that it is still allowed to mutate randomly because we gain the evolutionary benefits of trait mutation. But if we take that argument, then we will agree that the field is immature. Personally I need software to be so good that it makes all but a few programmers redundant. And I will probably be writing software and complaining until that happens ... which is to, till the day my body exprires. Maybe longer if I have cloned my traits to bots which outlive me / Tired streak. Just gonna fix this one regex issue today, do payroll, and sleep. / Brazilian? So Sam is ACTUALLY black? Awesome possum. / OK - I should take the rest of the day off, and do payroll, and update our accounts. This was a bit of a pain, but I think it's settled for the forseeable future until JSON / nested objects go out of fahhshen. I actually can't remember the last time I was sufficiently tired and alert enough to prefer a day off. / Wow, we actually made enough to pay May wages! Except mine of course. :p / Now that I've done payroll, I have a bunch of free memory, and I don't want the rest of my day off! Much to do. Maybe a bit of design analysis before the next nap. / Another day begins. Update: need to spend more time in rest. / chamath: I like this guy. He thinks like me. Haha. We all want to privatise social welfare. Our difference is probably ... that he really wants to win, and I don't really care who wins: I'm morally ambiguous, and the cause for that is that I'm lazy. The thing I'm probably a step ahead on, is treating social apps as a farm - probably a generational thing. LOL / Disgusting, in this day and age. I don't know how they live with themselves. LOL (Facebook tab memory consumption) / Every so often it's nice to be reminded that there are still smart people doing reasonably interesting things in the world at large. / Housekeeping day / People who pay for degrees in an environment where anyone can pay for a degree are often disappointed when degrees do not translate to wealth. Anything that is common, is quickly outclassed. The point of class laddering is "don't be common," it's the exact opposite of "do the common thing." / So far in 37 years I haven't designed my job searches with the intention of maximising current income. I wonder if I ever will. I always figured I'd do it in middle-age, but not before / 1. Pengetatan sempadan, baik. 2. Pengawalan pergerakan individu tanpa system electronik, buruk. 3. Dasar-dasar yang dikemukakan hanya sebaik pengawalan. Malaysia selalunya terlalu longgar dari segi pengawalan, menjadikan dasar-dasar berpuluh tahunlalu hanya wujud dari segi kesukaan sahaja. Boleh diperbaiki ni. / "Entrepreneurs seem to feel quite entitled." "They may not feel entitled. But ranting may be profitable." / Enforced tea break. / Super stressy. Plan: eat, nap, go back to office for data entry. Forget about mountains of software development for a bit. / OK, I've decided that forms are first-class data categories. Everytime (API) asks a web server for a form to fill out, to manipulate a donkey, (API) request should be of the (syntax) "give me a form about donkeys", not "I want to manipulate a donkey". #explicitOverImplicit / New Facebook web UI is so laggy. / A fitting end to today's media cycle. / Award winning travel video by Malaysia? Ok. But it needs more brown, round, and frowny, people. / So much to do. I grew up with an interest in technology, but always found that the problems with squeezing value out of technology always have to do with technology's interaction with human layers. Later in my studies, I figured out almost in entirety how the individual human cognitive apparatus is structured as a information system. Over the last two decades I've moved back and forth across the divide ... twice, tech to art, then tech to art ... for tactical reasons on the secular timeframe. It's always been about patching up my deficiencies of knowledge on one end, while leveraging what I've learnt on the other. This past year I've been back to tech again - very specific, very tactical reasons, just trying to get a small business to grow on a single executive input. I look forward to the next ten years, and to the ten after that ... I wonder if I will ever catch up in basic competency, or if other people will have figured out the things I thought they would ... or if, as it often happens, I get bored of waiting, and just go take swings at it on my own. / /mechanism for blood/lymph toxin clearance during sleep / I find this coherent with my practice - if you study yourself closely, you can observe correlations between rates of metabolism in specific muscle groups, rates of circulation and breathing, and rates of conscious sensation in various sense modalities. / Prioritisation - today I must work on more automation. I.e. code generators. /barf OK. But first ... after an hour-long fiasco afternoon ... I need to insert a global try/catch. / Memory dynamics today: - identified the landscape for a URL builder in JS; demarcated points of concern, and commited notes; - pausing software development work; - driving to office at 0645 to do data entry because I'm always late on bookkeeping these days; / Different strokes for different folks I guess. Some people associate humanity with sentiment, and some associate humanity with reason. I associate humanity with ... folly ... Let's try and do a little RFC diving before bed ... OK, bed time. Hopefully I don't wake up. But that's HIGHLY UNLIKELY / This post is producing a pretty good dataset. It's in two groups. I'll report stats when campaign runs out of engagement. "I am reading about people facing depression because businesses are closing down, just like how people are passing away, from illness. I just want to write this note to remind everyone that death is part of evolution. It doesn't matter if you die, or you live, extinction is progress. We can celebrate it, whichever side of the living we are on. I often read about people who only identify with the survivors, and I find it a bit strange that people are sad when something dies. I think, whether people and businesses live or die, most of them are individually worthless anyway. Only civilisation proceeds, so we should identify with that. " / "So what do I get?" "You ... we'll make you head of Petronas." "Petronas already a head. What are you gonna do with him?" "Oh ... hm. Hm. I have just the thing." / This is most inefficient but I am going to get up and force myself to do an hour of bookkeeping. Some is better than none. / /comment/ One pattern I think they should implement: - continuous clustering of content - continuous clustering of threats - when there's a correlation between contentClusterN and threatClusterM, there should be an auto-escalating moratorium on freedoms / distribution of N - and then an exponential backoff style mechanism to de-escalate moratoriums That's a basic pattern that could be useful ... as infra. Just an automated process to get it all going. / Talk talk talk. That's what a businessman must do. / Vagus study. Parasympathy. / Please tell me Selangor is not going to keep everything closed at 10pm. FFS ... have the curfew in the day time when everyone is trying to get out. We're a tropical country ... it's more energy efficient to operate at night. / /comment/ A bit too broad. It's like saying working in medicine is highly valued. In some countries, the payscale between surgeons and nurses is highly unequal, in some countries it is more equal. I think most of the listed items are basic skills. Anyone who is good at a basic skill can monetise it by turning that skill into content. To some degree the content marketing skills referred to are thus valuable. Traditionally this is referred to as the discipline of Rhetoric. This is the author's main point of view. The author is also aware of finance and technology, but not aware of how it works. So the tech items listed are also super vague. Of course, if you are good at AI deployments you can make money. But anyone can learn basic unsupervised learning deployment - you are not actually designing the algorithms, just running other people's work using CPU time like petrol in the gas guzzling engines of the 1950-1970s. In the future the pivot will be to building energy efficient engines, then there is no running from supervised learning R&D, which is frankly very similar to human pedagogy/training. So again we are back at Rhetoric. It's all great if you have some understanding of how human minds are structured in great detail. Maybe you could make money as an "expert meditator"? Hey, I'm an expert meditator - and let me tell you, it's way easier to con people into a false sense of wellbeing through ritualistic practices, when they have developed few hard skills which allow them to systematically gain a uneven advantage in competitive spaces. :) / Semantic alternatives to whitelist/blacklist: . - greenlist/redlist (will be obsolete in 50-100 years) - passlist/faillist ("ill" is hard to read) - grantlist/blocklist (four consonents per vowel, a bit chewy) - goodlist/badlist (almost too trite) - oks/noks (I like this one) - letlist/banlist (i like banlist, but can't find a short prefix that opposes it; letlist is a bit twisty) - prolist/conlist (i like the morphology, but it may have classist overtones) - haraplist/ikatlist (jkjk) - rightlist/wronglist (too easily confused with leftlist) - allows/denies (IPTables inspired) - blocklist/passlist (via twitter user) . Segue from a conversation in the computer language enthusiasts in Malaysia Telegram group. / /comment/ This is a popular topic. Your writer's position is a well-accepted but incorrect one : companies like xyzFood are not obliged to be a "neutral platform". It is not in their reason for existing, it is not in their contracts with partners, it is not in their government regulatory requirements, it is not in their investor mandate, and so it probably is also not in their management strategies or operational procedures. You can make a change by building a different company. / At the office for bookkeeping. / Jom study Malay :) / /comment/ When there is enough money to pay people, delegation is the way to go. But delegating quality assuarance doesn't work unless the qualities demanded are rigid. The alternative to delegation of course, is to work very slowly. In my current company, I have been working very slowly for the 2nd to 5th year. The first year was basically delegation and the second was wholey about cleaning up an absence of quality. It seems unacceptable to most people, but I am happy to move slowly in order to get quality locked into place. After the second year (after one year of delegation, and one year of cleanup after that), I have gotten used to the notion that things I might normally do in one year by myself, now will take ten years to execute in a corporate setting, because the talent pool basically needs to be trained from a very low level to a very high one, manually. As for R&D, even that will move slowly even though I am the only person working on it. It is just a matter of context switches. On days I do accounts, I forget how to write software; on days I write software, I forget how to speak English; on days I work on visual design, I forget how to fix fridges; when I am welding fridges, I have no memory of how business development works. It is just a good old heavy context-switching cost. :) I think if we remain in this mode, I too will increase in capability and the context switches will cost less over time. Nor betting on it, but it seems likely. Other switches: when I'm unclogging sewers, I don't remember how electronics work; when I'm training staff I definitely don't want to be distracted by anything except the staff's cognitive model. Most of the time, if a business function stops adding value, it gets tossed. I used to write long and detailed updates for investor relations; but investors generally seem disinterested in anything more detailed than a P&L and how their names sound in the newspapers, so I have deprioritised shooting emails into the void. I used to put a super low priority on monitoring social groups, but then one of those groups got to my team and effectively shut down our social media operations for three years - now I make it a point of discipline to monitor every local causus I can get direct access to, and then some. / Alright. Awake. 15 inboxes mostly clear (nowadays that's social networking apps I use for business). Time to feed. Regroup thoughts. Do work. Update all threat radars with new information, and have them in the corner while work is in progress. / I was writing about what I do on my current job, and it got me thinking about my own developmental process. I've been fairly consistent in my approach by working on projects which are expected to take years and years to expire. Here's how it began. An old story, nothing new. When I was five or six-years-old, the year before primary education would begin, my folks asked me whether I would prefer to attend a Chinese or a Malay school. Malay schools in Malaysia are the default, and require two languages; Chinese schools here require three. Having been exposed to the horrors of homework in kindergarten, I was quite adament about going to a Malay school where I would have less homework. My parents took this into account, but sent me to a Chinese school anyway. I readied myself for six years of pain and was not disappointed. This pattern was to repeat itself in two years, in six years, and in eleven years, from whence it began. I ended up spending five years, not six, in the Chinese school, and got really good at using dictionaries, navigating bureaucracy, deploying political camouflage, cultural anthropology, and pursuing independent intellectual life under an umbrella of general resentment for my peers. Same shit, different day, I suppose. I'm just doing what's easy for me, given my training. :) / MySejahtera's sign-up and log-in process: what a piece of junk. Lol / Promo post: Ivess was my seating partner for Std 5+6. As you can see, I was spoilt with good company from very early on in life. Anyway, she has two kids to feed, and she's selling USANA stuff now. If you want USANA healthcare products, please check out her profile and ask about it. /kthx :D / I keep forgetting to stablise my core while desking, then my shoulders start to fuck up. / SOGI / racial / national / cultural / tribal / subcultural language identity is something I may rarely empathise with. But living among people who live in such matrices, you play their games or they kill you. I'm mostly offended by people who believe in human rights, humanism, anything where there's some precept about what humans should do. Fie on you, and your prejudices. LMAO / Here it comess ... going to be on the receiving end of 50 dungu questions a year about why we wouldn't bother using it (presuming we stay on course LOL). Probably about five-years in the making, based on what we know about the industry. The end game here is to try and glue everything together into an ERP / SAP for microenterprises. (Grab finally rolls out ERP-oriented tools) / OK, I could do more coding, but it has been an interesting day, and I should rest. / /comment/ 1. Generally I avoid environments where i have to make and defend claims, so I shield myself from most causes of imposter syndrome where people make claims they are not sure they can defend. Different risk appetite. :) 2. "Move fast and break things," is a fun game. But usually I feel like I am only breaking myself. / Up and at work. Who's up? Let's get coffee. / Not much done yet, today. But that's the pace of work in a slow company. Time for a nap. / It's story time. (I took a nap. Now I have stories.) I used to have a pattern of dating people who were leaving the country for one reason or another. I think there were three in a row. I'm never surprised, as I don't think much of being in Malaysia myself. Since 2005 I've been here because I've wanted a low-pressure life (read: no visa competition), not because I thought the environment would help me achieve great things. I just happen to have papers here, and I capitalise fully on that privilege without assuming it will last forever. I'll just enjoy my citizenship while it lasts, thank you very much. So in 2015, there was someone I loved (still love), and we saw each other knowing it was going to splinter in like six months. Day one: the partner was sad, I was sad; day 1xx: we let it go, fairly quietly. I had a small chunk of savings from a project at that point ... about $15,000 ... which I know, is going to sound like a lot to people who make half of that each year, but it's also going to aound like nothing to the kind of people I'm used to listening to. For comparison, it's a month's salary for an early-mid career banker or consultant. Anyway, I've never been one to optimise for High Street jobs since that wasn't my comparative advantage upon graduation, so I've never bothered to make or save a lot of money (causally this all probably stems from me having not much of a priority on living long or being wealthy). Now at the point we separated, I had already made the curated decision to not spend my savings on an extended business trip to the partner's destination city where I could probably have hunkered down and made a living doing remote work. Software development even in 2011 was fairly straightforward, you could learn things for 18 months, and then start billing $4000/month right after that based purely on new skills just acquired. Anyway, I didn't chase the partner. I figured they needed to meet more people anyway, and I should probably try to build a sort of sustainable cash cow. So shortly before we broke up, I capitalised on a real estate opportunity and opened a cafe. It was fairly encouraging because a ton of equity ended up being sold via crowdfunding before I even got started. Everyone knows these folks are fairly unhappy because I've still not turned the company around since our go-to-market. No one's ever seen a cent of return, and we're barely making it through the SARS-COV-2 post-lockdown recovery. What we do have going for us is a lot of optimisation and a team with enviably high morale. I wonder why our staff still want to work for us, but they still do, even with capacity chopped to 40% of the norm (where the norm was about 33% of our peak sales during GTM). Optimisations mainly accumulated in the study of industry-wide cost factors, and we've pretty much gotten into bits of everything from manpower, to product, to service, to hardware and software R&D. Forcing factors have been weird: no more debt, and no social media for three years ... and we're a brick and mortar business. Did I mention it's been five years already. Anyway, enough with the boring businessy stuff. This is supposed to be a love story. Both that partner and I dated widely over the past period. The partner's long project ended, and we met up once for a chat and dinner. We both found ourselves no further forward in our respective careers, than we were five years ago, and we're each hyper-focused on digging ourselves out of whatever holes we've imagined our respective selves to be in. So on it goes, our paths diverged. I never know if we will ever see each other again. I get a note every now and then, and then an epoch of silence. I don't think it's a mature treatment, but that's just who the counterparty is. I sometimes hear about them from mutual friends, otherwise I've been told not to reach out, only to be reached for. It is a relationship I am fond of. But work must go on, so now that I'm done writing this, I am going to buy a bag of rice, among other effects. Work, work, work. :) / /poll on imposter syndrome/ /comment/ Posting here after I commented on this in a "developers" group, and was basically told to f-off because I wasn't considered a developer and thus was not qualified to have Developer Imposter Syndrome. So now I am wondering about Entrepreneur Imposter Syndrome. ;) Wow, them voices real! Maybe this is ... Imposter Syndrome Squared. / Too many people confuse emotion with intention. Emotions are complex data structures - intention is fuckin basic. Moving on, too many people confuse emotion with self-awareness. This one is a funner example - do you identify with your emotions? If you do, then congratulations, you are fully justified if you also believe that self-awareness is hard to nail down - unless of course, you also believe that you can easily nail down the causes and effects of your emotions. However if you simply don't identify with the parts of your brain which produce and process emotional activity, what's left is also fuckin basic. It really pisses me off to listen to people meander on and on about the difficult of building computational models for consciousness. I probably disagree with half of them (or more) about the model they are trying to implement. Via a new friend: (biomimetic architecture) / Long ass talky-talk shop kinda day. / Swske. Enforced feeding. Enforced work. Can head out for coffee later if there is demand. Keep me posted. Will depend on traffic also. / Once and for all, let's settle this issue of people who live in (or move back to) their parents homes. This is straight up corporate finance with regards to long-term capital allocation. The opportunity cost of real estate purchases was far lower in a previous era. The opportunity cost of time today is far higher than it was back then, due to to technological advances which allow individuals to convert time to capital more efficiently. If you have a family that you identify with (and not everyone does), then the body corporate is better off living in the capital asset purchased in a past era, so that current time accounts can be expended on maximising current growth. I'm sure it's been said before, though. Just a recap. / Data structure and data operation design. Bleaurgh. Usually my favourite thing, but right now this is way too slow. But it must be done. / Rowlings & transphobia: Incredibly sensitive topic, of course. A fundamental anchor for discussions in this space to distinguish between (a) arguments about how we police bodies and (b) arguments about how we police language. Because, while both are relevant, solutions to one or the other CAN IN PRACTICE be sensibly decoupled from the other. However, as one must always place disclaimers on things, it is FULLY COHERENT for anyone to demand a solutions to both (a, b) at once, and to deny a solution that doesn't solve both at the same time. I don't think it's necessary to link the two, but no one is forbidden from linking them. Oh well, that is the reason why this is complicated, is it not? / Exhausting day. Loads of threats on radar. I expect to fuck up a lot. :) First order of business, conclude computationally intensive tasks - so staying home, and working on software design. Maybe I should have just been a game developer. The stakes might be a little smaller. Nope, just a lot of foo. Lack of planning. Erasing everything. /* Rewrite pseudocode for entire section. */ Standing by for five more years of biting the curb. / B12 + protein + toast + coffee => on to the second half of the day ... later: time for a break. / Things I regret in this life. 1. Knowing too much about the human condition, in particular the structure of consciousness. 2. Talking about it at all. 3. Not having any interest in proving it to anyone, and therefore having few friends because most people who can think about things like this tend to be competitive bastards who can't relate to people who have nothing to prove. / Need to put major focus on my parasympathetic nervous system. Studies of this back in 2005-2007 were not as structured as I'd like them to have been. / 1716 hours : wow this code is so pretty. 1717 hours : well, no one is going to read it. **deletes block** 1718 hours : begins Nth rewrite. Attempting to implement a declarative syntax for nested document validation was probably the worst tactical decision I've made all month. / YES. SUBTLE MALAYSIAN TRAITS has a Discord server ... that means loads of people congregating, and I don't have to curate the space. Probably going to delete the Coworking Space server later ... actually no, the SMT server is not worky at all. / Two days of poor design work. Isomorphism was off by one degree. Need to fix that and rewrite. But chores are getting done. I need to maintain focus on sorting out PSNS / SNS balancing. Caffeine and running perhaps needs to be positioned more antagonistically. / For the same price, the imported labourer is of a higher quality than the local labourer. This is just business. But politicians will pretend it is anything else, and that is bad business - it is unfair to buy the superior product, then turn around and tell people "the product was no good, it was bad, smelly, dirty, stole jobs, contaminated our lives" when in fact the imported product is imported BECAUSE it was better. Politicians who act in good faith must address this issue directly, for what it is. / /hair saloons/ Polisi ini tidak wajar. Selain daripada kos pembelian barang baru, kos pengendalian barang baru (pemakaian, pembuangan, dan geseran masa akibat penggunaan barang baru) juga mesti dikemukakan dalam caj tambahan. / Hmm. Quite stressed this week. Unable to perform, and should probably pull back on the number of dumbfucks addressed on a daily basis. Need to consolidate efforts. Later I am thinking perhaps implementation complexities are down to one badly named data structure field, leading to ambiguous control. So again we run into one of the two hard problems. Nap. Shower. Feed. Another sprint. Can't wait to be done fixing this. Redrafted. Break time. 10 hours after 0th edit : nested document validator, stablised. / "Do I need to understand math to be a computer programmer?" Well that depends, do you want to assemble the car, or design the engine? / I think the future of gig labourers is live streams. Hey watch me work, oops, got a call - going offline now, gotta make some money - oh wait, client said we can cast this. Go go. Hey, don't get me wrong. I don't think this is a new thing. After all ... I was only brave enough to open a cafe because I completely understood social media. It is a competitive advantage that non-performers have no access to. / It's a rather strange period in my life. "do only what is necessary" => completely familiarise myself with an entire programming language and its idioms and common implementations "do what will add value to the business (one year ago)" => learn how to build a fridge "rest and recreate" => collect and organise pricing data from AWS "go to work" => make coffee; complain about coffee; data entry "go to market" => go to Facebook "hang out with friend" => make potato puns "a good day at work" => staff learnt how to name an SKU correctly; didn't regress on any other points of learning; the lights turn on and off automatically at the right time of day

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