Extinction is Progress

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.

Addendum: I also read about people referring to football (soccer) as the beautiful game. I kinda get it, but really, I don't think it's also just a bunch of people doing gymnastics with a bladder. I find business and politics in general much more stimulating. Those are truly beautiful games.

Reflection: 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.

Stay Classy.

I shit you not. One Singaporean publication today, published a piece on the virtue of discrimination purely between wealthy and wealthless people. Their argument was roughly that 'the avoidance of neighbourhoods with concentrations of expat manual labour was not at all racism, but simply an avoidance of poverty'.

Well I thought they were approximately half right, in this set of assertions, but I wasn't sure how to say intersectionality in Singlish, so I just commented, 'theoretically, we can't separate classism from racism; fun debate'. And then the editor (admin) replied with something along the lines of 'maybe people just imagine discrimination', so that was a kill opening, and I posted the common template photo above.

I also said, 'personally I'm happy to call myself a classist of some sort. Racism is just an unpopular variety of classism. It's classism for the lower classes.'.

How do I even come up with this shit? 

Web Apps on FaaS: Six Weeks In (after Six Years Away)

I just realised two things about web development in 2020.

(1.) A lot of web application frameworks now assume responsibility for being HTTP (web) servers also. 

Initially, web servers were designed to serve static content. Then, people started serving dynamic content, and because language runtimes didn't come out of the box with HTTP servers, you typically had this kludge of middleware between a language runtime and a specialised web server program (the driver).

But now it is de rigueur that scripting languages must treat HTTP as a first-class environment, and so language runtimes are much more supportive of HTTP out of the box, leading us to gradually reduce reliance on specialised web server programs. The old web server layer has basically become absorbed by the old web application framework layer, and now they are often (but not always) the same thing.

This is particularly true of web-first language runtimes, like NodeJS and Go. Furtheronto this is the common trait: web application frameworks today have an opinionated approach to parsing HTTP. 

 (2.) FaaS throws a wrench into this. Functions as a service are basically ways to carve up vCPU time ... but their implementations range from being specialised in one web application runtime, to being web-application runtime-agnostic. In the latter case, this means that FaaS implementors have to pick some lower-level abstraction, which at this point in history, turns out to be typically (2.1.) a cGroups-type Linux containers (I haven't yet figured out what MSFT is doing in Azure Functions), with (2.2.) some sort of gateway/reverse proxy sitting in front of the former. So now F/PaaS providers are inserting themselves in a very minimal fashion as dependencies because there doesn't yet exist any common vendor-agnostic consensus on how to implement a F/PaaS. Nearly all of them have an opinionated approach to parsing HTTP.

Now as a web application developer, I want to be able to use FaaS without being overly concerned about vendor lock-in. However given that each FaaS vendor provides different host runtimes, we now need to write our applications in a way that is decoupled from those idiosyncrasies. Which brings me to my main point: FaaS web application frameworks are a strange beast. They have to address the following:

 ... oh where do we begin, close to or far from the metal? Let's begin closer to the metal:

(A) sufficient abstraction over operating system and kernel variables; fortunately this is largely handled by ...

(B) ... the language runtimes, whether they are compiler or interpreter oriented, they typically now all offer some sort of low-level virtual machine (not to be confused with The LLVM);

(C) ... THE VENDOR'S GATEWAY/REVERSE PROXY's opinion about how HTTP should be handled; that is to say, how you get your request data, and how you return your response data, will vary based on which cloud you are using at the moment;

(D) and finally, if you happen to be basing your FaaS web application framework on some PRE-FAAS WEB APPLICATION FRAMEWORK, then be prepared to have to abstract over ITS opinions about how HTTP should be processed. 

In summary, this is going to be a problem most FaaS developers can ignore. Using any D usually wraps up all the complexity of { A, B, D }, leaving us to figure out how to glue those all to C, which usually doesn't take too long. 

But what if we want to write a framework that abstracts over all of { A, B, C, D }? Well that seems to be a little more challenging. And that's what I'm thinking about today.

Periodic Re-risking

/was commenting in a forum on questions people need to ask themselves in managing their personal finances; my suggestion was that people need to periodically ask themselves if they're taking too little risk - some might find it is true, then save less and spend more on projects/

My background: my folks are super conservative, highly educated, class-conscious, non-business-oriented types. So the way I was raised, and given some more privilege in terms of aptitude ... I had all the tools to stay in the top quartile of the population class/pyramid just by getting and holding down the right kinds of jobs ... this wasn't even a question the entire time I was raised.

My own interest therefore, is in commerce - because it's stuff I don't think I grew up with a lot of knowledge about. I had other priorities marked out until the end of my first degree, so even when professors asked me to do little jobs like "I have some data in Excel that needs doing" I would just tell them "I haven't studied Excel", and they would be like "oh, ok".

Anyway, following my plan, after graduation (2005) I focused on deprioritising non-commercial studies, so that I could focus on commerce (and Malaysian political economy, but that's another story).

After a few years (2012) I found myself too comfortable again. I could just sit at home trading for a few minutes a day on the KLSE (this is not even a high-growth market) and double my ~40k small monies in a few months, while I spent most of my time studying other things. It was at this point that I decided to start discarding money again ... I never had a business environment to play in when I was growing up, and I was aware that business people need to be comfortable taking losses, in order to be able to approach large opportunities. At this point I basically told myself it was OK to torch the whole trading portfolio, just for the experience of it. And that's basically what I did over the next few months - I just let it sit there, and (since most of it was in options), the time value decayed to near zero.

That was one of the big learnings for me - I'm still building on it. I'm still looking for more commercial stuff to learn. I'm not sure if this counts as personal finance, so I don't talk about it all that much ... also I don't think it's relevant to most readers who are usually coming from the other end, and always worried that they have too little money.

I've "had too much" since I was in college ...