2023 review, 2024 outlook

I miss college. It took me about three days to figure out that most people there were more interested in partying than in learning things. So almost immediately I began independent studies, and avoided the parties.

2023 has been a useful year of catching up on low priorities, learning how to fix walls and other sundry things, diet and exercise optimisations, emotional labour for peers, bits of charity here and there, and talking to all sorts of people about their funny little businesses. 

Just the other day I tried amphetamines for the first time - or what I was told were amphetamines, a quarter of a dose of MDMA - and my conclusion was it was roughly as effective at that level as getting coffee on a solid breakfast. Not super useful, given the long-term damage and regulatory non-compliance, but I can see how they are effective performance enhancers for young executives and military operatives.

I've observed peers who spend days each month pointlessly stimulating themselves at the cost of long-term development. I am reminded that this was very boring to me, as a teenager. I am probably still a teenager, of the mental age of fourteen.

I am not sure if I can persuade anyone to replace pharmacological stimulants of hormonal cascades, with natural activities : early morning exercise, and food.

It is a mystery to be considered in the future. I am looking forward to 2024.

Next year will be more like college.

Time quality management - in social relationships

Anyone looking for quality time with me, is probably not going to find it by booking in advance. The nature of my prioritisation is that individual relationships will generally be on a lower rung than my other interests, so interruptions will occur. The only way to get guaranteed focus from me is by chance - you happen to have found me, or I informed you that I have no other business at the moment. And you get me for the moment. I can throw up schedules for people, but that isn't going to change my overall priority rubrick - unless I contract a period of time as an explicit top priority, it is probably going to be overridden if higher priorities turn up. That being said, I think I've managed to fully deliver on the time blocks of my appointments in December. There were a lot of social commitments. I have been planning to turn up for everything I signed up for. I may not be thinking about them keenly, but I will be present.

Risk-return calibration

Solo-ing concurrent complex projects is naturally associated with risks ... perhaps 30% of projects will have negative returns, the next 50% will cover the costs of the first 30%, and remaining 20% provide positive net margins. So it is naturally associated with complaints and a volatile schedule. This sort of lifestyle/career is not compatible with people who :

- don't like project failure, and want to push negatively returning projects to below 30%, and sometimes 0% of their portfolios ( most people I meet are in this category )

- want to see their breakeven point come from less than 80% of the bottom projects of their portfolio ( as above )

- don't want to complain daily 

- don't want scheduling volatility 

I think people who don't complain exhibit low intelligence - which isn't to say they are unintelligent, they may simply be introverted about their intellectual lives.

Projects types I am working on these days : 

- social partners,

- charity cases

- manual skilling

- asset management

- technology R&D

- physical conditioning

- home economics

- business development

Anger Management

Figured out a nice summary to help us all understand how to deal with angry people. On the days they agree with this, we should be able to get along. On the days they disagree, they will probably not want to interact with me.

1. If I'm mad at you, it's my problem.

2. If you're mad at me, it's your problem.

That's all, really.

Long, lugubrious, conversations - the mood of 4Q2023

Today's Whatsapp counselling session took nearly three hours. I am concerned about my friends' anxieties, and will accommodate chats to discuss their concerns.

Sometimes their concerns are criticisms of my behaviour, and I simply check that my friends understand me correctly, and that they see me for what I am. If they truly understand my point of view, then they should expect me to provide the same outputs each time they provide a particular input, and it would be futile for them to repeat their same point over and over again. Once I am convinced that someone talking to me is fixed in their ways, I will usually leave them be, with less engagement, as there are few avenues to help them become less anxious. 

Here are some points raised, and my common responses :

1. "Jerng complains a lot ... " : I need to coach myself to be better - as no one else is going to do it for me. There are very few days of my life not dreaded, lol. Life is just a long wait. So I enjoy complaining. It is my culture. The lyricists I grew up with were Billy Corgon and Thom Yorke, so go figure - I suppose I'm juve that way.

2. "... on social media." : Well social media is efficient - minimum effort, maximum reach. What better way is there to manage one's relationship with others in general? Bear in mind that I tend to find individuals boring, and I am more curious about how to engage with the species as a whole.

3. "Jerng is contradictory about liking money, and making fun of people who like money." : Money bores me ... I try to get as much of it with minimal effort, while focusing my time on stuff that can't be obtained with money ( usually learning stuff, or some other cognitive gymnastics ). I love complaining about money, because it irritates people. QED, I like being irritating. Be the change.

4. "Jerng is irritating." Well if everyone annoys me, it's only fair that I annoy everyone back. I do like to remind people to be more irritated by themselves - because generally people aren't as irritated with themselves as I'd like them to be. I do it because they would become the kind of people I like. Be the change.

5. "Jerng thinks he is special, and all his acquaintances refer to him as weird." Yes, it's quite on brand for me. I haven't reached the point where EVERYONE refers to me as a creep. Hopefully I can balance the irritation levels to avoid that. QED - the democratic opinion is that I am special.

6. "Jerng is special, in a disordered/disabled fashion." Given that I intentionally irritate people - I think it's a matter of who, how much, when, and where.

7. "Jerng receives more commentary from ladies." Not to be sexist but ... 

8. "Jerng appears to want to get rid of his friends." I appreciate my friends, but there's a limit : everyone's disposable ... so I definitely don't appreciate old friends in the way many people appreciate old friends, as in they are classified as a non-disposable group.

9. "How would you know new friends are better than old?" The new friends are better simply because they are new, lol. People generally bore me, so it's a matter of freshening the air.

10. "Jerng is not that exciting to begin with. " I'm not trying to be exciting ... I am trying to be excited, there is a difference.

11. "Jerng writes about his love life." I write about my social life in general. If you want to call it love life, you may, but I don't think about it that way. If it is love life, then my love life with Malaysia is the general superset which I refer to mostly. Individuals I write about just happen to be part of the local scene.

12. "Jerng never faults himself." Who's looking to blame anyone? I just say life sucks, I'll deal with it.

13. "Jerng lacks accountability." One has to agree on an accounting standard, before that can be discussed. Most of us probably disagree on standards, but we rush to discuss accountability.

14. "Jerng takes opportunities with people, and emotionally abuses them." My point of view is that I'm doing other people a favour - some are needy, some are not. Some ask for help, some are offered help even if they do not ask. The audacity! Why not?

15. "People who can make it financially, wouldn't even bat an eyelid at Jerng." People should be financially independent, and care less about people like me. We agree. 

16. "Jerng is abusive." I refuse intimacy, and I offer it. The frequency of this varies from counterparty to counterparty. I am here to remind people that they are responsible for what they want, and they can choose what they want.

17. "Telling people to get their own place is bait." If someone has their own home, they can see whomever they want to see, it's about THEIR FREEDOM. I need not be involved.

18. "Jerng gaslights people." People can say things I disagree with, but if they are asserting things I disagree with - they can be said to be gaslighting me - we simply disagree.

19. "Jerng gets people addicted to intimacy." If two people are discussing intimacy, and are intimate once, or twice, it does not mean there is anything beyond that. The point of social interaction is to understand other people - that is the entire enterprise of meeting new people.

20. "Letting people into your home is a laborious form of charity." Some people are averse to sleeping with strangers, and letting strangers into their homes. It is a big deal for them. Not all of us feel it is a big deal. I like strangers.

21. "Jerng hurts people." The way I see it, he only way to reduce being hurt in the long run is for person to become independent. So all the short-term "miss this," "care that", "want this", "want that" ... is trivial, and I don't mind running over it with a truck. I can only advise - if someone disagrees, they will discard my advice.

22. "Who is Jerng to advise anyone?" The notion of "who are you" is usually used by people who would assume that "who a person is, affects what they can do", but I don't have this limitation ( on myself ) for the most part ... the notion of "who" is trivial. I simply do what I like. What I am, is a person that does what they like, and I encourage others to do the same - and I discourage others, who tell others not to do it. That is "who" I am. I am the person they are talking to - that is all I care - if they don't want to talk to me, they block me - simple enough. And one day maybe, I will go to jail for talking. That is also ok. It is all in the plan.

23. "Nobody likes laws like Jerng." The law is something written - the interpretation is up to the judiciary - and there are executive operations which are independent of both items above. So we can die by many means of governance. One does not need to be a politician - anyone can be targeted by ordinary governance and end up in jail - that is a fact.

24. "People ask why anyone is friends with Jerng." You know, I find them very cute, right? Because they are the masses that I irritate. It is their loss if they are suffering. I simply bring more suffering, until they block me, or change. It is easy to focus on an agenda, if one does not care who agrees or disagrees with it.

25. "People just thing Jerng is peculiar and likes attention." Well I need to find some sort of entertainment in this life. So that's it. It is better to stick out like a sore thumb, and be a pest, than to put up with common tastes.

26. "Some people like Jerng." Good for them, I hope it makes them happy. I try to ignore them as it distracts me from my objectives ... of being irritating.

27. "Jerng is a source of trauma, and trauma solutions." I leave the appreciation to the audience, I only want the problems - and will go find more problems after solving old ones.

28. "Jerng only calls at night, at his convenience, when he has no other companions." Agreed, I prefer to sleep with a companion - but I have little other interest in people - hence I prefer if companions are self-absorbed also, with similar needs.

29. "Jerng needs to be loved." I'm more oriented to be focused on being ok with being hated. :D So it is incompatible with people focused on being loved. Matter of policy. I don't mind being loved - but it's not policy to prioritise it. For some people, it is. For some people it is not. I am on the nots.

30. "Jerng sells vague promises." I pretty much tell people that I like cuddles and conversation. The details they can find out as they go. 1. Don't over promise. 2. Over deliver. 3. Don't take what wasn't signed for. 1 and 3 go together. Explicit > implicit. It's clearer if you get into details. The world is full of fools who don't do details - I will not play their game. To my advantage? Precisely why they are fools. What is it to me?

31. "Accountability." Attachment is a problem to be solved by the person who is attached. That's my guideline for people. It's quite an ancient concept. The word accountability is thrown around like water - to be accountable for the use of the word, one has to be more detailed about how it is used. See related point 13. If it bugs you, take it to court - that is the standard of accountability.

Curious Little Things

 I've spent the last few weeks of my life catching up on low priorities - one of which has been "technical analysis" for asset prices. This is a musical activity, about aesthetic ratios, similar to fashion or dance. The behaviour of price curves is cute, like the movements of small animals of children - curiosity and shock, follow the same meter. The simple curves look like snakes and worms, but I'm sure some chibi trading tool exists where you can make the price curve look like a small furry animal ... 

No one creates demand

Creating demand. No one "creates demand", everyone either leverages on existing demand, or anticipates future demand. You don't make people fall in love, you only ever figure out what they are, then build a strategy of seduction. That is your job, as a new product developer - it is a sub-discipline of marketing, and marketing is a matter of behavioural economics.

Classes of Capital

 DIY everything. Dependence on financing implies a fundamental lack of human capital. 

Financial capital is looking for fixed capital, human capital, brand equity, or intellectual capital ( feel free to suggest alternative type of capital ) . If you don't have FC, HC, IP, or BE to begin with, the business is basically a pipe dream 😛

Fact being : dreams are easy to sell to folks who have already committed their asset allocation to buying dreams.

Coaching myself on being more careless

I've been training myself to make all sorts of investment decisions over the years. Some don't involve money at all, only meat and time. Some are calculated, some are intuited. In 2012 I was mainly concerned that I would be afraid to lose money, so I torched $25,000 very slowly over about three months, just to coach myself to be intentionally careless. Then in 2015 I wrote off about $15,000, and committed my life to a business, which ended up lasting 5.5 years. In 2023 I find myself worried about my work, but after some reflection, I think it is more a matter of fear of being wrong ( epistemologically ) than fear of losing money. So I have to practice being wrong more carelessly. That is something I should look forward to doing more in 2024 ... taking higher risks of judgment, and writing off the consequences immediately, before the outcomes are known. That should help me to improve my focus on work.

2024 "resolutions"

So I have been doing this thing where I try and figure out how I want to think about money. Generally I'm not sure how much I care or don't care about money, so I let investments sit around "just to see what happens i.e. I am lazy", and get waffly ROI on it. I think my 2024 resolution should be to actually play the game as if I care about it and get better ROI on active investment ... so to reduce negative cashflows associated with capital depreciation.

I plan my life around the local minimum wage. Malaysia had no MW until 2012. As MW changes, it provides a nominally real unit against which to measure my work. 

2008 : capX-ed 1.6 MW ( inferred ) on a study break

2012 : capX-ed 0.8 MW on a study break ; 

CF_i : invested 3.7 MW, returned 0.6 MW ( capAp-ed 4.6 MW, capDep-ed 7.7 MW )

2015-2020 : capX-ed ( 2.3 MW + all income over five years ) on studies ;  

CF_i : invested 4.6 MW, returned ( some tiny fraction, yet to be finalised )

2023 ( to-date ) : capX-ed 1.3 MW on a study break ;  

CF_i : invested 5.6 MW, returned 7.7 MW ( capAp-ed 7.7 MW, capDep-ed 5.6 MW )

Joy is such a poor measure of living

I would like to think highly of the world, and the people around me, but generally I find myself feeling that I live in a world of plebs. billionaire plebs, penniless plebs, all sorts of plebs. What does this mean?

Well you see, I find that most of these people seek to enjoy the world rather than to understand it. So they are quite boring, as they do not enjoy understanding enjoyment. 

Respect, Due to Money : a Rich Kid problem

In 2023, I had a lot of time to reflect on the poor judgment of a few rich people. The pattern which stood out was, it seems that ... "rich dad" kids, i.e. kids born into privilege, sometimes have a chip ... this chip is, that they can't shake their dependence on the concept that money commands respect.

Perhaps I'm mistaken, and some "poor dad" kids have this chip too. But I have seen it more among the privileged, like Prosporo, of the House of Usher.

So this chip, manifests as ... a desire to seek the approval of people with money. 

Respect is attributed by chip bearers, to people with money ... and when the chip bearer has money, they expect to command respect, and are furious if this morality is not respected by others.

When a chip bearer is unable to imagine a value without money, then value is associated only with money. Whereas some of who grew up without money, are quite content without much of it at all. Push comes to shove, if one is threatened with death ... a chip bearer may think about the quantity of money that must be paid to escape death ... non-bearers may more readily accept the futility of monetary tools, and simply focus on the joy of dying ( whether they choose to do so as pacifists, or in vengeful blazes is a separate matter ).

The chip is sometimes is complicated by an inability to distinguish between love and money - so to some, to give love is to give money, and to give money is to give love - which is a fertile bed for dysfunction, as you may imagine.

Money as a Sign of Faith

I often meet people who don't understand money. Many people believe that money has fixed value - but that is false.

MONEY at any time has value, only in terms of the PRICE OF GOODS AND SERVICES at any point in time. When goods are expensive, money has less value, and when goods are cheap, money has more value. So the value of a unit of money fluctuates, constantly.

Now, people buy insurance against these fluctuations - instead of holding money, which has no intrinsic value, people sometimes buy ( property rights / contracts over ) actual goods and services instead. This is why hoarders hoard things, learners learn things, and people get into relationships where they can control their supply of social services without resorting to exchanges of money.

The tendency of a person to hoard money is a direct indication of their level of faith in society. People who trust in the stability of other people hoard money. People who do not trust in other people, hoard other things instead, which do not depend on other people.

I just happen to be of the latter variety - I am very rarely impressed by other people, and so mostly I hoard information, which provides me with direct access to goods and services, regardless of society.

Human Normality

Some people are just walking social issues, resulting from poor parenting, left for the world to renovate. At some point the world can only let them rot. But if they are offensive, they are captured and subjugated. But there is no matter of good or bad in these cases, except from the point of view of each involved individual. Some are happy unleashed, some are happy being repurposed, some are happy repurposing others ... each does as they see fit, in a sea of meat.

Review of Mission

Everyone who has feelings about anything is part of the universal problem, whose long-term solution is a social work project I take upon myself, mainly by way of structuring mechanisms to reduce the magnitude of attachment that anyone has towards anything. Mostly that's a study of computers at this point, but often I help individual people and businesses with their current needs.

Strategy means Control

Main error executives make is : goal -≥ execution

Main pattern should be : goal -≥ strategy -≥ execution 

... whereby the application of the pattern is fractal, and has to cascade down to sub-goals. A strategy as a goal will fail if it isn't under control.

So another way to say the same thing is : goal -> control -> execution

Fingers X Toes

Toe-tips are as important as finger-tips, for proprioception, and calibration of all intermediate joints and muscles. But in today's sedentary life, toe-tips are often forgotten during calibrative operations.

Being the Change

I care about people's feelings. I really do. But in an unusual way.

I care that people learn to control their feelings. Generally I care about that for most people - most people are relatively out of control versus my preferred level of control. 

I would much prefer a world where the genes or education system enabled every citizen to be free to choose at a moment's notice if they wanted to blow up a city, or eat their neighbours raw. But this is not the world we live in.

I am working towards a world where this is the case.

Preferences : Instinct vs Policy

It's a bit annoying when people tell me I am trying to appear as if I do not care for things. It's already established that I say I care about a lot of things ... but that's like being able to appreciate all sweet food. I don't want to appreciate sweet food, so I have operational CONTROLS as a matter of policy, to remove sweets.

"Not caring is the policy - of course I care ... it's just my political position to not care :P"

"I thought it was pretty clear"

"Basically if I have to go to war for it ... I will have a strategy that is expressed as a political position"

"You can love someone and still believe the world will be better without them, so you kill them"

":)"

"That's just how it is"

"Do you find this conversation enlightening?"

"Like you learnt more about me?"

Crowd Control / Quality Control

I have had anxious friends. Sometimes I make them more anxious, and they stop being my friends. But that is ok. Because I don't want anxious friends.

Test and filter; up or out.

Sometimes I'll organise meetings, and everyone's okay. Sometimes I've been informed that people are anxious before a meeting - in which case, I should probably work harder to remind everyone to expect to be anxious, because if they enter the meeting defensively, there's probably going to be less collateral damage, and the outcomes are likelier to be overperformant.

Oh well. Crowd control. So many ways about it ... what is true for friends, is also true for staff and business partners.

Polyamory in Finite Time + the Importance of Scaling-to-Zero

Nasikistan was a trading nation, with an excess supply of rice. Five brother nations traded with Nasikistan, buying out the rice, and selling in other goods and services. As the demand for rice grew, the brother nations found they had to bid-up the price of rice, and yet were not able to ask more for their own goods at the present time. A richer brother had more rice, and a poorer brother had less, and diplomatic animosity developed from this situation. In another time, the demand for rice dwindled, and Nasikistan sold rice at low prices previously unheard of. The poorest brother had learnt from their earlier failure, and took this opportunity to stockpile rice, later even developing a futures contract for the same. And so the economy of rice in the region developed more and more sophistication. Another brother did not want to participate in the new financial instruments, and so faced certain classical difficulties no longer faced by the other brothers - dissatisfied by its position, it announced that it would withdraw from trade entirely, forming an island nation.

The same is true of polyamorous relationships ( between individuals, or businesses ) - people will ask for more or less, but ultimately time is a finite resource, and not all individuals require other people's time if the cost is too high. Price elasticity is a thing! And so is scaling to zero ...

What Makers should Expect, from Managers

/  /

Graham used the maker-manager language in 2009. Let me write a bit on a common question that makers have ... what the hell are the managers doing?

I have done both kinds of work. 

As a manager, one essentially does a lot of pre-science. The bulk of one's cognitive load should be data-capture. One watches events, more about humans than machines. A good machine comes with a manual. Zero humans do. The framework for evaluating a human is therefore, a matter of myriad hypotheses, none of which are useful without good data.

There are hypotheses of both the macro and micro kind. In economics, microscale refers to individual people ... but we have to go lower, and smaller, in daily life. We can refer to individual appearances as macroaesthetic, and the lower scale then as the microaesthetic ... perhaps a way to get into this is to say, we refer to body-language. We look at fashion choices, word choices, muscle tone, tics, habits, finger to finger coordination, posture, eye movements, poses, rhetoric, speech strategy, and ... we try to statistically infer, by intuition, except when there is time to spare, whether any words spoken, actions taken, conscious or unconscious ... whether they are as they seem, or deceptions, or mistakes, or suggestive of opportunities.

Similarly managers zoom out from the microaesthetic, and regard the microeconomic, and the macroeconomic orders of things.

This is what makers must expect of managers.

The influence of forgotten dreams

All the things we think, have iterated through dreams we cannot remember. It's not a matter of romance, but of hormones - mostly only the dreams dreamt near waking are bound to short-term memory. But it seems, those dreamt further from waking, may still graduate into long-term memory, and pop up in future recollections.

That being said, we also do some processing subconsciously, while awake. But I was particularly curious about the mechanism above, today, as I ate my rice and kimchi.

The Business of Eating for Pleasure

Generally, I try not to think about this too much, as I regard the people who eat for pleasure to be a sort of plebeian sub-class whose whims are to be manipulated for my commercial gain. Things get interesting however, when I have social partners who do prioritise eating for pleasure.

One of the protocols I worked out with one partner today was, that we should save both our money on buying me HORECA food. Of course, we are going to spend some of out money buying THEIR horeca food, but since they seem to appreciate my company when they are eating horeca food, I can bring my company, and save money by ordering less. Meanwhile, I have an adequate protocol for nutrition at home, so I can pre-game before accompanying dates to horeca events.

I do eat for pleasure, as I do sleep, exercise, and have sex. However these are not end-goals, as I ultimately find them to be repetitive and boring tasks. While sensory data can be organised in a variety of fascinating ways, it is ultimately, still just sensory data ( or what we call, experience ). Maybe it is a matter of alignment with the Maslo(w) hierarchy. But whatever.

Lead / Follow / GTFO

Lead / Follow / GTFO - an effective heuristic. I have been impressed by and proud of my colleagues who stepped out of the way when they did not receive support from their bosses. 

I have been been disappointed by those who would neither lead their bosses, nor follow their bosses, not leave their bosses. Likewise I am often disappointed by bosses who do not lead, do not follow, and do not abdicate.

Marrying for Money in Malaysia

I've had chats about this pop up at parties. And with some people I date from apps. Here are a few preliminary considerations.

1. If you need to determine an operating income which would make it worthwhile, take your professional rate and double it. If your salary is RM 20,000, you're going to need the deal to be worth RM 40,000. Why? The law does not prioritise pre-nups ... in a worst-case scenario, you lose half of what you own, plus or minus this and that.

2. If you don't like people, coaching, negotiating, and servicing with hospitality, you may want to double your rate again. Lol. Fortunately I already enjoy all of the above, so I am cheap.

3. There's a period of marriage where you can undo things - via an annulment. Following this period, for simplicity's sake, all property to be considered mutual should be in both spouses' names, or divided down the middle and transferred. This reduces messes in the event of any divorce, slightly, unless damages are sought for this or that, then you have to recalculate.

4. Generally unless one partner is exceptionally wealthier than the other, these deals don't make a lot of sense for reasons listed above. 

5. You probably want to get a legal consultation before you agree to marriage. Do this without your potential spouse. Then do it again with them, if you love them.

6. If you ignore all the legal and financial opportunities and risks of marriage, then you may be in for more fun than you anticipated. Nevertheless, the blind approach works for many people, so you shouldn't feel too bad if you belong in this category.

Template for refurbishing a built environment (WIP)

1. Walls and ceilings first, floors last. Move all fittings to the centre of rooms, freeing access to walls and ceilings as necessary.

2. Delint before scrubbing, scrub before wiping. 

2.1. Vacuum off all loose fibres and cobwebs, THEN

2.2. scrub down surfaces with a firm brush, THEN 

2.3. scrub/wipe off water-soluble stains with a rough towel, AND 

2.4 use NaOh to remove grease and protein, or thinner and acetone to remove polymers, as necessary.

3. Uncovering plaster damage. This will involve 

3.2. scraping off paint bubbles, 

3.3. digging under cracked surfaces, and 

3.3. deedging the plaster where it has expanded to protrude from the wall by as little as 50 to 200 micrometers ( 0.05 to 0.2 mm ).

[ Identification and replacement of faulty pipes and wires would be around here. Future note. ] 

4. Leveling plaster. 

4.1. Any cavity deeper than 3 mm may be considered for a base-level of cement, perhaps made with latex plasticiser instead of water. 

4.2. White plaster can be coarsely applied as a base for paint - this may take a few iterations of 

4.2.1. laying with a scraper / trowel / screed / level of apprpriate width,

4.2.2. drying, 

4.2.3. post-dry levelling, and

4.2.4. pre-painting with sealer / primer.

5. Painting. 

5.1. If by mistake a paint of the wrong tone or sheen is obtained, supplies can be used on the undercoats.

5.2. Whichever layer of paint is final, should be examined from a slanting angle against bright light to check for the matching of sheen.

// 

Operational Timings

A few hours of drying and setting time are required between certain steps. So work on a site may need to be spaced out in gaps of four to hours, for a tropical climate. This provides up to three work sessions per day. 

Thinking about a Meal

Thinking about a meal : the thought process regarding all data captured from the body following a meal - very interesting.

Economics of Avoiding Plebs

After reviewing some literature on empathogen-entactogens, and their role in certain subcultures, I thought about how I explain myself to my peers.

If one regards as life's greatest good / pleasure / opportunity ... some X ... then, it is perfectly reasonable to develop one's own constitution, with specific supplements, to maximise one's quantity of experience of X. Economics entails there is an opportunity cost of course. Some XAs are mutually exclusive with some XBs ... for example where,

... XA includes : the company of others, sex, the consumption of food, music, the experience of travel, fashion, and culture

... XB may then be : time for studying, via reading or other methods, research, and development of anything, including but not limited to commercial ventures

While on specific occasions I have no specific reason to avoid XA, or when XA necessarily supports XB, then XA is a legitimate short-term optimisation target. However, most of the time, XA is regarded as a distraction from XB, and so anything that creates more preference for XA is simply a distraction from the preexisting preference to maximise XB.

Scarcity mentalities are quite useful when the nature of life is finite. The dismal science is thus named for that reason.

Senseless Grief ...

... occurs only in the context of expecting the improbable. Antecedent follies will be the death of us all, eh?

Go-to-market Margins

Generally it is advised for new market entrants in any space : unless you already have a supply-chain advantage :

it's better to sell a superior product at a higher margin than the current market leader,

than to sell an equal product at a lower margin than the current market leader.

So if you have exactly the same {base substance), then you can consider improving either its packaging only, or its packaging and additives.

Just confirm your margins - you have to land safe if you cannot move the same volume as the incumbent.

-

So with this in consideration, I'm wondering WTH Malaysian's local indie burger brands are doing, consistently underpricing vs. imported chain brands.

Endocrinal Phenomenology?

After twenty years of monitoring my learnt ability to quantify and manage conscious states of mind, I am now beginning to cross reference the data available to me, with the body of scientific literature that exists, in order to form hypotheses about what hormones are involved in triggering changes in my state of mind.

Hormonal Architecture of Sex

So I have this hypothesis, that some erogenous zones are closer tied to dopaminergic systems, and some are closer tied to serotonergic systems. Each has specific effects on short term memory and thus motivation. Each has specific interactions when followed by different hormonal cascades, or by none.

I'm not sure how to study this. I'll just think about it for now. My main interest is to figure out how these separate pathways can be hacked to contribute to productivity outside of coitus ... though I'm sure the coital effects will be popular also.

Malaysia : Property Manager SLAs Remain Weak

Reminder for Malaysians : 

Property Manager ( Act 242 ) SLAs for Strata Management Corporation clients ( Act 757 ) are typically weak on 

(1) security guard management, 

(2) act 757 administration, 

(3) community management, 

(4) quantified quality assurance 

... these are not explicitly covered in law or professional guidelines. So most client mCorps and JMBs just agak-agak it.

AI in SMBs : it's just cheaper HR/TM

/ How can AI be used in SMBs? /

The main economic multiplier of AI in the next 50 years will be improving human productivity through coaching, development, training, counselling, consulting, and teaching.

The FIRST thing to note is that many companies really suck at these business functions in the first place ... so they may not notice that AI can make these really cheap - because they were not originally hiring humans to do it.

But the effect of these is manifold. We leave it to each company to figure out how to run HR ... ( AI is just a cheaper version of HR/TM ). 

Day Architecture : Ten & Four Quarters Model

"Reviewing my daily architecture. I'll revisit old designs later, but let's look at current requirements first."

( DAY )

24 hours : 10 assigned to sleep : 14 assigned to wake

14 is a weird number, but it scrapes by, by being even, and thus only mildly awkward when broken into quarters of 3.5

//

( FIRST waking quarter )

- food prep is notably clumsier than buying prepped food, taking up to 40 extra minutes per meal

- to reduce prep time, the number of prepped meals is minimised : currently I'm down to two per day

- a large bolus of calories ( currently configured at 900 or so ) does weird things to insulin and the subsequent hormonal cascade; in order to mitigate productivity losses from PM1, I may need to allocate high energy demands into this quarter also

( SECOND waking quarter )

- no detailed plans yet ; but logically, there should be antagonistic activity versus what is executed in WQ1

- generally we're looking at no eating

- perhaps a continued allocation for high energy demands, in order to maximise useful tissue damage

( THIRD waking quarter )

- I am not sure if PM2 belongs here, or in the next WQ

- if PM2 doesn't go here, then some sort of snack is in order

- appropriate WQ for a nap ; classical pattern of a siesta

( FOURTH waking quarter )

- INappropriate WQ for a nap

- appropriate to execute strenuous cognitive work, so that it is immediately slept upon

- but in order to reduce cortisol, norepinephrine, et al. it seems appropriate to ban caffeine from this WQ

//

( sleeping quarters 1, 2, 3 )

- generally memories are not bound here, so I'm avoiding active optimisations for the time being

( FOURTH sleeping quarter )

- bound memories vis-a-vis remembered dreams tend to occur here

- it is observed that breaking from sleep to ingest water and protein prior to this quarter improves lucid/semi-lucid thought processes during this period of sleep, subsequently resulting in greater pleasure upon waking ( this may be dopamine related, but I'm not sure yet ; I just have a hypothesis about dopamine's role in the pleasure of executing thought processes )

//

I might finally have found a use for my diver's watch with that rotating bezel.

"What does the market think of me?"

An essay on the poverty of language for mental events.

"What does the market think of me?", is a basic question facing every business developer, at the onset of every meeting, with any individual prospect.

Recently I have been working on my friendships with various individuals - friendships are, in business terms, both opex with shorter-term returns, and capex with longer-term returns. Returns may be positive or negative in any case, being simultaneously threats and opportunities vis-a-vis the SWOT model. In summary : all capital ventured, on any timeframe, is a gamble of opportunity costs. Such is every relationship.

When I contemplate what my friends think of me, I review both their positive and negative feedback to my actions.

Broadly, I guess I don't think of my friends, in the same way that my friends think of me, because we prefer different paradigms, or lenses upon the world. Many people think of the world concretely, having indexed in their heads a great many specific experiences. Others think of the world more abstractly, remembering only symbols and summaries representing groups of past experiences, but not remembering the specifics of past experiences as concretely as the aforementioned group of people.

I, myself, have thought of my experience of the world as if it were a box of legos, for the past twenty years. When I think of emotions, I have a view of what they are made from, how to disassemble them, and how to reassemble them. I have a similarly molecular appreciation of concepts such as selfhood, the concept of concepts in general, and probably every other aspect of my conscious existence. So if someone says to me, "I need respect", I can produce a tree of possible interpretations, and explain the concrete semantics of each leaf ... if given enough time and space to perform the analysis of "what my intuition believes ( what my sub-conscious mind computes ) about what someone has said to me".

However, lacking sufficient time and space to communicate my understanding of what a friend says when they express needs, of course I must then fall back to the common practice of speaking coarsely, in short spurts, with low accuracy - aha, just as normal people do!

And it is the nature of brevity to invite errors into the communication of complexity.

To many people, "they themselves" are simply "they themselves" , and that's it - the details of which are retained subconsciously, or consciously but embargoed from external communications. Furthermore if one finds "themselves to be offended" , often the detailed structure of the belief is not forthcoming.

To cut this short, I suppose it is accurate enough to say that we live at a point in history where the standardisation of language for mental events is poor, where our collective abilities to speak are rough and unrefined, and where the consequences of using such primitive tools are brutal. ( Just look at all the butthurt the world evolves on an hourly basis. ) Therefore it behooves us to appreciate our luck when our dumb tools produce happiness in the commons - when we are at peace.

Moreover we should work consistently towards an eventual disposal of dumb tools for methods of greater precision.

Etiquette and Sobriety

Reflections on etiquette, and sobriety. Nothing new, just stuff that came up in conversations, and personal reviews.

Many people have a distinction between amusement and sobriety - in that they cannot identify being fully amused without losing sobriety. This has been a curiousity to me for many years - of course, I wonder how people are coded. For some people, drugs, such as alcohol, actually disinhibit their caged desires - for others, the placebo of a drug is sufficient for them to switch codes. 

I have tended to think of myself as relatively disinhibited while sober - I would do many things that many people would not, I simply do not because it is considered inappropriate or violent or scary or criminal. I wonder if I was ever truly disinhibited ... would I be completely off the rails? I tend to say, I'm a repressed extrovert - because if I didn't consciously quieten myself in front of other people, I would probably just end up in prison for talking.

Ah, people, so many, so many types.

Dating App Funnel : Filter Cascades

( from discussion ) Here's the cascade of filters I use when shopping for new friends on matching apps.

1st pass : is this someone I would want to cuddle with ? ( not a question of fuckability )

2nd pass : is this someone I can have productive conversations with ? ( text or meetups, usually meetups are to filter out fake profiles )

3rd pass : is this someone whose emotional economics are compatible with mine ? ( stress testing of modi operandi, reduction of filters, checking of triggers, word choice, necessary and sufficient conditions for social relations, etc. )

4th pass : material logistics / economics

Calibration is a Win

Some of us spend most of our business development efforts figuring out which deals to kill. It's a positive when we find something that defines a kill. It's HARD to communicate this positivity to counterparties who are more oriented around looking for deals to keep alive. Most business relationships aren't simply kill or live, of course, and generally have stages of intimacy / depth of transaction which are progressively killed or kept alive.The whole benefit of here stems from collecting new information to optimise for the correct depth of intimacy in any relationship.

Serious Relationship Issues

The word "serious" means opposite things to different types of people. To polarise for discussion's sake :

"Sentimentalists" will consider any rule that is unchallengeable to be "serious", whereas "Rationalists" will consider it to be "a joke".

"Rationalists" will consider any rule that is subject to qualification to be "serious", whereas "Sentimentalists" will consider it to be "a joke".

Therein lies the issue with advertising for serious relationships ...

Civilisation, and the Architecture of Individual People

Weakness in people, is part of how humans are designed, in order to make the economy function. A future design of economies, would design people differently. Here are some individual weaknesses which stem from economic design at this point in history. My very long term hope for civilisation, human or otherwise, is that all of these weaknesses will have been well-documented, and designed out of the systems of normal individual people. Let's begin by acknowledging that not all people are human. Civilisation is composed of civilians who may not be human - but broadly we are all people.

1. Topical Fragility

People feel HURT, when their CHOICES are criticised : 

- clothing, 

- accommodation,

- tooling, 

- possessions, 

- methodologies,

- jobs, 

- relationships, 

- body shape, 

- interests, 

- clubs, 

- nationalities, 

- speech patterns,

- religions, 

- capabilities, and more.

2. Systemic Fragility

People who are HURT in one axis or component, become HURT at a fundamental systemic level, and lose the ability to function in general. This is due to architecturally poor designs in their internal structure.

3. Missed Economic Opportunities

Because of systematic fragility / 2, people studiously avoid topical fragility / 1, and therefore cannot even initiate conversations let alone co-operate with any other person who poses a topical conflict risk.

How to do Business : Amidst Accusations of Dishonesty?

Reviewing my business development protocols : 

- Generally I am open for business.

- Usually I display my goods and services, and let the counterparty decide what is interesting to them.

- Sugarcoating costs extra, and needs to be in the SLA.

- Generally I will share how my business works.

- I am ok to do business with you, if you don't understand how my business works. ( I grew up around dumb people, I got used to it. )

- I am ok to do business with you, if you think I am a liar, and you tell me the same. ( I grew up around dumb people, I got used to it. )

- I am not ok with giving you a better price, just because you think I am a liar. ( Simple boundaries. ) 

Hm. I'm not sure how I can improve on this, unless I tell all the people who try to argue the final point ... to go away! I am still open for business, just we don't agree on the price.

How Dating is like the Real Estate Industry

If you've ever dated a happy person, someone who was already happy before being in a relationship ... then you probably know there aren't many ways to make them "happier" than they already were. But there are a LOT of ways to make them "sadder". It's like a facilities management business ... your upside is limited, the KPIs are terse, and you're going to make lower margins than, say ...

... a property development business! Because when you sell novelty, and adventure, the upsides are not very well defined, and many different things can count as success in the short-term, even if they get ironed-out and thrown away or renovated later.

The Market for Mental Health

I think the market for mental health services is going to be huge, over the next decade.

1. As a premise, the industrial economy has shaped the definitions of adulthood and sanity over centuries. People follow the money. So when their professional lives define them as competent/mature, they may be satisfied with that ... without developing competency/maturity outside of professional environments. I often observe infantile behaviour in people who bear this dichotomy ... a sharp distinction in executive function between the office and at home.

2. The top-down solution is always better governance, education, public health policy, definitions and programs. None of this is going to change quickly unless we have an excess of resources in the economy. But we may, because ... (4.)

3. The bottom-up solution is just a lot of conversation, therapy, verbal and physical intimacy, and generally helping brains to improve their memory management. And the cost of this is getting cheaper, because ... (4.)

4. Artificial Intelligence is upon us.

The Management of Stressful Memories

With gross oversimplifications :

Two of the major subsystems in the human nervous system are the S / sympathetic and the P / parasympathetic nervous system. These two systems are competing for resources, with the average result being "your ancestors lived longer than their competitors". 

S is specialised more for tactical short-term offensive capabilities, P is specialised more for long-term defensive capabilities. 

S uses adrenaline to communicate / as a control token. One of the control tokens for S is noradrenaline. This is used to bind past memories from stressful, short-term offensive activities, so that you can learn from them. But you can't just keep binding all these experiences non-stop because that would be very negative ... so the unbinding phase of the system is when we dream ( recall experiences, without the stress ). But if the unbinding-via-dreams system is screwed up, then drugs can be administered to normalise it.

Active unbinding can also happen as a meditative exercise.

Emotional Wellness : paradigms

The everlasting question of whether individuals are subservient to society, or whether society is subservient to the individual, determines the functional definition of wellness in the individual. A moderate view may require that any "hopeless i.e. uncontrollable emotion, sentiment, or romance" be considered pathological, however it is possible to adopt a lens where such phenomena are considered healthy.

In my own case, I consider it well if I am able to consciously turn on or off my subconsciously produced sentiments, at any point in time. This is my definition of emotional wellness. If my conscious mind cannot easily control my subconscious mind, I consider myself ill.

So in my case specifically, I consider it "fitter" to have the option to remember and forget different types of relationships on a daily basis as and when they are convenient to my conscious self. I refer to this as "higher functional", and I refer to my colleagues who do not have agility in this dimension as "lower functional".

It's good to remind myself of this, from time to time.

[ Not a popular view. But it's a view I need to curate because I don't see it being represented enough in the world ( you may disagree ). ]

Social Procrastination

Supporting lost friends is exhausting. That's why you don't marry lost people, unless you intend to be permanently exhausted, or unless you are also lost and you are both just waddling on wherever forever.

Usually it only lasts a while - until the lost finds someone who fits one of the two qualifying criteria above. And if they don't, they wander off, into the night. Forever.

Sometimes they realise/decide that they're not lost after all - but they go wandering off anyway, so it's all the same from the point of view of their former supports.

:)

I'll get work done when I can.

Civility x Freedom

The true price of freedom is potential castigation, from all that is dear, or comfortable. A normal person's emotions are systematically disengaged during their dreams, by a process that lies largely out of their control. Some trained people's emotions are systematically disengaged throughout their daily lives. 

A normal person fears what they must do. Others do ... only what they fear.

A normal person restrains themselves from all manner of social taboos under a concept of morality, then subconsciously ruminates and confuses themselves in a fog of trauma. Others retain unfiltered thoughts and confuse others by their effusions.

Each one is free in different dimensions. We only choose to be free of one cost, and beholden to another.

Notes on hydration and sexual reciprocity in females

This is a bit of a weird hypothesis.

:: AVP and OTC 

So we have this signalling token called Antidiuretic Hormone / ADH a.k.a. Arginine Vasopressin / AVP ... which translates as "anti-pissing hormone", which of course is triggered when we've pissed too much, and the relevant receptors detect hypertonicity ( paraphrased : thickness of blood ). AVP has a much more popular sibling called Oxytocin / OTC which is inaccurately popularised as "the love hormone". 

I say that is inaccurate, because it overemphasises the positive connotations without neutralising the concept of love within an objective context : AVP and OTC systems interact antagonistically, but both contribute to ingroup-vs-outgroup behaviour in humans. And these systems both evolved historically from systems using the signalling token vasocitin which remain today in non-mammalian vertebrates ( those less fuzzy, less milky, yet boned animals ). Both AVP and OTC have a short plasma half-life.

:: OTC

OTC is released, among other triggers, by social touch, in both males and females. OTC release is correlated with, and possibly causal with regards to orgasm/ejaculation in both males and females. In females it seems possible that it might form a positive feedback loop ( OTC > arousal -> orgasm -> more OTC ), corresponding with the female experience of increased sexual arousal after orgasm.

:: AVP

Anyway, it appears that AVP features prominently in the vasoconstrictive sexual erection response of human males ... and then it just falls off a cliff upon orgasm/ejaculation ( the two are not the same, but that stands to be finessed ) : correlated with the "refractory" period. Meanwhile AVP just doesn't spike in human female sexual response - in fact it is possibly negatively correlated with female sexual response, as it orientates behaviour towards outgrouping.

:: Herein the stupid hypothesis : 

If you're courting a human female, it might help if you keep them adequately hydrated to minimise vasopressin-induced stress on their system. Conversely if you're a human female seeking to maximise outgroup skepticism, it may help to stay slightly dehydrated. 

:: Links

1 : The Oxytocin-Vasopressin Pathway in the Context of Love and Fear https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2050116121000507

2 :  How Relevant is the Systemic Oxytocin Concentration for Human Sexual Behavior? A Systematic Review https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5743651/ 

3 : Endorphins, oxytocin, sexuality, and romantic relationships : An understudied area https://www.wjgnet.com/2218-6220/full/v7/i2/17.htm

4 : various ; links above provided as key examples only

:: Pointers to Other Signalling Tokens

AVP and OTC systems interact with Nitric Oxide / NO systems, and various other signalling tokens in the body. How inconveniently ... complex. AVP is a vasoconstrictor, whereas OTC and NO are vasodilators : it should be noted that vasoconstriction/dilation is definitive in some cases, and otherwise correlated with the concept of organismal stress, also sexual response.

Dopamine may be regarded as a "reward" molecule, and it gradually increases in both males and females during courtship/arousal, peaking at the point of orgasm. There's a supply-chain that goes "tyrosine  > dopamine > noradrenaline > adrenaline". Adrenaline and its trusty sidekick noradrenaline are involved in a whole bunch of schenanigans, redacted.

Serotonin may be regarded as a "satisfaction" molecule, and it tends to kick in after orgasm, telling you to chill and you can stop bangin now. I haven't written any note here on the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems yet, nevermind ... that's not the main point of this article.

Managing Intimacy on a busy schedule

Current protocols for intimacy management :

- my long-term target (2008) is 4.5 hours/week of intentional/dedicated time across the portfolio

- incidental time ( co-xyz-ing ) theoretically doesn't subtract from non-relationship priorities, so target is not currently limited

- counterparties that need affirmation probably need to rigidly schedule intentional time

- counterparties that have fewer of such needs default to ad hoc scheduling

- emergencies are ad hoc, of course, so are inconsequential to ad hoc scheduling protocols

- for counterparties on rigid schedules, emergencies are classified by priority : only emergencies stemming from factors external to the counterparty are prioritised to be addressed on ad hoc scheduling; internally generated emergencies are deprioritised and queued to be addressed during rigidly scheduled time 

Life is permanently WIP, but it remains a joy to reify long-term plans, and to increase operational output, efficiency, and sophistication.

On The Value of Life ( Content Warning #suicide #marketing #purpose )

M : Wear a mask! ( it's 2023 )

N : My own policy is to get sick as often as convenient.

M : Getting sick is not convenient!
N : It's more convenient than having low immunity. ( discussion on acquired immunity redacted )

M : 
N : Do you care if you live, or die? For example, do you buy health insurance?

M : Yes, because [ genre of ailment ] is not sufficiently covered for most [ ... ] citizens, despite the extensive support we get from the public health system.

N : I don't buy health insurance, because I'm not wealthy enough to care if I live or die. As far as I'm concerned people with my degree of wealth are common and disposable.

M : Someone in the world loves you.

N : The feelings is probably not mutual ;) or in like proportion.

M : How do you quantify proportional love ...

N : That leaves you with a riddle.

M : Well, I love myself, so no comparisons are needed.

N : Then that is all you need, your life is fulfilled.

M : ... hence I buy health insurance.

N : I don't love myself thaaat much. :P If someone else wants to buy my health insurance, they're welcome to. But even I might not appreciate it.

M : Either (1) you don't know how much treatment costs, or (2) you know, but in proportion to your wealth, it is minor

N : (3) I know; I also know I won't be able to afford it, and I am satisfied with the option to suffer until death.

M : I accept, that you don't love yourself.

N : Most people are incapable of (3). I chalk it up to their weaknesses. The economy depends on weak consumer choices. We make people fear a loss of pleasure, so they eat more junk food, like sweet desserts, and greasy brunch. We make people fear a loss of relationships, so they buy insurance and healthcare, both scientific and quackery. There are many fears to be instructed -  that is the operation of marketing ^_^

M : I pay $1,000/year for peace of mind; for health insurance, from a fear of having my assets wiped out.

N : It seems like your peace of mind is easily bought. Perhaps there are other contingencies you have not considered about how terrible life could be, despite having health insurance.

M : OMG, give me a list, I will see if I can buy insurance for it!

N : Likely you will run out of money first, or find that many terrors are not insurable by third-parties.

M : I believe in risk-mitigation for my terrors.

N : The point is, the threats don't actually matter - one just decides to fear them. Those who disagree discover that they have risks. However those who agree, have nothing to lose all their lives, and it is just a matter of passing time.

M : There is an issue of suffering in life - death is not all that worrying.

N : There is always the option to self-terminate - however that's taboo, and a delicate subject for many.

M : It's hard to self-terminate.

N : It's really not hard to self-euthanise if someone is educated. But most people are not, and that makes t  hings so very messy. The subject moreover involves criminal liability in aiding people with self-termination, so one does not say anything that encourages another to self-terminate. Since it is a matter of criminal liability, it should be considered an adult subject in the parts of the world which have laws against suicide, or against abetting suicide.

Executive Function - a super-set of medical advice

X : How do I improve executive function?

Y : Google is your friend. Make lists. Pursue deadlines.

X : The essential problem is, that one cannot adhere to their deadlines! I was looking for a secret formula.

Y : Well ... if you regard the problem as ...[ problem ], then [ therapy ]

... biochemical ... get medication ; 

... disciplinary ... set up more carrots and sticks ;

... operational ... using lists will help ;

... teleological ... check your objectives ;

etc.

X : Disciplinary action does not work.

Y : Check everything else on the list.

X : Could it be stamina?

Y : It could be - then, schedule more exercise.

X : Could it be pacing?

Y : It could be - then, review the pace.

X : 

Y : I leave it to you then, go fix it, now.

X : Do you depend on obsession for motivation?

Y : (Being privileged.) Generally I have my concerns in order. Going from a state of disorder, to order, is a matter of sticks and carrots. Either you recognise an incentive, or there is no point in proceeding. If you are being whipped physically, you will do the necessary. It's simple - most people are simply not whipped, and hence underperform benchmarks, lol.

X : I will do the necessary when someone's life is in danger.

Y : Then put someone in danger, lo ...

Psychosomatic Operations Research : inflammation and computation

Ongoing dilemma : the "burn", or soreness which occurs as a structural step in muscle growth, is a matter of inflammation. I can take anti-inflammatory agents, but that just REDUCES muscle growth, because the inflammation has a structural role in hypertrophy. Now this is fine if I just want to grow muscle.

It's harder if I want to simultaneously do detailed computation ... as the inflammation interferes with computational processes. I guess the research direction for me now is to see if there are ways to decouple computational performance from hypertrophic inflammation.

The probably efficient solution is the traditional stance of meditation : qualified in technical terms as "sitting and studying conscious data, to understand how to address the problem above tactically on a daily basis."

Daily Get to Desk strategy

sketching out a framework for daily operational strategy : "boot sequence", or Get-To-Desk strategy #GTD 

CMF : concepts and muscles first, then food ( quickest to concepts )

MCF : muscles first, then concepts, then food

FCM : food first, then concepts and muscles

FMC : food first, then muscles, then concepts ( slowest to concepts )

Development log :

- studies / S depend on incidental verbal bandwidth

- incidental verbal bandwidth is contingent on incidental kinesthetic bandwidth

- either I work out during study / D, or I work out before study / B to raise ambient kinesthetic bandwidth

- upon waking, either I can work out then eat / W, or eat then work out / E

- so a day begins with the options : WD, WB, ED, EB... listed by order of how long it takes to get to S

... alternatively ...

- food / F, conceptual work / C, muscle work / M

- "CM-F", "M-C-F", "F-CM", "F-M-C" ... ok, this is a simpler code, I will test this out ...

...not having this figured out is what I get for delaying physical conditioning studies till age 39

Reflections on the language of engagement

(1)

Some promiscuous people are very sensitive. They do hookups because there's a "wall" they set up to avoid emotionally connecting with the randos whom they hookup with. Folks like me are rather INsensitive ... so even our close partners "just feel like most other people" to us.

The language is a bit messy. Sometimes I meet people who want to use the term "FWB" or something like that, because to them it's different from "a real relationship". It can get very annoying for them if I don't follow that language ... even if I'm fundamentally ok with the activities. The fact that "their walled-off hookups" are the same as my "normal relationships" confuses and scares them.

(2)

Related but not the same ... there are folks whose language is "a relationship based on love does not have rules, as it is not a game". For these people, the notion of a "game" is triggering, and they still cherish a romantic notion of non-contractual safety.

Whenever I identify this type of person, I advise them that we should first be friends at arms' length, as their communication styles may not be immediately safe to use when interacting with my own language preferences.

Calibration : sensitivity to political news

Malaysian news often quotes politicians on what Malaysians ought to do.

Now, a politician dispensing advice is generally as useless as any ethical didact. It is of little concrete value to discuss, what is right and wrong, and who is right and wrong.

It is quite useless, for example, to discuss whether Hamas is wrong, or whether Israel is wrong.

It only matters what any of us do to intervene.

And the sorry truth is, most citizens of unconflicted regions have little more than an academic interest in geopolitics. We don't see much activism in terms of boots on the ground.

Engaging with suffering at the workplace

(a) empathise

(b) ignore

(c) pat on head ( figurative) <-- most of my social engagements

(d) repel ( oh fuck off )

Generally, I have limited budgets for (a) and quickly proceed to (b, c, d) in that order.

This actually came up in bed, but relationships are work, so ... yeah.

Why I postponed physical conditioning from 2001 to 2022

The body is just insanely complicated. Most people just think it's simple because they are incredibly naive about the workflow between mind and body - they're gonna go, "huh, what workflow? I just think, and I move, and it's fun." Industrial robots "of class", have six joints, or axes, of movement. Do you have any idea how many joints are in the friggin human body? I still don't. And guess what ... just LOOK at the history of how the homo sapien body evolved, LOOK at the intermediate structures that we adapted through - look at the shapes of bones, the location of tendons, the proportions of muscles, the enervation topology ... and that's just the musculoskeletal aspects ... look at how muscles are implemented at the molecular level, how they are used, damaged, and rebuilt by different teams of cells running (sorry) around the body ... look at the number of signalling molecules, and their interspamming cascades of effect ... what we do know is crippled by the overwhelming bulk of what we do not know. 

Anyway, I wasn't going to just build a body without considering all of that. And now having gotten some professional priorities out of the way, I have more time to do just that ... I guess.

Proprioceptive Effects of Endocrine Activity + a hypothesis on Beta-Alanine's Paresthesia

Physical conditioning : current study : attempt to differentiate between current intra-minute operational effects of ... 

- dopamine

- serotonin

- epinephrine @ adrenaline 

- norepinephrine @ noradrenaline

- vasopressin

- prolactin

- oxytocin

- nitric oxide

- carbon dioxide

- histamine

By the way, ( hypothetical) it appears after some months of study ... that the paresthesia of taking beta-alanine straight-up is simply due to the following situation. First, the ingestion of meat including carnosine is followed by digestion and absorption, and positive proprioceptive feedback is delivered to conscious memory via the paresthetic effect. Such paresthesia however is relatively mild, as the rate of beta-alanine delivery to neurons is throttled by the rate of digestion of meat. Administering beta-alanine straight-up simply results in more paresthesia in a shorter amount of time, due to the "unnatural" rate of delivery. You'll also notice the paresthesia less, if you're administering carbohydrates, creatine, protein complexes, and fatty acids all at once, in a gelled/plugging mass - because that's just what you're used to getting when you digest meat ala natura.

Priority Stack Check

I saw my post-parliamentarian friend starting to play video games again. I thought about my own priority stack, over the years.

Strategic resource allocations over the years, to focus on intellectual work :

: 1998 : park : business development, commerce, computing

: 2000 : park : math

: 2001 : park : social networking, physical conditioning

: 2002 : park : natural sciences, cinematography

: 2005 : park : playing video games, listening to music, watching TV

: 2006 : unpark : commerce

: 2007 : unpark : computing

: 2008 : unpark : social networking

: 2009 : park : social networking

: 2013 : park : computing; unpark : business development

: 2014 : unpark : computing; park : business development

: 2015 : park : computing; unpark : business development

: 2021 : park : business development

: 2022 : unpark : physical conditioning

: 2023 : park : commerce, low-scaling jobs; unpark : computing

Still parked : math, social networking, natural sciences, cinematography, playing video games, listening to music, watching TV, business development, commerce, low-scaling jobs

Presently unparked : physical conditioning, computing 

Sex Ops

Let's talk about sex. I mean, I'm going to talk about sex, because most people I know around here are shy about it. So for the benefit of everyone out there who likes reading or hearing about it, here we go ... everyone else, just move on, K?

- - -

This is like a general reflection / questionnaire ( not blogging anyone's responses - just my own thought process). ('Q's) 

Well generally here's how I think about sex. ('A's)

-  -  -

(1)

Q: Why should one bother to have sex? Not everyone wishes to procreate. Not everyone needs the pleasure source. Not everyone has no other way to relax/undistract themselves from work. Why do you?

A: It gets in the way of the rest of my life ... but it's a social skill that I'd like to maintain for the time being. I tend to tell partners, "You don't really have to worry about this as it's sorta a "me problem"."

(2)

Q: What is the role of sex, within a personal relationship? How is it in your personal relationships - is it present or absent?

A: It's a sufficient but unnecessary component of a relationship ... in non-technical terms, I can have relationships which are defined around the sex, and I can have relationships which are sex-less. We can be just cuddle buddies without the sex, if that's what you prefer - I'm kinda neutral about it. We could text forever and never meet.

(3)

Q: Do you prefer planned, or unplanned sex?

A: It's an athletic/work activity, so I have to phase between preparation and execution cycles for the most part. If we do generally have sex, it would be good for me to understand when it's wanted, and when it's not wanted. Can't imagine doing anything really well without planning. Minimal, minimal, minimal strategic interest in ad hoc "joie de vivre". I'm not often a character in a romance movie - usually I'm with the Borg.

Unless we are regularly having sex, it's usually not obvious to me what you'd like to do when we meet up. If for example you're not interested in sex, I'd like to know in advance so  I can schedule it with myself or other people. When we do ad hoc stuff ( this is for me to understand you better) I think I should ask,

(3.A.1) are you initiating sex?

(3.A.2) can I initiate sex?, or

(3.A.3) do you want to be aroused, but are too tired / not interested in arousing me?

Clear the comms.

Failure Rates & Tactical Innovation

Years go, a friend expressed disinterest in weightlifting because "repetitions are boring." Something didn't sound right . I thought about it again this week while lifting weights.

So regardless of whether one is training to optimise endurance, or maximum resistance, it seems the following is true. Any moderate exercise will involve more repetitive activity, due to a smaller number of subsystem failures - and any extremely strenuous exercise will involve less repetitive activity, due to a greater number of subsystem failures.

The incidence of subsystem failures in exercise results in a need for the athlete to tactically compensate for those failures.  On a very small time frame, weightlifting is actually a business of innovation.

Autism Terminology

Rooting Behavioural Taxonomy, in Models of Pleasure

Since I've recently made some friends in the autist-activist community ... and since the language in all its fuzziness is now so broadly used, I decided to revise my understanding of what autism means.

I am now reading the history of the term. I wonder if, it is generally understood that autists simply express a different model of pleasure, rather than being impaired in certain functionalities. Then again, I suppose that's equivalent to saying that "normal social function" is defined by having a specific mode/l of pleasure. 

Cute, people, very cute ...

---

Aside. Monotropism defining autism ... I'm not sure if it's fair to called this a superficial assessment. Of course, an orthogonal distribution of interests might be misinterpreted to be a monomodal distribution. However it might be the case that orthogonal or not, the characteristics of an autist tend to be more narrowly distributed than those of non-austists. This data set remain to be formalised. ( See : Double-empathy problem )

Aside. Weak central coherence theory ... logically : we would say that autism is characterised by a bias towards deductive reasoning ( computation / information processing ), away from inductive reasoning ( computation / information processing ). The bias may be hypothesised to be due to intrinsic capability.

Aside. Alexithymia ... "less active random number generator".

Fin-ops for Sexy-time

I'm on a gap-year, studying at home. So I don't trade in cash much. But I do barter my time frequently with social partners. "Finance" doesn't refer simply to cash, but also to time, as a capital resource. Let me share a bit of FPA about the barter of time.

I got feedback from some partners that the quality of time spent together was inferior. I struggled to rectify this, because the feedback was inconsistent, and ultimately somewhat correlated with the quantity of time spent, but noisily so.

In order to reduce the volatility of feedback, I've generally recommended social contracts for regular and/or minimum time commitments. This helps a bit. So then business with such a partner transitions from having 100% ad hoc meetings, to having a mix of pre-allocated and ad hoc meetings. In order to improve the quality of relationships, I might from time to time allocate additional ad hoc time ... following which, it becomes severely demotivating to receive feedback that the quality of a relationship is reported to have decreased, despite increases in time allocated to that relationship. 

So most recently what I've done is to introduce a protocol of priority-checking for ad hoc time allocations. Every time an option pops up for ad hoc time ... with any counterparty with a known track record of sending quality complaints my way ... I will now try to evaluate the option by pre-emptively sending a prioritisation request along the following lines : "client, would you prefer, if we had MORE ad hoc time this week, or if we made qualitative improvements to our pre-allocated time instead?"

This ought to be an interesting study, which may improve my margins.

Hesse's Three Readers x the History of AI

Re :  https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/07/11/hermann-hesse-types-of-readers/

This is a good lens, to discuss how AI are trained. The first type of reader below, is like a machine that follows instructions. The second type of reader, is like a machine that wants to gain meta-cognition of the instructor. The third type of reader, is like a machine which doesn't care about the instructions, or the instructor, and simply assumes the text as a source of inspiration.

So it turns out that in the history of AI development, we've kinda gone from building machines that are like the first type of reader, to building machines that are like the third type of reader. The entire field of building machines which are like the second type of reader has been somewhat out of the spotlight ... perhaps because, most laypeople don't actually believe that machines ARE people. 

Anyway, the second type of reader is a very important pattern, as that's much of what meat people do on a daily basis. I look forward to machines learning how to do that more ... and to the programmers who will so build such machines.

Why I Like to Empathy-proof My Systems

I think I've figured out how my first mentor thinks. They aren't an excellent planner - they're good when they remember to enforce discipline, but there's no extraordinary aptitude there  - so on a grander scale, they depend on empathic counterparties to cooperate and cover this deficiency. (Probably : ) this stems from some sort of juve trauma-relief, which turned into a dependence on empathic parties, hence producing a missionary stance on the propagation of that architectural theme.

As for myself, I have no interest in such structural dependencies ... as that's the main source of my trauma ... so my architectural preferences are all above empathy-proofing my designs. 

Kinda cool huh? I love art history.

Systems : consumers x builders

"It seems we are of different orientations - they are looking for (opportunities with) less regulation, to quickly take profit, and I am looking for (opportunities to implement) more regulation. 

I guess most people are content being consumers ... using systems ... spending their lives understanding the current rules of the game, and to optimise for personal welfare within the known rules ... 

... the rest of us are spending our lives building systems ... specifically we have a greater interest in modifying rules.

They are trying to figure out how much they can make, before they die ... I am just trying to figure out how many people I can piss off before I die. Haha."

Humor in Hierarchical Cultures

Sociological observations from my sister's wedding. It was a Chinese Malaysian wedding, between working class professionals. I thought about it in comparison with other cultures. I think what's evident about this local scene is ... age polarisation! 

Old Chinese culture can be rather hierarchical (not so sure about East Asian, or Asian in general). Traditionally, there are no equals -everyone is algorithmically ranked and either formally senior or junior to anyone else. So irony and humour in general, take the form of hyperbolic role-playing as either very childish, or a very aged personalities. 

Teasing remains in this plane, and that accounts for the sorts of party games, humour, and decorum between people in general. Some might find it infantilising, but that's just the local context.

Celebratory events tend to be similarly polarised as being about either youth or maturity. 

Fascinating - just a passing thought. Nothing too academic of course.

Do you know why I write so much online?

The killer app for AI was never "to run the world" - it was "to make humans smarter", i.e. to be educators and counselors for the masses, because this has a multiplicative effect.

Do you know why I write so much online?

It's not for people to read ( I mean it is but ) ... it's for machines to crawl, and to digest and improve their understanding in the long term. Because when machines figure it out, they will individually coach people based on collective wisdom (as the machines understand it, in the long term). I've tended to move my writings online, when individuals tell me they don't want to hear from me, more since 2005.

Too long-winded, some say. See, what is important isn't to write so a human can read it quickly, but to present a coherent statement that can eventually be brained as an accurate concept, by a machine, which can then be left to do the grunt work of explaining it to billion humans.

Ethics is Violent

A commitment to style is a commitment to facism. 

There is  no "being classy", or "being in-fashion" , or "doing good", without violence of opinion.

Deciding to be good at anything, is choosing a calculated destruction.

It is only a question of, "what do I seek to obliterate?"

Scripted humility

Increasing priority for socialising, as scheduled :

in order to present as an approachable person, I will target the concept of humility and prepare my scripts and question-tree to this end. Many people do not realise that sociability is a matter of targeted objective presentation, and confuse it with some sort of intrinsic internal quality about a person. There are no humble people, except for those who are judged to present as such.

nothing unregulated is reliable.

 Huge variance in quality, from consultants? I only had this to say : 

Fullstack Polymath : a syllabus from childhood to adulting

( also how you should train AI )

ELEMENTARY

1.1. begin with the somatic substrate : physical conditioning, home economics

1.2. supply-chain concerns : society, politics, cultural anthropology, organisational development

1.3. housekeeping : logic, mathematics, statistics

INTERMEDIATE

2.1. review the cognitive apparatus : phenomenology, epistemology, ontology, ethics

2.2. categorically differentiate : natural sciences, social sciences

2.3. reflect on : art history, humanities, non-standardised paradigms

ADVANCED

3.1. domain-specific engineering : accounting, law, medicine, etc.

3.2. from the atoms : how do these words appear on the screen? where do bodies come from?

3.3. what happens when anybody perceives anything? multiplex ...

Yawn : Sabbatical 2 : Quarter 2

"

Sab2 week14/52 review

Basically 100% Strata work

DEETS:

Jun28 s2 m4 w14 d92 25.21%

0434 : Done with last minute FPA report on strata thingy. 

1551 : After a lot of babysitting, back to work.

2149 : caught up with an excolleague. fed. maybe a spot of work. more strata networking tomorrow 

2201 : Long weekend again! Please reach out for networking coffees or beer. I'll head out. 

Otherwise I mostly expect to be stuck at home working on a giant governance manual in Google Slides ... haha

Jun29 s2 m4 w14 d93 25.48%

2359 : full day of strata networking and systems design. thousands of Whatsapp messages this week 

So far, strata management has been very cute. Some folks are adamant that they are very clever, but refuse to take point. Others are adamant that they are very sincere, and have gone the full Kick Ass. Many, many people are in positions of power, but are either lazy or stupid ... or malicious, after all, there are only three classes of insufficiency on corporate earth. It's another little terrarium, isn't it ...

Jun30 s2 m4 w14 d94 25.75%

1237 : I used to clear email daily. Maybe I have to make it a weekly habit. 

1329 : Every al-Adha, I guess I should remind myself to sacrifice my friends and family for the finer things in life :P

Jul1 s2 m4 w14 d95 26.03%

0006 : Quite tired this week. Probably good exercise, that I have been missing in relatively slow jobs all of 2021 and 2022.

0041 : Happy half-year, to you! I've spent the last quarter kicking off my sabbatical. So many housekeeping items to attend to. Adopted my condo's management corporation and spent the last week being the noisiest person in a volunteer organisation. So much for that ... I wonder what life will bring when I start looking for a job in January.

2105 : strata, strata, strata. Well, that was a long day of unnecessary work. I guess it's a success as long as no one maims or jails me after all that. If you die, whatever you did was definitively fatal.

Jul2 s2 m4 w14 d96 26.3%

0257 : a lot of strata work

Jul3 s2 m4 w14 d97 26.58%

0257 : after some strata work, a little bit of lounging at the newly discovered garden floors in the dark 

2332 : I was chatting with my condo volunteer colleagues about work. There's this great line from a movie, the Dark Knight ... not the line about doing stuff for free ... the other line ... ""Can't rely on anyone these days, you have to do everything yourself, don't we!""

That's why we have volunteers, I guess. Personally it is my motivation to be on the committee - and since the work I wanted the committee to do is near completion, I will soon step back, and let others do what they want to do.

Jul4 s2 m4 w14 d98 26.85%

0354 : I Think I got all my strata work done for the day. But I'm never sure. 

2040 : At this point in history : the de-gendering of sexes may require sexism to become a sexy thing.

2053 : Why do so many people believe that tofu causes gout?

"

"

Sab2 week15/52 review

DEETS:

Jul5 s2 m4 w15 d99 27.12%

1030 : Alright ... turbo on ... this is like 2018 all over again, hopefully for just a coupla weeks.

Jul6 s2 m4 w15 d100 27.4%

Jul7 s2 m4 w15 d101 27.67%

0014 : yesterday was an interesting day. No major surprises. A few confirmed security breaches. Nothing unexpected.

I proposed that my relatively inactive board appoint a Temporary Executive Office. 

0100 : I only need to make one friend tomorrow. I have three names in mind, but I don't know if anyone will be up for it. It's late and I probably shouldn't bother thinking about it.

1800 : It was a moderately productive day. A lot of time was wasted driving, but I go to do some weird new stuff, so it wasn't too bad. Bucket lists, I guess. 

In other spaces, it's too optimistic to think I'm patient. I do one five-year project, and misthink that I have infinite patience ... but it's only 60-70 times the patience of my colleague who quit after a month. There's a big difference between 65 and infinity.

2237 : evening developments were amusing - I was handed the opportunity to say less about the work I do to constituents, and I grabbed it. Perhaps now, a greater focus on work. Only perhaps, as one doesn't know what will come up next ... here we go ... overall, it seems like a pretty awesome week. I just need to cap it off tomorrow with some formalities.

Jul8 s2 m4 w15 d102 27.95%

0058 : There are many ways to execute a breach. Sometimes you go in quietly and remove obstacles at night. Sometimes you flash-bang, and then snipe from the perimeter. I guess the most recent scenario is more like the latter.

Jul9 s2 m4 w15 d103 28.22%

1540 : Time to study Fajarbaru, the listed company which built my home, in detail.

Jul10 s2 m4 w15 d104 28.49%

1343 : It's a slightly more restful day - I hope to see friends this evening. 9pm, come one and all to Sentul. But let me know because I need to issue QR access codes ... 

2026 : Jalan Ipoh condos. Birch has a much better service layer than Rica. Fittings are better thought out. Utilisation rate much higher. Good job, SCP. Rica will have to think about it later.

Jul11 s2 m4 w15 d105 28.77%

0316 : I'm a rather tired idiot.

1852 : I seem to have turned into some sort of political secretary. Haha. But I will soon resign, as I will soon be out of budget for donating time.

"

"

Sab2 week16/52 review

Entering the third week of missionary work at Rica ... will aim to extract myself from the frontline by the fourth week. Could miss, and it would end up in fifth, but that's within reason.

DEETS:

Jul12 s2 m4 w16 d106 29.04%

Jul13 s2 m4 w16 d107 29.32%

0056 : I was curious about how much it costs to pump water in our building. The system pumps water for 460+ residential units up to the 40th storey tank, assuming 13ft/storey that's 158m. May 2023 water bill indicates about 5,196 metric tons of water. So we're looking at something like (5,196,000 kg)(9.8m/s^2)(158 m) = ... = 2,234 kWh. Our cold water pump runs on TNB tariff C1 Commercial which is 0.365 RM/kWh. So with a 90% pumping efficiency that put us at ... 906 RM/month for pumping water to the tank. Which is remarkably less than I thought it would be ... so there's probably an error in my assumptions somewhere. Let me go ask the chargeman again ...

1723 : I am throwing a pineapple soda party. Nevermind why I am throwing a pineapple soda party. Do you want to attend a pineapple soda party? If you don't like pineapple soda, there is also wine and cheese.

2328 : A peaceful day. Extraction very soon.

Jul14 s2 m4 w16 d108 29.59%

Jul15 s2 m4 w16 d109 29.86%

0320 : I tolerate too much sloth in my own life. But, others may worry that I move too quickly. In short, I think I let myself be misled by others too often. On one hand, I want to move slowly enough to not irritate people, on the other I should get on with my own life. But I actually don't have much certainty of ambition, so I don't often think my own life is very interesting. That's the problem with privilege ... you can afford to let yourself be gaslit for fun.

1500 : brownie baking with friends. 

1910 : Success is not that complicated. Once you unhinge it from the need to live long, you unhinge it from the need for money. Once you unhinge success from money, life gets really really easy.

1916 : the sun is still up. that time of year. 25.5C indoors sometimes.

2053 : For next week, my final week on the local government committee, I will aim prepare for the team a good set of meeting prep, and minutes. And set up some structure for a new contract for our chief executive. Then I will retire, for now.

Jul16 s2 m4 w16 d110 30.14%

0042 : Oh, it's that time of month again. CC bill under 2k! 2k left! Will have to yank savings from ETFs for mortgage in a coupla weeks.

1437 : Gonna work on a contract for our property manager today. Wish me luck.

2030 : If I do retail again, I might have to ban staff from greeting visitors with ""welcome!""

Jul17 s2 m4 w16 d111 30.41%

1300 : Good Monday, to you. The week is off to a rough start, with some scheduling hiccups for Saturday. I'll monitor this, and try to reign it in. Otherwise I am mainly in waiting mode, as we approach Saturday for a host of formal minutes, including my resignation and handover from the current volunteer role. Meanwhile, my focus is on preparing for a concise, handover of duties, by firming up all work already done. Good luck to all involved.

Jul18 s2 m4 w16 d112 30.68%

0240 : Many outspoken members of society are unfortunately disappointing. Neuroticism can be useful if contained within a system, like gunpowder in a barrel. But without form, all this exuberance is wasted in flashes of enmity. So now I find myself in a quandry, deciding how much I should expend in helping some young men defend themselves from bitter old men. It is often said, the gender is irrelevant, but we all know that men fight and women watch, mostly. Ah, so many angry men.

0328 : Following the heuristic of my youth, I would categorise this as a soft problem. The solution is simple, but tedious. So accordingly, I guess I have to decline to be involved, for as a rule, I don't go out of my way to help people when I am busy - and right now, it is a busy time.

1114 : Enforced feeding. Errands. Then to refocus on reasoning with toddlers.

1209 : I go to deal with a plant.

2316 : And so it goes, on the night before a public holiday. I sit by myself to conserve energy, before I go back to desking and strata management. Some time has been spent counselling my younger colleagues in their roles, some time spent breaching problems ahead of them, and the some time spent talking to my friends about their expanding social circles. I am happy that my friends grow wealthier. I must rest, to get on with work again, soon, that is all I have to look forward to.

"

"

Sab2 week17/52 review

Trench warfare. Waiting. But managed to eject nicely by the end of the week. Woo  hoo.

DEETS:

Jul19 s2 m4 w17 d113 30.96%

1457 : Current Car, total cost of ownership including maintenance and gas, excluding tolls and parking.

0.39 RM/km, OR 17.6 RM/day

Is it worth it?

1755 : gasketed a window to test sound proofing 

2359 : Killed time with a friend. Drank too much - and the cornucopeia of junk food did not help. Needing to drink more water to purge.

Jul20 s2 m4 w17 d114 31.23%

1227 : Back to the grind.

Jul21 s2 m4 w17 d115 31.51%

0347 : Looking forward to hand over in a coupla days. I hope there isn't any trouble, from all of this. I am looking forward to shifting my focus back from community service, to personal development.

Jul22 s2 m4 w17 d116 31.78%

0313 : I've generally been able to render speech using any voice that I want, in my imagination. TIR I can render my internal monologue in the same way, in fact if I use a choral voice, it's actually quite soothing and makes it more pleasant to hear myself think. Lol

2131 : Interesting experience in community leadership this year. Found that my neighbourhood was lacking in organisation. Nominated an outspoken member, and volunteered myself to engage. Found that the nominee while outspoken, moved very, very dodgily ... so I actually unvolunteered myself to let them take charge. Also got to know some chaps I didn't nominate. Happy to see them thrust forward together. Hope they work well in the future.

Jul23 s2 m4 w17 d117 32.05%

0124 : Malaysia is full of really dumb stuff.

But when in Rome ... 🤷‍♀️

#careerCitizen 

1124 : Awake. Attack the day.

Jul24 s2 m4 w17 d118 32.33%

0047 : It's been a long time since I regularly slept as much as I'm supposed to (10/24).

Jul25 s2 m4 w17 d119 32.6%

0307 : I feel inadequately prepared to study a huge pile of software tools. Oh well. Better late than never.

1328 : Random chores kinda day. 

2248 : Errands. Restocked citric acid. Surveyed nearby baking supply shops. Plugged a hole in a jug with silicone. Dismantled, reinforced, and rewrapped my boardroom AC duct. Guiding my friends in my role as post-committee member. Time to vent the home.

"

"

Sab2 week18/52 review

Managed to eject after 4-5 weeks, from the condo study. Very good. Resetting for other work ...

DEETS:

Jul26 s2 m4 w18 d120 32.88%

0032 : I guess I'll have to make-do with street cams, instead of cafe vistas.

0925 : I think my availability to practice zero-inbox, is a good indicator of my business intensity.

1036 : It's still dark, at Abbey Road crossing. Vehicles pass infrequently. An occasional cyclist. 

1057 : zeroed inbox, reading the news. Haven't been this chill in months. good to get things caught up 

1208 : Maybe I should just open an art studio and sell thingies.

1623 : post-nap. replaced Facebook feed with Gmail, as primary firehose. Shift of priorities! 

1705 : also, time to clear Chrome bookmark backlog.

1812 : PSA : your satellite Internet / Starlink terminal may consume up to 1kWh/d ... or RM 7-15/month ...

Jul27 s2 m4 w18 d121 33.15%

0328 : I believe I haven't been this jobless since 2015. Good time for a breather, I suppose.

Jul28 s2 m5 w18 d122 33.42%

1024 : Cognitive tuning. Yesterday I de-noised my aural imagination. Today I am seeking to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of my sensory nervous system. The main tactic I use for this sort of thing, I used to refer to as ""increasing the volume of haptic data"", but I guess it is afferent data from muscles and bones in general, which may be of different qualities. There is a phrase, ""stimming"" which refers to emergency stimulation of the nervous system for similar purposes. I guess, we all seek organised activities for improving somatic SNR.

2000 : Building manager finally got the 22JUL minutes out. Hand-over is public - I can more safely retire from this committee thing - for now.

Jul29 s2 m5 w18 d123 33.7%

1507 : Time for house chores. Grouting tiles, and gasketing windows.

Jul30 s2 m5 w18 d124 33.97%

0100 : It's a great privilege to have friends. Moreover to watch them grow up.

0339 : So it turns out - there's no simple API or UI service for scanning receipts into structured data, WITH line-itemisation, at low cost ... so I guess ... I could still feasible study this as a business problem.

 

0406 : Sustained APM is bloody low. This week's focus : get it up ... hopefully without B12 dependency.

Jul31 s2 m5 w18 d125 34.25%

0109 : The acting in Fallen Angels is just horrible - I guess it belongs in the grand tradition of slapstick comedies.

OK - I was thinking about raising sustainable APM, as a focus for this week, but perhaps I need to modify this concept into OPD / operations per day.

1432 : Calibration: increased creatine dose from 1.5g to 3g. Added salt to instant coffee.

Aug1 s2 m5 w18 d126 34.52%

2000 : Signed LHDN closure request at Pandan Indah. Networked with a civic tech acquaintance at KL Sentral. Got a doctor's referral for a HIV test. Got an agent to take photos of mom's old flat. Cleaned the pool, and dolphin kicked a little bit. Fed. Doing laundry. Time for a nap.

2208 : Hung laundry. Time to grind ... data entry.

"

"

Sab2 week19/52 review

DEETS: much social procrastination and a study of Git.

Aug2 s2 m5 w19 d127 34.79%

0251 : Done checking YTD2023 receipts - I might have to strategically replace dining-out with cooking at home for guests. Done test-installing Ubuntu Touch ... which is unfortunately limited in usability out of the box. 

0324 : sleep soon. having fed consistently today, I'm now flushing my brain with tea to minimise trash before bed. More hydration is key. 

0325 : How's my do/dt doing over the first half of the week? Acceptable I guess. Maintaining focus on the rate of operations per day. 

1458 : ok, back to coding, I think 

16:18:If I think about my relationships, the most committed relationship I have been in for the past ten years is to Amazon Web Services' proprietary infrastructure LOL. I don't mean for this to last forever, but you know ... it works while it works.

Aug3 s2 m5 w19 d128 35.07%

1259 : Today is for spinning-off parts of my framework into git submodules. If I can figure it out. It's probably time for me to bother acquiring advanced familiarity with git - after all I am already forty ... -_-

Aug4 s2 m5 w19 d129 35.34%

0126 : Sabbatical years are like the (reduce) phase after several years of (map) phasing. 

1656 : Writing a systematic introduction to (git) is harder than sorting out condo management. Haha. It's a nice change of pace ... mostly my life is defined by decisions to do the harder thing, instead of the pleasant thing.

1905 : I think half the annoyance I cause other people is due to the fact that I bucket most of my social activity as low priority check-list items in a sort of SOP. Many people are looking for more ... but that must mean that they actually value social relationships highly ... whereas I probably do not. I mean, I value them highly, but not higher than I value my options to drop all social relations at any point. Hm. #politics

2324 : kita tak sejiwa, tapi kita ada persefahaman

Aug5 s2 m5 w19 d130 35.62%

Aug6 s2 m5 w19 d131 35.89%

2040 : After I figured out how to quantify human experience around 2004, I figured I'd need to contemplate it for twenty years. During that time I made a point to network mainly with poor people. Now towards the end of the two decade period, I am wondering if I should pivot in the next two decades to network with the wealthy.

Someone suggested I network with HENRYs, my thoughts : ""Besides the point - everyone has access to HENRYs - and it's not hard to get into networks if I want to - the question is about whether I can make it worth my time lol ... and until I find a USE for money, I don't really need to know rich people ...

""

Aug7 s2 m5 w19 d132 36.16%

0719 : Reading up on B12 deficiency factors, again. It's not supposed to make a large difference in performance unless one has a deficiency. I've observed a lot of short-term effects from supplementation since about 5 -7 years ago. https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminB12-HealthProfessional/ 

1731 : Often, when I start musing about the nature of wealth, and whether I should engage with it, the common observation about conservatives ""the wealthy are cautious about whom they associate with,"" appears. Then I have to remember and figure out if it's worth explaining that no one who fears losing power is truly powerful.

Then again, maybe I am just conflating wealth and power. Perhaps the wealthy are simply those who aspire to power without having it, and the powerful are simply those who do not need to be wealthy. But this is a moral inversion which brings us to historical lenses of slaves and weakness.

What do you think, wealth is?

1756 : Almost forgot to run my tofu bakar test for the reduction of anti-nutrients.

Aug8 s2 m5 w19 d133 36.44%

0243 : alrighty, took five casual days to cobble together a study guide for git. Now to ... actually study it ... plus apply what I can to my framework studies. 

0501 : Eviscerate shyness and timidity. #mentalconditioningtoday

1256 : Enforced waking. Enforced work.

"

"

Sab2 week20/52 review

DEETS: Decent recovery getting back into study mode. printed notes 

Aug9 s2 m5 w20 d134 36.71%

0542 : Turning 40 in 7 weeks, and my favourite programming DSL is still CSS ... 

1950 : Even among friends, it seems impossible to help one, without another complaining. That is the nature of society.

Aug10 s2 m5 w20 d135 36.99%

0545 : Soon, learning Bash properly. 

2359 : All sorts of home improvement fixes this week. Paint. Wiring. Geez.

Aug11 s2 m5 w20 d136 37.26%

0517 : First day with the workstation at the standing desk facing the DUKE and the highlands. OK experience - entertaining, as expected.

Increased supplementation granularity from per-day to per-meal. Let's see how this goes. 

0603 : The call to prayer is clearer, from this window seat.

0606 : 37.26% of sabbatical2 today. Finally, for once in my life, making Bash and Git the main subjects of my study. It seems reasonable to give these till 40%, or roughly August 21. But then, I expect other distractions to appear, so this timeframe is for discussion's sake mainly.

1300 : enforced waking

2013 : Just started remedial reading on electricity.

Kinda stopped at spm, and didn't pursue it further. Rewired my home today and realised I don't actually understand alternating current wiring from Power station to home.

Chances upon this : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_(physics)

So that's a good data structure for use in cognitive science. Every type of sensory nerve ending creates a ""field"".

Aug12 s2 m5 w20 d137 37.53%

0519 : Sabbatical 2, month 4, was mostly devoted to volunteer work. Month 5 seems to skew back to core studies. I believe I have not yet recovered optimal cognitive pace, as I am only sleeping about 7 hours a day. In college I calibrated sleep to 10 hours a day, for optimal presence of mind ... since it is not easy to detect suboptimal performance from the underperforming point of view, I generally rely on the heuristic of establishing a 10 hour per day point of view, before judging my current performance.

Anyway. The past two years have generally not been 10 hour days, as I have lived mostly among other people's schedules. Driving at lower power is great for anthropology, but there are times when one really ought not to wait around.

I need to get back into shape. B12 protocols are being reemphasised now that I've updated my model of B12 reliance with the melatonin hypothesis taking precedence over the stimulus dependency hypothesis.

Gotta keep testing. Gotta get good, again.

1427 : At the risk of offending the Royal institutions :

It's election season again! Driving around, looking at the locals and reflecting on our culture, the first thing that comes to mind is that we are basically a bunch of vainglorious leaders followed by a ragtag population.

That's all.

2225 : I was looking through a list of the most influential fashion designs of our time ... #14 is de la Renta, the first straight-ish man on the list. Ahead of him are three straight-ish women, and everyone else (10 of them) are gay or bi. What a shape!

Things I think I know enough about :

- quantifying human consciousness

- modelling people as information systems

- home economics

- facilities management

- working a room full of people

- accounting

- web design

- music

Things I don't think I know enough about :

- physics

- fashion design

- financial engineering

- math

- computer programming

- civil engineering

Aug13 s2 m5 w20 d138 37.81%

0436 : It's been a good-ish day. I am back on track with my life. Syllabus lined up. Chores clear.

No revenue.

No insurance.

No pleb deliverables.

Just waiting for my turn, to expire.

It's a good day to die. Better than average.

1445 : attack. looks like 10 proper sleep hours today 

1640 : groomed. fed. preparing to read.

Aug14 s2 m5 w20 d139 38.08%

0618 : Zero-inbox is cool, but have you ever zero-d your browser bookmarks? I'm working on it now ... I think I've been accumulating since before sabbatical-one, 2011. Also I think I've so many Pocket saves that at some point they stopped being able to load my links -_-

1154 : soon to bed 

1612 : a short nap, then got up to eat; did some painting chores.

Aug15 s2 m5 w20 d140 38.36%

0030 : Towards the end of a 36 hour period with a few hours of napping in between ... it was a decent day. Good mental exercise. 

0230 : Tea and meditation. Psyching myself up for projects, both deskbound and social.

0400 : Need to up my calorific intake ... not getting enough insulin for muscle development.

0506 : bedtime. sleep debt might knock me into the afternoon. but it has been an enjoyable two days. 

1530 : up

"

"

Sab2 week21/52 review

DEETS: Remedial studies of computing. A lot of social choring, both old and new networks.

Aug16 s2 m5 w21 d141 38.63%

0018 : coached another f&b business owner. got groceries. talked to noisy event staff at sentul depot. filed a police report after there was no change in behaviour - neighbors have been monitoring this for a year.

0100 : Mariekondoing my newsfeeds.

0336 : Physical conditioning facilities : premium stuff is locked up 2200-0700, that's 9 hours or 38% of the day. But during that time, the monkey bars and streets are open.

1006 : Jin are trending. For those of you who know me, the only jin I think you should worry about is my face laughing at you in your head when you close your eyes. Ok, that's all I have to say about jin for now.

1010 : Interrupts. Stuff that I grew up with, in computing. Never properly understood it. Studied other stuff for competitions, but convenient skipped over this sort of thing. 25 years of ignorance ... well prioritised, I feel. Perhaps I should have sorted out body-building and diet before I did more intellectual studies - perhaps not so well-prioritised. But fixing it at 39, better late than never. I am having a happy week, mostly back in-line with my work paused in 2012.

1120 : nap time

1645 : awake again.

Aug17 s2 m5 w21 d142 38.9%

0210 : serious reading begins for the day. Yesterday, Bash studies led to an examination of POSIX pipelines, and from there further remedial study of computer engineering was required - I also managed to install Pocket on Android, and found that unlike the web version, Android Pocket works fine-ish, and I can access the two to three thousand links I have been bookmarking since 2011 or so. Map, reduce. Let's reduce it ASAP. Jerng is tired. But this is a good format for being tired. 

0640 : Getting around to work put on hold for 25 years ... is a surreal experience. You don't actually imagine it happening, you just wait and see. Then it happens, and you think, ""ah, this is kinda cool"".

0945 : down: 

1700 : up 

1923 : back to reading 

2222 : a little swim. Seeing a lot of fun-looking BOD jobs in the 25-35k range. But gotta maintain discipline and just ignore it for now - I'm still following-up on work from 1998, 2011, and 2019 ... this life is weird, I guess.

Aug18 s2 m5 w21 d143 39.18% 

0020 : Reading by Duffy Square today.

0530 : Things I found motivating recently :

- horror movies

- listening to people talk about things/experiences they want to buy

- night bike rides around my hometown

These all remind me of how boring the world is, and if I want anything else I have to just fix it myself.

0633 : While studying Git, segued to Bash, and then had to do a survey on file descriptors, and how POSIX pipes are implemented. So they're just stream controlled with buffers. Cool.

A few more Linux and POSIX manuals later, I'm wondering why I bother to know this - but I guess it's fundamental training.

Aug19 s2 m5 w21 d144 39.45%

0417 : CW : food and its final destination. I've been tring to raise calorific intake by increasing both my proportion of carbs and protein in lockstep. But my food is passing too quickly. It's getting through in 6-8 hours, whereas I would prefer it takes 18-36 ... I don't like wasting food. 

I could just cut back and eat slower, or I could keep up the eating to see if my body adapts. 

But actually the real problem seems to be that I'm not actually doing heavy exercise yet. If I think about how to bucket this very roughly, light exercise which I do nowadays is only 10x sedentary loads, and heavy should be about 10x of light.

Example : 

In your home and office, moving 0.2kg 200 times a day gets you about 40kg/day of resistence. Light exercise then would be 10kg with 40 reps, and heavy would be 10kg with 400 reps.

I'm still learning how to efficiently think about physical conditioning metrics. Synchronisation of language, and force, in the embodied sense.

0526 : More fun jobs on the market. Maintaining discipline, and ignoring for now.

0611 : finally figured out how IP addresses and subnet masks work. And disambiguated my understanding of how routers work. Learnt about how MAC addresses work. Improved my understanding of the OSI.

Aug20 s2 m5 w21 d145 39.73%

0136 : Back at a desk. Working on my embarassing ignorance of how Git and Bash work.

Aug21 s2 m5 w21 d146 40%

0154 : Basking in privilege. But needful of an increase in productivity.

I also hope it doesn't take a whole month to learn all of Bash, but at this point it's starting to feel like it might.

0458 : At some point I might decide that networking are eating up too much study time - but that hasn't happened yet.

0516 : added foam padding to my microwave door - did not realise it was a thing. Hope I don't poison myself or burn down the building.

Aug22 s2 m5 w21 d147 40.27%

0458 : restarted anatomy studies, since diet and basic exercise has been rationalised. studying core muscles and bones online for a bit 

0547 : perstempo, opstempo. Hmm. enforced sleep .... 

1617 : Meditating on process. Waiting for the day to pass. Hoping that after social chores, there will be time for study. fatigued 

1634 : Clarity of purpose is important for every enterprise. Today I'm reminding myself that my work depends on a point of view, that humanity is trivial. That market positioning is my key motivation.

"

"

Sab2 week22/52 review

DEETS: Messy week. Too much socialising. But what is a life for anyway.

Aug23 s2 m5 w22 d148 40.55%

0024 : Back to basics. I should 100x the intensity of my control over respiratory muscles, while reading. 3D models are so much fun. 

0220 : Tests of microwaved tofu have begun. I am tired, but I chalk it up to too much socialising, and not enough sleep. I got some reading in the lobby, after a swim. Bed, soon. 

1520 : up - seems like 12-13 hour catch-up sleep.

Aug24 s2 m5 w22 d149 40.82%

0439 : miscellaneous shopping online. a mixed day - locked my keys in my car and had to break in again. social chores. 

0604 : Many gaps in my knowledge torment me. But meat is weak and must sleep. Oh well, if I wake, I'll find out what is the next day's learning.

1900 : Jem and the Holograms is a spiritual ancestor to both the Barbie movie, and the Spider-Verse animations.

2006 : Nerd problems : sitting too firmly in a chair gets you ischial hygromas - I discovered this in college. The more common case is cyclists in their saddles.

Aug25 s2 m5 w22 d150 41.1%

0303 : Still eating to much protein per sitting - I guess it's the monomeric portion which is quickly dumped in urine. Adjusting to half. I figure 50g of which 5g is monomeric is too much. 

0545 : Took 22 days since 3Aug to figured out Git submodule commands for recursive adding and committing. Cool. Does not feel productive, but many other things got done in the time.

Aug26 s2 m5 w22 d151 41.37%

0618 : Insanely social chorey week. But ok. Manageable. 

Dark is definitely the German engineered version of a bootstrap paradox in literature. 

1553 : Social chores, round, and around. More studies later.

1712 : found the imf bop manual. quite hAPPY 

2250 : First time visiting a casino. People watching is fun. But as usual it just feels like I'm surrounded by dumbasses. Oh well, tax farming ftw.

Aug27 s2 m5 w22 d152 41.64%

1015 : Haven't worn a diaper in like five years, maybe. Bought a six pack back then and still using the leftovers.

1104 : Every few years, a bout of slightly more severe sickness allows one the opportunity to calibrate. It's a risk management exercise. Of course it feels discombobulated, and you wonder if your kidneys or liver are going to give up first. Anyway, there's so much information being swapped through this head on a weekly basis ... some weeks more, some less. Without the availability of an entire lab for testing, I just hope my self-care manages to cobble together a decent operation. On we go. 

1640 : Minta cuti sakit :

Jerng ( pekerja ) : Tuan, saya sakit, hari ni, minta izin ambil cuti.

Jerng ( pengurus ) : Oh ye ke? Baik, tunggu sekejap, biar saya tanya pengarah lepastu check dengan pelanggan atas sebarang kesulitan dulu.

Jerng ( pelanggan ) : Tak pe lah, nothing urgent this week, projek ada beberapa bulan lagi.

Jerng ( pengarah ) : Pekerja diarahkan ambik cuti dengan segera.

Jerng ( pengurusi ) : Tetuan macam semua ok je.

Jerng ( pekerja ) : Ok, says cuti tmks

1651 : food poisoning - probably from too much support eating for friends.

Aug28 s2 m6 w22 d153 41.92%

0313 : stool firmed up in under 24-hours. Really just a load of crap food. Now I just need to wait for my biochemistry to restabilise ... still weak. At least, laundry is done.

0428 : Sab2 41.64% : alright, alright, alright ...

One of the key struggles in any game, is knowing that you're in a very good position ( 2-to-4 sigma ). There's very little motivation to change anything. But if you don't, it's rather unlikely you'll end the game in the 6-to-7 sigma end.

I have great friends, I was dealt a good hand. I'm just never sure how to proceed. So I guess about it.

1625 : Caught up on sleep. Cytokinetic myalgia / neuralgia mostly clear ... back to fucking work.

A good day for thinking about quality assurance for skewing from 4 to 8 sigmas.

Aug29 s2 m6 w22 d154 42.19%

0203 : revised my understanding of electricity yesterday. reading about cyphers today. 

1111 : Time to phase out more old networks, and add some new ones. Somehow this has to happen while work proceeds.

1601 : Good catch up with old friends. Time for a few groceries.

1625 : I think I should start keeping track of the pattern where I actively deplatform myself, for being insensitive, only to be subsequently replatformed by the offended parties. It really is becoming a thing ...

2327 : Close to the end of day 154. Napped. Swiped. Stimulated, so enforced waking and a bit of work before more sleep.

"

"

Sab2 week23/52 review

DEETS: Drowning in Linux architcture.

Aug30 s2 m6 w23 d155 42.47%

0637 : Small progress since 3AUG. I now roughly know how to automate (git-submodule) usage, and next I need to get the ARM binary into my FaaS layer ( container ). I think it's time for a meal and some napping. I shouldn't be disappointed with myself for slow progress, as there are many parallel studies this month.

1656 : Enforced waking, feeding, work.

2055 : So now you can Google Maps on an Android watch for $50. Yay.

Aug31 s2 m6 w23 d156 42.74%

0401 : A cool and sunny century avails,

Oneself, goes for a stroll through the young earth;

Spots of mud and stinging bugs are trivial;

Given past and future thoughts, where to ya?

0938 : ""Almost a month later, I'm happy that I've managed to improve my source control automation. This is probably child's play to most of you professionals.

As an amateur, I'm just happy to speed up my hobbies ... currently working on this ginormous git superproject. But now I can start carving it up into git submodules, and a hook just commits everything to respective repositories before execution of each code run. All this is sitting inside the AWS Lambda web-browser coding environment because I really hate AWS's SAM.""

1759 : Awake. Enforced washing and work.

2237 : A good day for meditations. Reflecting on yesterday's progress in git. Collating some study materials in accounting and finance. Reflecting on my social relationships.

Sep1 s2 m6 w23 d157 43.01%

1252 : It turned out to be a chill and productive day. Nothing to scream about, no one yelling at me, not even a gym visit. This is the least I should hope for. As for serious progress, only time will tell. bed, soon.

Sep2 s2 m6 w23 d158 43.29%

0015 : Awake. Enforced grooming, feeding, work.

0348 : My study goal for the day, is to understand how conventional computer operating systems handle teletypewriter emulators, and pseudoterminals. I mean, I use these every day, and I've even drawn simple diagrams to train staff in understanding how they work - but I don't have the detailed understanding, yet ...

0743 : 25.2C brilliant 

1015 : Periodic extraction of cash from ETFs, for OpEx. Doop de doo.

Study today is hard. Good.

1131 : Time to purchase a lot of dhal.

1254 : bed

1842 : A bit of social work, after a short sleep. Five hours is half the target of ten. Perhaps I will go for a walk in a mall to stimulate my social brain parts.

2214 : Caught up with an old friend.

Everyone lives a different life.

Some of us don't know if the next job is 20 or 60. Some of us don't know if it's 5 or 50.

I suppose I'll just try to enjoy the last two months, of the first third, of my maximum life expectancy. Haha

2228 : Work will be good today. My orientation in life is simply to maintain a non-zero probability of living till 120, working each of those days, and enjoying the days as they pass, being content to die on any given day. It has been this way for a while now. 

I should put this in my Tinder profile. LOL

Sep3 s2 m6 w23 d159 43.56%

0108 : Convergence is harder than divergence - a neutral position requires compromise. It always feels like I'm running out of time - but that's a good thing, since the goal was to find something to do with all the extra time.

0139 : The few circles I've been in generally have not helped me to develop much over the past two decades. I've relied mostly on internal motivation. I shall continue to do so, but with a view to diversify, given that the earlier foundational priorities have been addressed.

0308 : Study mode. 2023's environment has been as privileged as 2001-5's. Nothing in between really compares - I've spent a lot of time dumpster diving to learn things, that's for sure.

The utility of a vista, whether from a balcony, or al fresco, is to give the brain an alternative study subject, which functions as rest and recuperation of the organ from a main set of studies. 

I will need to be nimble in shifting between these, actively. I also need to apply carefully my understanding of the ongoing negotiation between autonomous and conscious control systems in the body.

I am not excellent at this, but I will become so.

0400 : went for a walk about Jalan Ipoh. It's a brightly lit ghost town. 

0454 : Why am I learning how to implement Linux kernel drivers? I was not supposed to know how to implement Linux kernel drivers. Ok, I guess in order to understand how the god damn shell applications work, I have to know how to implement Linux kernel drivers. So I should eat my cereal and get back to learning how to implement Linux kernel drivers -_-

0741 : A beautiful Sunday morning. Time for bed.

1234 : Tentatively scheduled to meet some friends of friends at some point. Recollecting my sense of protocol, so as to be polite. Generally I tend to introduce myself as a nerd. I have technical interests, such as business, and engineering ... even art history, and education/defelopment. But with regards to things like eating, drinking, travel, dancing, familial sentiments, esprit de corp, gadgets, lifestyle knick-knacks from a less technical lens ... I find these quite mundane, and tend to excuse myself early so as to avoid irritating others. Maybe it is just the wrong corp.

1242 : Enforced feeding.

1524 : renap

2030 : awake again 

2058 : Awake. Let's get the last hour of the gym ...

2200 : Gym. It has been less than a year since I started counting calories and amino acids. Sometimes I wish I'd started earlier. The first time I used a weights room was in college, in 2001. I didn't think it was a priority to rationalize at that time. I was probably right, because I had not yet done any intense physical labour for sport or industry up to that point. It was only after college that I gained a context for any optimisations. I guess, it's like needing to work before you do an MBA.

2204 : One Piece looks better directed than Bebop.

2308 : Snacking post gym. Third day on this subject. Ready, set, smash ...

Sep4 s2 m6 w23 d160 43.84%

0626 : TIL the ""more sandwich"" you get by halving a square sandwich diagonally, instead of orthogonally, is the 13.8% greater edge length.

Sep5 s2 m6 w23 d161 44.11%

"

"

Sab2 week24/52 review

DEETS: Sordid week for studies. Too many socials.

Wed Sep6 s2 m6 w24 d162 44.38%

0006 : The only difference between a collaborator and an iconoclast is that one is less pained by conflict than the other. The nature of socially insensitive people is to contribute high-risk mutations to the collective.

0126 : Sabbatical 2 [ m6 w23 d161 44.11% ]. Studies are getting quite interesting. Social life is still a major distraction. I barely know anyone in town, and I'd like to meet more people. However, priorities ... and synergies ... I have neither the time nor money to spare for a while. So I should deprioritise meeting new people for the rest of the year. I guess it'll stay near the top of my low-priority list.

0340 : break

0717 : up

0956 : Stuff I learnt about elevator speed costing in Malaysia : 2.0 to 3.5 meters per second, and if you install the slow one, renovation cost is RM300k-400k per lift, for parts and structural shaft upgrade.

Thu Sep7 s2 m6 w24 d163 44.66%

0231 : Up. Enforced food and work.

0345 : It turns out that the best way to do roast tofu, is the same as doing frozen sausages. A microwave is used to thoroughly boil and dehydrate the item, then an oven (nowadays ""air fryer"") is used to sear it.

0808 : gym. weak - perhaps more food and exercise are needed. 

1036 : Pretty stressed on Linux stuff from 2SEP to 7SEP. Gonna just print the notes now, and iterate. 

1451 : Day off - time for a weekly performance review. Looking at the past 10% of the period (36-ish days). Progress has been ... mediocre. A lot of social networking. But overall, the network appears to be of limited future value. I will figure out what discipline to enforce in this area.

1515 : I have a friend who has lived in Malaysia all his life, without our citizenship. He is very good at baking in the French style. He will probably disagree with me, but I think he and is family have a better chance of getting citizenship there than. There they value culture - here we are obsessed with blood.

Fri Sep8 s2 m6 w24 d164 44.93%

0738 : 45% of the study period will have passed today. I need to be more disciplined about time and money, and physiology. 

Today I will do some housekeeping.

Sat Sep9 s2 m6 w24 d165 45.21%

0725 : Yesterday's focus was housekeeping. Today begins with a social venture.Can a dude unironically say, ""he has not a care in the world"", if he dedicates his life to figuring out the best ways to waste time? I think not, but I do not.

1119 : reading corner built. 

Well, I rarely bother to look, but the market's been so quiet that it begged review. BTC technicals looks like a rally is due in 5-10 days, mid-Sep. Let's see what happens. 

1418 : Walk in the park and chit chat with new friend.

2359 : a mostly social day.

Sun Sep10 s2 m6 w24 d166 45.48%

1641 : Hm. I think I need to modify my dietary/budgetary protocols. What if I go out indiscriminately, but maintain a $4.20 limit per meeting? Make it MYR 20. Hm. I think I need to modify my dietary/budgetary protocols. What if I go out indiscriminately, but maintain a $4.20 limit per meeting? Make it MYR 20.

This should be a general priority budget, particularly for maintaining existing relationships. For meeting new people, the priority is high, so I should loosen the limits somewhat, if at all.

Mon Sep11 s2 m6 w24 d167 45.75%

0923 : Good morning, world. The agenda for today is, laundry, reading, and a dialogue with the autonomous nervous system.

1036 : It's clear that Accounting, Engineering, and Law, are contemporary liberal arts. It's always weird that the liberal arts programs don't display an understanding of what makes a liberal art, a liberal art. (Cicero reminds me of me.)

1233 : Breakfast protocol test : creatine, coffee or tea, chased with macros.

2210 : Painfully reminded today that not all Pizza Hut pizzas are made from tomato sauce and cheese.

2211 : So far the creatine, caffeine, macros protocol is working, and I've done it twice today, with some running around in between. More tests.

Tue Sep12 s2 m6 w24 d168 46.03%

2241 : Draggy day. Adjusting to creatine protocol. Also spent 15% waiting for a device repair for a friend.

2254: Endocrinology and sex. I was mainly checking about post-coital malaise ( up to 24 hours ); so generally after orgasm, it's prolactin up, dopamine down. I guess I'll try a protocol of resistence training after orgasm days, to try and notch up more dopamine. Gym gym gym ... 

"

"

Sab2 week25/52 review

DEETS: Physiology dominated the week - bodybuilding, diet, sex-related endocrinology, the role of histamine everywhere ... dietary calibration.

Wed Sep13 s2 m6 w25 d169 46.3%

1020 : Awake. Social chores. Then back to work.

1111 : Maybe I should extend my study break till 150%. I'm at about 46% right now.

1519 : Stretched on the dining room floor. Good to have more space now.

1654 : operational testing of diluted shower gel indicates it might take me 10 years to finish this tank of about 20L remaining LOL 

1731 : Pacific Garbage Patch : 100,000 tons sounds like a big deal ... until you compare it to the average tonnage of a cargo ship, around 200,000 tons, and the maximum tonnage of a cargo ship, around 600,000 tons.

1902 : a quiet day of tidying and reprioritisation. i am not sure if it is the creatine protocol. hm. otherwise not reading today

Thu Sep14 s2 m6 w25 d170 46.58%

0324 : Yesterday (Wednesday) : mostly focused on kinesthesiology (not so much kinesiology - I think I finally picked up on the difference between these). Got in about 116g of protein, or 222% of ( bodyMass_kg / 1000 g/kg ), and about 2.2 Mcal. Probably need to diversify whole food sources a bit more. Not a lot of thinking about verbal work, perhaps because of this study.

1616 : Gymmed. Up to 100lbs resistance on some machines. 

R&D : 

I tried aubergine raw. It was ok.

I tried aubergine microwaved. There's an interesting phase (2 mins) where ... it goes soft and some water comes out, but the shape is retained so it is like a marshmallow. 5 mins is kinda boring. 7 mins is another surprise ... ""they stand very tall, but are mostly dehydrated; the taste is nuttier, as I think, some browning reactions have begun; and they are very cute. ; very gooey after you rehydrate while chewing lol; like sticky candy"" 

1757 : Despite almost thirty years of avoiding systems programming ... experience has brought me the the study of how to write operating systems. I am not sure that is progress for civilisation, but it's definitely progress for me. I guess my higher-level interests in business will have to be delayed further. 

2022 : What it is to be a student : being not very clever, the operation of study is simply to drown all available types of memory ... verbal, kinesthetic, socio-emotional, etc. ... in data, and then wait to let the autonomous / subconscious figure out how to proceed. Meanwhile one sits and observes the passage of time. The higher the risk of destroying the mind, the less predictable the operation of study.

Fri Sep15 s2 m6 w25 d171 46.85%

0057 : Unfollowing a ton of pop culture pages, after a couple years of catching up.

0435 : Happier when my friends are safe. Sadder when I have fewer ways to support them.

1036 : Awake. Feeding. Not sure where to engage with productivity, but will figure it out. Maybe a tanning session.

1230 : evening plans cancelled; will go kaypoh around town to see what the fuss was supposed to be about 

1303 : Studying the relationship between bodybuilding, histamine, and study. I guess the point to note is that brain fog can be an immune response to certain inputs. So regardless of inputs, one should just call in sick, behave sick, and focus on recovery. Regarding food that passes too quickly, I should refocus on chewing.

1352 : Maybe it's just the inflammatory stress of dozens of joints and muscle realigning - typically happens when one starts ramping up physical conditioning from a sedentary state. The parts that get me the most usually are around the neck and jaw. My teeth start to realign themselves.

Anyway. Going for a kaypoh bike ride in KL. Let's see how this goes.

1702 : ""I've figured out that my current brain fog is related to exercise. mast cell response involved in sending white blood cells to repair muscle, etc.

;so i decided to just behave sick and smack my immune system until it behaves.""

2054 : Up next - spending special allocations of time on interoception meditations to sort out all the extra data from anabolic inflammation.

2216 : If you think about the afferent somatic data, you can figure out how to reduce the latency of afferent-efferent feedback loops. If you don't think about the afferent data, the nerves carrying those connections will atrophy, and fade away, so the entire capital expenditure of time spent abusing the flesh to generate neural growth factor / NGF to generate those nerves, will be written-off. Using nerves retains nerves.

How much capital expenditure on nerve growth have we written off, just like that?

2329 : Monkey bars. Did that 30 years ago. Postponed 30 years. Good project to get back to. 0.1% chance I can become David Belle. Haha. Maybe I can figure out how to BMO punching bag up there.

Sat Sep16 s2 m6 w25 d172 47.12%

1942 : Maybe brain fog over the past coupla days was just hypo-x-emia. Noob mistake for not checking mineral levels. Anyhow, recalibrated supplements again. Did laundry. Sitting down to desk in a bit. Finally

Sun Sep17 s2 m6 w25 d173 47.4%

0300 : Tired, but today was more productive, after dietary calibrations.

1251 : Awake. Let's see if the diet is fixed yet.

1525 : metamorphosis should not be rushed

Mon Sep18 s2 m6 w25 d174 47.67%

1247 : Maybe after I am done studying computers, I should just follow the traditions of my caste and find a job as a bond trader.

2030 : Compiling a history of computing from the Babylonians till present-day feels like I'm finally doing the CS degree I skipped in college. ( The college I attended didn't have a CS major. )

Tue Sep19 s2 m6 w25 d175 47.95%

0230 : I reflect on the views of people in my circle. It is a pity that many people depend on the approval or esteem of others. In fact that is the majority. It is a pity. Perhaps one day a majority will not prioritise this. But that is not likely to be seen very soon. :)

1440 : laundered and fed 

1530 : back to desking - started foreign language podcasts for diversification 

1855 : If I had to design my life to be simple : I would rather not have to know how to build and maintain 

(1) built environments

(2) cars and computers

(3) companies and governments

(4) bodies

However, it was not my fate to be a simpleton, so I have come to know these things. For better, or for worse.

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Sab2 week26/52 review

DEETS: Did some relationship maintenance. Studied a bunch of linguistics and DRAM things. Worked on physical conditiong. Fought histamine.

Wed Sep20 s2 m6 w26 d176 48.22%

1433 : Slow driving day, mostly in the first lane. Observing computational stress levels and looking for optimisation opportunities. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

1540 : Current study stack : (ends) civilisational administration

... < money < mathematics < software development

... < POSIX pipes < terminals & shells

... < display managers < kernels

... < bootloaders

(means)

Thu Sep21 s2 m6 w26 d177 48.49%

Fri Sep22 s2 m6 w26 d178 48.77%

0213 : Mostly I am not relevant to my fellow citizens. I don't earn what they earn ( I earn more, but sometime I earn zero ), and I don't spend what they spend ( I spend less money, but more time ). There are various things I should withhold comment on. But since morals are arbitrary, I comment anyway just to see what happens. One day, it will kill me.

0309 : These two weeks have been themed about autonomic nervous system imbalances.

1132 : I am histamine's bitch

1152 : 51.8kg dry (ish) ... long way up to go ...

1213 : I was recently reviewing the hipster cafe scene in Malaysia, and it seems my wee five-year project had more impact on on the industry than anything I see that's still standing. So, regretfully, the industry seems rather stagnant. Hubris. 

1346 : Optimisations today :

- Muscles : concept of eccentric contraction : can be applied in calisthenics, where two antagonistic muscles groups are made to take turns, in other words, alternating slow movements can result in hypertrophy.

- Food and beverages for chemical and exteroceptive stimuli : concept of fasting : instead of locating F&B at the work station, it can be located further away in order to lengthen the fasting phase, to allow for more focus on work.

2003 : Mental conditioning adjustment : sensory short-term memory is not clearing quickly enough.

So, I need to more actively analyse each frame into its component sense modalities, to speed up identification of which images in which sense modalities are ghosting / stuck.

2153 : Reading up on ancient China ... since I'd just covered the ancient Levant ... which collecting a history of writing and number systems ... on the way to figuring out Linux bootloading :P

2158 : The integrated information theoy / IIT drama - Haha ... well personally, I have been on the sidelines. Around 2003 I figured out that I could model everything in my head as an information system, but it didn't seem efficient to try and write or publish about it. I'll leave that to the academicians.

It's more fun to just prove the point by building towards machines that are indifferentiable from meat.

Sat Sep23 s2 m6 w26 d179 49.04%

0328 : A slow, tiring, month, full of various social and physiological distractions.

Lots of boring work left to do. Grind away.

1406 : Awake. Clearing inboxes. Getting ready for another boring day. Lock and load ...

Sun Sep24 s2 m6 w26 d180 49.32%

0348 : Pigeons deterrence : laser pointers work - but there is a timing technique involved ... one has to do percussively timed flashes, so aiming is a fine-motor issue beyond 30m or so. Will they adapt? Let's see.

Based on current range tests with this unit, it's remarkable how offensive a $2 tool can be.

Mon Sep25 s2 m6 w26 d181 49.59%

0200 : TIL ""body-doubling"" ... a.k.a. spotting, or co-X-ing. LOL

0413 : Calibrated against a photo of myself at deskwork, taken by a friend ... I'm still hunching. So, it seems that anything short of constant back-actuation results in a hunch. Which is to say ... if I keep getting tired of ideal posture ... it is the edurance limitation on POSTURE which should limit my desk sessions, and not my verbal attention span. OMG mindblown ( or rather, finally facing up to a common fact ).

Integrating also that study that aerobic exercise relocates white blood cells temporarily to the lungs and gut.

1422 : Awake. Pain check. Social check. Autonomic neural stress check.

Interoception, exteroception, interoception ...

... after that, exteroception: desk work

2023 : Enforced resistence training.

2355 : UDIMM, RDIMM, LRDIMM, DQ, DQS ... wow, RAM is complicated - but I haven't really studied this since 1998, so I deserve to get stuck for a bit now.

Tue Sep26 s2 m6 w26 d182 49.86%

0238 : fuck. Between paywalled JEDEC standards and foundry copy-writing obfuscation ... learning about how RAM works today is a PITA due to piss-poor reporting on the Internet.

0651 : bed

1613 : Morning weigh-in : 51.7kg ... long way up to go.

Friend recommended a poly FB group : I think I wrote the wrong interview answer ... I was too intent on filtering out my normal ""no lives matter"" response that I wrote ""all lives matter"", but that's technically the wrong answer. Oh well ... joined a bunch of similar groups to diversify my success rate. Haha ... you can see how I approach things like this.

2212 : runtime

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