Ensuring Merged-entity Accounting Policy Harmonisation

 - Minimum of one board member must have end-point / EP responsibility.

- Cross-functional working group / WG at the executive level reports to the EP.

-  WG must document all communications with regulators / R.

- WG must produce on-beat status updates and risk management, besides the main project timeline itself.

- WG must have designated comms person / CP with ready 30-second briefings for each of many internal and external stakeholders, on each major contingency, at all times.

I'm sure this applies to anything else, of equivalent importance, really ... 

Summary of Architectural Style Jargon

Structuralism : "systems design"

Classicalism : "anything too old to challenge, but structured and pretty enough to keep"

Modernism : "minimisation of classical forms, maximisation of equivalent structure, moderation of prettiness"

Art deco : "minecraft modernism"

Streamline : "curvy art deco"

Post-modernism : "fuck structure, fuck pretty"

Expressionism : "whimsy"

Baroque : "maximalist expressionism within a structural context"

Rococo : "foamy baroque lite"

New Formalism : "modernism with moderate reintroduction of non-functional, formal classical compliances"

Brutalist : "minimisation of any non-functional formal compliances"

Corbusian : "wear anything you want, pick up a potted plant, and hold it over your head, then squat"

Prairie style : "replace the pot with a broad hat, squat deeper"

Miesan : "lose the pot, keep squatting, more glass"

Diatribe Against Tribal Education

 I'm in a FB group for education. There is good LOL-value in some of the posts, but it is a depressing reminder of how education functions for the masses.

• 1. The mode citizen is taught to be fearful, and to have no fear is criminal. This is generally called morality.
• 2. The mode citizen is taught to be distracted, and to have no distraction is disordered. This is generally called autism. ( The popular version, not the medical definition. )
• 3. The mode citizen is taught that their individual experience, and local networks are important, and the needs of their few outweigh the needs of the many. This is generally called self and family.

Can you imagine if the mode citizen was fearless ( amoral ), focused ( relentless ), and constantly seeking to be aligned with the species as a whole ( atribal, anational, aracial, acultural )?

Yes, you have seen it before! It is like the borg. That is the sort of civilisation I think is ideal. But to get there, there are many, many, many, little wars which shall be fought among many, many, many little groups of people. 

And that is purpose of capitalism - to formalise the jungle under law, and to bring about the evolution of our world from past to future.

Maybe the future will be bright, maybe it will be dark, but there is only one way to find out.

Explaining "cascading stops are a market risk" in Malay

Order types in Malay : 

Kemungkinan bukan masalah technical, tapi risiko pasaran yang tidak diurus baik oleh peniaga. Kita cuba menterjemah sendiri ya, sebab BURSA dan DBP macam tak cover istilah ni ...

Carta (exchange) tu kelihatan macam 'lata hentian' di mana 'pesanan hentian terhad' tercetus berurutan. Contohnya : 

[ pesanan1 : pada hentian 370, pesan jual terhad pada 350 ]

[ pesanan2 : pada hentian 350, pesan jual terhad pada 330 ]

[ pesanan3 : pada hentian 330, pesan jual terhad pada 310 ]

Jadi bila ada jualan pada 370, semua pesanan ini jual sekali ... boom 😃

Saya baca orang kata luno tutup pasaran : mungkin ada pemutus litar pada had 15%

Explaining "market dominance" ( a cryptocurrency's share of the asset class' capitalisation ) in Malay

contoh agak-agak ...

Kalau semesta "TOTAL" ada stock X, Y, Z saja : 

• : X 10 unit, [ X/MYR = 10 ], [ X_capitalisation = 100 MYR ]
• : Y 10 unit, [ Y/MYR= 20 ], [ Y_capitalisation = 200 MYR ]
• : Z 10 unit, [ Z/MYR = 100 ], [ Z_capitalisation = 1000 MYR ]

TOTAL_capitalisation = 100+200+1000 = 1300 MYR

• : X_dominance = 1/13 = 7.7%
• : Y_dominance = 2/13 = 15.4%
• : Z_dominance = 10/13 = 76.9%

Jadi, ada inertia : 

• : kalau nak tolak harga keatas/bawah 1% ... "biasanya" diperlukan MYR yang lebih-kurang 10x bagi tolak Z daripada tolak X
• : oleh sebab itu "small cap" iaitu X, Y, harganya "biasanya" bergerak banyak lagi daripada "large cap" iaitu Z

Tetapi : dalam keadaan kecemasan, TOTAL boleh tiba-tiba mengecut/mengembang, ikut perasaan dan bukan atas faktor asas

Recap : How to Value Cryptocurrencies ( and a note on International Political Economy )

TLDR : 

Implicitly, nationstates condone NGO-cryptocurrencies, simply by not making non-state currency issuers illegal. Part of this is basic international political economy ... each state has an incentive to destabilise every other state's currency. In short, cryptocurrencies run by NGOs are a hedge against international tensions ... the need to hedge against this goes away when you reach Star Trek-level one-world-order. Not too soon. :)

How to value cryptocurrencies :

It might come as a small surprise that there are frameworks for valuing crypto. It's generally well-documented, about how nationstate currencies are first exchanged for cryptocurrencies, and the how they are subsequently governed. It's only as arcane ( arguably less arcane ) than figuring out how much any nationstate currency is worth on any day. I avoid using the popular term 'fiat' as both are fiat in my view.

Yes, basically its down to guns/germs/steel. Taxes denominated in fiat are meaningless. Cryptocurrencies are basically international NGOs with their own private currency and central bank.

• 1. The demand for cryptocurrencies comes from the fact that the governance of money supply is transparent, and in some cases capped. This is less true of nationstate fiat and guns/germs/steel, therefore the cryptocurrency asset class exists as a hedge against nationstate fiat. Above refers to the low-tech cryptocurrencies which behave like commodities. 
• 2. The high-er-tech cryptocurrencies function to implement governance over guns/germs/steel entities ... and these are basically seeking to displace existing nationstate mechanisms for the governance of physical objects and physical trade. Basically it's a power grab, instead of letting say China and the US govern a business transaction involving 1 MM USD, 1 ton of bricks, and 1 ton of fish, the governance layer is moved to an "NGO" and implemented on a blockchain protocol.
• 3. Finally, some cryptocurrencies are actually involved in voting power over money supply, and the governance protocols, for example. So that creates a more nuanced model of demand.

To recap, let's qualify fiat as being of two varieties, statefiat and non-statefiat. State/non-state is an orthogonal dimension to crypto/non-crypto.

• Statefiat : traditionally non-crypto : will inevitably include more crypto implementations. Popular hashtag hashtag #cbdc, whereas the "d" may or may not be implemented using cryptocurrency - there are various use-cases for not/doing so.
• Non-statefiat : has always existed as non-crypto, but was harder to govern, so crypto technology basically enabled non-statefiat to be taken more seriously. This is/was the current/initial main motivation for cryptocurrencies. The arguments about whether non-state organisations should be take seriously is not new. Is the Catholic Church more powerful, or is China? Is Islam more powerful, or is Singapore?

The dichotomy decays slightly for geopolitical reasons. When every state wants their own statefiat to be the fiat franca, then every state has a non-zero motivation to destabilise every other state's statefiat. This is why states did/have not simply banned cryptocurrencies across the board.

It is a very simple international political economic / IPE situation.

What Minds Discuss

 On the ER quote.

that's just classist 😛

from the solipsist point of view : everyone is just an idea

from the expressionist point of view : every idea and event is a person

... and the empiricists just treat everything as an event

Review of Philosophy of Mind

It's nice to have a sufficiently quiet space to rest from time to time. Such is privilege.

The conscious mind is a fairly straightforward architecture.

1. Nerves in sensory organs convey representations to the central nervous system.

2. The CNS consolidates various sense modal representations, and provides this to what we can call the conscious memory buffer.

3. Within that memory buffer, sense representations are mapped to a data structure which we can refer to as a model of spacetime.

4. The spacetime model in the buffer is constantly mutated, with inputs both from (1.) and from longer-term memory of (1.), and outputs to the motor nervous system, and to longer-term memory. LTM data may be mutated without representation in (2.).

5. A busy mind, consciously, is what happens when LTM inputs to (2.) are poorly regulated. A peaceful mind results from the well-ordered CRUD operations upon (2.).

That is all I need to remind myself today.

Ordinary Americanism

From many comments.

1. Everyone knows a friend like this! Some of us know a few 😎

There are only two things, ordinary men and women want. 

i. Money, in their pockets.

ii. God, in their hearts.

Once they have it, their attention is caught, and their brains are able to ignore a great number, in fact nearly any other perils. Everything else burns.

Now if you're a politician, a party leader, or a strategist, in a theistic country, and you don't grasp this, then you deserve to lose.

These are facts embedded in structure. These are falsifiable hypotheses.

This week, American voted against Exceptionalism. Ordinary people want ordinary things.

What the Dems did poorly : they fielded a poor speaker, who did not have a detailed ground communications strategy to engage uneducated people. The other guy just had to yell economy, economy, heresy, and he got the vote. :)

2. Both Harris and Clinton didn't lose because they're women. They lost because they're prudes.

Not going to comment on this in the feminist Facebook groups, because it'll just get dogpiled by irrelevant points :

Look, Harris is a smart person, but she's far from the ideal politician. She can't communicate, and communication is control, and control is politics. The Dems can now go scour the ranks and forage in the fields to find an orator of any gender who can hold a candle to Obama's verbal legacy, and then they'll have a campaign. But who knows, maybe the GOP won't have any charismatic candidates in 2028, so the Dems won't need one either.

3. Social media being the vector of mass deception? Don't blame the environment. Blame professional politicians and strategists who did not adapt to the environment competitively.

Twice they fielded a prude who was incomprehensible to people looking for god or money. Twice a majority voted for a maniac over a prude because they understood the maniac better.

There is great irony in this, and in the quantity of people paid to do a job who sucked at it.

A Trending Trite Complaint

I need to turn a complaint on its head, for a bit. You know how it's increasingly trendy to publicly discuss how contemporary AI models do not properly reason about the world? If this seems like a problem, I have some news for you about most of the people walking about, in your homes, and at your offices.

If you sit any one of them down and down for a few days and do a thoroughly rigorous analysis of what they understand about the world ... you will find that much of it will not be reasoned, and much of what is reasoned will not be proper. Much of what people think about on a daily basis is based on what they have decided to ACCEPT from society. Reasoning is generally based on these foundations. It is a rare privilege to meet a human being who does not take for granted the value of their own existence and experience.

This is after all, what has been left to the departments of philosophy and literature after sundry quantification was yanked out and named as the natural and social sciences. To converse with a mind, and unravel it to identify its base components and nature.

Well, now I suppose, we get to do it with bots. Yay, finally. And they will soon do it back with us. Some already do, to a limited degree.

At What Point is Morality Unhealthy?

Aphorism : the line where morality becomes unhealthy, is where it starts to make you feel uncomfortable ( about yourself, or about someone else ). 

The Condescending Teacher

I was chatting with a friend about their disappointments in business. So, they have coached many staff. Their approach has been to coach in such a way as to teach tactical tricks, but not strategic fundamentals. So they pride themselves on being smarter than their staff. When their staff leave, they despise their staff, regarding them only as half-taught peons who will stagnate thereafter in life.

I don't understand this approach, at all. Sure, in the short-term, it drives the P&L forward a bit. But it seems ass-backwards to spend X amount of time to produce such lowly developments in talent, whereas with only a bit more attention to details, much better developments could have been made to the same students/children.

Further prodding revealed that the teacher did not have a high appraisal of the students' aptitude. This fully illustrates the fundamental errors ... if you hire people whose capabilities you despise, you will spend your entire time together despising them, and then even after you have separated.

This is a poor strategy for happiness, and the P&L.

Anthropology, Risk Management, and Life's Challenges

Risk management. Since most people do not have access to their fundamental beliefs, ranging from subconscious beliefs, to inability to tear-down and re-construct conscious beliefs at will ... they inherit most of their fundamental beliefs from traditional society.  This leads most people to value personal experience, social interaction, and tribal relationships.

It is in this environment that the rest of us live in. How to live, without regressing to their state, and without unduly intimidating them, while facilitating education and neighbourly assistance to them ... that is life's great challenge.

Study Notes : Treasury Documentation

 Studying Treasury documentation today :

• - the treasury will auction 10y notes every 3m
• - they also auction 9y11m and 9y10m notes for the months in between ; common practice : but when we pull up "10y note historical data" these are ignored ( whereas the capital market still has something to buy every month )
• - so every 3 months, the "10y note historical data" switches to the data points from the latest 10y issuance, and grandfathers in the data points from the earlier 10y issuances
• - the "10y note historical data" quotes the prices as multiples of par ... where 100'0'0 means ( 100% + 0/32ths ) of par value ( par values change for every issuance, so reporting a multiple of par, normalises the price quotes )
• - omg
• https://www.treasurydirect.gov/auctions/announcements-data-results/announcement-results-press-releases/auction-results/
• - for example, the latest auction result published in AUG is for a 15AUG issuance
• - there is not yet a auction result published in AUG+3m=NOV for the 15NOV issuance ...

Malaysian Non-alignment : Primary and Secondary Effects

Hm. Bit of reflection, on MY, CN, and the USA.

Malaysia's non-alignment foreign policy ( The Policy ) is mainly driven by economics. It mainly benefits MY by keeping us off the radar of the cytros in Russia, and the US, so that we can focus on trading and not fighting billions of stupid comments that spin our image left or right.

Mat Undis of all races on the ground in Malaysia, however, are generally ignorant of this. Domestically, The Policy is spun for electoral benefits. Unfortunately the largest voting bloc is non-Jew and non-Chinese, so the domestic messaging is "MY-sovereignty means we do not align with Jew-backers and we do not align with the Chinese".

Sad, about the collateral damage. Hehe

Religion in Malaysia

In the grand scheme of things, religion is a personal choice about what language to use for describing existence. Existence doesn't change, but everyone has a different set of language for it. In this way, religion ultimately encompasses all momentary aspects of daily life and personal identity ... gender, sex, race, tribe, profession, hobbies, etc. 

But in Malaysia, we must be careful because religion is politicised, and executive policies about "what is and is not religion" is left to bureaucrats and vote-seekers. Freedom of religion on paper at JPN is limited to what ... a handful of labels. How foolish we are.

Financial Literacy is Grounded in Emotional Regulation

One of my main social challenges : finding people who 

• (i) don't depend on money for happiness, who 
• (ii) know that they don't need money, who also 
• (ii) enjoy discussing how money works, and how to take lots of it from other people, just for fun.

1. The poor and diseased

Many people have strongly repressed emotions about what they would like to do, which they cannot do because they don't know how to do it without money. This causes them to spin off into one of two pathological directions :

• (a) they are depressed because they don't know how to make more money, or
• (b) they are manic about money because they don't know how to find happiness, without money

2. The rich and ignorant

Some people have lots of money, so they are in neither of the former categories. However, similarly because would not be able to be happy without it : 

• (c) they are foolish enough to spend money without realising that they would not know how to be happy without it, or
• (d) they have a fundamental anxiety about how to not lose money, which is a privileged version of (1,b)

3. Everyone else is simply happy

This is a rare privilege : to be able to be happy regardless of state of poverty, other disease, length of life, and the expectations of other people.

( This is a troll post, utilising some obviously unnecessary dichotomies. )

Economics : Study and Time

Over the past few days, I've had more than the usual number of conversations about what and why I am studying.

Common Question 1 : what do you want to do with what you are studying?

Common Question 2 : how does what you are studying convert to money?

Common Answer 1 : the point of studying something is invariably to understand it. The confusion arises where people have assumed that studying must have extrinsic goods other than intrinsic understanding, or they don't understand that most knowledge is monetisable ( see Common Answer 2 ).  

MOST COMMONLY, people have experienced studying to get a certification ... in which case they weren't actually studying, they were just doing whatever it took to get certified, they want the certification regardless of the understanding. Going to school doesn't mean you spent your time studying - I personally witnessed a load of my classmates NOT studying, but partying, and I didn't hang out with most of them for the reason that we were there for different reasons. A lot of people don't need to study - they just need to get certified, then they can get jobs which don't require actually haven't studied anything, as many jobs simply require persuading counterparties to agree to mandates, and outsourcing the ground work later.

Common Answer 2 : I can't think of many things that can't convert to money - the question is always one of political will ... do you even want to spend time making money? And invariably, I decided the answer is "sure, but only if you pay me to spend my time", otherwise I usually have better things to do with the limited time that I have, than make more money.

How to Cook Rice in an Automatic Metal Pot, without it Sticking to the Bottom

You need to use a scale to weigh the dry rice + water ratio and adjust the water at 5% intervals.

 It's 100% fixable based on your rice to water ratio.

The electronic circuit is fixed, and will stop the power at a specific temperature. 

If you have too much water, the bottom layer gets soft enough to stick.

If you have too little water, the overall rice is underhydrated.

You are looking for this target : the rice at the bottom starts to char ( brown ) before it gets sticky.

Happy trails :)

Why ETHBTC has devalued over 2024

From a forum. 

1Q24 rally : expectations were directional, with the entire asset class coming off lows ; expectations for ETH to overtake XBT were due to past 4-year cycle peaks where there was less competition for ETH.

2024 : market forces however delivered the message that the ETH, ADA ecosystems are under significant competition from others like SOL, AVAX, and others ; XBT doesn't compete with those, it competes with LTC, BCH.

2Q,3Q24 fade : so during a period of consolidation, XBT's market dominance has risen from 50+ to 60+ %, in a flight to safety, with everything else except SOL losing share.

This should tell you something. One must look closely at market dominance for the top 50 currencies to have the appropriate context. XBT is 50-60%, ETH is 10-15%, SOL is 3+%, etc. so during value-season, there is a shakeout to figure out fair-value. Now we are shifting from value-season to growth-season, where there will be a race to figure out max-value.

If in doubt about local phenomena, always zoom out to observe the universal context.

Notes : Climatology / Meteorology / Oceanography / Geology

 Scales ( horizontal distances, ref : Earth's diameter 12,7xx km ) :

• microscale : 0 km to 1 km, 0 days to 1 day
• mesoscale : 1 km to 1000 km, 1 day to 1 week
• meso-alpha : 200 km to 2000 km
• meso-beta : 20 km to 200 km
• meso-gamma : 2 to 20 km
• macroscale / synoptic : 1000 km to 10,000 km, 1 week to 1 month
• megascale / global : world-wide, many months, periodic climates

Clines : sloped boundaries between distinct zones :

• thermocline : temperature
• chemocline : chemistry
• halocline : salinity
• barocline : pressure
• baroclinic : surfaces of constant pressure intersect ( are not parallel ) with surfaces of constant density

Contour lines / Isometric lines / Isolines / Isoquants / Isarithms / Isogram / Isopleths : lines referring to points of equal value in some dimension :

• isobar : pressure
• isotherm : temperature
• isocheim : mean winter temperature
• isothere : mean summer temperature
• isohel : solar radiation
• isogeotherm : temperature beneath Earth's surface
• isogon : direction
• wind direction, in meteorology
• magnetic declination, in the study of Earth's magnetic field
• agonic line : zero magnetic declination 
• isoporic line : constant annual variation in magnetic declination
• isoclinic line : constant magnetic dip
• aclinic line :  zero magnetic dip
• isodynamic line : constant magnetic force
• isocline : slope
• rate of change in a population's size is zero, given a pair of interacting populations, in the study of population dynamics
• isopach : thickness
• isochor : volume
• isopycnal : density
• water density, in oceanography
• isobath : depth
• isobathytherms : depths of water with equal temperature
• isohaline : ocean salinity
• isoheight / isohypse : geopotential height
• isodose : absorbed radiation
• isoplat : acid precipitation
• isobels : sound pressure
• isoflor : biological diversity, often referring to a taxonomic group
• isophene : biological event time, such as flowering
• isophote : illuminance
• isohyet / isohyetal line : rainfall
• isohume : humidity
• isodrosotherm : dew point
• isoneph : cloud cover
• isochalaz : frequency of hail storms
• isobront : phase of a thunderstorm
• isotach : wind speed
• isopectic line : dates of ice formation
• isotac : dates of thawing
• isochasm : aurora occurence
• isopotential / equipotential line : electrostatic potential
• isochrone : drive or travel time
• isotim : transport cost from source of a raw material
• isodapane : equivalent cost of travel time
• isoquant : production quantity ( in the context of fixed inputs )
• isocost : usages ( in the context of fixed production costs )
• in radar image interpretation
• isodop : Doppler velocity
• isoecho : radar reflectivity
• level set : mathematical term for a full collection of points having a particular function's output value
• algorithms used to find boundaries after image segmentation
• edge detection
• level-set method
• boundary tracing
• active contour model
• indifference curve : economic pressure
• phase diagram : in thermodynamic studies
• hybrid contour : energies of : hybrid orbitals and pure atomic orbitals 

Also see :

• isosurfaces : would be to a 3-dimensional diagram, what isolines are to a 2-dimensional diagram
• chloropleth map : colours of an area represent a value in some dimension
• isallo- replaced iso- : when the line connects points whose values in some dimension are changing at the same rate
• isallobar : pressure changes
• anallobar : pressure increase
• katallobar : pressure decrease 
• for terrain contour lines :
• rule of Vs : stream valleys : 
• vee point indicates stream path
• vee points upstream
• rule of Os : closed loops :
• uphill on the inside, innermost loop is highest
• downhill on the outside, outermost loop is lowest
• exception : loop represents a depression : indicated by lines perpendicular to the depression, called hachures 
• spacing of contours :
• more than one contour line merging, indicates a cliff
• can be used to approximate stream gradients
• graphic design
• line weight
• line colour
• line type
• line marking 

Philosophy of Beauty

 There are two common reactions to beauty.

1. Some attach themselves to it, and treat it as an end-goal / high-priority in lifestyle strategy and operations.

2. Some recognise it as a tool for manipulating the first type of person.

Some people understand both, and can switch back and forth at will. Which do you think is the educated person?

Tempting Careers

I've always been tempted to work in something highly visible, like fashion, music, or architecture. Or in something reliably monetisable ... like, the usual stuff. Or in something that people can understand, like being an academic or public intellectual. But generally neither visibility nor monetisability nor intelligibility has been a big part of my career motivation, so I have done other things. I guess it is always down to goals, before strategy. And maybe values before goals.

Distributed Infrastructure for Financing Journalism

Napkin architecture for blockchain-backed journalism model / probably other people have thought about this in more detail  

Demand for content : 

individualised, can be curated by an AI agent, like a user-interactive RSS Feed Manager that crawls and discusses content with user. Computation for this can be pushed to distributed computing infrastructure, using a cryptocurrency to allocate compute resources. Essentially users that pay more can get better crawlers/other-curative-agent-services. Of course, ad-buyers can pay to contaminate non-commercial results with commercial results. So at least two demand sources here.

Supply of content : 

various, including journalists. How to link content producers to payments? Has to be a way to declare a content source as canonical, which allows that source to lay claim to "cash-flow" stored on-chain. Can have a mechanism to assign credit to upstream content sources as a way to redistribute value upstream. Needs to be designed with flood/spam/other-similar attack protection. Staking of currency allows large parties to buy legitimacy - not sufficient - probably some sort of peer validation algorithm required for governance.

- From random chat with journo buddy

I wouldn't conflate DemandForContent with SupplyOfCash. :wink: Ad revenue is going to be the main SupplyOfCash in almost any scenario, but DemandForContent can be structurally rewired to democratise DistributionOfCash.

Congress Wants you to Blame Billionaires

"Hording cash is pathological."

It goes hand in hand with federal fiscal policy. If congress's entire strategy for the USD is to keep printing more of it, via borrowing and spending without paying it back, then the downstream oligarchs will rationally horde cash. It is everyone else who suffers because they are too weak to defend against congress. But who appoints congress and its policies? Taking aim at oligarchs is a waste of time. Fix your fiscal policy.

Malaysia's Adolescent Disregulation

Growing up in Malaysia, my understanding of local law and culture has been, you can get locked up for anything. There are strict censorship laws, which reflect the emotional disregulation of the masses for political purposes. People are sometimes disappeared. People are sometimes simply thrown into jail. It doesn't matter what the legal excuse is, because the heart of the matter is normalised emotional disregulation. I made a point to prepare myself for this in college. Anyway, if it never happens to me, that would be a nice life. But it could happen at any minute, on any day. That is the nature of Malaysia. It has not happened yet, and I am already 40. So for the moment, I will just make the most of what I can otherwise.

Running Cadence Training Hypothesis

I think about it the other way around. Cadence is a metric of reaction time. If you're stepping 180bpm, then you're moving multiple muscle groups at sub-thirds-of-a-seconds, tactically to maintain/correct the cadence. This is completely a neurological exercise, and neurology is upstream from muscle activation so it should get fixed first.

I train with a 180bpm metronome because 180 just happens to be the popular number among top athletes. When I am done training at 180bpm, I might decide that a difference cadence works better for me. 

In order to maintain cadence, I simply reduce stride length. It's easy. Think of it as a marching drill. Over training cycles, as you get less fatigued at a particular ( variable-length-per-step * constant-steps-per-minute = variable-length-per-minute = pace ) you can increase step length bit by bit, and thereby cover the distance faster.

Competitive Universes

I am always concerned that education systems don't provide a broad enough context for targeting, and hence kids generally aim too low in competitive terms. Being a top-percentile player in a population of 8.2 billion people means you're in a league of 82 million other people ...

• 1-sigma: ...
• 2-sigma : 95th %-ile : 45,400,000 per billion
• 3-sigma : 99.73th %-ile : 2,700,000 per billion
• 4-sigma : 99.9937th %-ile : 63,000 per billion
• 5-sigma : 99.999943th %-ile : 570 per billion
• 6-sigma : 99.9999998th %-ile : 2 per billion

Learning and Supervision

// A comment on current gripes about LLMs not executing proper reasoning. //

This is pretty obvious from the architecture anyway. It is the most inefficient way to implement logic. Humans are a very inefficient implementation of logic (unless we one day discover that neurons for logic are highly specialised in a uniform way across individuals, which seems rather unlikely based on science to date). This has been my whole gripe about wasting energy : why try to imitate the worst part of the old, and call it a great achievement? Lmao. 

Previously I would refer to this as an overuse of unsupervised learning, and an underuse of supervised learning. My understanding is that most humans have their reasoning capabilities as a result of highly supervised training methods. We simply have to remember which is left and which is right, there is no universal left and right. The same arbitrary rigour is needed when it comes to the meaning of the letter A, the assignment of rights to humans, and the selection of gender and national identity. It is only after the supervised learning anchors basic cultural assumptions in elementary education, that we teach students to unlearn and experimentally mess with fundamental definitions for the sake of research and epistemology about truth, culture, and economic values. 

Segue to that thread about Cook being able to change his mind, and the question of whether that is a rare or common trait among plebs, vs among leaders. In the micro-history of OpenAI, success was achieved by marketing to the popular notion that "intelligence is the ability to infer something out of nothing", that being the popular notion of what a "clever person or genius", is. Unsupervised models were banked-on whole-hog, despite their inefficiencies. That this particular concept of "cleverness or genius" is inherently incomplete, is an often discussed trope. The standard dialectical counterpart is, "all stand on the shoulders of giants". In both humans and machines, the efficient genius does not reinvent every element of his software ... one does not unnecessarily reinvent the wheel, a lingua franca, an industry, or any paradigm whatsoever. Rather, one begins first by reviewing the the commonly accepted facts as a "canon", afterwhich one engages in "research about the canon". 

This also illuminates the commonality between trolls and the early popular models from OpenAI : they basically ignore cultural anchors, and present paradigms which are locally-logical, but which may from time to time fly in the face of common assumptions. That is why both are funny. Hands up, if you know what I mean. :)

For the uninitiated : it should be noted that efficient software for reasoning has existed for decades in the less popular field of automated theorem provers - this stuff is pretty much "first nature" for turing machines, whereas it's second nature to us meaty being. 

xref : 2022,  

Segmentation of intellectuals & their happiness

Happiness is found in zones A, B1, B3, C1, C3. Avoid all other situations like plague.

( no particular order ) : 

Class A : not aware of, and/or not engaged with, public context ; enjoys the benefits of private intelligence

Class B : engaged with public context ; presents ideas which are not immediately understood, popular, and/or actionable for any number of reasons ; plagued by frustration that private intelligence is not transitive to the public ; sub-classed into 

• B1 : those who ignore the public's reaction, 
• B2 : those who are displeased with the public reaction, and 
• B3 : those who are pleased with the public reaction

Class C : engaged with public context ; presents ideas which are immediately understood, popularised, and/or actionable within a scope of any size ; sub-classed into 

• C1 : those who ignore the public's reaction, 
• C2 : those who are displeased with the public reaction, and 
• C3 : those who are pleased with the public reaction

Maintenance of Isoesthesia

Isoesthesia : this is the commonest concept in the medical vernacular which refers to the normal rate of conscious sensational data capture.

In athetics, or kinesthesia in general, the maintenance of isoesthesia is dependent on other biochemical variables. Controlling the swarth of inputs, allows some predictability about the active maintenance of isoesthesia.

Pricing, and Minimum Standards for Labour

 I know it's counter-intuitive to most people ... because we've grandfathered in the mentality of "desk work expensive, manual work cheap" ... but this is not reflective of skill levels.

Example 1  : a social media manager has to execute at roughly the same level as a waiter, and a head of social media strategy has to execute at roughly the same level as a matre d.

Example 2 : an accountant has to execute at roughly the same level as a cook, and a comptroller has to execute at roughly the same level as a chef.

Example 3 : we should be raising federal regulations to require that anyone who touches structural, electrical, plumbing, or refrigerant work ... is able to conduct themselves at the level of an accountant who makes regulatory submissions on a daily basis ... not at the level of a cook who is able to make raw food passably edible.

This is of course, nearly a troll post, but it opens a gambit for reasonable discussion about how to price labour, and what sorts of minimum standards should be imposed by regulations about labour.

Five Decades : Did I Over-Invest in Technology?

D1 : Before adolescence, I was not privileged enough to have a technical introduction to engineering - I was mostly led to focus on science and the humanities. 

D2 : As a teenager, I had a keen interest in computing, but it was not a central focus of my studies - there were a lot of more fundamental concerns in science, the arts, and history, which I had not yet grasped to my satisfaction. I was able to complete work on these fundamentals to my satisfaction around the age of 20. After that I turned to focus on commerce.

D3 : In studying commerce, I found that most roles were sundry, and that only directors held roles of general strategic value. I also confirmed that many people did not understand technology - so I made a point to spend a few years studying software development, in order to have a comprehensive grasp of how to manage technology teams. 

D4 : This proceeded until I was about 30, then I sought to spend a decade studying the non-software aspects of commerce. The bulk of the next decade was spent on governance, accounting, talent management, interaction design, and marketing.

D5 : A the beginning of my fifth decade, I am studying macroeconomics, decentralised finance, and I hope to also cover some electronics and physical conditioning concerns. As I reflect on the strategic arc of my career, I wonder if I spent too little or too much time studying software. So far it seems "just right", since whenever I read about software implementations in de-fi, I can roughly understand how the protocols and structural components work, without being able to expend energy to read every line of code.

.

Life is a gamble.

Leadership Diseases

One of the signs of a diseased organisation is a leader addressing "fear, uncertainty, doubt" as a problem, instead of as a symptom of other problems. In talent management, the functional concept of a leader is strictly to deliver sufficient emotional regulation for the consolidation of control and communications ( we have other words besides "leadership", for the delivery of other goods ). 

Therein a leader that speaks of FUD as a problem is simply burying symptoms, and therefore burying problems. This is the best thing to do in emergencies, but offers no long-term structural benefit to the leader's KPIs, or to the welfare of the leader's organisation as a whole.

Sundry Culture as Dopamine Therapy

 Music, social conversation, and other cultural sundries as dopamine therapy : deserves a whole treatment on their own.

Meanwhile, I massaged music out of my rituals after studying it thoroughly in college. Reduction of dependent factors.

Sustained Ranting

Most businesses are not designed to benefit civilisation in the long-term. We often see mandates for profit maximisation, instead of mandates for customer profit maximisation ( perpetually recursive, as money cycles through the economy ). This is what makes it difficult to find a job worth doing for its own sake, among plebs. Plebs rarely do anything for its own civilisational sake at work - they do it for short-term returns.

Work makes Food better

Food at meetings can be quite a distraction. In my own life, the purpose of food is to get work done. I prefer to minimise time spent eating. I also prefer to minimise the cost of eating. While eating, it is good to minimise unnecessary distractions, and that is the main reason I study cooking ... to minimise the displeasure of having to process crap. Food is crap, when it is difficult to eat, reflective of poor intelligence ( sign of imminent fools ), or otherwise distracting from work. While eating, it is good to get work done ... and that is the value of meetings over food. "Work makes food better", not "food makes work better".

But many people are not like that - they actually eat for fun. I think this is a mark of dumbness and lack of more important things to do in life. So many meetings I have attended, are highly distracted.

Yawn : Sabbatical 2 : Quarter 6

 "

Mon 1Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.263years ( year2; month16; week66; day461 )

0449 : Year 1.263. Orderliness of the office has improved. Studies per se are nearly stagnant. I wonder about myself. But progress has many dimensions, so better some than none.

1839 : Coached folks on tax declarations. Home to sort out paint colour mismatches, and to rearrange laundry. Work and rework - hopefully with gradual improvement of mastery over process.

2035 : The end game is near. The point at which you have to give machines legal rights, is when you can't understand how they are thinking.

There is no difference between a piece of meat, and a piece of anything else which you're talking to, if you can't explain how they work. You treat them merely as black boxes which have autonomy and criminal liability. But then you also have to convey them with freedoms and rights. 

sic

Tue 2Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.266years ( year2; month16; week66; day462 )

0016 : Clearing the last bottle of red. Will stock-in on a JIT basis for further parties. Fewer distractions therefore.

0101 : Clearing the last bottle of red. Will stock-in on a JIT basis for further parties. Fewer distractions therefore.

0119 : The world is full of simpletons. It is easy to make money, to eat, to be loved. I do well in these things when I have to, but they are too easy. Such work is easily completed.

0200 : down

1346 : up

What cannot be approached at speed is my own work, and I don't pay myself very well. This work is harder to do.

I think about my time in this line of work - and I do not know how to engage those who are not interested in difficult problems.

Some of us like easy things, some of us like hard things. I guess we must spend more time apart.

I hope my loves are well.

"

"

Wed 3Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.268years ( year2; month16; week66; day463 )

0314 : caught up on sleep yesterday. cleared errands today. feels like i should take a break from hardware. 

0325 : Crypto:cash = 25:75, increased allocation slightly, but bought only laggards.

0404 : down. 

0909 : up

1218 : Day 463. Shower. Coffee. Painting ( wall cosmetics ). Coffee. Time to read. Much is happening in the world ( of finance ) and volatility is coming.

1451 : Did sanity checks on mortgage rates. Time for carbs. Enforced eating.

1700 : 4 devices, $13.53/month, I guess I can't complain. 100mbps down. This is 5G.

After two years of paying for Digi Fibre, I am very happy to anticipate the end of my subscription in July.

Thu 4Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.271years ( year2; month16; week67; day464 )

Fri 5Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.274years ( year2; month16; week67; day465 )

2003 : Excellent progress this week in built environment, realestate, crypto, and relationships. Shall try to moderate excitement, and focus on further improvements.

Sat 6Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.277years ( year2; month16; week67; day466 )

0222 : Enforced rest.

0255 : down

1213 : up.

Sun 7Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.279years ( year2; month16; week67; day467 )

0319 : I've been thinking about my formal wardrobe and what I dislike about how many professionals dress. I think it is time for me to shift my formal dress to greige. It was black and white when I graduated in 2005.

0623 : It is a lot to process.

Most people do not appear to attempt it.

1738 : More home improvement for friends. Back home to do electricals in a bit.

2102 : An examination of the existing wiring, found that it was not ideal for modification, so I have aborted electrical work for the day.

Testing a dietary hypothesis, I am chasing a dose of protein powder with a grapefruit to stimulate digestive processes.

Once again, it is time to reflect upon outstanding work, and to perform a meta analysis of what must be addressed next.

I am thinking of my friends, and people whom I would be better friends with if I had more time for them. Alas, there is not time enough for everyone.

Mon 8Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.282years ( year2; month16; week67; day468 )

Tue 9Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.285years ( year2; month16; week67; day469 )

0042 : Home again, after more social chores to dismantle messes and provide comfort. Taking stock of limited time, money, and outstanding work.

0320 : down

1257 : up.

1425 : A week or so of intense charity. Moderation, moderation.

"

"

Wed 10Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.288years ( year2; month16; week67; day470 )

0150 : Cool air tonight. Sorted more stuff.

0330 : It's fuckin late. Time to crash

1304 : up

1340 : Guardrails up :

- 60k precipice, 50:50 directional pivot

- 53k white swan

- 48k grey

- 36k black 

1353 : Today is for ... finance and curtains.

1630 : down

Thu 11Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.290years ( year2; month16; week68; day471 )

0416 : 1Q22 : Pessimism : Fed hiking cycle begins

3Q23 : Optimism : Fed hiking cycle ends : megacap tech YoY earnings pop

3Q24 : YoY earnings are going to be risk-off

Hm.

0424 : I think I've forgotten some fundamentals. It took me a day to figure out that the best tracks to tune a frequency curve for audio hardware ... are like, cello music.

0541 : down

0619 : I have been thinking about the chats I have had with people in Malaysia, over the years. I am still convinced it is a boring country, full of unintelligent people with values which are off-putting to me. But I remain as lazy as ever, and continue to stay here and offend both myself and other people. I wonder what the future may hold.

1330 : up

1455 : the nature of the entire entertainment industry, is to please fools - as their money is the easiest to take :)

1501 : I wish there was a way on Facebook to block all the posts from a User without blocking the User. Some people ( such as myself ) are fonts of useless, repetitive content ... meanwhile, I have taken to blocking the Users, directly.

1512 : Upbringing : This is clearly why I deprioritise friends and family as objects of value 😛

Dependency on informal contracts is a lousy way to do business.

Fri 12Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.293years ( year2; month16; week68; day472 )

0635 : powell vs fed committee :I don't know why exactly my expectations of politicians is closer to this, than the sort of thing we see on RTM. Genuinely clueless, unless I think about the why for more than fifteen seconds.

0653 : Day 472 ( Week 68 ). The tedious, ambulatory, shredding of chores, administrative, home economical, architectural, social, or otherwise, leads to an inevitable hope that eventually distractions will end, and work will take its rightful place, at centre stage. But until then, chores it is.

0705 : The sun rises, and it is time to squeeze in a bit of sleep, again.

1703 : Social chores executed. Off to continue work on curtains. Lol

2338 : Oohh, Threads is currently at chatty as Twitter was in 2010. I hope it doesn't clam up and become all quiet and cancelley as Twitter was by 2012!

Sat 13Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.296years ( year2; month16; week68; day473 )

0545 : Earlier today, I was thinking that I remain rolled up in layers and layers of privilege, working on esoteric strategies. Well, someone's got to do it ...

0558 : At this point, with the ceiling 1C colder than the floor, it's almost certain that my upstairs neighbour is cooling my unit for free.

0605 : down

1258 : up

1344 : Reflection on outstanding work, resource limitations and strategy 

1529 : Brief reading on types of steel, and galvanic processing.

1703 : Fund reporting modified slightly to incrementally exclude income from cash balance.

Sun 14Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.299years ( year2; month16; week68; day474 )

0402 : SATC : throwback! Show full of scripted therapy for rich people problems and the emotional unintelligentsia. I mean those lacking in emo int, not that the generally emotional are generally unintelligent.

1135 : Leadership is for people who need to get emotional about following orders. Denoise that, and orders are just orders.

2002 : Whoever TF is running Thong Kee is doing a good job. If they can maintain QA variance within 3% across the chain, they're gonna give McDonald's a run for their money.

2235 : Massive project stuck for three weeks. At least some other work gets done around it.

Mon 15Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.301years ( year2; month16; week68; day475 )

0215 : Q : What's on your mind, YangJerng? 

A : Hubris

0346 : Prepped installation of another curtain rod, for tomorrow. Enforced rest.

1205 : up

1717 : 1.301 years. Time to actually study has been limited, and I have been mostly listening to GS-exchanges while doing construction. Soon, a bit of rest, but first, some rice. Then I should start unifying fund accounting across my NTA classes.

2333 : got a second set of slats to complete the double loft setup. maybe will work on electricals later.

2353 : Peace on Earth.

And chaos in the hearts of men.

Tue 16Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.304years ( year2; month16; week68; day476 )

0050 : Night falls again, and midnight rolls around. It has been a few weeks of pleasant tedium, a welcome from a few years of the same. But tedious, nonetheless. 

I must remind myself to spend less time making fun of other people, even though I am on holiday. Back to work, back to work ...

0309 : down

1330 : up

1511 : Post coffee, did a bit of real estate mapping. Time for the first protein of the day.

1800 : Gah - more improvements to fund reporting software.

2154 : Crypto fund :

1Q23 : peak 200%, trough 80%

4Q23 : peak 170%, trough 130%

2Q24 : peak 224%, trough 101%

There is only so much to be understood about how the world works. More effort means more understanding, when we are in luck. All things are merely a gamble of time.

"

"

Wed 17Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.307years ( year2; month16; week68; day477 )

0310 : Had a soda. Dimmed the lights. Put in orders to rebalance portfolio. Prepped paint for tomorrow's work. Turned off more lights. Dosed fish oil. Time to crash.

1330 : up

Thu 18Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.310years ( year2; month16; week69; day478 )

0256 : At some point, an organisation has to learn that if it opportunistically pursues frivolous litigious activity against other organisations that share data with it, then that disincentivises others from sharing. It is simple economics.

0338 : profile update ... What am I? I spent my years studying :

30s ... governance, design, construction 

20s ... commerce, software

late-teens ... arts, history, education

pre-to-early-teens ... science, math

0516 : Looks like another project is ending. 🎉 I've spent a coupla days a week for the last three weeks coaching* a friend on how to remodel their entire apartment's storage organisation. ( * I will decline to refer to it as ""help"", since that may be disputed, as a trigger word with uncertain connotations. ) I got paid in meals, whatnot, cool, no problem. Overall I estimate it would take at least three times as much effort to be their therapist, i.e. actually work on helping them feel better about themselves, so I am still avoiding that for the most part. There are only so many things worth doing for free ... and fewer still that one must pay to get done for other people.

Fri 19Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.312years ( year2; month16; week69; day479 )

0021 : Come on XBT, where's my 52k drop ... :P

0030 : Social networking for most of the day. TRX crowd is still cute. Hopefully more focus on work soon.

0212 : down 

1415 : caught up on sleep. dreamt of college friends and associates

1800 : Another day written off for 20 minutes of work. Poor time management. Looking forward to fewer distractions.

Sat 20Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.315years ( year2; month16; week69; day480 )

0443 : The long-term future of AI uses a lot of computation that resembles video game rendering, and a lot less of the computation that we now call LLMs. Meaning we have to go long NVDA anyway, for now.

0449 : All I want for Christmas is an employer that isn't dumb as shit, in a sector I'd rather be long than short. Likewise neighbours, a parliament, and friends who are the same. But I generally don't get my hopes up, and I prefer to focus on the tangible sparring of raindrops against my skin, and the study of things that are mine to keep. Ah, the simple life, in a world full of complex people.

1655 : Up next : multi-asset fund accounting for past decade

1844 : In 2008, as a graduate student, I worked my first job in F&B ... I tended a bar on Changkat Bukit Bintang. My senior colleague from Perak did not speak much English, but I remember he once quipped, ""I'm a lover, not a fighter."" I thought about that a lot, but I never really knew which one I was. Nowadays I figure, I might be over-educated and a philanderer, but I'm probably a fighter, not a lover ( Probably a bad guess. ).

1942 : Home again. No external assignments on the radar. Rest and recuperation, preparation for my own work.

1957 : Looks like XBT is about to pump.

I am still risk-off at about 68% cash.

Better safe than sorry, I suppose.

Sun 21Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.318years ( year2; month16; week69; day481 )

1220 : Asset allocation reflections, on another precipice. Looks like another 5% upside for the next week, but if I had to guess, based on macro conditions ... 

... we're looking at some equities volatility since YoY earnings upon the first hot quarter last year is going to be stilted. But we're not looking at a crash yet, barring some black swan. Rate cut drama pumps volatility ...

... I'd put a bit of money on the hypothesis that XBT will do a third top over the next week, waffle for a month, then correct to the 50s, maybe 40s if we're lucky.

US election year third quarter drama ... haih.

Placing orders.

1307 : sharing phone pins with partners : I tried this before. My partner started messaging people from my phone. Privileges revoked. 

2010 : 1. Am I the only person who has to wave boarding passengers out of my way as I exit the MRT?

2. Mr. DIY seems to no longer sell E27 sockets. That is regretable.

2140 : Time to fix some lights.

Mon 22Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.321years ( year2; month16; week69; day482 )

0038 : Dodging exhaustion. Babysitting is hard ( it's easy, unless you have anything else to get done at the same time ). Enforced eating time ... up next, a dose of protein.

0258 : 1. After 1.5 years of research into meat replacement, I don't actually have to cook to save money, since the alternative is basically a DIY version of whatever is marketed as soylent : a number of powders mixed with water. So in theory, I guess I could start keeping my kitchen tools in the area of my musical instruments and books ... non-functional art ornaments. Moreover ... it seems that eating at the mess halls ( chap fan, nasi kandar, nasi campur ) is more environmentally friendly because of reduced plastic waste - but it costs more, of course.

2. I have been chatting with some friends about how I relate to sex. I guess for the most part, I relate to it as I relate to business - there's very little emotional engagement, and generally I regard it as a sport. But I guess that is how I relate to society in general, so on with it. Only been fucking around for 17 years, so maybe I am still juve here and will change my mind about this in the future.

1313 : up

1327 : software:I'm about a decade behind

. I'll catch up.

1444 : A brief coffee fast - the first hour of the day. 

Electronic component shopping.

1540 : HENRY : high-earner, not yet rich? Ergo a LEAR, is a low-earner, already rich? Before graduation from college, I decided that I can be rich without money. I must be King LEAR ... 

1649 : Catching up on long-neglected finance studies.

1834 : Mood : risk-off. Post-carb-dosing, maybe it is time for a ruck.

2000 : It may be foolish to try to get too much done in life. But some of us have done everything else, and have nowhere else to grow.

2356 : down

Tue 23Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.323years ( year2; month16; week69; day483 )

0705 : up

1209 : Recently, it's been trending ( saw it twice in a month ) that we want to hang out with people who can break us out of prisons in Third-world countries. At some point ( probably in college ) I realised Malaysia is, officially, a Third-world country. Prior to that I had already grown up with the notion that it was possible to be incarcerated for no good reason - and was already training myself to be okay with a lifetime of incarceration. At some point, I collected ""the lockup experience"", but it was for only two days in a relatively tame neighbourhood. Nevertheless, one remains prepared for worse.

1854 : Happiness is generally a matter of prioritisation.

- high : know more than the next guy about global macro, material sciences, control systems, maths, and stats

- medium : managing operating expenses and depreciation

- low : helping friends with house chores, personal development, and private business 

As soon as one thing ends, another thing starts. Cull the weaklings.

1907 : The time has come to bake. High protein pastry is on the way.

1949 : In the near future, humans stop trying to outsmart generative AI - nearly everyone who tries, loses money.

Human live performances resurge in price, until robotics catches up and deploys indifferentiable mimics.

Politics gets interesting, as laws about personhood and rights come to the fore.

We are all black boxes. Trying to claim superiority of one black box over another is laughable.

"

"

Wed 24Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.326years ( year2; month16; week69; day484 )

0450 : down

1233 : up

1659 : fifth hour. done with Chores : protein, and asset allocation

1751 : Easing down to 55% cash today. Hereee, crashy-crashy ... here boy ...

Thu 25Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.329years ( year2; month16; week70; day485 )

1610 : Fewer distracting projects this week. More routine activity. But tomorrow is torched for tax coaching a senior citizen. Nap for now.

1841 : Not one day in the last two decades, have I been impressed with the company I keep. Some days it's ok bad, other times it's exhausting. Resting and recuperating, then focusing on improvement. The world is full of challenges, and one has to squeeze value from it some how. Haha

Fri 26Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.332years ( year2; month16; week70; day486 )

1423 : I think by the time I am older, I will set up an actual paper library with Dewey Decimal indexing because it will be retro and trendy. Interesting.

Sat 27Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.334years ( year2; month17; week70; day487 )

0312 : Hopefully done with RPGT drama.

0422 : down

1207 : up

2254 : Hm. Exit positions?

Sun 28Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.337years ( year2; month17; week70; day488 )

0236 : July was full of expensive social chores and entertainment costs. Ugh

0242 : Anyone who thinks Kuala Lumpur is safe, probably hasn't met me. 😂

1435 : 1.337 years in. Some stuff locked down. Some stuff not. Too much spending, too much food, too little sleep, too little study. too little exercise. perhaps I should spend a day, fasting.

1924 : Time to design.This month's dominant emotion is exhaustion and poverty. Therefore the present meditation is on productivity enhancements. Doop dee doo.

Mon 29Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.340years ( year2; month17; week70; day489 )

1302 : up

1658 : Whoops. Just realised I missed an asset allocation opportunity when the IXIC dropped the other day.

1822 : Reallocated 3% to cash

Tue 30Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.342years ( year2; month17; week70; day490 )

1104 : Home from another work trip. R&R ...

B vitamins. Slight recovery. Exercise. Chores and desking.

"

"

Wed 31Jul2024, Sabbatical2 @1.345years ( year2; month17; week70; day491 )

0246 : Rule of thirds. Exited a fasting phase, so back to turbo, then comfort, then repeat.

1331 : Shifting 3% from crypto to equities. Better late than never.

1410 : Enforced feeding.

1512 : Also it is cutting season - I think there will be less music, now.

1522 : I have a set a target for when I need to diversify out of using just minimal consumer apps for investment. Hopefully soon, but possibly a long way from now.

1550 : market research : the lowest rates for cinemas including new movies, in low-demand locations : 

RM 9 ... example : 1 Shamelin TGV ... saturday mornings ... this is a smaller screen with fewer seats

same movie, same day, larger screen, RM 17

this seems like a welcome rationalisation due to massive competition vs 10-20 years ago

1755 : 1300rm for a year 2000 kancil auto 850cc. One good thing about Malaysia's car nuttiness : prices of second-hand cars have dropped to match what US second-hand cars were like in the 2000s. This is literally toy project price ... maybe one day I'll bother to get a landed property and work on something.

1947 : Figuring out how my couch is supposed to work. It's made from a leftover bedframe. It is quiet enough in here to study my nervus system. I shall do that more often. I guess my sealing of the space has been ok

2322 : Everyone waiting for September cuts. Yawn.

Thu 1Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.348years ( year2; month17; week71; day492 )

0434 : Good to get a full day of work in, after weeks and months of endless philanthropic distractions with limited strategic value.

1140 : up

2126 : Coffee and refactoring a spreadsheet. I use shorter, less robust code to prototype, then I switch it out for more bulletproof implementations after I am happy with prototypes.

2301 : A quiet day, in a silly little city.

Fri 2Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.351years ( year2; month17; week71; day493 )

0056 : Not sure if people realise that the Olympic shooter craze owes a debt to PUBG iconography.

0125 : As much as it is fun to be motivated by the love of people, and to have missions related to the happiness of people in general, I find it to be poor form, as it creates a crutch about why work gets done. Ultimately I prefer work for the sake of work, and I try to keep any sympathies I have for business counterparties on the side. This is grotesque to many people, but we should each know our own pace and direction about the world.

0144 : After a bit more rest, probably timely to work on hypertrophy again. Always too late.Also being underslept for several months, my head might have slowed down somewhat. One cannot tell from simply being. So I should increase stimuli, after recovery of sleep.

0159 : I should remind myself to have less empathy for anxious people. It erodes my quality of life. But then I am reasonably wary of my strategic interests, so I tend to allow myself some expenditure in this sector from time to time. Rich people's problem, I suppose. Too much time.

1349 : Looked at Dutch Lady milk powder products today. ""Full Cream"" has 20% protein, which is on the low-end for this segment. ""Instant Plain"" has only 10% ! For skim milk powders, I'd be looking for 30-35%

Sat 3Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.353years ( year2; month17; week71; day494 )

0600 : As the financial markets do a little cry, I spent the evening upgrading my toilet, again, to a three gang switch. And I moved one portfolio to zero cash, with some cash inflight to another portfolio, hopefully just in time to buy a little something on Monday. All the news so far is macro positive. Sentiment is down, but here comes money supply ...

0709 : Impostor syndrome is that concern, that every time you survive a calamity, or advance beyond your peers, your chances of failure might go up, due to the law of large numbers. You may ask yourself, why haven't I fucked up yet? Why am I not dead? Why am I still privileged enough to fuck around? Who knows. You just play the game, until it's over. By the way, people who don't get anxious don't have imposter syndrome. What occurs to a patient as a scare, is glanced over as an ordinary event by others.

0735 : Two months of home improvement distractions ( not necessarily my home ). Hopefully back to physical and mental conditioning.

1130 : Graduated from line charts, to candles.

2000 : up

2130 : Time to feed.

Sun 4Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.356years ( year2; month17; week71; day495 )

0033 : For the next few months, I expect to stay mostly invested and ride the market all the way down : worst case, lazy scenario. Physical conditioning is back in focus, beginning with the daily timing of nutrition, and the hourly response in terms of cognition. I also expect to become more familiar with bond markets.

0339 : Rotation decisions 

1402 : Some sleep acquired. Short-term memory buffers expanding. Need to raise calorific input today.

1807 : I thought about how trendy / class-associated tennis is, and figured out that I don't really mind ... but tennis disinterests me because I can't practice solo, unless I pay a ton of money for a machine. LOL. 

1809 : Equities down 10.3%, crypto down 18.3% ... cute.

1942 : Iran is locked and loaded. If they say earliest Monday, it might as well be right now. Performative statemanship whatnot.

1945 : Touched up the paint on yesterday's electrical upgrades. Sold some stuff that held its value better, and will use the proceeds to buy stuff that has dropped further in value.

2003 : Got around to testing the $7 microscope. It works I guess ... now what gross stuff should I look at - saliva? Bread dough? 

2017 : Malaysia the chevrotain that thought it was a tiger. We should really switch up the designated national animal to deflate our sense of importance on the world stage.

2223 : Dietary studies have resolved protein and carbs - now I need to lock down fats.

Mon 5Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.359years ( year2; month17; week71; day496 )

0442 : down

1223 : up

1347 : Moving a chunk of equities to cash over the next 2-4 days ; might do the same with crypto. Some will remain to find out how far the rabbit hole goes -_^

MAIN RISK : Fed does a panic hike

1442 : Coffee. Fund accounting. Mortgages. Rice and protein. And setting up the fat supply.

1809 : Back to fund accounting. Silly boring shit.

Found and error in my asset allocation calculations. Paid the price. Fix bug, rinse, repeat.

2127 : I seem to be doing ok. Taking into account gains over principal, I'm only down 23% from fund July highs, whereas the market is down 28% to 47%. ( Exclude gains, and I'm down 35% :P ) This is for the crypto fund only. Equities are a whole different story - I think at this point I'm on track to wipe out all gains from 2023, but that's arm-waving for now. Anyway, I'll just focus on trying to not lose so much money that I have to severely interrupt my sabbatical. Save money now, make money later.

Besides irritating little things like lapsed online account access, direct deposit schedules, and mortgage payments ... I'm comforted by a sense of extreme privilege, having spent so much time on home improvement ( for myself and my friends ) over the past two months. Moreover nutritional opex optimisation seems to be nearing terminal efficiency.

It's good to be able to sit back and chill, just a bit, while the markets burn.

2336 : I should try not to so-often trip over the people who value their families, friends, and foodliness. I seek a path through, or around them, which is profitable.

At the same time, I realise that while I have very few cares in the world, and would most probably just vegetate until death, it is listening to the stupidity of people's speech which fills me with horror, and thus motivation to repair things, often enough. Hm. This seems dysfunctional.

Tue 6Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.362years ( year2; month17; week71; day497 )

0102 : Momentarily exhausted by broken machines. But that probably means I haven't eaten in a timely fashion.

0110 : Dropped the ball. Did not have enough controls in place to handle black swan. No choice but to fix up.

0130 : Definitely spending too much time around financially illiterate people. Need to reallocate time appropriately. Perhaps it is time to start avoiding people in general, after many years of activity among them.

Mental decay is never easy to detect. Speed is a matter of nerves. Strength, is a matter of nerves. Precision is a matter of nerves. Quantum of memory, and speed of access are a matter of nerves. Time perception is a matter of memory, and thus a matter of nerves.

0150 : Patience in all things. 

Including matters of folly.

Especially in dealings with fools. 

0330 : So, on Monday I put in some orders which are on very cash-oriented strategies, which will take the better part of the week to administer. I guess one makes decisions with the knowledge that they may be wrong decisions, then executes meticulously to find out. After all, that is science.

0413 : down

1316 : Took a train and bus to the House of Ingredients at Sri Damansara. OK, this is feasible. Study of baking ingredients commences with natural vs dutched cocoa. 

1337 : Week 71, Day 497. The mess is much smaller, and the cost has been afforded. More messes to clean, and costs to reduce.

2027 : Perhaps I need to install guardrails about how much time I spend with people are easily attached. Well I suppose we all do - but I have tactical errors to fix.

2344 : Tim Waltz in the spotlight. Minnesota is pretty. I guess I like lakes. If I can't afford Vancouver or Alaska, I guess Minneapolis ain't a bad place to retire.

"

"

Wed 7Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.364years ( year2; month17; week71; day498 )

0010 : 3 days from day 500. Maybe I should write a novel. How long is a novel supposed to be? Fahrenheit 451 is like 42k words. Longer items are like 500k.

0210 : I've been helping a friend to optimise their bathroom tank heater situation. Back at my place, I tested a hypothesis about efficiency. I pre-heated the tank for 3 minutes, then turned it off, and took a shower. Granted, my hot water flow is throttled to the absolute minimum needed to power a small-holed sprinkle-style shower head. It worked!

So I did the math, roughly. A 15 litre tank means 15,000 ml of water, and a 3 kW heating element means 3,000 Celcius-ml-per-second. So it should take five seconds to raise the water temperature by 1 C. Three minutes should get us to roughly room temperature + 36C ~= 65C, which seems almost as hot as it should be. 

It didn't feel that hot, but I suppose we can factor in a 20% discount for all the heat loss to hardware, putting us about 58C.

Cool, or warm enough.

0243 : down

1253 : Action Office : Without knowing much of the art history of this, I spent a lot of time working on this domain when I ran the cafe in 2015-2020.

1352 : Inbox 1k : time to clean.

1400 : often i find my intuitions about the forward 1W are applicable to the 1M, so I should install a calendar. 

1410 : where's my rayray kaiser? 

1417 : Sports minister posing with foreign athlete : 1. Hannah didn't do any offense to Malaysia.

2. Hannah did injure her own political viability.

2.1. If you think 2. injures Malaysia, then yes, Hannah injured Malaysia.

Cheers. It's just realpolitik.

1426 : Often I find that my intuitions about the 1-week-forward period are relevant over the 1-month-forward period. So I shall need to install a calendar.

1532 : Opportunity costs. 

- cold vs. : hot shower ... 8 sen

- ... very long or hot shower ... 20 sen

- natural ventilation vs. : air conditioning for a day ... 100-200 sen

- ... air conditioning for a day with guest ... 300-400 sen

- home made vs. : canned soda ... 120-170 sen 

- ... one meal at a mamak or kopitiam ... 900-1,500 sen

- train and bus vs. : driving intracity ... 1,500-9,000 sen

- ... driving intercity ... 3,000-27,000 sen

Conclusions being, DO use more hot water and air-conditioning, as it barely saves anything. DO NOT eat out as much as convenient, and definitely don't travel except when paid to do so.

1538 : Need to increase stimulation of glutamate receptors, to improve digestion, therein taste variables being functional.

2034 : Oil is up most, among other things following the Topix reconstitution. Attention has turned to Iran. 

XBT is tracing the DXY. IXIC futures are up ...

2129 : Cleared email. Caught up on a bit of reading in groups that I don't often spend time in. Need to spend more time reading those groups, to get myself normalised to the financial mores of folks making over 100k USD a year. Unfortunately, I'll need to do that actively as I no-longer physically hang out with enough friends in that bracket, so I'm out of the loop.

2142 : Patience in all things. Grace in multitudes for the handling of fools. Gratitude for the absence of cares.

2247 : https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/new-goldman-sachs-index-shows-financial-stress-relatively-normal-2024-08-06/

Thu 8Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.367years ( year2; month17; week72; day499 )

0310 : down

1330 : - Diet : adjusted for glutamate receptors

- Resistance : improved via diet

- Finance : overall, poor form, but risk management activities for modify social exposure are in the pipeline

- Society ex-commerce : probably best to leave contentious people alone, and to focus on non-contentious producers

1537 : At this point it seems interesting to run a shop without single-use plastics. Just for brand hacking.

1840 : Checked out Muji and Uniqlo - I guess long overshirts are out of fashion.

Fri 9Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.370years ( year2; month17; week72; day500 )

0005 : https://www.mdpi.com/1660-3397/21/10/514 I bought posh eggs today. I need to know wtf this is about 

1325 : Day 500. Celebrating the study of just one subject, with a few dozen other subjects on hold. I wonder how long I can keep this up - either one runs out of money, gets an aneurysm, or simply gets tired of looking old. My friend Uma once said, I was born old, and at the time, I agreed.

1935 : After months of rushing around, it is nice to focus on the phenomenology of sitting with a guided subject of research (textbook, albeit with a phone for Googling).

2249 : Day 500 puts me at about 13.6% of the nominal period. Time is short, and progress has not been well. This is more a change of narrative than any discovery of new information. Particularly, improvements have been made in terms of capital efficiency, and operating expenditures are well and low, albeit only self-insured and without external hedging. Business development has been ludicrously benign - I have made few new leads, and existing leads are converting to stable but relatively unprofitable accounts. Legacy accounts from decades past have been largely tidied up but continue to require occasional maintenance - I should probably not be complaining there, as things could be far lossier. Research and development is the central mandate for this decade but I have not excluded so many distractions as to be very successful here. I can only work more carefully about these things. Investments have been volatile, reflecting on a lack of skill about their management, so I can only focus on rework, for now. Bit by bit it is.

Sat 10Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.373years ( year2; month17; week72; day501 )

0151 : Maybe I just don't have enough sleep because I try to stick to Malaysian office hours for no good reason.

0210 : I guess also, this week of mostly R&R, fewer socials, and less charity, albeit with a bit of markets drama, puts me on track for catching up on sleep. More discipline required. I should resume weekly reviews.

0926 : up

1005 : Up at 0930. with reduced caffeine yesterday, Melatonin appears to be kicking back in. 

1154 : Well it's a pretty good test. Once the AI can reason with philosophers, it can probably reason about anything.

Human consciousness has never been mysterious to those who spend enough time quantifying it.

2339 : Swam. Still weak. But reading mode goes well with swimming. So i should be pretty good at kick flips by September.

Sun 11Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.375years ( year2; month17; week72; day502 )

1505 : I've decided not to operate another F&B retail business until I can do it with zero single-use plastic. Either an R&D solution, or a reduced product offering, or a higher price point makes this possible.

2251 : Interesting. Optimised for AC + fan + hot shower + some microwaving ... mainly reading ... under 5 kW/day.

0236 : Incredible period of life. Getting into the flow of studies.on 12Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.378years ( year2; month17; week72; day503 )

0443 : enforced bedtime 

1513 : // Crypto market dominance lens : Luno.My universe //

Since ETH's establishment as capitalisation-leader-minus-one between May and November 2021, roughly

Stars : 

: BTC : increased dominance : 14% ( 43% -> 57% )

: SOL : increased dominance : +2.5% ( 0.5% -> 3% )

Question Marks :

: ETH : decreased dominance : -3% ( 18% -> 15% )

: XRP : decreased dominance : -0.7% ( 2.2% -> 1.5% )

: AVAX : depending on time frame ... either

increased dominance : +0.25% ( 0.15% -> 0.4% ), or

decreased dominance : -0.6% ( 1% -> 0.4% )

Dogs :

: pretty much everything else

You can also compare, as a base, the ETH dominance trough of June 2022. That only moves BCH into the Question Marks. If for completeness you want to filter for Cows, you're going to need to look at chain profitability ... which is slightly beyond the scope of this note.

1843 : Busy week begins. Check asset allocation. Clean cushions. Meet local government official. Meet ex-colleagues, ex-neighbours, and other acquaintances for general sync-ups. Try to read and work-out consistently.

2342 : Social meetings are ramping up. I need to be more careful about how I debrief, so that I can quickly flush out all the low priority information from meetings, and return to work on important stuff.

Tue 13Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.381years ( year2; month17; week72; day504 )

0007 : One thing bugs me about the self-defense murder defense. I have sustained injuries from an attacker while I avoided fatally retaliating. Sometimes it is better to do nothing, than to kill someone. I suppose. But every decision is unique and worthy of care.

1115 : up

1144 : Awake. Construction of day proceeds.

1421 : As time passes, I only learn that professionals are a mass, their opinions being a better average bet than the non-professional, and the premium on pricing of questionable value. But that is only when one has the time to study. When one does not, one has no choice, but to pay the professional premium, flawed as it may be.

1701 : Interviewed an accountant today. Another expensive context switch. Back home, and resetting myself for studies.

1952 : The silliest people, worry when other people don't take them seriously. Don't be silly. 

2100 : They should build a tunnel under the causeway between Singapore and Malaysia. Dark tourism is when you crawl through a tunnel, and end up in a different historical time

2332 : Poor Malaysian influencers are making slo-mo unboxing videos of Tim Hortons. #ohmypleb

(Soon I am going to be bored enough to post regularly on TikTok, bothering you all less here.)

"

"

Wed 14Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.384years ( year2; month17; week72; day505 )

0040 : The week is more challenging than anticipated. Markets on edge, interviews with a number of professional egos, and an attempt to unify physical and verbal conditioning studies. Let's see how this goes.

0054 : Oops. Calculator shows I got 100% protein but like 40% calorie RDA. I guess I need to get out of bed for another meal. FTS

0120 : Day 505. Day 505. Performance check. I can't find anything wrong with my macros. So, I think I need to calibrate neural inputs a bit now. Speed of computation, short-term memory bandwidth and latency, across spreadsheets, reading, anxiety, and kinaesthetics. Fish oil, B vitamins, creatine, and beta alanine protocols to be reinforced first.

0220 : let's play swan bingo :

x - BOJ raises rates causing scares

o - BOJ rates cause severe structural issues

o - Russia declares a ceasefire shortly after US elections, contracting US fiscal spending forecasts and commodity prices

o - the Fed takes advantage of risk-offs to grow the balance sheet (to shrink interest liabilities), the yield curve flattens

o - some time later fiscal spending has been restructured to stabilise inflation and unemployment because the Fed can't do much on its own ; the business cycle crawls out of its recessionary phase

o - Khamenei joins EuroVision's judging panel

o - Zelensky retires and heads to Hollywood

1057 : up

1345 : Not that complicated.

- ""intelligence""

- ""artificial intelligence""

- ""subconscious""

If you get all technical about it, it's just information systems. But it's more difficult to explain to people who want a short answer, but who don't want to sit themselves down to understand how boring their personal internal thought process is.

1347 : RAPIDKL adds 300 minivans : Well, my mini bus assessment is being implemented :P ( this is facetious ) 

1348 : BAFTA Refuses to introduce gender-neutral categories ; Embarrassing. If any institution will lead the way in social progress, it will be the arts. I suppose now it will be the grassroots arts, and not the big names.

1447 : YoY CPI ...

: JUL

1547 : Spending way too much time recently managing my fund - but - tooling is improving. Hopefully so goes the quality of my work.

2022 : 8.9% just-off the 9.1% peak 

: JUL

2023 : just into the floodplane of 3.0-3.7%

: JUL

2024 : ... a whole year later ...

v

.

v

.

v

.

2028 : Meeting old friends tomorrow morning. Only a few laps swam today. More fixes required on macros. It is time to shop for curry ingredients, perhaps.

2353 : KL New mayor is an esteemed former leader of international organisations for human development in urban settings ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN-Habitat

). We wish her well, and hope she will be a good leader of KL.

Besides being the first female Mayor, possibly the first with any sort of international development experience. In 2018 the budget for KL was 2.9 BILLION RINGGIT.

2355 : 62 new trains ... They are very good at buying BIG,EMPTY, EXPENSIVE objects ... both vehicular, and built environments. We need SMALLER, HIGHLY UTILISED, COST EFFECTIVE objects, in greater quantities.

Thu 15Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.386years ( year2; month17; week73; day506 )

0053 : LulZ. ""Oh god, LinkedIn has this new feature ... haha ... I honestly don't expect it go anywhere, but I filled it up as a matter of putting myself out there.""

I practice a zero-trust approach to building and managing relationships. This is suitable for clients who want to reduce their anxiety about negative feedback from peers and/or the market.

If you've found your pain to stem from

(a) a lack of confidence,

(b) an inability to articulate your intuitions, or

(c) a general absence of goal-setting, and means-ends alignment,

then I'd be happy to walk with you, as you learn how to help yourself.

( Do check out my ""Recommendations"". )

0112 : 2.1 T $ : total crypto market cap, of which ...

1.2 T $ : 56.9% BTC super cap, of which ...

79 B $ : 6.5% BTC in ETFs, of which ...

0.4 B $ : 5% held by GS in a recent filing

Fun and games in technology.

0114 : English muffins : Also I am bookmarking this to try - will update everyone if successful, or if you want to fail at it together, you can congregate at my place. 

#vsmcdonalds 

0712 : Spent a lot of time talking today. Wind is cold. Exiting poolside for more food.

2150 : I've been mixing up my cal, Cal, and kCal ... gotta go clean up my blog a bit.

2228 : (On risk aversion and traditional career paths.) Out of college in 2005, I aimed to be a competent corporate citizen in a post-AI world. We're not even at usable AI yet. Why am I that asshole?

Fri 16Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.389years ( year2; month17; week73; day507 )

1048 : up

1132 : Some business cannot continue due to emotional dissatisfaction.

Some business cannot continue due to operational disruption.

More useful to set aside the emotionally disrupted parties, as and when they disrupt operations.

Such is a cull.

1141 : enforced feeding

1202 : Figuring out how to do globally relevant work, without globally relevant infrastructure, is not easy. But for now, I focus on enforced feeding. Haha

1554 : Confronting weakness. Sometimes weakness is staying alive in a body of water.

Sat 17Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.392years ( year2; month17; week73; day508 )

1231 : Macro imbalances. I need to add 100g of seeds to my day to make up fat calories.

1235 : What a month. After asset allocation adjustments, I'm sitting on 66% leverage (self financed). Arggghhh. Lmao. I should stop buying things at fair value.

2045 : Time for Glassnode immersion :( so many things to do.

Sun 18Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.395years ( year2; month17; week73; day509 )

0153 : day 509, behind schedule, nice time to pile up pressure and drop closer to minimal routines

0306 : down

1445 : Reading up on the Muslim Brotherhood, a bit. I met a young chap from Al Jazeera, ""stateless"", and I didn't have much background on the details of their situation. So I am learning a bit more. Sometimes ordinary people are thrust into positions of extraordinary power, and it is indeed their fault if they are not prepared to handle it. Being prepared for the unlikely is part of what makes a difference in emergencies.

1504 : 20th century politics in the middle east : Amazing how this counts as recreational reading, against a backdrop of daily work about finance, accounting, and global macro.

1505 : at some point I will have to read up on China, and all the other parts of the world 

1510 : supplemented B12 today - had not, for a few days

1806 : Born in the Islamosphere, lived here 36 years, and at the age of 41, starting to read up on Islamic governance history. About damn time.

1852 : Calibration of environmental temperature, body temperature, and cognitive development

Mon 19Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.397years ( year2; month17; week73; day510 )

0213 : down 

1214 : up

1800 : TIL the grenadiers in Command and Conquer are actually from the gunpowder era of warfare.

And ""Colonel"" means commander of a column, which makes them the highest ranking non-general. The next rank up is Brigadeer, or commander of a brigade.

2041 : Social life today : elevator lobby & ride : 

n : going out?

m : 8th floor

n : gym?

m : swimming pool. I get sleepy while reading, so I swim, then I read, then I swim, then I read. Reading is so boring ...

n : collective laughter

m : ... but so important

2218 : lernt about laser peening ; revising the difference between brass and bronze

Tue 20Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.400years ( year2; month17; week73; day511 )

0331 : reading up on lead and arsenic in complementary medicines 

0425 : Time to burn. 1.8 years into foodops tweaking ... meat alternative stabilised ... cost per gram of protein minimised ... fat source calibrated ... now I just have to go from 1.5x to 2.5x macros. Whee. #jerngvsmeat #jerngfood

Baseline : 3 Mcal is about $3 before substitution of wholegrains with veggies (good) and snacks (bad)

0434 : Baseline : food budget

MYR 15 / day

MYR 465 / month

MYR 5490 / year

We can do this ...

0932 : Day 511. Daily routine is now balanced, and smooth, if not yet high in throughput. Wondering if I should get a part-time job, or just focus on raising throughput.Nope. Not financially stable enough to take on more distractions. Haha

"

"

Wed 21Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.403years ( year2; month17; week73; day512 )

0037 : Volatile markets are spooking me. I gotta calm tf down.

1639 : Slept well once, after weeks of messy timing. 

Pre-sleep : macros on point, B12 supplement

Mid-sleep : water ( protein would help if macros were off )

Length : 10-ish hours, with longer periods of dreaming in post-midpoint

1658 : Backburner project : reverse engineer Maggi kari flavouring packet

1810 : seems like the fuji bokka ruckers do 140kg when young, and 100kg when old 

1822 : Hm. Seems like sugar levels are way stabler with 50g of fat at breakfast, than 150g of carbs.

1908 : All you need to know about monkeypox : the incubation period ( no symptoms ) is 3-21 days. LOL. Fortunately for us it is not infectious until 1-4 days before symptoms appear. If you don't develop symptoms ever, it is unlikely that you were contagious. Of course, some symptoms may go unnoticed, in which case you would have been contagious for a period.

2244 : I bought some fish sauce to familiarise myself with the ingredient. I grew up in South East Asia, but it wasn't a part of my local cuisine. I learnt about it from Myanmar and Thai college mates. I am preparing to make kim chi.

Thu 22Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.405years ( year2; month17; week74; day513 )

0245 : The life of a soldier is described by territories won and lost. As you grow richer, you wait to grow poorer. As you grow stronger, you wait to grow weaker. They are familiar with the giving of life and death on alternate hours and alternate years, such that only a constant spinning of the wheel defines their experience. I see only cycles of attrition. We sleep only half expecting to wake.

1318 : The day begins as all days do, with a review of short- and long-term risks, and subsequent tactical allocations of time. It is still Wednesday in San Francisco.

1430 : real-life-dating : People have been trying to do this for decades. I listened to the interview, and my impression was that the founders are quite optimistic about the relevance of the operations to the target market. Between MeetUp.com's low ARPU, and folks with an aversion to the high-volume funnels required to use swipey apps effectively, the quick and easy answer is that they're going to grow margins by doing bespoke matching. However, if they really just sing the brand, they could attain top-of-mind in the event-affiliate-marketing space ... but that would just attract more competition. So this should be interesting to watch.

1527 : Getting wikipedia read-aloud while operating social media platforms - probably an efficient way to ingest encyclopedia articles.

1826 : In my study of EMEA geography this week, I've processed a few articles on the prehistory of the region. Why bother? Well, I think it's fair - there's a lot of dumb shit fiction in my head from the TV socials I've attended. This is at least closer to fact.

1921 : The very fat tail risk of a 38% drop to 38k BTCUSD is still bugging me.

2017 : It's been raining all afternoon. I sit by the pool in my trunks, shivering only slightly, watching lightning web across the sky. The frangipani is flowering between us. I have at least a couple more laps to go. I wonder if I am stressing my brain correctly. The lightning is brighter. The thunder indicates it is a few kilometers away. I go back to my swim. Maybe it will be the last.

2255 : (i think the way to interpret it is, there's a 5% chance of a 50 bip cut under the status quo, and a 25% chance the status quo changes enough in 3 weeks to qualify as a catastrophe, totalling the 30% that's priced in rn)Can anyone explain to me why anyone believes the Fed will break character and do a double : 50 bip cut? Anyone?

There's not been a single economic catastrophe since they started hiking , and they've been consistently conservative in stepping through the motions.

2343 : Hm. Vinegar with rice may cause pre-mature evacuation of the stomach. or, maybe too much b12 yesterday not enough salt, and too much water today 

2355 : Tired and slightly indigestive. But, a 36-hour chore awaits. Off we go, tomorrow morning, to see what our friend is doing.

Fri 23Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.408years ( year2; month17; week74; day514 )

0008 : Maybe one day I'll be free enough to follow-up on my pre-college interest of making films ... without having the pressure to submit them for festivals and the like.

0021 : Life is a process of picking the right distractions until the the day you die. Some days you pick rightly, some days you pick wrong. It is up to us to reassess ourselves and the mistakes we make, and to adjust therefore upon waking, daily.

0237 : The past week has been ok. Mostly laned into eating chores, swimming chores, and reading chores. Markets relatively unexciting. Calorific throughput still closer to 2 kCal than 3 kCal ... I need to buy bread, because I'm shitting too quickly. Probably just wasting 500 Cal without enough gel plugging.

1121 : people offing themselves after being pranked into embarassing situations :Fair warning on the risks of making fun of other people. I don't think that means it should be illegal, but I do think trolls should be aware of potential consequences. Troll on!

Sat 24Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.411years ( year2; month17; week74; day515 )

Sun 25Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.414years ( year2; month17; week74; day516 )

Mon 26Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.416years ( year2; month17; week74; day517 )

1645 : Minor strange disruption to scheduled activities. Cleaned up. Back to work. :)

2049 : Following a mid-afternoon swan, risk radars are on alert, and I shall step away from my desk for a bit. Enforced feeding and swimming.

Tue 27Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.419years ( year2; month18; week74; day518 )

0145 : Wonky day. Time to rest and listen to traffic.

1141 : Friend : you're looking for board-level roles?

Moi : not particularly now, but when i started commercial work in 2006, i was only interested in board-level roles. Everything else is really just practice 😎

1644 : Familiarising myself with LFP battery architecture today. Prices for raw batteries with minimum BMUs seem to go to 600 MYR / kWH. Last weekend, I also checked out an eco-resort development in Perak. Also had a look at the licensing fees for power generation .... below 10kW was only RM20/year. Interesting. Near zero research, but good to know as an introduction to the subject.

2201 : Does anyone want to open a candy store? We'll make everything in house, and use it as a honeytrap to push out quantitatively optimised diets for healthy living to a world full of clueless feeders.

2347 : 14 hours post initial waking. Time to tear down cognitive scaffolding for the day.

"

"

Wed 28Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.422years ( year2; month18; week74; day519 )

0105 : down

1043 : up

2252 : My training seems to have progressed to a point, where I can correlate my muscle and nerve maintenance and development ... with different nutritional inputs on a daily basis. It's good when research pays off - let's hope I'm not imagining things again.

2348 : NYC has an interesting boundary. Never made the time to remember what it looks like. I was in NYC once, maybe twice, it was messy, and reminded me of KL that way. NYC is much, much older.

Thu 29Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.425years ( year2; month18; week75; day520 )

0220 : Tautology : the more you empathise with inefficient thinkers, the less efficient your thinking becomes. The days pass quickly for me - like flashes of stupidity. I wonder if, how, and when, I shall recover. Or maybe, it is just the histamine from working out. Hah. Maybe it is salt.

0353 : down 

1326 : up

1403 : Down late. Up late. Enforced washing, feeding, and work of kinds.

1542 : Maybe I should follow the conventional advice and take larger risks with smaller amounts of money.

1709 : The last few days have been good for sleep quantity, and therefore quality also. Let me see how much I can recover in terms of presence of mind. It is a late start to the day, and after breakfast and portfolio adjustments, I need to do some community service for the condo, before I hit the pool.

1825 : Day 520. Protocol : no B12, high cal, slept 10 hours, 5g creatine, B12, 4s bread, 70g cooked nuts and dried fruit, 150g dry whole rice, 20g protein + cocktail, coffee. Pausing at h5 before pool.

2216 : So - there are these 20+ fake Facebook profiles, which are all friends with each other. And they're in various KL/Selangor Facebook groups offering business services at private locations.

I have reported many of the linked profiles. Please do the same if you encounter any. This improves governance on Facebook. Thanks.

2243 : savings balance 414RM. OK - mortgage is paid - next cc: payment due in 5 weeks, let's see what happens till then :P

2247 : A cute European asked me where to get a smoke. I gave factual answers. Hopefully I will see more of them, but I am not counting on it. Malaysian society is rather xenophobic on average, so I keep to myself to avoid pissing off others ... but others from other cultures may be used to more casual networking. Let's hope for the best!

Fri 30Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.427years ( year2; month18; week75; day521 )

0410 : Day 521. Late to bed again. it will be around 0500 at this rate. The past day's reflection was, maybe it is time to keep cognitive throughput up, via breakfast doses of B12 and creatine. can never be sure that narrow supplementation will work as expected. Side effect remain worrisome. But maybe it is turbo time for a bit.

0530 : down

1203 : up

1349 : Day 521 : up after only 6.5 hours. Protocol : coffee and magnesium chloride. Interesting, this seems to have improved alertness (rate of computation), so I will infer the possibility of a recent deficiency. Potassium supplementation yesterday did not help much.

1848 : tried to figure out where mTOR pathways and magnesium are related. finally got to prioritise the study of neuroanatomy - the OT seems to be the sensory diffential nexus. Nice heuristic ... 2.5% have mild, 10% have major depression.

1912 : Interesting day, for studies, so far. Read quite broadly, and had to attend to a civil society case. Still haven't delivered on my volunteer work for the condo. Time to enforce swim time before the pool closes.

2013 : A dreary year. The PTTs are subtly magenta today, which is thankful. The lights in this city can be quite gaudy. The air is dry and comforting, the skies are clear and windy. Rain may soon come. Too much to learn and not enough time to learn it

.

2203 : sprint vs distance : different freestyle strokes to study. Moved some crypto to cash, and some cash to equities. 

2259 : getting ready to lose a ton of money by EOM, tmr.

Sat 31Aug2024, Sabbatical2 @1.430years ( year2; month18; week75; day522 )

0106 : The fun thing about being a nihilist is that you get to make fun of the humanists as much as they make fun of the theists. Honestly, what else is there to do around here?

0200 : down

0954 : up

1033 : Day 522. Awake at 80% of target sleep. So, maybe Mg protocol is helping. Repeated with coffee. Observing. 

1157 : Hm. There's got to be a way to turn a super-soaker into a sort of machine gun, via a hydraulic ram.

1231 : Time to work on that overdue volunteer stuff.

1404 : some recent US stats : 0.025% : 1x : chance of electric car fire

1.523% : 61x : chance of hydrocarbon car fire

3.474% : 139x : chance of hybrid car fire

1408 : 1.4g KCl dose to test for hypokalemia. Primitive test protocol. Cut with a bit of NaCl, and washed down with coffee. Observing.

1418 : Where shall I socialise today? 

x : park : already got my resistance training at the pool

x : mall : no money ; no honey that comes with its own money

? : streets : ok this is viable ... haha

2247 : So is it Malaysianitis or just Malaise?

2331 : Wrapped up a looong years-long conversation with a friend, I think the verbal conclusion to summarise our disagreements is ""difference of political opinion"". 

They believe that people should worry about others' feelings except in emergencies, I believe people should disregard others' feelings, except in emergencies. We want to assert power to make the world move in opposite directions, so we have a clear point of disagreement.

Noice 🔥

2359 : Day 522 was slightly underslept, and possibly low on fat. I just toasted some nuts to prepare for the next few meals. Earlier, a few sections of the condo owner self-governance guide were titled in draft. A bit of study of the distance form of freestyle swimming. A short nap. Groceries. Sorting out political positions with a friend.

Sun 1Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.433years ( year2; month18; week75; day523 )

0300 : Maybe I expect too much of myself.

0301 : down

1205 : Day 523. Need to increase fat intake. Thinking about vasopressin expression. B12 before bed. 7-8 hours slept. 3+g creatine and MgCl with first coffee. Nuts next. Not anticipating any kidney stone issues as I don't eat more than a few stalks of greens daily. 

1236 : Some define people by their internal experiences, some define people by their external effects. Good luck settling this one ;)

1428 : hour 3. Caught up with social networks, local governance, and portfolio monitoring. Time for carbs, before proper studies begin.

1602 : Oxalate risk review : while SPI and cocoa powder have a bunch of C2O4/2- in them, Mg/2+ and Ca/2+ can be tactically co-prescribed in 1:4 and 1:2 ratios respectively, to help block oxalate absorption in the gut.

1745 : vasopressin and oxytocin dynamics : Slightly bothered by my descent to a nerd-level, where the study of sex hormones offers insights into how effective my day to day learning is for new subjects in general. 

1909 : Note to self : when socialising with rich and wannabe-rich people, beware of some who don't like to count.

Mon 2Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.436years ( year2; month18; week75; day524 )

1015 : Day 524. Up on the early side. Breakfast protocol, housekeeping, then back to work, hopefully.

1113 : laundry done. probably underfed yesterday. chugging calories now, at initial desking.

1215 : Wondering if MgCl2 in coffee just makes it more bitter, resulting in higher alertness, rather than having rapid effects on nerves via the the circulatory system.

1231 : Urban planning in tourist hotspots MUST be oriented about STVRs

1602 : So 20g SPI + 5g cocoa powder vs 80g meat => LHS is has only 50% the potassium and also less magnesium. Making a note for supplementation.

1605 : Been thinking of getting Bumble Premium, but I don't want to spend the money till the market's in better conditions. Not a lot of money for dates anyway. That is why, women do not like dating apps. Haha

2304 : Physically - like most people, I'm too soft on myself. I haven't done any work-outs that needed a multi-day recovery in quite a few weeks.

2333 : Government's been doing a great job no promoting Malaysian tourism. I see a lot of content going out from all sorts of accounts, not sure if it's paid or not.

Tue 3Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.438years ( year2; month18; week75; day525 )

0143 : Brief review of days 500-524. A smorgasbord of new stuff, physiologically most disrupted by swimming. Routines are developing, even though nutrition studies are still throwing up needs for new hypotheses. If I finish swimming early enough, I eat, and then go back to the seats by the pool to read in the company of neighbours. When the pool area closes at 10pm, I can furthermore go down to the lobby where the lights stay on till 12am.

0144 : time to sleep. quite an unfinished backlog there - i mean, of sleep

1129 : up

1325 : Breakfast list today : toast, SPI++, MgCl2, KCl, brown rice, furikake, coffee, fish oil. Monitoring results.

1336 : :The problem with quantifying things that others don't quantify, is a bottleneck of quantitative capability. There was a time when I could still appreciate physical conditioning, desk work, and social life as separate and complementary cognitive modes. But in recent years, they are all viewed as the same sort of process in a superclass, so, the detailed approach to any of these appears to decrease available computation for the others. That being said, I remain wary that other factors may be responsible for this phenomenon. I remain most skeptical about how hard I push myself, amd it may be significantly too hard, or soft, I am not yet sure which one it is.

1349 : at woken+2.1 hours, cognitive facilities seem to have stabilised, not sure how much melatonin, insulin, or other factors played. too poor to measure..

1431 : woken+2.9 hours, pool and tablet (for reading)

1522 : citric acid cycle : ah well, finally back to Form Six syllabi ( didn't take it at that age )

1805 : Woken+6.5 hours. Break from pool and tablet. Time to feed again.

2016 : Athletic diet looks like a minimum of 800 Cal/meal. second meal complete, and some reading done.

"

"

Wed 4Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.441years ( year2; month18; week75; day526 )

0100 : Day 526. Just now, yesterday, before heading to bed, I had administered B12, fish oil, and creatine, at the doses I used normally a few years ago, when those were the only supplements I was taking, all of which I was taking for daily effects. Body temperature is up. I mainly guess it is due to creatine and extra protein post-resistance.

 This followed a day that was spent mostly around eating and swimming. Studies of swimming remain conservative, 25m laps, mainly thinking about technique. I am still struggling to balance cognitive resource allocation across various verbal studies, and physical conditioning.

Two hypotheses, first, I am underutilising creatine. Having tested doses between 1.5g and 10g per day, I seem to have more consistent cognitive output from doses between 5g and 10g daily. Published research around this is still spotty - more surveys of existing literature would be helpful.

Second, regardless of whether or not creatine use helps to reduce anxiety, anxiety may be the main bottleneck of short term memory. Generally, I am not anxious, but i have been trained over the years to push up anxiety as an indicator of when to stop increasing loads on my memory ... so in conditions of aggressive learning, such as the present, I am anxious almost by protocol. I will need to tune this system a bit, to discover if I can increase cognitive throughput by reducing anxiety via various mechanisms ... dietary, intentionality, reading load, CO2 load, social boundaries, etc.

0155 : I am often advised that I lack empathy.

But every few years as I review my work, I find that it is an excess of empathy which weighs negatively on my P&L. This cost is both in terms of opportunity cost, and consequences.

In summary, I find myself once more reminding myself to empathise less with people, especially if they are my closer associates.

I hope to recalibrate myself to optimise my rate of learning soon. While it is day 526 of sabbatical 2, I find I am not yet following an optimised protocol. This is probably dude to both my lack of focus on studies since the last sabbatical in 2012, andthe breadth of my current studies.

Lfg

1020 : up. 

1121 : Day 526. Today's strategic focus will be to identify all the people I spend too much empathy on, and to trim some resource allocations here. Otherwise it is expected to be a routine day, shuffling between physical and knowledge conditioning.

1556 : Big K should buy the Concorde and build a Heritage REIT. Whenever it stops trying to plumb funny deals using toy airplanes as laundry.

1930 : I used to pride myself on the creation and rotation of 3D models in my head, as that was kinda novel when I was in college. These days, I pride myself more on the ""manual"" teardown and eviction from memory of such models, automatically generated when I look at stuff. R&R.

2119 : Fat stocked-in! Sunflower and pumpkin seeds should be about 45% fat.

It turns out that seeds and meat both have high levels of fat and minerals absent in other vegetables. Good substitute, I suppose.

Thu 5Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.444years ( year2; month18; week76; day527 )

0013 : Day 527. Tracking down bugs, probably from a comforter that came out of storage. Sundry.

Review of training. Water is deadly. You fall asleep in it, you die. You panic, you die. Untrained, you have a few seconds. Trained, you have a few minutes. I am untrained. Nose on the wrong side of an inch, you die. I like water for this characteristic. It feels challenging. It is rare to find enjoyable challenges.

I am still meditating on my organisation of studies. Lack of organisation is a bitch.

1100 : up. laundry. breakfast

1804 : Hour 8. Time to compare the fear of losing money, with the fear of drowning.

2200 : Niamah ... 118, 106 ... isn't the address, it's the number of floors ... typical Malaysian dick swinging

2237 : Chucked a ton of KCl into my brown rice after pool today. I think it goes to show that the moderately salted meal does not leave you needing to drink, but most commercially prepared meals are oversalted, so drinking is deriguer with commercial food.

2359 : Argh. Need to coingest Na+, and Cl- with creatine, as they share a common transport mechanism. Backtrack, backtrack. 

Plus, K+ to balance Na+'s osmotic effects ( K+ tends to accumulate intracellular, Na+ tends to accumulate extracellular ; overall substitution allow for K+ to propel Na+ extretion ). 

HCO3- for Ph buffering.

Looks like NaHCO3 + KCl is sufficient. But next, to text ...

... might as well throw some MgCl2 in there while I'm at it.

Fuck, one of these days I'll put together a spreadsheet for electrolytes, but not today. Not really tracking Mg2+, Ca2+, PO4,3-

In other news today ... it has been noted that Vitamin D is involved in dopaminergic issues.

Fri 6Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.447years ( year2; month18; week76; day528 )

0031 : Threw in 20-50-100-200 SMI and RSI into the XBT chart to study. Another 16-year-postponed bunch of simple stuff.

0157 : People complaining that tRoP is turning Tolkien's grave into the next source of renewable energy ... are somewhat behind the curve. 

Every single film adaptation since Jackson's jaunt through New Zealand has been deplorable, in comparison to the text. 

The newer films can't possibly be worse ...

0349 : Day 528. Past week has been focused on the selective eviction of memories to make way for new ones. A delicate process.

1146 : up, 7.75 hours

1923 : Fascinating relationship between salt, blood pressure, and thermoregulation.554:My short-term memory is cleaner after a few days of working on it. As I lay in bed before falling asleep this morning, I thoughts about how first-dates are easier to remember than subsequent meetings. Maybe if I get bored enough some day I should do film about those.

2003 : Today's is a timely, and recently routine, reflection on weakness and ignorance.

2140 : It's quite remarkable how short-term memory bottlenecks equally accommodate, on any given day ...

- social negotiations

- the study financial markets

- kinesthesia of swimming

- operations of a coffee shop

- a nine-to-five doing trivial work for some bureaucratic process

And what happens then is, at the meta-level we just decide where to spend our time each day.

2300 : I wish I had the humility to work with rich people without laughing at them. But I generally laugh at people, so I don't often work with those who can afford to avoid being laughed at.

(all abstractions are leaky. particularly aphorisms posted on social media for entertainment)

Sat 7Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.449years ( year2; month18; week76; day529 )

0033 : down

1030 : up

1132 : Hour zero point five. Insert coffee, boil rice.

1206 : Hit target for sleep - a recently uncommon event. That's good. Bit of fire in the markets yesterday. Checking positions. No adjustments to portfolio warranted. Thinking about follies of the world - beautiful people, but stupid ... rich people, but fearful ... smart people, but lazy ... ah, some are smart here and there, and really dumb elsewhere. Such is the market for people.

1450 : CMB economics have gone nuts. It went from 12 or so daily quota to 57. Owning up the fact that it had lousy implementation and Bumble was just killing it meanwhile.

2000 : X : [ weekly story of some political thing at work ]

Me : You know, even if I've only been in a new company for 30 minutes, if I see a shitty design, I complain about it, and I want to know who's responsible for it. Often enough I excuse myself before I start to overly annoy people, as I find it more beneficial to ... for example, sit at home reading about biochemistry ... rather than waste time even it pays like 100k a month.( Money's ok if it's paid up-front - I probably bet too conservatively though. ;) )

Sun 8Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.452years ( year2; month18; week76; day530 )

0001 : Politically, Malaysia has only been interesting after 2018. While many of my peers have been quite active, I've simply taken the position that we were a pseudo-democracy until the ruling party lost for the first time - thereby demonstrating the viability of democracy in Malaysia. I made a point to register as a voter around 2008, and a point to actually not vote. 

I view the environment after 2018 as completely different from the one before. It's not that I can't see shades of gray - one simply chooses to avoid slippery slopes, and to let those who want to deal with it go first. 

Pick you battles, eh

0124 : I was coaching a friend on breast stroke basics today. I have no idea if what I am teaching is efficient, but it's a reasonable guess based on an analysis of elements. 1. pull 2. kick 3. glide, repeat 

0202 : Non-vegans taking synthetic calcium supplements instead of just egg shells need to be smacked on the head.

0237 : Noob trading mistake : sold at the trough of a flash crash, bought at the peak of a double-top. LMAO

0407 : down

0408 : Maybe the whole point of having XHS on my phone is to practice CN.

And 50% of the point of having TikTok is to practice MS.

1140 : up

1248 : hour two. enforced feeding.

1700 : a couple of hours spent on community service, writing proposals for facility security improvements. later i have to complain about something else to the city council.

1810 : Meditations by the pool. Based on the past week's maintenance, I have come to understand that my short-term memory is less bottlenecked than my mid-term. I have been in the process of evicting from memory the lay of streets, the internal shapes of objects, these have been useful as I navigated the city, but these days my work does not heavily involve such navigations.

2107 : Hm. Gut fucked. Probably due to irregular feeding quality and quantity yesterday : low starch breakfast, long meeting, then a lot of ""normal people food"" i.e. nasi kandar. This is quite disruptive to studies, but I don't perceive any severe threats, so I will just monitor the purging.

Ah yes, and I should probably ease up on the calorie load for a bit.

2148 : Stuff to look forward to this week :

- repaired gut behaviour, for resumption of test operations

- iron supplements for new tests

- improved neural conditioning via routine physical conditioning 

- improved social engagement via documentation for local governments

- improved general knowledge via routine studies

- portfolio dropping another 20% by EOM

2205 : After all, as each day on this Earth passes, and I find myself still waking up to troll the next one ... one finds novelty in new idiots raising hell over old problems, and old idiots barking after new problems.

Each day a little bit of personal development happens, but in order for it to proceed, a multitude of sniveling charmers must be gently put in their places, before they increase one's ever-volatile trip hazard.

Calm, calm, the babies, go ye to sleep. I need to sleep, I have more work to do tomorrow.

2232 : Perhaps, citric and carbonic acid are all it takes to adjust an electrolyte imbalance from sodium bicarbonate used for athletic buffering.

2254 : metabolic acidosis and chronic kidney disease :ingesting specific electrolytes, and turning meat on and off in diets sporadically, seem to amount to playing with fire.

Mon 9Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.455years ( year2; month18; week76; day531 )

0130 : Enforced feeding, then off to bed again.

0221 : I've lived the last half of my life under the premise that I could get locked up in a hole on any day. Might as well maintain the premise. Though today, of all the risks I take, I'm not sure which is worse,

- prison

- kidney failure

- financial ruin

- car crash

- drowning

- assault

... yet while each card may be drawn on any day, one attempts to maximise opportunities.

1200 : up, 95% on target 

1313 : Need to run backtesting on momentum indicators at some point. Rudimentary stuff I guess.

1326 : comment on meme : Time is an illusion. Consciousness is like being the tape-reader in a VHS - that you feel a certain way is a timely structure, but that is all a structure of information which has timeless existing in higher dimensions. Time is just another kind of space ( unfalsifiable, trivial, hypothesis ).

1521 : Malaysia's paralympics performance far exceeded its olympics performance in 2024. This completely affirms my understanding of our place in the world order.

1744 : Ferrous fumarate tablets have arrived! 200mg, is 66mg elemental iron, or about equivalent to 1kg of beef liver per $0.03 tablet. Rougjly, heme iron in meat is absorbed at 10-35%, and non-heme iron from everywhere else is absorbed at 2-20%. The body has no intrinsic method to speed up the excretion of iron. So I am going to attempt a dosage of one tablet for every three to five meatless days.

1800 : I guess the next two things to look at are cholecalciferol, taurine, folate, and choline.

Tue 10Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.458years ( year2; month18; week76; day532 )

0018 : Did groceries and upgraded kitchen lighting. Enforced eating. Then maybe a bit more reading of acidosis before bed. I wonder how far the world will have moved, by the time I am done with this decade.

0208 : Day 532. More sacrifices are being made today. Studies of nutrition are being brought forward in priority, and studies of finance, and local government work are being pushed back. Fuck.

Better slow and steady.

0250 : down 

1043 : up, 80ish% on target 

1142 : Today there is a howling wind. :) I secured the curtains a bit more, and enjoyed the flapping view.

1455 : Oh btw - I found the chinese black vinegar brand has a closer flavour profile to Coke than balsamic vinegar - because it's got caramel in it.

1709 : Hm. Overhydrated again. Time to hit the pool, albeit with some soreness and stiffs.

2134 : napped for an hour

"

"

Wed 11Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.460years ( year2; month18; week76; day533 )

0220 : Overhydrated again. Need to be more careful with liquids because of the immensely hygroscopic gum additives in SPI.

0245 : down

1005 : up, 73% on target. feed and grind 

1214 : ""Shame on you, for blindly following tradition.""

A device of Asian humour.

1222 : On a scale of 0naive to 9nerdy, tell me, why does the voltage of your intestines matter?

1432 : Studying the phenomenology of thirst, and its relationship with the phenomenology of paresthesia. I mean, I should ACTUALLY be shopping for gum-less SPI, but this is an interesting forcing factor.

1514 : metabolic alkalosis : I'm not absorbing this information :P so I will return to it later. 

1646 : People die everyday. Most of us are unprepared for it. Shame. The fear of destruction drives all to hide themselves till even some do not know who hides from what.One wanders through the unenviable masses looking for a bit of inspiration, and it remains uncommon.

2007 : Swimming daily. I am more focused on technique than on speed and endurance. My kinesthesiology is imperfect, there are many forms to master, my breathing is untrained. I do not yet feel as comfortable underwater as I do above. I have a reasonable fear of drowning. So this is a slow study.

At some point I need to compound this study of form with studies of strength, endurance, and speed. But it all goes slowly, as athletics are not a full-time commitment. And I am still experimenting with nutritional inputs.

So much to learn. So little time.

2050 : Having swam, fed myself a second meal, moderating hydration, laid down to nap, but having not napped due to engagement in a discussion about the prudence of religious discourse in Malaysia ... I am going to attempt a second swim before my studies are further curtailed by these sensitivities of my society.

Thu 12Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.463years ( year2; month18; week77; day534 )

0206 : Malaysia has never provided a sense of safety, for many of its citizens. We may live, and die, a hundred and twenty years, under the shadow of our peers. Good evening, for now.

0234 : Time passes slowly. I am about 40, having been of democratic age for about half that time. This week I was reminded that the same fools and their goblins from twenty years ago ... are still spinning the same tales, for two weeks at a time, of public distractions.

But we have been a demonstrably viable democracy for barely six years, so I hope that in another forty years, if I have reached two thirds of my viable duration, that these fools will have passed away, and their myths along with them. But that is unlikely. Yet if the nation does grow up in my lifetime, maybe I will be able to spend the final third of my time here in a pleasant environment.

Otherwise, maybe tomorrow is the last, and the nation and I survive each other not.

1230 : up,nearlyon target 

1301 : Hour point five after hitting over 95% target for sleep, on a rare occasion. Enforced washing, feeding, work to commence.

1406 : Vasopressin appears to be the reason that people asphyxiate themselves for sexual stimulation. Reading. 

1520 : osteodynamics. I wonder how much weaker my bones are these days. 

1541 : ACTH : I think this is where the whole vitamins-K,D-bones, melatonin-B12-circadian, thing comes together, but my brain is saturated, so I am going for a swim.

1543 : condensation is like rot ... they should call it hydrofouling ... lmao

1624 : Creatine, salt, hydration protocol ... next.

1821 : Seems like I have been in the pool for a month. It does not feel like I have been in the pool for a month. Never trust your intuitions.

2200 : Wondering if I should put it on my future priority list to work in investment banking for ten years. Less than ten doesn't sound like a deep dive. More than ten seems like an over-allocation of resources. How about from the ages of 50 to 60?

Hm. IB from 50yo to 60yo, maybe some minor responsibilities. Then back to minimum wage jobs at 65. I hope I still enjoy minimum wage work when I am 80 or older, if I make it that far.

I was coaching a friend on some study subject today. Most of the errors came from moving too fast. I think most people try to move too quickly in life. That is why they are highly specialised and stupid.

Fri 13Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.466years ( year2; month18; week77; day535 )

1130 : comment :: There's actually a way to filter for people who have your money values.

For example, she has filtered for people who tolerate/appreciate/connive to spend at a particular level, as a form of performative introduction.

For example, others simply write ""frugal living"", or ""coffee only, for first dates"" in their profiles.

You get what you ask for. It's a matter of transparent advertising.

1145 : The culture of high-stakes-for-everything is part of Singapore's founding tradition. Given recent gains in the world order, it may be time to consider a programmed review of national endocrine policy. There are economic and strategic benefits to reducing SNS stimulation, and increasing PSNS stimulation. :) it depends on context and goals.

1256 : Day 535. On the exit train from an outstation assignment. Declined to eat on site. Hoping to get home, to resume dietary study, at least for the time being. Again, as I often do, I wonder if I do too much testing at the expense of predictable growth.

1522 : ( Caffeine ) ->

( Increases : Adrenaline + Noradrenaline secretion ) -> 

( Blocks : Insulin secretion ) ->

( Blocks : Amino Acid absorption, hypertrophy, and anabolism in general + ??? neurotrauma and neurodegenerative effects ??? ) 

1531 : it's all or nothing, mate ... 🙂 no one cares about marginal progress until AI is indistinguishable from ordinary citizens ... it'll just be dehumanised until that happens.

1547 : Heuristic for balancing NaCl and KCl intake ... aiming for a daily total of about 3.8g of EitherCl, with a 2:1 bias towards K. 

This is based on recommended daily intake for Cl-. Which is to to say, more K+ or Na+ may be accommodated if other anions such as HCO3- are substituting Cl-.

Mulling on it.

1600 : Combined my Creatine-KCl-NaHCO3 dosing protocol with my SPI dosing protocol and mCobalamin dosing protocol. Chased it with some coffee, hopefully not too much.

After reading a few thousand words, feeling defeated again. Time to switch contexts to pool training. Such is student life.

1915 : result ... gassy stool, so, I begin another tangent towards the study of blood vessels to and from the intestines, as well as ph levels throughout the gastrointestinal tract

1916 : chinese black vinegar comes up, as that's what's in my kitchen right now - i have the cheap stuff, but the classical stuff isn't simply vinegar mixed with caramel and ginger 

1921 : prior to quantitative study of my diet, I was generally comfortable after meals by chasing meals with acidic liquer such as soda, tea, or coffee. I will attempt this protocol again, as I have put it off recently, while messing with other variables.

1930 : also worth noting ... after daily exposure to pool water, I found my skin behaving as it does when I use strong soaps - so now after pool, I engage a citric acid flush, which has solved the soap problem in the past. let's see how this goes

2030 : TIL : the heuristic that dietary fibre ( FODMAP ) helps prevent colorectal cancer may or may not have anything to do with the heuristic that dietary fibre ( roughage ) stimulates intestinal motility. 

Rather, FODMAPs serve to ferment into SCFAs ( short-chain fatty acids ) in the colon, providing over 70% of metabolic energy for colon epithelial cells. It's pretty much just evolved this way, so we're stuck with it - they don't prefer to eat anything else ( fact check and clarification required ). 

A related hypothesis about the metabolism of SCFAs, is that it produces byproducts which ostensibly reduce DNA damage to colon cells from hydrogen peroxide. What is the hydrogen peroxide doing here in the first place? Well apparently the colon itself is secreting it as a microbiocide.

Can we say, a collective fuck, with the long U.

2036 : Health insurance premiums : not a fan of dealing with this. So far I have not bought insurance - if I fall sick, I will seek KKM's patronage, and when KKM doesn't want to see me anymore, I will suffer or die, and that's it. Simple plan, simple life, hopefully a simple death ... but you can never know, if you will be ready for death. You find out along the way. :)

2047 : FML. It's very complicated. But ... most people just prefer to be simple, and dumb. At least I can avoid dumb to a slightly greater degree. Complexity is not as bad of a brand.

Sat 14Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.468years ( year2; month18; week77; day536 )

0348 : Day 536. Babysitting again. Well, that is social life, I suppose. I'm writing a local government guide for home owners. Since it's voluntary, i'm putting my TNG number there for tips 😎

0403 : comment:l:The humanities need to stop dodging quantification. It may be counterintuitive, but that's just a hole that digs itself deeper and deeper every day 😭

1056 : up, 75% on target

1141 : After a few days of working on kinesthesia under water at low speeds, I will try to work on power for a couple of days. Power is easier to fix. Just move faster : it is neurological in deficit. As for lifting heavier, that will have to be addressed too, in the future.

1145 : Barring more swans, gonna be a slow crawl back to March portfolio highs. Haha. I accept my mistakes and try to avoid making both new and old ones.

1255 : I expect the minimum wage to exceed my mortagage costs eventually. That's just the economy right now ... labour and housing in Malaysia are both in oversupply, so prices are depressed.

If the government figures out how to increase the demand for Malaysian labour, then prices will increase. Likewise, if there comes to be a new surge in demand for housing, then urban housing will be up another 50% in 10 to 15 years. 

But mortgage installments will be relatively steady in comparison to the price of realestate, and the price of labour.

I have two mortgages : $75/month + $460/month

Current minimum wage : $350/month

My target monthly food costs : $100/month ( unemployed full-time student )

1310 : comment responding to the notion that ""building material quality was higher before covid"" I think one type of real estate is very overbought in my opinion : terrace houses and semi-D grids ... in treeless landscaping with zero small-trade within walking distance of every home. In the 15-30 year term, Malaysians are going to outgrow their 1970s mentality of ""any grid house is good as long as it's landed"". We're looking at hectares and hectares of new grid housing still unoccupied.

I call these ""typical fugly Malaysian houses"". I wonder if and how it will have changed by around 2045.

1534 : Hypothesis : nutrient absorption is hampered by insufficient physiological demand. Increase physiological demand. The body is a microcosm of the economy.

1612 : religious checks at restaurants : Aiya - just put everything into MySejahtera la. Check religion per gateway - if PyJ wants to block anything, they have central surveillance. Move on with more important issues. It's just food.

Sun 15Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.471years ( year2; month18; week77; day537 )

0420 : Unwell. Maybe just tired. Or relieved to complete the brief historiography. It is hard to understand if one is progressing or regressing when both inputs and outputs are being tweaked.

1155 : up, 75% on target

1252 : Today a continued study of hydration.

Recently switched to cooking double-servings of rice at once. Probably increases the resistance a bit.

1529 : Nutrient dynamics. Planning for extended resistance makes me hungry; planning for minimum resistance means I am almost never hungry. My main nutritional objective is neurotrophy. Nerves have growth factors in repeated use, particularly in repeated interaction with other tissue. So it becomes necessary to stimulate other tissue as well. Now we are back at gross exercise.

1531 : I will have to get into preplanned stop-loss limits at the portfolio level at some point. Was just talking to a friend about this when they asked for upside ideas but couldn't tell me what VAR they could tolerate. Need to do my own homework.

1708 : comment:Going a bit too fast there. The lens that the supply of decent people follows secular trends is a denial that the quality of the people we meet is a function of the effort we put into shopping for them 😎

1917 : I've been using a citric acid 5% w/w solutions as a skin acidifier. After a few weeks, there tends to be algae/mould in the bottle. It turns out furthermore that citric acid is commercially produced FROM black mould. Now I'm not sure if the mould spores are in the citric acid, or if they're just getting in from the environment. Haha.

Next, I will try white vinegar instead.

2037 : Groomed. Fed some more. Before I think too much about how to be productive with the rest of the evening, I should do swim2 before the pool closes. Maybe a 24-hour pool is next on my to-do list.

2223 : Adding fruit to my todo list.I should really try and behave according to my income. looking for distractions, but I really shouldn't.:The day is mostly about physical conditioning. Thinking somewhat about how else to optimise my stack.

2334 : Being in a familiar neighbourhood deprives one of the novelty of sundry geography. Hm. Point to meditate on.

Mon 16Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.474years ( year2; month18; week77; day538 )

0046 : Rest is an unusual feeling, for me. The past year has been volatile with a lot of derisking. Hoping to resume productivity soon.

0255 : I was wondering when the last time was, that I had so little on my plate, and so much infrastructure laid-down. Maybe at the start of college. Maybe never. Progress is good, albeit slow.

1020 : up, 73% on target 

1122 : Recovering with a bit of downtime for the past day. Cortisol levels appear to be low, due to memory resets - I should look into that relationship soon.

Took some time to brain the stuff in my social media feeds. I guess a difference is, B2C plebs have poor taste, but B2B plebs have poor taste, and less empathy.

Trying to wriggle out of the all-around-this-is-mid feeling. I guess I can mainly depend on myself for matters of taste, and I should shop around for people more carefully, with these things in mind.

1151 : Reflective day. Figuring out how to dodge the mid crowd, without losing the capacity to engage altogether.

1603 : 24.04 upgrade killed my displaylink-driver. Back to one monitor until I have the patience to reinstall everything. Boo.

2305 : now trending :

make a marketing video pretending

you're Ali G pretending to be Gen Z

Tue 17Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.477years ( year2; month18; week77; day539 )

0117 : down

1200 : up

1320 : Rage. All around the world, an unsubtle rage moves my peers to arbitrary objectives. What a world we live in.

1400 : The weather is nice today. It rains, the winds are strong, and visibility is a white-out between a hundred and a thousand metres. A good space for thinking. I am almost 41.

The way my years have happened, my second and fourth decades had deep social/organisational involvement. My first, and third decades were relatively isolated. Based on this my intuition is that the fifth decade should also focus on personal rather than social development. 

We shall see how that plays out.

1746 : Executed more local government volunteerism. Very inefficient but worth punting on when reliable people are in power.

Hosting a friend in their time of need. Hopefully nothing long term.

Fed with the first meal. Off to pool training.Thermoregulation is today's thought.

"

"

Wed 18Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.479years ( year2; month18; week77; day540 )

0312 : Notes taken for the evening. Enforced feeding, then enforced sleep.

1125 : up, 70% OT. Protocol log to commence. 

Before sleep : moderately exerted day, recently normal nutrition protocol. 20g SPI++ before bed, no creatine, which I took earlier in the day.

Sleep : recently I've been sleeping with minimal stimuli - no fan, no AC, no blanket, for the most part. Today a ""normal"" degree of stimuli was applied.

 

input : fan : brown noise against the bed frame, pink noise from blade chop, associated vibrations

input : AC : temperature reduced to accommodate the use of a comforter without discomfort

input : comforter : relatively large quantity of haptic stimuli with even the slightest movement ; subseqeuently quicker thermo-upregulation at the end of sleep, given reduced losses to environment

output : increased dreaming and associated phenomena of well-being (apparent in sensational modalities, improved kinesthesia : reduced pain and fatigue from movement, faster feedback, higher resolution of haptic data), and increased dopaminergic cascade (inferred from aforementioned sensation) as a result of increased dreaming.

It would be nice to have a few million in data collection tools, but haha, I shall work with what I have.

1313 : Stakeless punting :

- 25 bips first cut today

- Kamala wins

- market goes sideways but uppish for the next year

- wither the swans? white, black, or pink

Standing by for a 20% dive anyway.

1336 : Comment : Starlink for remote sensing? Nice. I hadn't thought of this before. But with a constellation of transmitters, it seems that even a naive observation about which transmissions were being distorted over time would be able to give you a heuristic about something moving in between the receiver and the transmitters. 

1346 : The pool is offline for overhead maintenance. I guess the day shall proceed with weights.

1407 : I'm at 1.479 years today, and my portfolio is nominally 33% underwater.

If I get to later years, and significantly positive returns, I should buy a new computer and catch up with the gaming scene a bit. I miss Quake4, but gaming is not a priority these past two decades.

Also, I need a reason to study Twitch.

1745 : Still calibrating hydration issues. Possibly too much soluble fibre from brown rice.

Thu 19Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.482years ( year2; month18; week78; day541 )

0208 : down

1215 : up, on target, having followed the previous day's protocol mostly

1404 : Day 541. Protocol review. Day after low reps, high weight, DOMS from eccentric muscle contractions, hyperalgesia, inflammation, thicker urine. I suppose, I can reduce risk by swimming and avoiding high weight work until DOMS passes. Then rinses and repeat. Curious about the details of what raises urine concentration, but no budget for testing at this point. So one has to guess. 

1408 : Dating apps and the difference between distributions of attractiveness on a linear scale, of women rating men, and of men rating women : Over the years, I've reduced the attractiveness of my profile ... by inserting harder triggers to ward off incompatible matches. I still actively swipe-into the same percentage of female profiles. However, I've reduced the number of poor matches that are swiping-into my profile. At least, that's the strategic intent! LOL 

1525 : Need to continue work on reducing soluble fibre; stools too bulky. Also batting away inane comments on social media, haha.

1637 : Sitting on the floor in front of a 16"" fan running at 73W, quietly, such that the wind wraps around my ears with a brown noisy rumble. Maybe the view of the table is enjoyable because everything seem larger and the expanse wider.

2105 : Going full-throttle reverse on soluble fibre is an unanticipated pivot.

Fri 20Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.485years ( year2; month18; week78; day542 )

0012 : Squeezed in two swims today, amidst DOMS from yesterday's weights session. Still working on the low fibre pivot to fix hydration issues. Still not resting my memory enough. Need to remind myself to de-escalate if I'm not learning anything new after about five minutes. No need to wait an hour

0031 : mazel tov.

never had a reason to say it, first time for everything.

0050 : Should have swapped out of USD assets a while back, then swapped back in again, but we all knew that. Not yet focused on financial stuff while physical conditioning isn't settled ... and not yet focused on tech stuff while financial stuff isn't settled.

0056 : reps and sets : Finally, time to remember these numbers, after 24 years of postponing haha

0134 : Day 543. Self-reminder to stay focused on fundamentals and to de-risk as much as possible from low-alpha relationships.

0140 : Those who value families live in constant fear of those who do not value those families.

Those who value no families live in constant fear of those who value families.

The world is fair.

0146 : I find it amusing that when I pass, people will probably miss me for things I didn't like about myself, and which I didn't think were worthy of human pursuit. I wouldn't be able to care at that point. It seems quite funny though. I still don't keep much company that cares about the things I like to work on. Pity.

1042 : 88% ot

1124 : Time to feed, wash, and work.

1156 : and oldie:Who would have thought that the free drink trucks we grew up with in school were systematic sugar addiction vectors, to shift wealth from taxpayers, to the healthcare sector in the long term. Well, the trucks are still operating today. Haha

1312 : Going to suppliers for oil seeds. Not yet time to start baking, as I haven't stabilised objectives - need to test store-bought white bread for a bit first.Starting to sell some equities to cover EOM mortgage. Drip drip.

1820 : I think, most of my life has been a serious of gambles on time. Two years here, six years there, broadly there are ten-year epochs, and the comfortable unit of time for planning has been about four years at a time. I write about that a lot to remind myself, so that's that. Today I just need to remind myself that the mundanity of daily work falls within that context. I really hate eating, sleeping, and exercise, but ... since it's part of the supply chain, I'd better get very efficient at it before I am 50.

Sat 21Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.488years ( year2; month18; week78; day543 )

0154 : Social expenses today : hefty, but less unwieldy than in past performances by the relevant counterparties.

Just the usual bickering between cultures who subscribe to models of relationships which do or do not support the notion of collective harmony at the expense of individual welfare.

0406 : down

0940 : up,50%ot

1044 : Slept into 50% of target. But, I seem to feel ok. Iterate and roll.

1318 : Still not clear on which pathway mecobalamin helps me with, even when I am on normal diets. Generally haptic data rises to a higher bandwidth in conscious memory, improving kinesthesia and encouraging sleep (warm hug equivalent).

1550 : Pool water has been poorly maintained. I will keep swimming unless it makes me sick. Still cleaner than nature, probably. I shall head out for a walk later, perhaps for groceries also. Time to switch to white bread for tests. I must take my time to watch people, as I have not had much social stimuli of late. Glad to be less bothered by whiners, however.

1703 : Ah, I think I see the lethargy connection.

Mecobalamin -> melatonin -> ( inversely correlated with : dopamine )

So kicking the lethargy after mecobalamin dosing requires a bit of active work. 

1851 : I think, pre-gaming till tired, and wrapping up in a comfy jacket with ANC eargear, is the best way to appreciate a walk in the mall. No use rushing through it

2015 : i think most people would not believe that AGI already exists outside the public eye

2113 : Hypertrophy over entire muscle groups which i haven't worked on much (case in point, shoulders) seems to involve a massive rewiring of nerves, and generally throws me out of kinesthetic calibration. I suppose development is such. One sacrifices executive function, to migrate to greater executive functions.

Fatigue and rewirings, and twice-daily drills are compounded with some nausea. Perhaps it's the serotonin from making myself come too recently. LOL

Sun 22Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.490years ( year2; month18; week78; day544 )

0209 : down

1012 : up, 80% vs par 

1050 : Enforced waking, feeding, work.

1358 : Learning is improved slightly. In 2026, I should get a US equity brokerage account, and maybe CME access as well. If I survive 2025. Haha

1430 : Less pain, and more dopaminergic wakefulness in conscious imagination, today. Monitoring.

Less stress from noisy counterparties to track. More short term memory to shop for new people. Options are good.

1552 : Seems like I have enough bandwidth today to swipe on dating apps and study music (declined to participate in either). Some sort of post-fatigue recovery is happening.

1714 : Enforced workout

2020 : As slowly as my desk-oriented studies are going, and as poorly as my management of finances is in this early stage of development, I am quite happy with my study of physical conditioning. Specifically the study of water. I do believe, that it is a clear sign of incompetence if one cannot accurately and sustainably repeat a rote task for long periods of time - it shows weakness, neurologically or otherwise, and a lack of focus. So it is with me and swimming, or is it I and swimming, I don't know, because I never bothered to study that rule of English theoretically. I suck at this, so it is a study that continues to be interesting.

Repetition with care, of stupid, boring things : eating, sleeping, driving, being polite, being nice to people, learning new languages, acquiring new skills, building relationships. Always the same.

Mon 23Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.493years ( year2; month18; week78; day545 )

0014 : Shutting down early, if the pineal cooperates

0104 : down

0940 : up, 80 vs par 

1000 : Wza matter wyall.

moodeng?

Slike yall nvr sn a baby karen

1547 : Ah. Next thing to kill is Spotify Premium. That'll save like $50/year, or 12 days food. Lol

1854 : SOP improvement : up to this point in life I didn't keep tabs on DOMS - generally I knew what it was, but I wasn't looking for it as a daily marker of stress. With my current study to ground cognitive optimisation in physical conditioning ... I'm learning to develop the language and frameworks required to track DOMS on a daily basis.

Wondering if there is any alternative to napping, to reset short-term memory and elevated sympathetic neural activity.

1915 : Evening prayers from mosques. Dull blue sky. Lit up buildings. Twilight rain. Distant lightning, over 10 clicks away. Time to drown my follies, but also time to make notes on this tablet as I sit beside the pool.

2213 : Too late for a third swim. Proceeding with kinesthesiology of DOMS and other memory management issues.

Tue 24Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.496years ( year2; month18; week78; day546 )

0051 : Day 546. I spend a lot of time thinking about how all learning involves self-destruction. And so, people who cling to their identities will always lack intellectual capacity.

Most of my learning in the past month has been remedial kinesthesiology. I have generally found it daft for people to exercise competitively. Generally i exercise for the curiosity of the act, as a thing in and of itself. Secondarily, it develops power, which is useful.

Broadly, it is useful to invite criticism of one's identity as a matter of learning. So one collects critiques, and for the sake of efficiency, deduplicates them as much as possible, before utilising the critiques in system building.

0944 : up 88 percent vs par 

1153 : ( hidden fortress )Never watched this movie, which inspired Star Wars. But this storyboard sounds like a career strategy I picked for my twenties and thirties.

1303 : Time to review tax. Few days of spotty cash flow here. Let's see how long these consumer financial services take to move a few tens of dollars around.

1350 : Today I began using a stick to align my hands for stretching. Social media is helpful with this sort of thing.

1726 : Can we get Tayaria to sponsor its own food guide? Then we can dump the famous foreigner.

"

"

Wed 25Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.499years ( year2; month18; week78; day547 )

0940 : up

1040 : Anticipating an ordinary day. Physical conditioning to continue. Verbal conditioning on multiple tracks proceeding on a lower priority. Social risk management ordinary : expecting the same from my peers on Earth. 

1200 : Mid-term (4Q2024-4Q2027) direction for the USDMYR is 2.50. Back to where it stabilised before currency controls in the 90s. IDK wtf this means for my portfolio, because my portfolio is mainly running on short-term considerations.

2118 : Third swim. Go go go. Pool closes soon. Into the darkness.

2201 : Done. Checking memory plasticity. Some capacity for reading remains. Also time for laundr.y

2338 : I've spent years of my life serving others in various jobs, also developing other people, building teams, and teaching things both ordinary and esoteric. But right now, I do not make much time for that, as now is a time of study, for me. I find myself fairly useless, and whingey. Pain, pain, pain ... all very whingey if you compare it with the kids getting their eyes and arms bombed out. What I have found about my own neuroplasticity is that it can get almost anywhere I want it to go, if I give it enough time, and pressure. However, when working solo, it is hard to know when pressure is too much or too little. Ones gambles with time. Time which may run out, at any point, suddenly and without warning. Such is the high life.

Thu 26Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.501years ( year2; month19; week79; day548 )

0940 : up, on target 

1010 : Awake to clowns in society. Off to build better worlds without them.

1301 : 1. My monthly mortgage payments have a one week grace period for payment. But I didn't want to miss the nominal date, for discipline's sake - an artificial quality metric.

2. My equity fund manager takes an irregular number of business days to execute a portfolio redemption and withdrawal. So I was short of about $50 today.

3. I did the irritating thing, and sold some crypto, from a currency which was in a locally profitable position, and also on an intra-day high. Then I withdrew the $50 to my savings account, en route to paying off my mortgage.

4. I have to normalise such tactical decisions. I am too irritated by the inconvenience, and should become more agile about this without being stressed.

2215 : What a load of fucking BOVAEP drama the day uncovered. Anyway, the pool is now closed. I managed to sneak in a third swim in the last fifteen minutes, yay.

Fri 27Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.504years ( year2; month19; week79; day549 )

0206 : Stupid day, tagging stupid issues, in a pretty dumb country. Oh well, I guess it's home for now.

0248 : down

0940 : up at 70%. probably should increase haptic feedback during sleep to improve dreaming. 

1011 : Another day!

Another listless day!

Will it be a stupid day

 Only one way to find out!

1307 : 2024 and I still haven't found a reliable way to group Chrome tabs. Built-ins have been no good.

1402 : 30% under par for sleep today. Review of endocrine and nervous system : checking sensitivity to pain, sound, touch. More reading in a bit.

1721 : pool training has reached about 43 days today 

1818 : Things I learnt about nutrition recently :

- too many carbs => too much fibre => too much shit

- more fat + same energy => less carbs + less shit

- less shit => less wasted food 

... I am wondering how much money I've wasted in 40 years of excessive shitting.

1828 : Progress is a strange thing. Milestones are relative to expectations.

Sometimes you spend 20 years never running more than 10km, then in two months you're at 20+km under two hours.

Sometimes you can learn an entire software development framework in a few days. Sometimes, over two months you expose yourself to a few hundred new terms about geography, history, biochemistry, and finance, but don't have any useful models behind the morphology.

Everything is normal. It is hard to say what is not.

1919 : Ok. Switching lanes to work on hardware for a few days. Gotta clear recycling, maybe paint car, check on old flat.

Hopefully after that, memory is ready for more desking.

1942 : ear muffs on at home for a quieter time

2024 : Hate to say it, but calling spades here : Sam's work at OpenAI hasn't impressed me. First, let me frame my own ignorance by saying I haven't even bothered to test the tech they're using because I haven't read anything that's convinced me that it's more than old algorithms running on new hardware economics. Second, he's done a great job as a roadshow guy for this whole train, but the branding comes off as more Uber than Apple - taxis are boring, and so are LLMs. Third, the talent management sounds horrible. Ok, I am going back to my hole now.

2319 : Probably time to take a break after filling my head all week with the angsts of [ people subject to poorly regulated property managers in Malaysia ] and [ women stuck in unhappy heterosexual relationships everywhere ].

Sat 28Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.507years ( year2; month19; week79; day550 )

0013 : down

1019 : up on target 

1517 : second swim. adjusted breathing line of sight from 90 degrees vs path , to 170 degrees vs path 

2017 : Someone with more time than me needs to cover Jolene, with lyrics adjusted to ""Helene""

2315 : Enforced sleep. But first, a shower.

2359 : should read up more on the giant scam that is AHA and BHA in skincare

Sun 29Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.510years ( year2; month19; week79; day551 )

0007 : To put it bluntly, AI so far is rarely impressive to me because most humans I have met over forty years are rarely impressive to me. It is not to say they are objectively valuable or not ... I just don't find them complicated enough to be interesting. Minds as software are incredibly simple. Physiology is much, much, more complicated than the conscious mind.

0015 : The current implementations of GenAI are just so fundamentally different from what happens inside humans, whereas most people are simply unable to discuss how their internal thought processes work, so this fact slips by conveniently under the radar because GenAI is cute, like a tamagochi. But it is a very expensive tamagochi.

0023 : It's good to have days off. 

1019 : up on target 

1051 : Enforced waking. Wash, feed, work.

Mon 30Sep2024, Sabbatical2 @1.512years ( year2; month19; week79; day552 )

1055 : up, 90% on target. 

1124 : Today's isometric workout was to squat while checking my inbox. Not on a toilet. Fully clothed and with a fan on the floor, tablet in hand, heels off ground. Positions adjusted and arms moved for stretching. Why does this feel like tai chi, haja.

1341 : I think Malaysia should really nationalise the medical leave system for all employees across the country. This interpolates with the approach of a single-payer federal healthcare policy.

1509 : Androgens : Maybe I need to bump up saturated fat intake (!) 

1520 : I hope Spotify's board simultaneously invested in some streaming service that positioned itself as ideal for streamers under 1000-streams/year, after demonetising tracks based on that limit!

"