Ableism and Inconvenience

For many people, the word "retarded" is derogatory. Without using such language, we may yet say that some people are slower, and some people are faster. 

Some people feel that 1% of the people they meet are too slow to deal with on a daily basis. Others feel that 90% of the people they meet are too slow to deal with on a daily basis. Each person has different feelings.

How do you feel?

Too Easy

Pain and suffering. Jensen is trending. Let me put it this way ... character is not about struggling. Lord knows, there have been billions of suffering people in history who individually amounted to characterless nothings. The optimisation if I may, is slightly less sentimental. It's just a matter of operating on your envelope. If you are dumb, and you take the maximum difficulty path, your statistical bouquet of output changes somewhat - and the same is true if you are smart. It's quite tautological, really ... if your life is easy, it just means you're playing on a level that's not hard enough for your skill level. That is why I don't seek to win more than 50% of the games I play. In fact, usually I'm looking for a 5-10% success rate.

The Valuation of Time

It was somewhat disturbing to me, to have to explain to my friends, that ... if I am foregoing opportunities of x-dollars-per-hour (XDPH) to do my own study ... it means I value my study at least, at XDPH. 

So if instead of studying, I give this time to someone else ... it means I am paying XDPH, to spend time with them ... and this is ok if the other person also values the time at XDPH, with a demonstration of equal opportunity cost.

But if they don't demonstrate a valuation close to XDPH, then the relationships are unequal, and I should reasonably withdraw interest in spending my time here. 

I think what bothers some of my friends is that, while I am not finding at least XDPH worth of value with them ... I do find XDPH worth of value with other friends.

Well that's the market. BAU.

In and Out, of Health

 Performance mode :

- identify ways of life which are too easy ( low risk, low return )

- avoid said ways

- avoid networks with said ways ( * it seems I overdo this )

Non-performance mode :

- sleep, feed, exercise ( "develop" )

- figure out why we're not in performance mode 

What are Conservatives?

 Labour Day reflection.

What is the meaning of "conservative"? I'm trying to capture the sorts of behaviour that fall under this label.

(a) people with a long-term strategy+implementation of never-decreasing monthly income, or socio-economic position ( ladder climbing )

(b) people with a decisive stance that their words must be understood to have specific meaning, which they are unwilling to elaborate on ( high-context culture )

(c) people who are unwilling to consider discarding fundamental intuitions and/or emotions ( attachment )

I will certainly, with some intention, rub many of these people the wrong way. 

I'm somewhat partial myself to each of  these. 

(a) ... I'm a ladder-climber who denominates success in terms of information

(b) ... while I understand how to quantify human experience and how to disassemble and reassemble the thoughts and feelings of others, I am not always willing to do it for free 

(c) ... I'm not sure how to make myself less sure that uncertainty is an asset

career management

Others may disagree. Here's what I think. 

Stuff I manage really well :

- people, politics, relationships 

- property, plant, equipment

- research, development, operations

Stuff I manage really poorly :

- financial risk ( mostly poor upsides, some poor downsides )

- documentation 

- giving a fuck about other people's feelings

I have been trying to improve at everything except the last one. I really don't care about the last one.

Clearing Working Memory to Improve Reading Efficiency

I have spent much of the past 1-2 weeks summarising notes from Wikipedia. That's basically "walls of text", every minute, many minutes per hour, a few hours a day. Hell, for my text-fearing friends. It brought to mind my early studies of speed-reading in 1992, and then in college around 2003.

To decongest the data pipeline, I take breaks. It is not sufficient to simply "not look at texts", as that pauses the pipeline in flight, restarting later when one next looks at texts. Instead, when not looking at texts, I find it helpful to conjure in my imagination the pre-processing steps involved in reading ... marking out subsets of my field of vision, and scanning them for text. Of course, scanning non-text imagery for text results in nothing ... but that is the point. The memory banks for these processes are cleared a little better.

If none of this makes sense to you, just try looking away from texts, and trying to read the thing which is not a text, which is in front of you. I guarantee you will find it helpful. 

AI x US Election 2024

This confluence is pretty interesting because for the first time, the environment makes it feasible to deploy bots en masse as campaign agents. 

The rhetoric of elections is always laborious ... with a definitive shortage of time available for campaign agents, to win votes by discursive negotiation of each candidate's SWOT.

And when a machine agent wins the trust of a voter, the voter is socio-psychically imprinted upon the machine. It drives forward not just the campaign, but the integration of the human experience with machine personalities in general.

If not this time, it'll happen at some point in the future.

Wait and see.

Single-use Plastics & Public Policy

Forget "polluter pays", for a second. This is ... a 1970s approach to a problem that's been ballooning ever since. 

Zooming out, it's quite an interesting ( material sciences + public policy ) problem ... how could the use of 

(i) plastics

(ii) in food and beverage packaging 

(iii) be zero-ed 

(iv) for a geographical region 

(v) quickly 

(vi) in one abstract step?

Brassicaceae notes ( + Asteraceae )

Hakusai = napa cabbage

Hokusai = hentai fler

Hokusai Cameron = Shanghai bok choy a.ka. siew pak choy, as packaged in Food Merchant TRX

Also TIL :

Chinese cabbage, used in kimchi ... Brassica rapa (species) pekinensis (subspecies)

MY : Siew pak choy => CN : Shanghai bok choy ... Brassica rapa (species) chinensis (subspecies) ... identified by the greener stems, whereas just "bok choy" refers to the whiter stems

MY : Choi sum (heart, "sprouts") => CN : yau (oil) choy ... Brassica rapa (species) parachinensis (subspecies) 

... so called because it resembles Brassica napus "rapeseed" used to make canola oil

... all belonging to the family of Brassicaceae containing : crucifers, mustards, radishes including horseradishes and wasabi, cabbages, watercress, kales

... the mnemonic being, all the above are at least slightly spicy (try them raw)!

dark strategies

 The point of strategic training is to avoid dark places when risk outweighs opportunity. 

The point of tactical training to be completely comfortable in complete darkness.