Punching a Deal

Career diplomats live the myth that negotiations depend on manners to a large degree.

Entrepreneurial leaders understand that the will to power trumps manners in most affairs : substance is more important than gait.

Calcium in Common Beverages

Did a quick check on absorption rates for different calcium salts. Since vinegar is most commonly available, and vitamin C powder has storage concerns, I'm just throwing my foodgrade chalk powder into water with ACV. This seems to work for now. Target dose is 0.4g +/-1 0.1g chalk to match the calcium in a 150ml dose of milk.

So this is promising as a substitute for baking soda in making soda water. Basically less salty due to the absence of sodium, and more immediately energising, due to the calcium content.

Malaysia as an implementation of Marxism

(The Rawls killed Marxism narrative) offers a cute lens on Malaysian political history. 

Like Marxism, Mahathirism focuses on the power dichotomy between haves and have-nots, while taking a position that class warfare justifies the internal stratification of each class. In other words, "in order for all haves to have less ... some have-nots must have more than other have-nots".

It may be argued that Singapore ended up being more egalitarian in economic policy. And that anti-communist Malaysia is more Marxist than communist China.

Qualia are Trivial

It's just an information system. Qualia are trivial if you see them as data types.

ghosts signal incomplete operations

Ghosting in conscious memory buffer. That always seems to mean, previously considered imagery had not yet fully migrated to longer term memory, and so adding related info to the same buffer is detrimental to storage. Very interesting.

Op-sec : How do I confess my feelings?

V-day fills social media with questions about how to confess love. I wrote a short op-sec checklist for an anonymous enquirer, presumably not female, who asked about female behaviour.

There are some questions that come before the answers you seek.

• 1. How do I verbalise to myself, what I feel?
• 2. What is the least hurtful way to communicate what I feel, to the listener?
• 3. If what I communicate is accidentally hurtful, despite ( efforts to de-risk with 2. ), how do I de-escalate hurt in the listener?
• 4. If ( from 3. ) I fail to de-escalate, what is my exit strategy?

After you already lock all this down, it's much easier to answer the original questions ( roughly ) :

• 5. How I verbalise (1.) to the listener?
• 6. What is the risk of not executing (5.)?
• 7. Do female listeners want to be friends with the speaker under circumstances of (3, 6.)?

quality tagging

Horrible days are good.

Bad days are ok.

Ok days are bad.

Good days are bad.

Great days are good.

How Frequently You Think of Sex

Not sure why some people think about sex all the time. Also not sure of it's too naughty to make fun of them for thinking that way. Haha.

Kinda like housekeeping. May or may not be frequently done, has its uses, but generally not worth considering while not the present task, I guess.

Labour Microeconomics : vacuous comment

 Salary negotiation strategy. 

• 1. I notice that employEEs typically anchor their strategy on the heuristic that pay only goes up. ( Personally, I rarely assumed this approach. )
• 2. In service of (1), the most common strategic complement is for employEEs to acquire specialisation. ( Hence, I rarely bother to specialise. )

Resultingly, the economy loses a lot of talent because people over-specialise and don't translate a large chunk of their skills into P&L value. Then again, I suppose this excess supply is mopped up by companies whose organisational structures favour generalist agents.

Exercise : US tariff regime change

US Treasury obligations are largely to US investors/pensioners. I don't yet understand the dynamics of pulling back on the supply of treasuries. It seems to increase the cost of carry for banks, driving up business borrowing costs, increasing disinflationary pressure to offset the effects of lower unemployment and increased focus on domestic industry.

Trade isolationism however, seems to shore up the DXY with a reduction of net imports. This seems to mitigate against the effects of Japan's transition to a 2% growth economy, retaining some sort of carry trade for the USDJPY.

Net net, my undereducated thoughts over a cup of coffee ... US investors may increasingly seek financing from abroad, to drive domestic growth. This simply shifts the burden of USD interest obligations from the US public sector, to other nations, and to the US private sector. I'm not sure if this further fuels the private credit renaissance, and if that has further structural impact on global market risk.

What we know is that the fed printer is on standby, always.

What we don't know, is what new swans will be birthed through the remaining years of this policy regime.

The Value of Listeners / Rubber Duckies

A lot of social psyches require another personable individual to :

- validate their speech/
make them feel heard/
hold their space/
contextualise their social hypotheses/
affirm their sense of identity

I find that I make do with a lower bar ... since most of my work is not relatable to most people, I have made do by publishing my journals on a daily basis. It is not necessary for any responses to be received, and I satisfy my self of social identity through publication.

Therefore, in relationships with individuals, anyone coming to me with an offer to provide ( list of similar offerings above ) is going to face a situation of very limited demand, unless their work tends to overlap with my own.

Anyway, I guess there are other aspects of intimacy to be exchanged with social partners, so dating continues to be fun even though I rarely have intellectual subjects to discuss with dates in technical detail. 😎

Gaussian Elimination

Gaussian elimination : this was missing in the 1990s Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia syllabus ... leading to a bit of a curiousity, where we studied matrix operations without being told wtf they were for. I only learnt that matrices were related to simultaneous equations several years later, as I was not focused on the study of math in my 20s and 30s. 

Gaussian elimination is demonstrated in Chinese texts dated 0 +/- 180 CE.

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I was wondering where "elementary row operations" come from, and couldn't find any historical study of this. Then I watched a YouTube video by Jeff Suzuki, and realised they are indeed elementary ... and merely the arithmetic analysis of simultaneous linear equations covered in secondary school ( should be in primary, since it's just arithmetic ), but applied within the notational box of a matrix.

Now that after 25 years I have bothered to figure out what linear algebra is about, it makes a lot of sense that some countries teach this in elementary school. It's not that hard, when minimally approached from first principles.

The #1 Misconception About Intelligence

AGI cannot be properly based on words. It must be based on models of sensation.

The number one misconception about intelligence is that it is based on words. This stems from the common sense evaluation of intelligence as a matter of verbal ability. Yet fundamentally, verbal intelligence supervenes upon ( is made from ) sensory intelligence. Spacetime and qualia.

AGI x SQLite : embedded

Personal preference : AGI needs to work on embedded systems. So SQLite is a good target.

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Hi folks. This is a survey of interest on the subject "embedded AGI" or AGI running on tiny resource bases.

State of industry : immature

Readiness to begin R&D : present

Commercialisation Horizon : 2030 to 2035 ( if at all )

Level of interest sought : hobbyists with commercial experience, or folks who want to work on this timeframe for a go-to-market, basically without glamour.

What I bring to the table : I write code. I already modelled the quantification of human conscious experience around 2004, but had no immediate commercial interest in it. I have commercial experience running a business. I'm basically on year2 of a 10year study break to catch up on some college-era interests, so any opportunity for banter is welcome.

Cheers if this is interesting, please DM. If any of the text is irritating, please avoid vacuous flaming. Thanks