Blizzards and Butterflies

 Society progresses as the sum of its parts. There are many parts. We will never know which parts matter. We just smack everything that looks like an opportunity. Few will be known for pivotal roles in history. Every role is pivotal.

Individual Happiness x Disease

I have met a lot of people who are pathological dependent on other people for their own happiness. I think, the common notion that it is healthy to have this dependency is ... yes, normal, but no, not aspirational. Also I find that theism provides a unique solution for such people, when they cannot find enough support from ordinary human neighbours.

Unpopular Relationship Advice

Here's some relationship advice :

1. Get out of any relationship where you don't have ( at least ) equity. If you hold 10% of the risk, you should have 10% control over the outcomes, for 10% of the upside.

2. Let's say you're bad at math. And you have no math friends. No worries. Follow your gut ( subconscious processing ), get out if it's a bad spot. I mean, what else do you have to go on? Of course, if you're smarter, you don't need to regress to your gut as often.

3. Let people burn. Unless, you've figured out what they're doing good for you. The alternative is they're doin you a bad. It's not your job, to teach them how to be good people.

Like what you read? Follow me for more unpopular relationship advice 😘🤪

Degendering Sports

• 1. Remove all gender categories from sports.
• 2. Curate a balanced variety of sports which will be dominated by different body types.
• 3. Have fun and stop whinging about gender in sports.

Easy for me to say.

"Kafir" in Malaysia

 "Kafir" in Malaysia : someone proposed they ban the use of this term.

I am not sure a ban is appropriate. I identify as a kafir, but not everyone does. It should be debated over a year or two years on public television. 

It is the avoidance of public discourse which limits mental development of Malaysians.

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I was asked not to encourage derogatory comments.

I am not opposed to derogatory comments.

I am opposed to people who are bothered by derogatory comments.

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Regarding a popular response, "kafir means non-Muslim", the dispute arises about what feelings, actions, and modes of interaction, muslims should have with kafirs. This is the only controversial part, I think.

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People who are bothered by derogatory comments, are the root cause of everything that is closeted about Malaysia. Probably everywhere else too.

A thread on STDs.

A thread on STDs. For you / your kids / your partners.

I am not certified to comment on this, so this is based on my own experience.

Dating or being in a relationship with someone who has an STD is up to you. It depends on your understanding of the risks.

1. HIV is now curable. It wasn't in our parents' generation. You can be an inert carrier for life. But only with meds, so it does cost money. Ignore for now the cases where they managed to actually evict it with mRNA/etc. cutting edge tech.

2. HSV1+2 are non-curable. There are no meds or therapies for eviction. Then based on your country, either 70% of the adult population has one, so it doesn't super matter, or very few people have it and it does matter.

However you can also have it and be an inert carrier ... YMMV, I've had partners who did tested positive for it, but never knew they had symptoms, and their partners also never got it from them. Symptoms can be very painful, but generally non-lethal.

EBV/mono is a cousin.

3. HPV : is very specific. But once everyone has gotten their vaccines, if someone has it, you can debate the safety issues of what to do for the two years while it generally goes away.

4. Syph : the weird thing about this is that it can be dormant, so getting tested is generally important. Curable. But long-term damage if not quickly addressed.

5. Nearly everything else is a bacteria i.e. curable with antibiotics issue.

Play safe, have fun. Do homework, or find healthcare that you trust.

https://www.threads.net/@_jerng/post/DGywIvFTBV3?xmt=AQGzYPFqpVGogo_UgeOcS82fyMJv8uJDNi4km8Dg9DgOFw

Advice for young CEOs.

 Advice for young CEOs.

• - be crystal clear on governance mandates and economics
• - hire domain specialists for finance, product, marketing, IT, HR, etc.
• - focus on resolving prioritisation conflicts between stakeholders

But everything changes, if you have weird mandates. So watch your mandates first.

Putin's strategy : do you brain it?

 

Putin's strategy : do you brain it? Most news is about the US's response, and RU has only said "the US is aligning with RU".

1. RU's HARD warfighting capability is LIMITED by global economic SANCTIONS. The restoration of NORMAL TRADE is an urgent concern for RU. This is Putin's business venture with the US, with Trump as lead business developer.

2. The resolution of (1.) allows RU to acquire HARD real assets, the land and resources of UA. These may be disputed, but that is the next point.

3. RU's SOFT power is near-neutral in the US, after a decade of campaigning, but it is negative in the EU, due to the UA drama.

The resolution of (1.) opens up long-term relationship opportunities between RU and US grassroots. This potential alliance is a flanking manoeuvre, as it increases pressure on the EU from the US.

That's all I see for now.

https://www.threads.net/@_jerng/post/DGymgcTTNll?

Fabric Computing Dreams

All I want for Christmas is a framework for (1) low-energy (2) low-throughput (3) asynchronous (4) fault-tolerant (5) distributed (6) numerical computations. Is that too much to ask of the world? Ah, well ... being a noob means I should learn how bloatware like kubernetes works, first. I suppose. I talk to myself too much.

I have been examining kubernetes just to see what's in fashion for orchestrating large scale computing. It feels bloated, but I should try to understand it properly. Here is roughly what I am looking for ... ( list )... more along the concept of having tiny binaries in hundreds of devices cooperating on slow, but broad, computations

Which sounds better, (1) pan-conscious computing, or (2) cellular computing ? Why not both.

A short thread on Machine Phenomenology

I've been busy on Threads. Still figuring out how to cross-post ideally.

https://www.threads.net/@_jerng/post/DGwyeIaT0YZ?

A short thread on AI.

I'm not certified to have an opinion. You don't have to take this seriously. But maybe it can add colour to your view.

What do we mean by "artificial" "intelligence"?

Artifice : made by skill

Intelligence : to be like us

( because we cannot possibly have other definitions of intelligence )

1. What is the goal? To be like us, can we say, that we know what we are?

In philosophy/ metaphysics / ontology : we begin by proposing a manifest. A list of things that make up the human experience.

What is conscious experience?

The WhatList

How does it work?

The HowList

What a minute ... none of the business people are talking about the WhatList. They are talking about,

What can we do with AI?

The UsefulList

Wow. That rips things up, doesn't it?

2. The study of theWhatList is called phenomenology.

This is to talk about experience, and how it is experienced from the naive 1st person point of view.

The word phenomenon ( what is consciously perceived ) is different from noumenon ( what is not perceived ). Some people say, qualia. You can Google it.

And the richness of our lives comes from this, first person experience. Yes? Feel free to disagree.

But this is not commonly discussed today in AI. Why?

3. Solipsism means you know about you, but you don't really know about anyone else.

You talk to your friends, but do they really exist? How do you know that what they say, and what you understand, are the same? 

We do not. We ASSUME that we understand each other. This is a big part of why communication fails - sometimes we assume wrongly.

Some of us don't care about other people's experience, as long as we can get something useful from using them. ( The UsefulList )

Now we treat AI like this

4. This is sad. Not just because, we don't want to treat AI like proper people.

It is more poignant that we cannot achieve a proper implementation of AI unless we think about AI as proper people.

Why?

Simply because, self-awareness is what characterises us. So if we do not properly write the WhatList, we cannot properly build the HowList.

And we will always build only some half UsefulList, just not as well as we could if we properly built the WhatList first.

And thus we poorly craft AI, until such time as we begin to take the study of phenomenology seriously.

That will be seen as front and centre once we hear researchers and business people talking about what it feels like to be human, and how they are sure that AI feels exactly the same way.

As for me, I studied this a long time ago. I am just sharing my experience with you.

Thank you for reading!

Kokumi, Umami, and other interactions

I got here from reading about umami. So far what I have is 

• - anions like chloride (Cl-) present as bitter ; bitter is a negative feedback signal, so bitter stimuli tend to mute everything else ; this is also why excess salts of chloride present as bitter
• - amino acids like glutamic acid present as sour (H+)
• - alternative cations like (Na+) compete with (H+) ; sour and salty stimuli tend to mute each other
• - salt and umami receptors share a root ; when (H+) competes with (Na+), the presentation of saltiness is muted, and so umami presents as sweet
• - kokumi is related to calcium (Ca2+) sensitivity ... throughout the body ... but in taste, the CaSR may simply amplify other tastes instead of admitting a new qualia ; to make this more complicated, it's not calcium in food that stimulates this ... it's gamma-glutamyl peptides in food which stimulate intracellular calcium, which trigger CaSR, or something like that

That's pretty cool!

Parallel Fuel Metabolism Pathways

Fat, carbs, and amino acids, have mainly parallel, not inline, metabolic pathways. Power train management therefore must balance THREE macro-fuels in a mix.

Additionally, 

• - mixing carbs and amino acids with fat has the effect of slowing down absorption, thus reducing serum overloading and excretion of the former
• - protein metabolism ( both catabolism and anabolism ) is also governed to a degree by serum concentrations of the other macros, and by non-proteinogenic animo acids

3 Axes : Kubernetes Cluster ontology

- axis 1 : LOGICAL : 

• CLUSTER- [ CONTROLPLANE- DATABASE- APISERVER ] >
• SERVICES >
• DEPLOYMENTS >
• REPLICASETS >
• *PODS* >
• *CONTAINERS*

- axis 2 : TEMPORAL :

• DEPLOYMENTS >
• REVISIONS 

- axis 3 : SPATIAL : 

• metal >
• virtual >
• NODE >
• *PODS* >
• *CONTAINERS*

To highlight the dimensional pivots, any TEMPORAL Revision may alter ReplicaSets ( they1 ), and therefore their1 subsidiary LOGICAL Pods ( they2 ) and LOGICAL Containers ( they2 ), or their2 corresponding SPATIAL layout.

All the above is orthogonal to CAPI and CAPI Servers, which function orthogonally to provision Clusters.

See also : link

How to Study Cryptocurrency

It is a rich area of study :

• philosophy ( metaphysics/ontology of money ),
• economics ( macro systemic behaviours subsequent from ontology ),
• politics ( downstream microeconomic social effects )

Occupational Review

I wonder if I have been consistent about personal branding. Mostly I avoid commerce, and focus on civilisational issues.

Consistency is also an arbitrary component of the brand. Inconsistency is possibly on brand.

1. In college, avoided all commercial subjects, with a preference to study those in industry.

2. Entered the workforce. Did not aggressively ladder. Had at least one funny interview at Binafikir having been briefed that " accounting knowledge was not required ", but was then asked only about my opinion on financial statements. I declined to participate, they declined to ask further questions. Lady who briefed me has since retired from Big K having followed Azman all the way.

I literally slept through accounting in Form 4, until they let me drop it. I was a science snob, and did not consider it hard. I later taught myself financial statements two jobs later when helping some folks raise money for their company. Trivial.

3. I have many interview stories with employers who expected more than ( the laziness I presented above ). All in all, I feel that I have been consistent about my (lack of) ambition in commerce, while maintaining it too easy.

Arrogance is on brand.

4. My first interview out of college, I told the strategic planner that I thought marketing was easy, a matter of selling stuff to dumb people; was offered an internship, declined. An interview for sales, I attended with their friend's boss, boss said, "you're going to leave", I said, "of course, how long do you want me to stay?" One of them replied, "we don't like people who are thinking of leaving." I did not impress them - they did not impress me. This was before BF.

I had 4 jobs in 3 years.

5. 4th year after college, I was trying to DIY my masters level study at home. Figured I could learn something also by being a bartender - ended up on Changkat. Not for long - 6th job I was PM at a web startup, but I ended up learning web dev hands on. Did some gigs after that.

6. 6th year after college, did a short stint in tech public relations. Then made my second attempt to DIY higher education : spent half a year learning functional programming and dabbled in stock warrants.

Making money with active trading seemed too easy. I was afraid I would not properly understand commerce, as I hadn't done a corporate job really for very long. ( insert funny mechanism : ) I made myself go back to employment.

7. 8th year after college, I helped some guys set up a hipster coffeeshop. They were sooo slow, and the pay was less than my travel expenses. The next year, I had four jobs in sequence, across a 10x pay range.

8. 9th year after college. I succeeded in a hit job, and dislodged the chap who had hired me to help clean up a huge mess. Then I resigned, and somehow managed to raise money to open another coffeeshop. That kept me busy until the 15th year after college - learnt a lot, but lost money.

9. I worked two jobs to get a sense of normalcy, until my 17th year after college. Both my bosses had been disciplined by their boards. It was a good time for me to get back to studies, after 10y in commerce. 

10. The markets were good, so I raised my study targets. I thought a couple of years off would be enough, but there has been so much to catch up on in studies. I have now retargeted to study for a decade, until the 26th year after college.

Who will hire me then? I don't know. Maybe I will not live that long.

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https://www.threads.net/@_jerng/post/DGuxK9ozsRT

A weird story thread for you. I was born in Kuala Lumpur. Attended a public Chinese primary school in Sentul. Then a private middle school for three years, where I got to hang out with rich kids. Dad worked for the church, so fees were free.

Then moved to Seremban, a small town, and attended a public Malay secondary school for two years.

Oh I also got to do third grade in Mrs Johnson's class at Wilmore Elementary School, in Kentucky, when dad studied for a doctoral degree.

Seremban was annoying, so I ended up learning about cultural anthropology, and wrote about it for my college admissions essay. 

After SPM I started the A Levels back in KL, but got into a liberal arts college, and bailed to the US. ( Bates.edu : anyone went to Bates here? ) I think I got in because my relatives had attended, and the college liked building legacies. Not sure if I made it worth their money - haven't even made enough to attend reunion in 20 years.

The funny thing was, I'm such a snob that when I finally got to college after aiming to do so for 9 years, it seemed like all the kids there were really mid. So I decided to spend time on my own, studying whatever I had to, so I wouldn't be mid, like the majority.

I also made a point to hang out with more international students because I figured I had more to contribute to them than to Americans. This I admit was a gamble. But it is what it was, and so I'll roll with it.

Super privileged.

This was a half million Ringgit windfall living arrangement, and I wasn't sure I'd ever get a better deal for the rest of my life, so I just focused on enjoying the environment while it lasted. Clearly I knew nothing about commerce ... and to-date, I am reluctant to prioritise material laddering, because it seems off brand, and I know how to enjoy myself by just sitting and thinking about things.

Anyway ...

... being a intellectual snob, I found a lot of institutional structure to be "dumb". Mainly, there was no educational objective except to run kids through the system and send them off to work thereafter. Super vague. No architectural nuance about who learnt what, and how that was optimised. Very free market.

So by the end of my second year, I had given up interviewing professors, and decided to DIY studies in the library. Fun.

Later, I did get to "work" on a committee that administered a redesign of the general education program. A fun gig. 

Along the way, something else happened.

I had been casually concerned with the question about whether conscious experience could be mapped to discrete structures ( "digitised" ), for a few years. So during the free time I had to study, I eventually got to the point where I'd figured out how to map all my own mental events ( the spatia qualia / phenomena, not the temporal computation ) to signals, and since I knew we know how to digitise two dimensional signals, I figured I had understood how to quantify first person experience.

It was a bit mind-blowing, so as a matter of risk management, I figured I'd probably have to think about it for 20 years to see if I'd changed my mind. ( I haven't ... I still think I am some sort of enlightened asshole. )

It was also kind of obvious eventually that unless I wanted to teach meditation and phenomenology, there was no more work to be done here. 

Then I spent 20 years studying commerce, in the Malaysian context.

At some point, I figured I could go and learn how to talk to machines, so that I could implement my understanding in a medium that others might be able to appreciate.

But I was in no rush, and treated myself as a retired person from before the day of my college graduation. After all, I had already accomplished a state of mind which was beyond what I had considered before. I was able to be happy or unhappy on demand, so life has been very chill since college.

Which brings me to the present, about 20 years later. 

Ok lah, so now you know why my feed is full of these crap STEM chats, shitposts about dating, and random Malaysiana.

Catch you around, later, if you haven't unfollowed this fool.

It is time for a nap. Writing helps me sleep.

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https://www.threads.net/@_jerng/post/DG4E8NlTpth?

Career adventures :

- attend college ; professors don't actually design college

- work at think tank : much tank, not so much think

- work in consulting : country manager gets fired and sues the firm

- work in funds management : programming not highly employed

- work in startup : founder reneges on staff comp

- work in bar : this is not bad

- work in startup : founder calls staff asshole upon negotiating contract

- work as contractor : client likes work, won't pay price

... cont >

- work in public relations : principal leads client to deviate from global, global smacks client

- proper sabbatical 1 : yay

- work in hipster coffee : client pays just enough to cover costs

- work in systems integrator : three years of accounts missing ; audit impossible

- work in finance app : client not happy, CTO declines to comment

- work in incubator : milestone is getting the hiring manager fired

... cont >

- run independent cafe : partners turn off social media

- work in restaurant group : entire senior management layer quits or is fired

- work in e-commerce : there are three CEOs ; court cases pending

- proper sabbatical 2 : yay

... all I can say is, unemployment is very peaceful, educational, and socially productive, except for sporadic temper tantrums from neighbours.