Pain and Entropy

Pain management is the essence of every biological activity on earth. At least, that's half the story. But time is an arrow, and entropy creates an asymmetry about pain and pleasure.

Hence people will almost always pay more to avoid irritants than to obtain amusement. And the main drivers of change in external markets and internal organisations are people who get irritated easily, not the people who cause irritation.

Pain, pain, pain.

Time's arrow defines the asymmetry between pain and pleasure.

Pain evolves as an anticipator of past trauma - the nullification of the familiar signal is all that is required, so there is typically a finite cost to the nullification of pain. Violence is a gamble against finite capital. Under more dysfunctional conditions, the cognitive mechanism itself is faulty, and then violence becomes self-directed in an attempt to correct faults of recognition, which do not depend on external signals.

Pleasure evolves as an anticipator of past growth - the pursuit of the familiar signal is unlimited in speculation. Indulgence is a gamble against infinite uncertainty. Under dysfunctional cognitive conditions, indulgence becomes self-directed in an attempt to derive growth from internal finitude, under conditions of deficit external opportunity.

We see this in the development of Trump's trade policy, in our manic pixie dream peeps, and in the wards of psychical medication, in irritable peers, and in struggling businesses.

The dysfunctions of motivation in life are wondrous to behold. Thus we learn how to fix individuals and organisations alike.

Adolescent Development of Pain Tolerance

Emotional regulation is a skill poorly performed by folks of all genders. We make fun of man-babies, and crazy bitches alike. Perhaps it is a virtue to maximise one's ratio of (irritating-to-others)-to-(irritability-of-self) ... we're not all trolls, though I am clearly predisposed to be one, myself.

Trolling and the manosphere are light and dark sides of the same coin. Trolling is a lens on the adolescent activity of competitive pain tolerance. Adolescence approach this rite of passage in more or less gendered ways of course. Sports are generally understood as athletics of the developmental sort.

It is probably well documented how the rituals of both antagonisation, and support, are practiced by groups of young and old, women, men, and those who find themselves in between this crude dichotomy.

Long Short This That

Also, it is sad every time I make a gross decision to go long or short on a particular social network. My mind is not the most agile, and it becomes a matter of resource limitation, where I can't both divest and maintain those relations.

• 2001 : short networking with Americans
• 2003 : institutional affirmation
• 2005 : short living in America
• 2007 : short working in "proper" offices
• 2008 : short working for poor paymasters
• 2010 : short employment in software development
• 2013 : short [ study mode ], long [ commercial networks ]
• 2015 : short [ employment with decent wages ] , long [ own business ]
• 2020 : short [ own business ], long [ employment with decent wages ]
• 2023 : long [ study mode ], short [ commercial networks ]
• 2025 : long [ memory managed code ], implicitly short [ garbage collected code ]

Overall unpopular : 

• - short first-world privileges
• - short professional titles
• - short dating classy people
• - short foodies
• - short travelling

Hm. :)

One plays the hand ....

Indexing Flat Lists of Imperative Code Statements

 This is a bit silly. But when writing flat lists of imperative code, I think it is useful to organise code into blocks/functions in lists named by step-number, and then to execute the step-functions in sequence. Consider it an indexing of the imperative code.

Reflection on countries i have lived in

I am sad, for my friends in the US. I lived there for 4.5 years between 1991 and 2005. Then I returned to Malaysia to study Malaysians. It was a pretty easy decision, as I didn't have any ambitions which required me to live in the US.

As an international student, the environment was not incredibly encouraging. The healthcare system then had the same structural characteristics it has now. The limits on immigration also. Now things are a little crazier, of course.

Over the years since 2005, I met various Malaysians on their way to fight for an opportunity to stay abroad. I wished them well, but did not empathise for obvious reasons. I hope they are doing well.

I tend to follow a path of least resistance in life, with very few exceptions. I always wonder if I will be needed anywhere else on Earth. Otherwise I will probably grow old where I live now, not far from where I was born.

A quiet life, befits a busy mind. This week, I am learning to write in C. I tried avoiding it for many years also, but the opportunity to descend was clearer of late. This should add robustness to my understanding of how machines think and communicate. I have been studying machines as a hobby, since I grew tired of studying people twenty years ago. 

I don't study Malaysians because they are interesting. I do it as a matter of due diligence. When I lived in the States, I studied Americans for similar purposes. There are always new things to learn about boring people. And that's always going to be available to everyone on Earth.

As for making money, it is not important if you already know how to control your mind to perceive whatever you want to perceive. In addition to that, it is a great, and amusing, game.

We must all play it from time to time.

-

It's just a secular debt reset. The pain will be over shortly, but not too soon. Some of it will traumatise individuals forever, though.

The whole immigration thing is a strategy to keep the courts flooded with nonsense for four years.

Melayu ketimbang Malaysia

"klo tiada cina dan india di Malaysia, melayu tetap akan mengapikan kemelayuan antara satu sama lain"

... haiya, lawak ini sudah berdekad ; selama ini ketuanan putrajaya tak tukar rancangannya ... alhuiat bangsala dimartabatkan peralatan utamanya ... kita tonton je seumur hidup.

nak bentukkan sebangsanegara pun susah ... demi perundian, sah orang pemimpin akan mempertikaikan Melayu ketimbang Malaysia.

apalagi marhaen nak buat? enjoy je, hidup kita di pengairan arus ini ... 

Margin of Ignorance

It's not hard to make money - money is all around us.

It's hard to make money without conning people.

• 1. Most consumers are dumb - and are used to buying dumb stuff. Poison, rip-offs, emotional druggery, you name it. 
• 2. B2C companies are aware of this to varying degrees. Some intentionally involve themselves in such practices - and are fully complicit in self-harm of consumers upon themselves. Others are as ignorant as their customers, and so they too fall into category 1 via autocon.

Minimalist model of motivation

 There are only three reasons to be in a relationship :

• Class 1 : to feel safe ( pain avoidance )
• Class 2 : to be entertained ( pleasure service )
• Class 3 : futures ( money as a buffer over time )

This encompasses all social relationships : commercial, familial, etc. It's just biology, underpinning economics, via shakier concepts like psychology, politics, and spirituality.

Corporate Governance

 Only dumb managers optimise for their annual bonus instead of shareholder welfare.

Only dumb directors design companies which allow dumb managers to exist.

Only dumb people work for dumb managers. 

I said what I said.

A student curates fear

Nerves. Everyone gets them.

Most people are emotionally regulated via strong cognitive dependencies on compliance with their current society.

"Hermitic athletes" train to reduce those dependencies. This affords us greater degrees of discordant behaviour without triggering emotional disregulation. Nevertheless hermits must retain situational awareness of what society expects, as a matter of risk management. Brinksmanship requires finesse.

You would think that after decades of this, I would stop caring about what people think about me. Unfortunately, my situational awareness is too complete, and I almost never forget what the ordinary person expects, even while I am actively ignoring it, and sometime running it over. Active and not passive ignorance, is the trait of professionalism.

Anyway ... I was just now, learning about the mechanics of some software stack, and as usual ... the absence of social and intrapersonal cognitive support triggered the sensation of fear.

Fear of what? What the hell? Just the next abyss of ten thousand abysses ... every unknown toolchain, every unknown industry, every unmet person, every uneaten meal, every unlived tomorrow, hour, and minute ... anything yet to be done, is a hypothetical, an unknown quantity. Should I not be used to approaching these unknowns already? Maybe this is just an appropriate treatment of curiosity.

I suppose, after, what Freud calls the "super ego", or the awareness of what society expects, is still in good shape here. And when I stop worrying about things, then I suppose, you can legitimately call me insane.

:) 

Thought process during desk work

Most of my daily work involves reading, writing, and rewriting notes. Meanwhile the other aspects of my brain are monitoring my physiology : comfort of breath, resolution and throughput of conscious sensory data ( peripheral and imaginary buffers ), latency of motor ( peripheral space ) and imaginative ( imaginative space ) response to intent, need for food, need for hormonal stimulation downstream from physical stimulation.

I also think about girls - but not in terms of pornographic sex, for the most part - which is how people joke about what men think about in their free time. Mostly I just miss the pretty ones, and their emotional uncertainties which they presented as interfaces for me to add value - obviously this is quite superficial too, and I suppose it is a component of sex. Maybe I should be thinking about girls in terms of their organisational strengths and contributions to co-work : but I tend to think that's a given : I generally don't associate with people except when I know what they are useful for. Likewise I don't expect to be useful to others people unless they derive value from our interactions.

"Message passing" has high- and low-context interpretations in computer programming

 TIL : some cunts in the ancient development of computer programming languages decided to use the term "message passing" to refer to "remote code execution / RPC". 

In my view, this was bad nomenclature ( see Karlton, "two hard things" ). Subsequently, there arises the corrective terminology of "first-class messages", because RPC is a verb, and in natural language, a message is a noun. Perhaps not always!

Linguistically, we can analyse this under the lens of "high-context vs. low-context" communications. In natural language, the high-context interpretation of "message" is indeed a verb, that is, a message is normative by the sender, and is intended to invoke some sort of behavioural change in the receiver; whereas the low-context interpretation of "message" is simply a noun, that is, a message is simply a set of things, which make be interpreted in any one of various ways by the receiver.

Back to computer programming languages. There are languages like Erlang in which "message" refers to a low-context, i.e. dumb, message. And there are languages likes C++ in which "message" refers to a high-context, i.e. non-trivial control, message. The only reason I ( a noob ) didn't know this before, is because I learnt Erlang before I learnt C++.

So after all, given the possibility of both high- and low-context interpretations of the term "message passing", it has become important to specify "first class message passing", as the sort of feature that 

(a) passes dumb messages, or

(b) passes non-trivial control messages, which are encapsulated in the semantic infrastructure needed to treat them as first-class citizens in the current programming language : that is to say, such control-messages should be able to be 

• - passed as arguments, to functions
• - returned from functions
• - assigned to variables

Business copywriting is fascinating

I've borrowed the notion of whitespace very much from doing computer programming, e.g.

: the best bullet is any symbol that looks like a bullet

: any ( parentheses ) can / should be surrounded by spaces ; any punctuation or slashes fancier than a comma or period also.

Are you sick of financial advice?

 Here are some pro-tips, which are not financial advice.

1. Learn how to be happy, just by thinking away your dissatisfaction with the world. Minimise dependence on external objects.

2. Learn that every day is a good day to die.

3. Learn how to live on minimum wage in your current city.

Don't follow me. Adjusting yourself is more important than following anyone else.

You can do it! I believe in you.

- me reacting to the stream of things on Threads

I wish Malaysia would ...

Based on all the butthurt I read in the Malaysian press : I think the one thing Malaysians need to learn how to do is cooperate without having to apologise to each other. Stop treating your pain like it's someone else's problem. Delete the words "sorry" and "apology" from your vocabularies. That's my vision for Malaysia. I don't expect the nation to change, but one can dream. :)

My study of the poors

It is 1995. I sit for elementary school graduation exams, to signal my class to future observers. It has been three years since I exited the US, and my career at this point is oriented around going back.

It is 2001. Despite my lack of effort, I manage to get into college and leave Malaysia. I arrive at college in the US and find myself surrounded by rich, happy, but apparently unintelligent people. I start digging myself in for a period of study, expecting it to take extra effort.

It is 2005. It is time to graduate. I had considered aborting my studies after two years, as the institution did not have a syllabus which I deemed appropriate for my interests in the architecture of education systems in general. But a dean had said I was expected to complete the iteration, so I obliged. I have been waiting for two years, to surround myself with poorer people in a commercial environment, in order to learn about that. This is how I return to Malaysia.

It is 2023. I have spent countless hours sitting with, and working among poor people. The previous two years particularly, have not been so poor, because I had been focused on earnings to pay back some debt I had incurred from a prior venture. But the time has come to consolidate my interests once again. So I begin a sabbatical. 

Two years later, I find myself reflecting upon this process. The US is in turmoil. I remain observant without too many conclusive thoughts.

Dating things

Strange things I've encountered in the dating environment :

1. People who have a thought, and presume that you have the same thought, without an explicit discussion.

This is generally bad, bad, news, as it establishes all sorts of runny foundations for activity that needs to be worked out later. The best thing to do generally is to say, "hold up, we need to talk about this". This is problematic with people who don't like to talk about things, enjoy being in moments without risk management, and who are only turned on when their verbal faculties are turned off. Bad, bad news. Recommend to avoid.

2. People who have presumptions about what vague words like "relationship", "love", "feelings", "loyalty" mean, and how they are reified in practice. Recommend to discuss.

Safer things I've encountered :

3. People who know what they want.

• 3a. People who  ask for what they want, without taking it by force.
• 3b. People who can can explain what they want, if you ask them.

4. People who know what they don't want.

• 4a. People who tell you what they don't want, before you discover it by accident.
• 4b. People who can tell you what they don't want, if you happen to ask.

This is a non-exclusive list, whereas it would be nice to have a MECE framework, I'm just jotting this down between other work. Might get back to it later.

Dehumanism

 I like the sound of the adjective : dehumanist.

I shall henceforth identify with it, unless/ until it acquires a popularly accepted meaning which I disagree with.

Power and Speech

 Briefly reflecting on the nature of power and speech as currency. There are these interesting sets of people, with tiny intersections :

• A : those with great objective accomplishments 
• B : those who are well-spoken about their models of the world
• C : those who present at attractive, and are thus influential 

Well,

• ( A < B < C ) : is the ordering of membership size
• ( A ^ C ) : these are typical celebrities
• ( B ^ C ) : these are not horrible, but they are more like interviewers/ prophets
• ( A ^ B ) : are people whose social media content I want to follow, but they often  don't present themselves, so often third-party coverage is needed
• ( A ^ B ^ C ) : truly rare, and treasured members of society; to humanists these are gods ( figure of speech, I'm not a humanist myself )

Reading Aloud, again

 Throwing back to college / now 20y later : I speak to few people, weekly, and spend most of my days reading ... so that circuit is a bit saturated. It becomes many times more effective for memory, if I read things aloud - so I have started to do this again. It's all about casting redundantly on multiple bands, to increase stimulation of the underlying network.

My Studies from 1997 to 2025

The main reason I observe nationalpolitics is as a matter of empathy with a nation, or group of nations. Otherwise macroeconomic phenomena are largely ignorable, while one focuses on microeconomic work.

Empathy with sad situations begets sadness, so I largely avoid it. Yet I have spent years of my life moderately studying what I largely avoid. Most politics on earth is about the manipulation of power, and undeniably all commerce is just local politics.

On the microeconomic scale, macroesthetic control is largely derived from microesthetic control, but that is a wholly separate issue. Around the age of 14, my macroesthetic interests* involved computing, math, and science.

From 15 to 20, I put more emphasis on studying history and culture, as a matter of understanding the origins of the present - I focused this period on non-commercial and non-political domains, as that was allocated for the period afterwards. By accident I become quite well-versed with microesthetic work.

Then from 20 to 39, I devoted myself to a study of commerce and politics, without too much effort - simply participating in businesses and conversations in my own neighbourhood, which I did not suppose I understood, which I wished to understand better.

At 39+ I had the opportunity to take a pause from these studies of nearly two decades. Since then, I have been reorienting to work that I personally enjoy*.

It has however, also been a good time to extend my study of commerce and politics beyond my immediate neighbourhood ... and to look at my own country as a whole. In doing so, I also have been able to afford time to further understand the relationship between my country and the other countries of this world.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-studies-from-1997-2025-yangjerng-hwa-o8eqc

AI Agents in the Workforce

 There's a big difference between 

"we don't hire junior executives anymore" and 

"we now provide all junior and senior executives with a team of PAs"

Deepfake victim trauma

• 1. Regulatory environment, and public legal education in should cover this domain of offenses. 
• 2. Mental health preparedness should cover this for all children, again via public education. We are now living in a time where this sort of violence is common. So defenses must be taught.

Power and Relationships

Amidst a lot of calls for "software developers need to stop coding by hand, now", I find nothing new or particularly enlightening. Delegating work to any agent, human or machine, is the same - either you can and do check it, or you accept the results on faith a.k.a. trust.

Since I generally don't delegate anything I can't check, except when I'm feeling lucky, I don't often find that my workflows are delegable, since I my work is mainly about learning how to read and write new things.

Plebs : most of the world aspires to obtain assets controlled by specific individuals, under legal frameworks, guarded by trust, and hence accessed via relationships.

I diverged from this strategy, many years ago, and I have prioritised assets over which I have direct control, such as the functionality of my little mind, and its comprehension of various domains of mechanics. Happiness is instantaneous, and most other knowledge is a matter of tooling which I am happy to learn.

It is a curious path. I continue to study it.