Need a sort of ruler for neuroplasticity, since it's rather hard to gauge : most occupations don't require huge amounts of this, so generally people ignore it.
First draft : acquiring a neutral preference between
Hm
"
Tue 1Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.014years ( year3; month25; week105; day735 )
0014 : I brought up the example of Friendster when discussing SSA's COBOL rewrite in a thread. Ultimately business decisions kill operations, cut by cut, and it's almost never going to pivot on the technology ( Friendster successfully pulled off a rewrite - failed to scale anyway ). Hoary board, mistargeted userbase, what a walk down memory lane.
0051 : My fingers hurt. Physical loading successful.
0115 : Replaced laundry list of stuff I am into on my dating profile :
I like women who know what they want.
And I like not being the person they depend on to feel better about themselves - i.e. you should have this sorted, or please don't date me.
0154 : Resisting the urge to write fun little programs ( like an entire fullstack framework ) while I have huge deficiencies in other areas to amend.
0201 : Facepalm - I guess programming is the fun budget.
0300 : Back to knative tomorrow. Why knative. And how
1344 : Awake. Cleared inboxes. Reminded myself to aim lower for the day. Off to feed.
1547 : (journalctl -f) gives a nice log tail
; it's amusing to have my computer talk to me in the terminal while I do other things - and it prompts me to study processes I am ignorant of
1644 : Tactical review : protein dosing
- 1 g/kg_bw upon waking is too much unless accompanied by a bunch of soluble fibre
- but possibly I should get that at least that much in within 4 hours of waking.
1800 : MgCl2 dosing on point. Best way seems to be chugging it with water, then chasing with coffee.
1811 : Good month. Poor weekend. Apropos.
1825 : oh right i was supposed to do fun stuff today
1832 : Oh, crap. Looks like a calorie deficit again. More carbs ...
1948 : Midday CaCO3 dose
2105 : Oh well. I guess 2025 / undergrad+20 is the year I started reading Linux kernel development docs properly.
2318 : Been on a Ca2+ boost for the last coupla hours maybe lol"
"Wed 2Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.016years ( year3; month25; week105; day736 )
0100 : Today's HRmax, roadrunning without too much stress, 179. Not happy. Want to push it up to 195-210. Also using this as a proxy for VO2max because I don't have the latter testkit.
0149 : Scheduling. I think a good cadence for getting chores done ... will be to schedule the first week of each month for deprioritisation of desk work.
0211 : Just discovered Linux Security Extensions - so I guess that's another rabbit hole, for another day.
0449 : down
1300 : day 1 of offweek
1320 : Folks ... movements where people have the option to work less, don't jeopardise the middle-class. The middle-class is defined by having an option to do less.
1329 : If you're building a modern shipping canal, the magic numbers are
12 meters down
40 meters across
1332 : ""I want to be able to buy things without thinking about the price.""
- This is a common goal. By common, I mean pleb foolish. LOL
1928 : There are various strategies about public relations.
1. Say nothing, wait to be attacked, or promoted, defend in public. Otherwise stick to private relations. This is suitable for timid people, or those who value private relationships more than public ones, both rich and poor.
2. Say lots, promote, and attack in public, wait to be counterattacked, or counterpromoted, defend in public, otherwise let others pick their avenues of defense. Avoid private relations. This is suitable for those who value public relations, and who aren't averse to public shaming.
Each individual and organisation picks its associations.
2012 : Post meeting rest. Then I need to do recycling.
2023 : I consider comfort with death to be a competency which is lacking in many people. But it is not so polite to discuss it with them.
Thu 3Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.019years ( year3; month25; week105; day737 )
0037 : After testing a waste separation workflow at home for 2.5 years, and having surveyed a number of waste buyers, and having reviewed the poverty of federal and city governance about this, I have ( unfortunately ) concluded that individual KL citizens have no incentive besides personal amusement/conscience to perform waste separation.
0258 : Cleared six months of recycling. Omfg. Never again until have more space, or the government improves policy.
0311 : Let's look at some cute coding stuff ( if I can find any before I get sleepy ).
0324 : Let's look at that slide on web architecture. How do we go about simplifying this mess.
0457 : Personal distraction from more serious stuff : kept rethinking the half-built toy JS-framework I have for personal use. Surveyed the ecosystem a bit. Updated my list of forcing-factors :
- old : no TS / only JS
- old : no build step / loads like ol'jQ
- old : minimise framework size
- undone : zoom out and look at the cache hierarchy SSR/ virtDOM/ SPA, and try and figure out why there's so many of these but not coherently linked together as deployment options under the same roof
- undone : review standard APIs like WC/ SSE / WS / WT (new) and try to figure out optimal usage
- undone : review options for client-server state sync
- TIL : WebTransport :
1514 : Awake. Enforced feeding. More home ec today
1719 : I am thinking of starting an OnlyFans account ( I completely missed Twitch, so never got onto it. ).
I think it would be fun to livestream stupid chores like darning socks.
Zero sexy elements. Just housework.
Maybe one day.
2111 : Monthend reflection : since I'm digging into POSIX, i might as well skip Rust and go to C first.
2209 : Regret of misfortune is a common, and unnecessary, distraction.
2258 : Moderately scary time to be fully-invested right now. But given that I was in a worse position six months ago, I'm probably just a shitty investor 😂
Fri 4Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.022years ( year3; month25; week106; day738 )
0307 : I am enjoying the monthend.
0600 : Web User Agent state : exploded : it feels like too much. The APIs, include:
- webstorage : kv store
- indexeddb : better kv store
- origin private fs : fs/block store
- cache : specific responses/ files
- service worker : local proxy code / enables offline apps
- background sync : async server- to- local proxy protocol
- background fetch : async fetch() so user can leave webpage / restart if failed
- push : browser-specific services maintain TCP long poll, though protocol is standardised
☠
0625 : And the list of web transport APIs :
- http normal / TCP
- http fetch() / TCP
- server side events / TCP long poll half duplex
- web sockets / TCP long poll full duplex
- web RTC / UDP P2P
- web transport / UDP streams
Whoa ...
0654 : So after all, there are three orthogonal dichotomies, and 8 combinations.
Site : Static x Dynamic
Rendering Side : Server x Client
Application Pages : Single x Multi
1449 : Review of cognitive factors : perhaps the heat is getting to me. More shower, maybe needed.
1522 : Malaysia is a dumbass place to be. We import rice and export brains. Our business models fail if we retain brains locally. So this is all part of the design.
But I am dumbass, so Malaysia is a fitting place to be.
1830 : TIL : getBoundingClientRect()
Which seems to be the main way to check if any DOM element is in the viewPort.
1907 : TIL : CSS containment!
Sat 5Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.025years ( year3; month25; week106; day739 )
0613 : Uncertain data : I'm messing with three input variables and I'm not sure which one affects the output more.
1. Heavy study load.
2. Restricted diet.
3. Age
Lmao
0659 : TIL : Last 5-8 years : WIP they are exposing CSS internals to website devs : JS and WASM may create custom CSS behaviour :
0843 : TIL : 2019's intersectionObserver, which supplements 2015's getBoundingClientRectanglen
1510 : Did my little overhead presses after a day away from home. Woke up a bunch of muscles that had gone numb, so it was a good stretch. I need to study this more, to figure out if hypoaesthesia after exercise is a major problem or not.
1743 : Home after a long ass social call, and trying to reorientate to my setup. Context-switching is expensive.
1808 : Quite out of shape today. Probably a calorie deficit - rectifying. Discipline is a funny thing. You can do things one way, but if you don't do things like everyone else then you lose track of what everyone else is doing. So it is good to do what other people do, from time to time, as a hedge against stupidity. I spend too much time around people who generally prioritise stupid things, but it is also stupid to be ignorant of stupidity. So we have to be animals.
1848 : Under hypoesthetic conditions, the first ten to twenty minutes of manual labour seem to be rather trying. Probably low sugar, low protein, and absence of hormonal cascade. Hm. So I may need to increase a minimum allocation to trigger cascades
1918 : Spend too much time studying weaknesses, and people who fear weakness will avoid you.
2030 : Lowering my expectations. Gonna read CSS spec and lift intermittently for a bit.
2052 : Commitment to work on ""immovable"" mountains should not be confused with passion. Sometimes it is a matter of deciding to be too lazy to commit to anything exhaustible.
2106 : Recently, I was reminded to execute proper tongue posture during kinesthesia. This has nothing to do with conjugation. It's also one of those points of kinesthesia which you can read about in ancient physical conditioning texts, which only makes sense if you're actually fit enough to observe the kinesthetic advantage of posturing your tongue differently while moving the rest of your body. I'd say it makes about a difference of up to 30% in terms of effort required to coordinate the upper-half of my body, between optimised and worst tongue postures.
2328 : Slightly histaminic, and reading w3 specs in bed. Thinking about all the weird little jobs I took for experience in programming, and how things turned out over the years. Weird little jobs, weird little town, befits a weird guy's weird career, I suppose.
Sun 6Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.027years ( year3; month25; week106; day740 )
0025 : Malaysian egg drama. You've seen the labelling for ""omega"", ""selenium"", ""kampung"", ""horse grass"", etc.
Weight for weight, some of these get priced at 2x-3x the price of baseline price-controlled eggs. But what is the governing body, regulatory framework, and data-driven evidence to support the claims of each?
I think this can be improved. After basic testing, I'm just going with the price-controlled stuff for best-value.
0038 : TIL the US treasury secretary and his husband are 0.5 billionaires
0211 : I was reading Forbes' list of ten richest people in the Trump admin. So cute. Even if they're batshit insane/ evil ( and I don't view them as such ), it sounds like a lot of fun stuff is going on over there. ( Yes, I know people are in pain/ dying. ) It just makes me reflect as one is wont to from day to day, about how I've generally avoided respectable roles in respectable companies because they didn't seem like fun at all. Ah well, we value different sorts of capital, and plan different strategies about killing a few decades on earth. On we go. Still fun to read about others.
1520 : Slight inflammation perhaps from burns, exercise, and allergies. Time to feed.
1638 : Day 6 of the monthend. Started a day late, so it's only been five days. I'm testing a schedule where all my weekends are restructured into a single monthend, as weekly context switches seem detrimental to productivity in my line of work.
Recently reached out to say hi to some professors I met 24 years ago - a quarter of a century, almost, seems long. And I don't feel different from when I was 14, but I do have an amusing time comparing my perception of ""2/4/10/20"" years as a 14-year-old, versus my perception of the same as a 42-year-old.
I ran out of food today - so I am back at a desk to do groceries. Nice to be able to do online shopping now - twenty years ago, this was possible in the US but not in Malaysia. Meanwhile, I walked outside for food, at a restaurant downstairs. A homely place, messy, with messy-looking customers, but the cooking is alright, so it is my go-to place. Upon my return home, I realise that I fail to appreciate how tidy my home is, unless I also remember how messy the streets are. That encourages me with the right sorts of hormones for memory iteration.
I think about my time in college, and how I managed it until the present. I have always thought of rich and powerful people as easy to understand, since they function at levels of abstraction which are broad. It is the poor dumbfucks I don't think I get, as there are so many reified issues across so many individual lives. Hence my studies have been skewed accordingly.
I wonder if I will ever find myself needing to pivot studies towards the rich and powerful.
1654 : So far equity markets haven't broken AUG2024 lows - once they do that, maybe all hell will break loose. Hah. Wait and see.
1811 : Napped. Lucidly. Consolidation of somatic, social, and conceptual data.
1847 : The social life of a generalist, is a matter of rotating between different groups of specialists, who don't understand each other. Ergo the therapist analogy.
1916 : Cost rate of decisions, which took more than 2 minutes of my time : it ranges across $4 to $40,000, and if you take into consideration things like career paths, up to $4,000,000. So, some rationalisation is due here.
1934 : In 2005, I began my study of adult life in Malaysia. ( I had to make a decision about which country to park in, and about what to do in that country. ) After 20 years, my observation, which is limited to a sort hobby, is that the political process in Malaysia suffers largely from abandonment by non-politicians.
This is a continuation of the political disengagement engineered by divide-and-depress strategies from the 1970s. I'm biased of course - I was a registered non-voter, until BN lost its majority for the first time. Anyway, it's interesting to watch people redirect energy from focusing pressure upon public agencies ... to taking matters into their own hands, via civil society, or private investment.
In my limited observation, it does not seem effective.
1944 : Still struggling with 30kg load
1957 : Enforced feeding. The struggle to manipulate 30kg continues.
2309 : TIL <details/> has made accordions native!
2316 : dialog::backdrop is also now native!
2334 : CSS Anchor Positioning API : this flies in the face of existing approaches. I guess that's ok, as long as there are no contradictions.
2344 : There's a modicum of grief, associated with realising that to be a serious HCI / human-computer-interaction executive, you will be stuck with IETF-W3C's politically balanced ( otherwise functionally retarded ) development process for the rest of your professional life. Because, IETF-W3C isn't going away any time soon, nor is all the work it has already done ... which most of the world uses daily. Holy shit ...
2350 : IQ is controversial? Wait till you get to dealing with the colloquial usage of EQ ... and then after that pondering the implications of the fact that the Emo-Intel book guy has a book called Soc-Intel, and how no one talks about SQ ...
Mon 7Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.030years ( year3; month25; week106; day741 )
0005 : The entire suite of new functionality attached to button[command] seems to further mess-up the separation of concerns between HTML and CSS. Or does it? I suppose the HCI resources could be viewed as legitimate resource concerns, regardless of presentation.
0010 : on Putrajaya using bots for copywriting.
0119 : CSS column-count is a good thing : glad they nativised that!
0124 : Maybe I should have just focused on being a producer-DJ from 2002 onwards :P
But as with most things in life, music is not something I care enough about to fully focus on it.
0135 : I used to think of Dostoevsky as the Russian cultural reference I had most affinity for, but today I think I've updated that to Nina Kraviz. Soft power is a thing ...
0149 : I think it's time to start building a HTML+CSS menagerie webpage, which demonstrates all new features as they get added to mainstream
0224 : Time to study CSS (flexbox)
0251 : Munger : you go broke via liquor, ladies, and leverage
Buffet : Charlie just made-up the first two to alliterate the third
Me : oh thank god
That being said, liquor is useful for parties that lack personalities, and ladies can be distracting if you pick the wrong ones. Back to fundamental analysis ...
0338 : CSS (writing-mode) ! what a win
0411 : On first reading ... CSS style queries seem like an abomination ... what do you mean I have to insert [style] values in my markup, which are selected with @'container ? WTF is wrong with selection by [class] and [data$=]?
0747 : Scatalogical best guess before bed :
Bessant/treasury is not crazy enough to do it this way. But he is onboard with the end goals.
The end goal is a cyclical reset. Lutnick/commerce is on point. Everyone else has to follow through to maximise negotiation leverage.
Rubio/state will parrot the talking points but he totally hates all this.
The quickest way to end the pain is with 10y below 3.6%, various trade agreements with dozens of states disenfranchising CN, JP, EU, Fed cut in May, QT/ selling treasuries of >5y maturity, simultaneously buying/ QE at <5y maturity
followed by US debt refinanced on the 10y-50y end, debt ceiling raised,
then 3Q25 boom, pivot to QE at long-end, more rate cuts tugging at short-end, small trading profit, restoration of economic confidence, passage of fiscal incentives for republican backers, polemic turns from trade to war, throttling of support for Israel, final push to end RU aggression ( necessary dramatic flourishes )
1552 : Starting to think that all exhibitions of art should provide ""team context"" and prominently feature the biographies of collaborators, supporting members, and partners.
1623 : Since January ... ETH.D/XRP.D has dropped to ~1.8 from ~3.0.
If ETHUSD-20% to 5.3k, XRPUSD+45% to 11.1k, a flippening emerges as foretold by some of the more active market participants.
1718 : Monthly bill payment. Won't pre-pay for Q2, as I'll bet that stocks will go up and I can sell for a better price next month. LOL
1833 : Alrighty! Paid bills. Got a coupla hours to think about web architecture - then off to Pudu Ulu park for an hour of walking with weights
2329 : Short walk. Thought a bit about web architectural studies, and the mediocrity of my peers in this city and beyond. Good end to the monthend. Laundry. Then to a desk.
2348 : Artists in love with their own work, complaining about a lack of commercial traction : hah?
Hey, that includes some of you parents too.
2352 : There's a difference between market failure, and manufactured crises.
I used to run a company where the investors couldn't tell the difference ... but hey, no longer my problem.
Tue 8Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.033years ( year3; month25; week106; day742 )
0058 : Oh, React does CSR by default ... hence the need to exceptionally specify SSR.
0437 : Solo study mode.
(a) don't talk about fight club
(b) talk about fight club, and nod when everyone nearby tells you it's stupid
I tended towards (a) as a younger person, but gradually having familiarised myself sufficiently with adults of various cultures, I have become more comfortable with (b).
In the 24th year of this, I think the hard part is still just focusing on work, while everyone else is doing less boring things.
0443 : Points of discipline :
1. don't get dragged down by the people around me ( generally experienced, even if not always successful )
2. increase standards of people around me
2a. by coaching ( generally experienced, even if not always successful )
2b. by searching for smarter people ( needs to improve )
Hm.
0518 : Maybe next I need to read blockchain whitepapers and catch up on all that other trendy AI backend rubbish.
1603 : Awake. Cleared inboxes. Not much time or money to pursue social matches. First day of the workmonth, and I think it is going to be a lot of theoretical catch up in blockchains and ML.
1613 : Enforced feeding time.
1922 : I'm happy to see that my old friend, has managed to achieved what they aspired to : prime brand association, probably money too. I worry less for them, now.
2046 : I've assembled about 20 whitepapers on popular distributed ledger technologies. Will probably need to push this up to 50. Nice to finally find time to learn new stuff, but as always ... the opportunity cost stares you in the face. Haha. Such is my commitment to the poor but smart-ass strategy.
2139 : Oh tests are recently trending because someone broke the Turing test (again). They are trivial because there are lots of humans who don't pass TTs.
When I thought about how to communicate how consciousness is structured, I decided quite early on, probably around 2008 - you can't decisively, because of solipsism. You can get as close as breaking TTs ( various degrees of media : text, video, IRL body ).
But then all this is fundamentally why society has social justice / empathy / dehumanisation issues : it is not provable that other minds are like our minds, in any event. We just decide to admit them to the in-group/with rights, or not. It's fundamentally political, and no way around it objectively. ( Until we can actually scan/map human consciousness down to the pixel. )
2203 : Woke + 6 hours : ingested more food. Pressed a set. Thought about memory consolidation. Need to optimise intraday memory better. Maybe more R&R
2220 : jevon's paradox: seems like the intuition here is ... with lower prices, in a market for widgets of varying quality, demand gets rearranged, with freed-up buy-side liquidity seeking marginal high-end value per unit
2313 : LLMs being stochastic parrots : Yes, but : if you have obscene amounts of $, you can buy enough stochastic parrots which can run the same algos running in human brains, but extremely inefficiently. We're literally at this point in history right now, but the models will get fixed eventually - they have to, because it's $ down the drain lol."
"Wed 9Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.036years ( year3; month25; week106; day743 )
0006 : I had an early interest in technology. But technology study opportunities were rare in my youth, so I diversified and began viewing the world through the cultural lens of anthropology when I was 16.
Since then, I have been able to study a few specific groups : Americans, Malaysians, technologists, marketers, labourers, and then some.
I am way behind my peers in the study of new technologies. And frankly, most of these seem quite mundane for now : cryptocurrencies are mostly graft, and artificial intelligence is mostly a circus. But these things will firm up from toys, to tools, in good time.
So as much as I think, this stuff is really boring right now - I have to get onboard and RTFM.
0030 : Ne Zha 2 trailer depicts itself a little too seriously - how very Chinese
0130 : Woke + 10 hours. Snack. Memory consolidation. Really, the only reason to break while reading.
0330 : Woke +11.5 hours. Done fed again. Caffeination and back to the desk.
0427 : Flipped over to ML reading for the rest of the day.
0511 : Ah, can't find a painter I follow on social media - because don't remember their name or handle.
0607 : In case you still don't get it :
- asking pure LLMs questions with physical import
- is like compiling Doom to JavaScript
- it's possible but wasteful
- instead, you should just stick a bespoke physics engine under an SLM, like anything you use in games
0659 : It just recently occurred to me that most people regard science as
(a) something other people do ;
(b) something oneself does, but validated by institutional engagement ;
whereas for a minority of us, it's
(c) something oneself does, without the need for social validation.
I guess my experience was uncommon. I was introduced to hypothesis testing and the scientific method at 8, phenomenology and transcendental idealism at 14, and cultural anthropology at 16.
I didn't bother to get a degree in science because I didn't want to do it for a living, as a form of commerce. I was doing science every day, and I knew I would be doing it forever regardless of my place in life.
Currently I'm catching up on numerical methods. It's great to have a chance to do this, and not be buried under the culture of commercial colleagues, which is what I tend to do when engaged with commercial work.
1327 : Down+5 hours. Awake, perhaps due to yesterday's dietary inputs. Iron and 450g of eggs. Hm. Spent an hour reading inboxes and magazine content on socmed. Might get up by +6.5hours to eat and get more exercise. Might be a short study day.
1658 : Today is for a focus on statistics.
1834 : Adakah rakyat Malaysia kerap merasai kekosongan alhuiat perseorangannya?
Kenapa asyik mengapikan kerja orang lain? Dah lah politik senegara tercemar dengan isu-isu agama, kepuakan, dan adat, sehingga kemajuan bidang lain tak boleh jalan berdekad2 ni ...
... manakah matematik, sains, akil, kejuruteraan kewangan dan industri, dll? Yang ada di Malaysia, langsung tak terkira maju.
1912 : Why do people say you can't bias a coin-flip? All you have to do is shave it into a segment of a cone, right?
1928 : 120g white bread + 200g egg + 70g seeds
=> 48g protein, 1 Mcal, diversified fats
This is a remarkable simplification, which seems quite low in execution costs.
1958 : TIL : stochastic processes
2047 : So are we shorting insurance stocks like mad now? Would they get bailed out, though? LMAO
2104 : In terms of systems design, there's an interesting tension between ensuring a minimum standard of living for all, and equitable access to a curve of incentives which pushes the envelope for growth.
2212 : Woke +6hours. More food. Coffee, then back to desk
2231 : I miss my friends. But the only useful friends are the ones presently useful, so that is how friendships are curated over years.
Thu 10Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.038years ( year3; month25; week106; day744 )
0017 : covariance matrices of real and imaginery parts - complex random vectors : I will get to this eventually, but not today : today is day 1 so we are still early in the survey, nevermind ingestion
0036 : Better to eat my rice in 75g dry 272 kcal portions than 2x that.
0041 : 0040 hours - time for a run. What sort of hrmax can I get today ... ?0040 hours - time for a run. What sort of hrmax can I get today ... ?
0255 : woke + 11 hours. run results not great, hrmax 166 only, chalk it up to less protein today. continued feeding. coffee. tidied up study tabs. time to goof off, intellectually
0256 : Why aren't we shorting cloud computing companies? Aren't stateside chips about to get really expensive? :P
0612 : My achievement of the past decade was managing to learn how to swim before learning how to do systems programming.
1246 : I've always said that politics is the only sport worth following. Even then I regret not making more time to keep up with what I do. That's the life of a nerd, I suppose, my focus is elsewhere.
Huge fan of the current situation. US-CN trade announcements are vibe-matching the IN-PK daily border gate ritual.
1644 : Egg shop closed. Gotta check hours next time. Off to drag weights up the hill.
2100 : jarrod sio, a.director, sarawak education dept, said something about UM being not oxford, and that being functional was efficient. / Well, it does miss the point. The point of top brand universities is to filter out candidates for top brand firms. And the point of top brand firms is to consolidate business relationships within a group of the wealthiest members of society.
It is precisely why our focus on meeting minimal industrial standards makes our best labour products mediocre on the global scale in terms of pay per hour.
It feels good to celebrate a functioning country.
But maybe it would be also worth celebrating if we had a globally dominant one. Putrajaya has never cared to do this properly, so we celebrate village idiots and export the best talent.
Would be nice to see this fixed but I am growing old and thr chances of it happening in my lifetime are ever slimmer. Haha757:I wanted to write some reflections on old friends. Maybe after working out.
2336 : Time to start studying C-level programming as a 42-year-old.
Never thought it was a necessity, but now that I'm on sabbatical ... I should just drown myself.
I might never write a line of C in any professional context, but I should just ingest this skill, since it's ""everything beneath"".
Fri 11Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.041years ( year3; month25; week107; day745 )
0027 : I should just shut up about evolutionary pressure as the determinant of all social consciousness to-date.
0326 : Embedded DBs ... spun into Distributed ones
1. TIL the ancestry : BigTable/SSTables > LevelDB/multithreaded > RocksDB/moreFeatured > CockroachDB/Distributed+SQLised ( which is now closed source, such that YugabyteDB is an open source cousin )
2. TIL SQLite SaaS has been around since 2022 with CF-D1, and now there's Turso and SQLiteCloud ... main win for me is scale-to-zero serverless pricing, like DDB ( Aurora does not ) - plus it's port-out friendly ( DDB is not )
... I'm going to go play with 2. about to see where the limit is on serving client-apps direct from edge-DB
3. TIL : CF's Durable Objects also very interesting : on-edge, in-memory object, that merges CRUD operations, and asynchronously flushes to persistent storage. With replay.
0331 : oh what a day ; maybe cognitive edginess is from the chalk i added to the protein powder
0452 : There's a lot of people looking for emotional engagement from a meetup. Sorry, emotional engagement is foreplay ... some of us don't know if we wanna foreplay with you yet. If you want foreplay, you have to convince us, etc. If you don't like coffee talk, just skip the people who only want coffee talk ... market clears.
1533 : Had a very interesting conversation with someone before work started today. Zero questions about the nature of my work. Expletive remarks about the quality of my work. I told them to go fuck themselves.
I guess sometimes I'm on one side, sometimes I'm on the other.
1615 : A bit of Googling and more messages exchanged were illuminating. The subject is inherently excited about this domain of knowledge -- however their model of the world is fairly simplistic, and yet they carry the conviction that their model is applicable to a large domain. I commented on their semantics, and domain, and wished them a good day.
1647 : Up + 2.7 hours. Conversation with the noisy fellow seems to have died down. Unlike eggs, I can't ingest too much protein powder at once, as it seems to be be more easily absorbed ( I might be mistaken ). So for now I am testing a more gradual loading, about 10-15g protein ( slightly more powder ) at a time, instead of a single dose of 25g ( 200g eggs ).
1719 : Yesterday's work somewhat marred by interruptions to the thought process. Threat minimised, now time to repair.
1845 : Why are there so many people posting about the US's ""tariff formula"" as if it's actually designed to be meaningful?
Oh right, it's designed to distract people who think that rational discourse is front and centre ...
1852 : Singapore's PM says ""we don't talk about citizens as visitors"" Cerita, mitos, dan adab yang menaikan gagasan ""pendatang"", ""kontrek social"", ""ketuanan"", dan selainnya ... tidak membawa apa-apa makna dalam perundangan. Oleh sebab itu, selalunya saya penarik perbincangan kepada dasar perlembagaan, dan apa yang tertulis nyata. Kalau kita hendak menyatukan niat dan pengeluaran ekonomi bagi semua rakyat, hanya perundangan yang jadi tumpuan ... bukan pebende lain.
It's an intentional decision of culture. SG will decide one way, MY will decide another.
Objectively, all is trivia ... culture is made by humans. However, some humans may disagree, as they are not humanists. So we have politics, because people don't agree on epistemology, and thus solve problems based on the manipulation of force.
2021 : Tengku Zafrul : He has the pedigree of representing all 3Rs under a non-fascist brand. So he has a lot of potential in Malaysian politics. Always has.
2201 : Nap time. Soporific experience with Lambda Custom Runtime docs ... might be a while before I get my first C webapp running in there.
2218 : Finding non-English transliterationsfor writing in Malay :
1. ""Identity"" : this ranges from arithmetic to personal contexts, I found the arabic ""alhuiat"" is used for both, so I am trying to use that now.
2. ""Concept"" : ""gagasan"" was what I used today. I suspect there are many possible contenders..
2302 : ""the muggling of non-Malay Malaysians"" - haha
Sat 12Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.044years ( year3; month25; week107; day746 )
0020 : Colonel Meyers appears to have encouraged insubordination and I would have fired her too. Been there, done that.
I don't think her bosses are sane, but insub is insub, eh?
0109 : time to update study notes in git
0227 : Better late than never ... 42yo / part-time techy / doesn't know C / paiseh.
0231 : Stuff I managed to never touch, by evasion : React, Angular, Go, Java, mobile dev - the time has simply not been found / i'm such a whore about this : it's always a yes if someone's paying for time
0304 : 10GB RAM on 6 Graviton2 cores is USD 0.48 per hour.
1315 : Someone approached me for a chat on topics XYZ, I said, that's pretty cool. Then I mentioned some citizen initiatives that I monitor, and that I haven't sought to amass institutional rank or relationships for most of my life, so I would not have much leverage in delivering immediate influence. A career strategy that separates me from many of the people I have loved, but it is what it is, I suppose. :) I always wonder if I will bother to amass more credentials later in life. Most people would guess not. I leave it open to discovery.
Sun 13Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.047years ( year3; month25; week107; day747 )
0253 : There's no male loneliness epidemic. There's a male expressivity renaissance. So what? Nothing fundamental has changed, or will change, unless you fix yourself. Buncha whiny cocksuckers aight
0258 : Maybe it's time to start using AI to help me clear my backlog of unread articles.
0415 : Social chores on Saturday : managed to get rid of a piece of fish my sister gave me several months ago - shared it with someone else.
New protocol : there's really no space in my head to digest new studies on an ad hoc basis, so I'm pushing all the links to a list in Whatsapp, and opening them when I have breaks in between more current work.
Giving back : 20th anniversary of my college graduation this year - I have no money to donate, so far, so I am poking around to see if there's any help wanted from alumni in admissions.
0606 : I really hate AWS's Serverless Application Model. But that's probably because I don't know CloudFormation. ( Most of what SAM does is compile CF configurations. ) So I guess I gotta learn CF now ... C and CF, April is going to be SO much fun
0646 : off to bed
Mon 14Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.049years ( year3; month25; week107; day748 )
0112 : Maybe I should eventually just pigeonhole myself in something boring, like SELinux.
0321 : TIL ""Sabine Hossenfelder "" - and holy shit, that's just horrible.
0408 : How do I stay in-touch with software development, without letting it take over my life?
I started study ""broad"" computer programming in 2009. By about 2013 I was quite sure that AWS had a very interesting market position, and I was starting to orient myself around AWS as something to go deep into. I only got to spend more time on it during lockdowns in 2020. Now on sabbatical in 2025, I think I'm really falling into learning C and learning AWS as backstops for my minimalist approach to the industry.
0410 : donald miyagi - good one
0430 : i thoroughly enjoy suggesting to people that all the things they think about daily which have ""nothing to do with sex"", result from an ancestry of selective phenomena
0435 : The reason I stopped playing computer games seriously in college was ... it was the first time in my life I felt enabled to study real-life graphs as a matter of dopamine delivery.
But the real world is very complicated, and the right-sizing of speed-running domains is really the first thing about speed-running.
That is why I feel liberated today, by making AWS and C two of my current games.
0556 : Snacked. One last coffee and squeeze of reading before the night ends.
0602 : Time to goof off. What do I do for goofy hour today?
0603 : Most people are really bad at communications. Some are self-victimising about it. Perhaps the others are simply not self-aware.
0605 : Goofy hour today : async coding patterns in C
( prep for writing webservers )
0624 : libuv : paused reading, going to sleep
1610 : I regret watching so much television over the first year of sabbatical. It was an attempt to remain socially relevant, but I don't think the returns justified the expense. That being said, I often make intentional expenditures even when I don't think the returns justify the expense ... as a matter of testing to see, if I am wrong about a hypothesis. In this case, the parameters are such that the hypothesis is unfalsifiable. I guess that just reflects my openness to gambling with time.
1620 : Human rights : epistemically problematics + politically toothless ... in this day and age.
1651 : LinkedIn could potentially add gates on profile security - there's certainly a class of user who only wants to network within their own industry.
Meanwhile I'm a shameless web crawler.
1658 : Elderly care : Putrajaya should formalise this into opt-in federal monitoring infrastructure. Apps, wearables, social workers, etc.
1704 : Dear incels of any gender :
Market Research -> Product Development -> Sales
Don't skip steps
1733 : TIL : the 'make me a sandwich"" meme is from a SNL sketch circa 1995, John John Mackey Weatherman
1841 : Today's loading : 30-40g recipe-controlled protein powder + bread + seeds + coffee + B vitamins between breakfast and tea.
The calcium component seems to be doing a number on me, but I will have to mutate and repeat this test a bit.
1854 : I've heard of robber barons - these are robber karens : property rights infringers who profit until enforcement happens, then they whine about enforcement : shrines, durians, etc.
2006 : Break time. CPU branch prediction is a whole nother level of nerd
2037 : Everything is easier in hindsight.
- the care and development of other minds
- the learning of new languages for control of meat or machinery
- the exploration of one's own inability to judge prudently
- the deciphering of hidden layers in the market and the state
2144 : Lack of social engagement can be tiring. That's why I always tried to work in hospitality in my twenties and thirties. :)
2206 : Since I am studying C execution, the time has come to also familiarise myself with WASM.
2257 : I must be insane. The world is trying to get AI to write code, and I am trying to learn assembly language. Then again, folks probably think I'm nuts anyway, so this is probably on-brand.
2345 : Every time I have a stupid year / month / week / day / hour : I console myself with the notion that at least I get to live the life I wanted.
Tue 15Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.052years ( year3; month25; week107; day749 )
0044 : mediastream recording API :Glue! Seems like nowadays we can just use the browser as a coding dojo, since this should provide access to webcam data. Which can then be operated on in WASM.
0147 : my god, what a fucking day. all i have to look forward to now, is a few years of zoning out in front of my computer, doing stuff i never bothered to do as a teenager
0308 : Copypasta web API example from MDN. A little journey into computer video begins here, as we have capture. Next is to figure out how to throw data into WASM and do interesting stuff.
- so much easier than 1997
- ... than 2009
- ... than 2015
- ... apparently this API has been stable since 2020 ... so it is good to live in the future
0322 : Hands-on editing work ... such a throwback ... my first and last production job was summer of 2003, shooting and editing cuts for the Bates Dance Festival. I think that was right after Electronic Music & the Arts in sophomore year which was the only time I had to do audio production. Didn't do much of either after that ... as I worked on my library research for most of junior year. Then commerce after graduation. Small chance I'll do more art before I die, but HAH, no priority. LOL
I even got my drumsticks out to thrash around. I should practice singing eventually - maybe I can give Billy Corgan a run for his money.
0403 : TIL : Structured Programming : subprograms : sequence + selection + iteration
0457 : Where's my 400% recovery.
1553 : TIL Protoporphyrin IX (PPIX) is a very interesting molecule, which goes as far back as cyanobacteria.
1630 : All of you ""I told you so, China would dominate"" folks are a bunch of cunts ... unless you already put your chips in before the current Trump bomb shit show. lol
2010 : Hate doing pure library research - but it's essential, so it gets done. Only hate it because there are always more pressing temptations to do empirical work. Otherwise it's enjoyable.
2018 : Finally got to : Lagrangian mechanics
2128 : Snacked. Back to work ..
2155 : I puff up with foolish nerd pride, upon entering into the Wikipedia pages for ""generalised coordinates"" and ""configuration space"" and finding them poorly written, deciding then to write better notes about these.
2318 : The most productive function of CSS to me has been : modifying Gmail, Wikipedia, and AWS Docs for readability. This gets updated every few years.
2333 : TIL : Newtonian > Lagrangian > Hamiltonian > Routhian : Legendre transformation
When I was 14 I wanted to study physics - but the Malaysian syllabus for that is horrible, so by the time I was 17, I was quite bored of waiting to study it and had started studying other things. This is a good return.
2337 : Fuck my life ... trying to teach myself physiology, physics, math, and economics at 42 ... haha.
Just kidding. What better time, than now."
"Wed 16Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.055years ( year3; month25; week107; day750 )
0043 : Threads user :""what's your goal?""
Me : live every day like it's a good day to die.
As for motivations ;)
So around 2004, I figured out that AGI is not a hard problem, because I figured out how to quantify my own conscious experiences. That's why I basically just stopped worked on tech stuff and went to study people for a bit.
The current LLM trend is pissing me off because it's so inefficient. I'm just refamiliarising myself with the tech so I can either complain about it properly or just kick it along to the end game.
0242 : now studying : (pipefail)
0255 : Time to goof off for the day. Enforced goofing off, if you will.
0359 : Wandering around the insides of AWS feels like freshman year at university.
I've used AWS sporadically for fun over the past few years, but never with the spare memory to be curious about every button.
0411 : Gonna call it a day for desking. Probably should do the custom lambda runtime example tomorrow.
0549 : Did not feel very productive today. But I learnt a bit of physics. Motor neural tone is firm, but I should raise calorific throughput. Enforced bed then another day. Chugging along.
1707 : 20.58%, Day 750. Systems mostly stable. Research continues. Social work happens along the way. I have been blessed with the opportunity to live life in the same lane since I was 14, without severe distortions of mood, identity, or happiness. The environment has been learnt along the way, and the risks have been well-proportioned to my limitations. I can only continue, as it is interesting work.
1950 : Sorting through the mess of jargon which is PLT and Type Systems today ... at this rate I might as well formalise with some sort of CS degree in the future.
2256 : All worded out for the day. Flipping over to programming studies.
Thu 17Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.058years ( year3; month25; week107; day751 )
0436 : Calling it a day for serious stuff. Going to goof off later ( not sure on what yet ).
PLT readings after breakfast should continue on polymorphism and dispatch varieties.
Lambda toys after dinner should involve implementing HTTP GET and POST in C.
0445 : Goofing off today : a brief look at Switzerland's role in aiding Nazi Germany / Bergier Commission
0530 : libvips and wasm demos.
0555 : Logged 2.3 mcal, 2.7 gP/kgBW
1522 : Good morning. I miss my loves wherever you are.
Desk time!
1531 : I don't know about yall. My dating apps straight up say that I like long term relationships but I don't demand emotional support. LOL - which probably sounds like a hookup to needy people who get into relationships only for the support
1537 : Monthly sell-off to fund opex.
1548 : why post with limited engagement? 1. I value public life over privacy.
2. I can afford only so many resources for social life.
3. So my journal is publicly distributed on every social media platform which I use.
LMAO - this is a 20 year practice, I find it amusing that it needs to be explained
1617 : OK - housekeeping - about fifty tabs unsorted, go.
1741 : Generally I find that I'm an overconfident person trying to make myself more fearful ...
... in a world where most of the other people are more fearful, and trying to make themselves more confident.
Sorry if it rubs wrong. It be that sometimes.
1832 : Getting the sense that it's very hard to study Programming Language Theory texts without first learning Lisp, given all the examples are written in Lisp.
1901 : My life has been a series of disappointments with leadership, to the point that I just gave up trying to make sense of what other people wanted me to do.
It's not the right path for everyone. But if you doubt your leaders, be assured, there are other ways about life.
1906 : US deportation drama : The court case will be pretty clear.
- court has ordered executive to retrieve body (dol)
- executive has paid agent to hold body
- agent is denying access to body
QED
1917 : I think my corporate fault is being too humble. Haha.
1925 : Dense reading day, and memories not fully consolidated from yesterday. Limited working memory for this function, so switching to programming work at lunch time.
2121 : Stabbing at CORS and seeing about (vips-wasm) today.
2132 : omg ... CSS Shapes module ...
2247 : Enforced feeding every three hours seems like a good plan.
2253 : CORS is sprawling and verbose. I need to make a slide, but I don't want to make memory for it today.
2320 : The path I'm on began 24 years ago, with some critical decisions. Perhaps by the 40th year I will be able to say it was an outstanding success. For now it has been comfortable. Perhaps too comfortable.
Fri 18Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.060years ( year3; month25; week108; day752 )
0049 : Editing a (python) script. Haven't done this in a while. It's a dummy webserver to test a (c web client).
0121 : Wow, I feel so accomplished - all I did was edit other people's code and I have :
- an HTTP POST client in c
- a HTTP server on Python
- curl on Bash
0236 : Ran free() for the first time, missed a few semicolons ... all very rite-of-passagey. Nice to see from the all-father where PHP and SCL get their temperaments.
0505 : x86_64 : 14kB
aarch64 : 195kB
Brilliant.
0535 : enforced eating, then sleep
0546 : Bothering to learn how to write C is probably one of the most avoided and hence least expected developments over my past 20 years.
0602 : Got my first segfault today. So exciting
1426 : USA : The whole immigration thing is a strategy to keep the courts flooded with nonsense for four years.
1553 : A conference is just a party for people who take their own points of view very seriously
- advice for my careering journo friend
1613 : Avoiding anxiety is something I am uncommonly good at. Generally I only notice that other people are troubled when I spend time with them to listen to their gripes.
Everyone is dealt a hand. Play your hand.
Even if I have thought I am one of the smartest people on the planet, I have spent most of my life trying to disappear into the background. The appearance of folly is a simple strategy.
The appearance of intelligence and beauty is a great distraction from productive work.
1625 : Let's look at the C code.
2355 : I suppose I worry too much about my poor country, and I should just ignore it more, and focus on my own work. Haha
Sat 19Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.063years ( year3; month25; week108; day753 )
0310 : Time to log into the console.
0628 : AWS Lamba : same binary executable :
: uploaded via web to /var/task : chmod is ok: ""exec format error""
: uploaded via Lambda Layer : runs fine
... very sneaky
0852 : Good exercise in C scripts. Now I have more reason to read the big books
0918 : C : Got to copyedit some code that realloc()s a buffer dynamically. Should get more practice. And I need to hit the textbooks a bit for syntax.
1713 : Reflections on writing a toy app in C. I should have just done this 28 years ago. Instead I avoided doing it because it was said to be hard. I think I am too impressionable that way. And in combination with a poor environment, where the majority of role models have been poor.
This probably runs parallel to my avoidance of ambition about social, political, and economic capital ... haha, so maybe I will get around to fixing that eventually. Which is still not yet a priority, and I am on track to procrastinating on that till no sooner than 2032 at the present rate.
1924 : Tech leadership within a country is simply the displacement of foreign vendors over time. A country that lacks its own capabilities exposes more vulnerabilities for attack.
The other danger is self-indulgent posturing, as with Proton's saga of blockading foreign vendors, with no actual domestic substitute, reducing the quality of lives for decades.
1943 : Malaysians are poor, proud, and stupid.
Poor : top of the 3rd quartile, bottom of the 4th.
Proud : little needs to be said about this - we are even proud of bring proud.
Stupid : ( as above, but aside : ) Our focus is on taking from each other, instead of taking from the rest of the world.
Due to the inflammatory nature of this post, I will not respond directly to any replies. I said what I said. I old already ... hahaha.
Sun 20Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.066years ( year3; month25; week108; day754 )
0130 : the # miskinbodohsombong problem :
1. You must convince Malaysians that they are poor. Anyone who is happy with their situation has no reason to work harder.
2. You must convince Malaysians to be humble. Pride is nice, but it doesn't pay the bills.
3. You must convince Malaysians to be smart. Stealing from each other is of net zero development. Stealing from outside Malaysia ... perhaps a greater opportunity. And no, I am not referring to the endless bullying of imported labour ...
0333 : Good morning. Back in the chair for a bit. Maybe off to Bukit Kiara in a few hours, but first ... catching up on reading.
2224 : ""fork() creates a copy of the parent thread, then overwrites it""
""WHAT?""
oh it's only 8KB for the context; and copy-on-write means, the parent's allocated memory is locked as read-only, and given two reference counters ... representing the pointers from the parent- and child-processes to old allocation ... as soon as either P or C writes to memory, the kernel intercepts the write, allocates new memory, and deducts one reference counter from the old allocation ... when the old memory has zero reference counters, it is deallocated by the kernel ... in 4KB pages.
Mon 21Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.068years ( year3; month25; week108; day755 )
0254 : One day if I'm free ... gotta make a movie ... using minimal tech ( current phones are so good compared to cameras from the 2000s ).
A movie : about the last time each couple was together ... before one of them hated the other. A scrapshot of selective memories.
Hm. Let me develop this more.
0303 : To Kill a Mockingbird : Probably a bad idea to keep starting businesses with this mentality :P
0406 : A few days into digging deeper into my tech hobby from the 90s, I have flirtatious regrets about not going directly into technology when I graduated in 2005. But upon reflection, the approach was sound : I needed to spend the better part of two decades familiarising myself with people I didn't have anything in common with. Doing time is key.
0440 : I guess AWS keeps Lambda running on Graviton2 because those are older chips, and Lambda's price/computation is higher.
1036 : Next we will try the C++ Lambda runtime. But not before bed.
1111 : I don't understand people who are excited about LLMs, probably because I don't understand people who are excited about people.
1134 : distracting weekend, but got some work done.
1817 : Good evening. Back at a desk.
Neural tone last week seems to have improved, due to calcium intake.
Higher loading has improved hyperesthesia over the past month.
Need to increase load volume, to increase calorific throughput.
Also need to review rice toxicity.
1831 : ""do you sometimes feel like a plastic bag?""
I'm colourful but monotonous, translucent, and full of crap, yielding to extreme pressure - and apparently one of the first things that people with suicidal thoughts reach for. Was that too dark?
1847 : Let's do a little C++ today.
2026 : If Java is a substitute for CPP, and Rust is a substitute for CPP, then Rust is a substitute for Java?
2027 : I follow accounts that look interesting. But if I engage with interesting content and it doesn't result in more interesting content, I excuse myself to avoid being a pest. Except when I feel like being pestilent.
2032 : If in life you have an interest in 150 things, and you find 1 person to talk about each thing with, you're doing ok.
2104 : Chamath on NVIDIA skirting US Export regulations to get Chinese revenue :
My opinion : good luck tryiing to put a gate on an incredibly bulky, and inefficient industry ... hardware is straightforward, but the current state of software is primitive, and I haven't heard a single talking-head say something intelligent about how it's managed yet.
2157 : This lambda-cpp demo is : poorly documented
2312 : Progress.
1. I didn't know C and C++ have different printf() concerns
2. The given AWS demo is designed to silently fail by default
Lovely.
Tue 22Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.071years ( year3; month25; week108; day756 )
0127 : Social distractions. Risk management risk management risk management 😂😂😂
0145 : Negotiating with people who hope for what is not available is difficult. Very limited budget for this. Cut and move on. 👍
Maybe when i am older i will have more time for other people's interests. Maybe not.
0151 : Consciousness is trivial. People mistake knowledge as different from being the embodied computer of information. But it is after all, just computation.
0156 : I think it is becoming too frequent that people ask me to care for them more, and I ask how much money they want. And they don't want money.
Caring is very expensive. You need to pay me to care about things. lol.
0237 : Let's read some the CPP libraries to see what AWS was doing there.
0402 : Different sorts of people give other people the ick. For some, it's people who don't have feelings about things. For others, it's people who do.
0413 : I'm grateful for the opportunity to have spent the greater part of the past 25 years with people who did not impress me much. Perhaps if I survive another 25, I will be able to say it was more impressive. Who knows. Live and learn.
0620 : The greatest obstacle to progress, is pandering to the needs of people who want things from you, but who have nothing you need urgently to provide. Management of these entities is key.
0711 : (1) My first gig with startups was helping some folks raise $1.1 million, then they offered me $970/mo, no equity.
It was an easy quit ... and then I got my first job as a (2) bartender, which led to (4) a consulting gig, which I levered into a small raise for (5) a business which I ran for 5.5 years.
There were gigs in between, notably (3) getting paid to learn how to code for 2 years at $900/mo, by one of the (1) guys, who called me an asshole when I wouldn't continue for less than $4800/mo
(3) actually came with an equity grant, accruing monthly, but this materialised only partially, and even that was never encashed.
(4) slowed down into a $490/mo bartending job ... but that was when I went to 10x the same year, through four jobs, before (5).
(5) I paid myself $1000/mo : I figured it was a reasonable lock-in for a very long haul, as I didn't want to be distracted from work by being paid too low.
All in, I think I was undemanding. A strategy of quietness. Poor choice? Maybe.
0745 : orite let's write some C pointer array salad
0847 : USA : if judges start appointing private attorneys to prosecute contempts of court, the US Marshal Service is going to have some tough calls to make
1115 : Time to goof off for the day. If I have any woke left in me
1758 : Awake after a nap, not quite a full sleep. In sync with circadian, however. Enforced feeding. Bit of work. Maybe groceries which I am always late for ...
1803 : I was reading about folks who don't understand that the whole point of branded schools and firms is to defend the protection of old money networks.
Professionals are like knights. School is jousting. Everyone wants to be a baron.
I guess that's why I didn't find it interesting. Still too focused on learning things, and not on making money.
We live different lives, we do.
1830 : Normalise awak.
1918 : I would like to suggest the term ""context-stealing"" to reify what actually happens when the software runtime performs ""work-stealing"" across hardware threads. :)
2016 : TIL : BLAS for FOTRAN and its decendents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Linear_Algebra_Subprograms
2020 : Two next things to test on Lambda :
- Erlang v27 : wondering how fast it is with the half decade of JIT upgrades
- C : but without cURL, so sockets ... omg"
"Wed 23Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.074years ( year3; month25; week108; day757 )
0317 : Relearning Erlang syntax. It's been 13 years since I spent a few months writing a framework!
0443 : Overpriced trash, and ignorant consumers.
0633 : There's all sorts of trash out there. Rubes. Slicks. Moms & pops. Hipsters. White Lotus archetypes. Crazy Rich archetypes. Mostly, lacking.
0807 : Done : dev : prototype lambda handler on Erlang ...now for a shower, then maybe later to try and deploy it.
0811 : Erlang RTS gets better every 5 years. Haskell? IDK - probably still an undisciplined as hell good for nothing PLT playpen.
0826 : 1999-2000 .: studied small town Malaysians
2001-2005 .: studied small town Americans
2002-2004 .: studied history of ideas, and quantification of consciousness
-
2005-2007. : studied Malaysian professionals
-
2006-2023. : studied commerce
2007-2015. : studied wannabe-startups in Malaysia
2008-2020. : studied minimum wage workers in Malaysia
2021-2023. : studied SMBs in Malaysia
-
2007-2025. : studied computing
...
0900 : next hurdle is building the aarch64 Erlang 27.3.3 and getting it into a Lambda layer
1055 : Yawn. LFG. Click click click. Launch launch launch. Compile compile compile.
1141 : And we have a BEAM in Lambda. Preliminary result is, it's very big. 89MB of RAM.
1359 : Work today is slow, stabby, and sleepy. Chugga chugga.
1415 : At the end of each day, most human endeavours are trash. And over years, it takes an enormous amount of energy to carefully avoid the majority. Life is whatever we make of it.
1531 : Many people have their priorities upside down.
- they look for relationships to give their lives meaning
- they view other people as foundational reasons for their own existence
- instead of treating others as disposable cherries on top, they're hoping that finding the right cherry will change the substance of everything beneath
- but they have no point of view aside from the views of other people
- an easy sign of this is their prioritisation of the accumulation of money
- we live among plebs
1539 : KTMB drama : Mana ada tersirat? Tersurat lah. Melayu ketimbang Malaysia ... itu lah pemikirannya.
2055 : groceries
2229 : Being the most confident person in the room usually means you'll walk away the poorest. The drive to grow ferments from abject dissatisfaction with the present.
2231 : Today is for reading on concurrency.
Thu 24Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.077years ( year3; month25; week108; day758 )
0057 : TIL : DICOM Medical Imaging standard
0104 : Due process is a definitively lefty concept :P
0115 : OK. Did a lot of testing in C, C++, Erlang on Lambda over the past week. Good survey. Little big rites of passage. Foundations improved.
Probably circling back to numerical methods next. Maybe some playing with front-end web architecture.
0153 : I'm actually quite concerned that we still don't have a language agnostic framework of ""small, interesting, programs"" which are uniformly implemented in popular languages according to standards.
0300 : github's markdown preview and web UI commits now make it attractive as a potential blogging platform.
0303 : Malaysia should implement something like the US's GI Bill :
- you do military service
- 36 months active duty : 100% benefit
- 5 months : 50% benefit, and in betweens
- tuition, board, lodging, accessories ... with a cap
0316 : TIL Route53DB
0412 : Goof off, reflective, 4am tropical rain, kinda day.
0438 : It's actually quite tiring to develop the boundary of civilisation while living among folks who have no concern for such things. Moreso, an avoidance of such distractions leaves one with a limited base of resources for that. Yet one is happy daily, so that is the infrastructure for a neverending project - simply to stay entertained in an otherwise whingey world of fools.
0457 : Not sure if I've got the balls for this, but I should probably be very risk-on right now.
0458 : Let's do trigonometry.
0511 : Trigonometry : another discipline full of too many stupid names for little things. I need to abstract away from that and just focus on remembering the geometric relations in abstract.
0526 : Studying programming is doing stuff I postponed when I was 14.
Studying trigo is doing stuff I postponed when I was 8.
Malaysia's a horrible place for STEM kids.
0826 : Next to test an actually complete OTP process tree in Lambda.
Fri 25Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.079years ( year3; month25; week109; day759 )
0324 : Back to the chair. I think it's a continuation of trigonometry today.
0411 : A productive pay day is an ambiguous forward indicator. The environment contains negative and positive feedback loops, which will emerge regardless of foresight or the lack thereof. The only thing to be done reasonably, is to treat it as ordinary work.
0432 : I spent a few hours trading notes with a freelance teacher, about their career, and about my current project of self-education. Different things tug at each actor in the crowd. From time to time, over the past 25 years, I've had the ordinary concern that my work would not be valuable to anyone but myself. The originating strategy here is that, this is ok. It really changes everything about how you plan a career, if you focus on doing only what you think is important. I don't know how to relate to people-pleasers - I mean I do, but I can't honestly say I fully empathise with most of them. I do make a point to reflect on all this from time to time, as a matter of risk management.
Today I'm studying trigonometry.
0530 : Day 759. Progress at 20.82%. I had extended my second sabbatical to a project of ten years, but even now I remain intimidated by the size of the gaps in my knowledge, and fear that I must extend the project to beyond ten years ... possibly simply banning myself from focusing on commercial work until I have a better grasp of the terrain. Of course these fears are premature, as it is 1/5 through the period.
Of cheer, I have dipped my toes into C/C++/Rust and no longer fear work in this mode ... as a minor aside, I have improved my understanding of Erlang's hot-code-loading, reduction-based preemptive scheduling, and C-interfaces. These two lenses are orthogonal, addressing the best-in-class approaches to both vertical and horizontal growth of computation. So it is safe to say that I have, over the years, learnt one or two useful things about how to get computations done.
Presently I worry more about understanding what computations need to be done.
Sat 26Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.082years ( year3; month25; week109; day760 )
0205 : Back in a chair. Surveying the market. Gonna jot down some notes from social chores today.
0320 : Done with journaling. Now to read a little.
0332 : Maybe one day I'll build a computer language which does Erlang faster than Erlang, but OMG, that just sounds like the time I started writing a JS framework. Banality.
0413 : Clit operator : does anyone know how the Haskell team decided to make <*> the operator symbol for ( Control . Applicative )?
0443 : Can we please stop teaching school kids that (facts) include (rigorously unfalsified hypotheses)?
0523 : So, is everyone ready for a big crash?
1622 : did a quick read on the Kant - seems like his theory of aesthetics is based on the notion that some sensations are unquantifiable, so he keeps it separate from analytical categories ; in our day and age, all sensations are quantifiable - and so the distinction evaporates - though not for the masses who do not know how to quantify things like smells, and feelings
1833 : After journaling, the day turns to C studies. Let's see how sizeof/ and strlen/ are implemented under the hood.
1842 : The time has come in life, to study pointer arithmetic.
1942 : Ah, a menagerie of 'libc's
1943 : @meta @threads why did you remove the CTL+ENT to post function? OMG
2113 : Toyed with the idea of a lowercase-only character-set for a programming language.
Turns out FORTRAN 2023 (b.1956), and Ada 2022 (b.1980) already do this. Both are ISO-ratified. Both have (libcurl) wrappers, that don't reimplement httpc. Ada even has GC.
But they don't have large open-source communities formed around package managers : Rust has this, and the borrow-checker feature (which may be copied by other langs later).
2150 : I learnt how to do web development around 2009. Back then there were some trendy companies ... but I declined to get involved at the product level because they seemed like dead-ends. (There were a couple of interactions, but I ended up running a cafe instead.) I just looked at the stock performances of GRPN, GRAB, and UBER. I am nominally happy to have stayed away from working on the first two.
Why has UBER performed well ?
turns out the answer is lobbying
2215 : interesting but unsurprising - there are various stenography methods with unicode
2250 Side quest potential : Lambda helloworlds in FORTRAN and Ada ... they just wrap ( libcurl ) however.
Sun 27Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.085years ( year3; month26; week109; day761 )
0135 : Trying the Erlang release process.
0206 : Erlang/OTP documentation is a mirror of its concurrency model. Just to figure out how to do a ""release"", there's
- a .app file
- a .rel file
- a .script file : for a .boot file
- a .erl file : for a .beam file
... and not a non-linear description of how to fit these together, spread over several webpages.
0209 : Most normal folks who start work after zero or one degrees ... are not familiar with academic careers. Academicians often do research until they're 30 or 40, then continuing ... or bailing out to industry.
I didn't want to do that. I spent my 20s and 30s in industry. And that's why I am now spending my 40s in academia, at home, haha.
0218 : coffee is a vegetable
0249 : Improved Storyboard : so I can take a bunch of romantic tragedies, and rearrange them into the basic sensory / emo arc of something like Your Name, by putting all the decay into the first half, and all the development into the second half. Half-swapped tragicomedy.
0600 : Napped. Disconnect motor control. Disconnect optic input. Switch analysis to aural and haptic fields. Up.
I need to give myself less shift for being slow. I am a generalist - being slow is part of the plan.
0615 : While I feel quite productive in my current work, my mind always wanders back to the years I spent making myself do work that I thought was really dumb, because I wanted to understand the people who thought it was really smart.
Was it necessary? Not in general. But necessary, as a study of culture.
0749 : BEAM memory tuning ...
0830 : giving up for the day ; long, messy, second half day
0912 : Progress today was 7/10. Calcium seems to be making a difference on neural tone. But physical load still needs to increase. Forearms need to heal a bit also, that, is slow. Gonna focus on desk work while muscles cannot progress. So, the theme of the day is memory consolidation.
1002 : Not a horrible day. Merely troublesome.
Mon 28Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.088years ( year3; month26; week109; day762 )
0001 : 600 vCPU 1 TB RAM 100 node cluster, 13-14 seconds, $ 0.02.
This is what is possible with Erlang on Lambda ... I have no idea what for, but it's interesting.
0527 : although I don't feel productive, it is time to goof off for the day
0544 : apt install gfortran gnucobol4 gnat
0718 : Too tired to proceed. However, it seems that working on fortran means I'll need to become quite familiar with (make).
0845 : As much fun as people are in general, very few original contributions arise from many. And as few as are the names associated with progress, everyone depends on an unnamed mass of individuals.
Most individual experiences are universal trivia. The deepest grief, the greatest joy, the broadest angst, the emptiest terror, the deepest love, the sharpest passion, altogether the most redundant of conscious experiences.
And most of us have no choice but to follow the incentives offered to simple minds. And any forward movement depends on suckling of a billion feeble minds .
Oh well, politics. It remains rare to find people who wish to do more in life, than to make others happy.
1628 : Awake. Slighty better slept. Need to throw back some protein.
I will try to be productive today.
1734 : Back at a desk. Today is a FORTRAN day ...
1748 : Life is a stack of priorities. Pop some on, pop some off. At 42, my stack has been unwound to things I wanted to do when I was 8 to 14. There are things I wanted to do from 14 to 21 which I will have to do after I am 49, if I live that long. Commerce, and society, perhaps.
2053 : a.out means ASSEMBLER OUTPUT : ohhhhhh
2225 : A date asked ""tell me something weird about yourself."" I found a candidate story.
I once ran a cafe that, and as a matter of industrial design, provided individually wrapped and logoed sanitary pads in the toilets for menstruating customers. Since we shut five years ago, I've had a box of leftover stock sitting around, for orderly disposal. I really hate single-use plastic, but it is what it is. So I had the entire stock unwrapped and now it's just sitting in a bin at home next to my paper towels for use in case of emergency spills.
Tue 29Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.090years ( year3; month26; week109; day763 )
0038 : Trying : Linux kernel style 8-space tabbing
0047 : Lerning Linux kernel coding style ... perhaps applying it elsewhere.
0118 : GNU build is so difficult. But so is everything else in the universe.
0249 : ldconfig : right.
0308 : Noob mistake of the last 24 hours : libfortran-curl.a ... can't find header.
WRONG VERSION OF LIBCURL INSTALLED XD
0344 : next challenge ... why is my ""fpm build"" command failing with ""sh: 1: git: not found""
0633 : Time to goof off for the day
0654 : Head hurts /metaphor.
One more day till the month end!
0833 : Chances of interruption are high. But if am undisturbed for the next eight years, I will be much more caught up with STEM things which I postponed after highschool. Computing fundamentals should be more solid in a few months. After that there can be more focus on maths and stats.
2133 : Awake. Two days till the month end.
2310 : Back to FORTRAN, I think.
2321 : ""I always wonder if/when I return to the workforce at the age of 49, what sort of internships/other roles I should apply to.""
""Why would u consider internship ?""
""I am probably too humble haha. humble and lazy are a poor combination for corporate laddering ;) since my early 20s, I have only been interested in board-level work. but i take it as a given that other work is important also. and I am not fussy in gaining experience, and earning the respect of a local community""
2351 : ""did you work in a bank?"" I have a funny story. I used to work at AmInvestment Management on the buy side in 2007. The wifi was crap. I wrote an email to the MD telling him there were systematic issues in the company.
Later I had resigned because there was not enough opportunity to study computer programming. Then the MD's PA called me to his office, and the MD asked if I wanted to work on the IT systems. I said, I had already resigned.
Later I gave him a book on how General Electric does internal improvements."
"Wed 30Apr2025, Sabbatical2 @2.093years ( year3; month26; week109; day764 )
0010 : It is usually, not my job to interfere in people's companies. Political awareness is knowing that there are 100 things that you can do, and 2 things you can do to make people happy. Life is a choice about who to make happy. :)
0218 : TIL : C storage classes!
0220 : The Forth programming language is fun! Explicit stack manipulation ! Forth should be used in teaching children about computers.
0443 : This is the best way. In another 20-50 years, artificial wombs will have changed everything, again.
0500 : Monash at TRX? Excellent - I can start applying for work in a university which I can reach by train from my home. #mrlazybones
1107 : let's catch up on GPU architecture
1335 : 1337 code interview debate : Well, skill issue. Dumb employers will use poor tools to hire enthusiastic talent into roles that are neither : well defined / nor fit to the player / nor beneficial to shareholders. 🤣🤣🤓
1336 : which is cheesier? ( international linguistics dance off ) ma petite chou / pukiku yang sempurna / my loving cunt / wo de meimei
1342 : tooks 3 days for Meta to restore the CtrlEnt post feature to Threads.
2042 : Awake. Last day before the monthend. What kind of work can I squeeze in today.
2124 : I think those of us who have been short the US for a few decades are premature. Growing older, as a student of economic history, the end comes farther away than we will live to see, perhaps.
""The decline of Roman currency, particularly the denarius, was a gradual process that spanned approximately 200 years from the early 3rd century AD to the late 3rd century AD. The debasement of the denarius, meaning the reduction of its silver content and weight, began with Emperor Nero in AD 64 and continued until the mid-3rd century. "" - Google AI
2144 : 13 views and 1 vote : ends in 15 hours : no one wants to be lewd in pubic
Thu 1May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.096years ( year3; month26; week109; day765 )
0156 : Did a bunch of houskeeping. Time to make rice.
0257 : time for modern GPU architecture, finally
0310 : Malaysia is so poor at STEM, that when I talk about becoming a leader in scientific computing, people ask me if we have supercomputing hardware.
Hello, this isn't the 90s. The bottleneck isn't hardware. Malaysia's hardware to smarts ratio is massive.
We have very poor smarts.
0321 : Time to immerse myself in FLOPS/W information.
0334 : TIL : as of 2024 supercomputing is in the 1-3 exaflop range, per collocated or distributed cluster. Also finally, I have a reason to remember what the SI prefixes are, up to 10^3^6.
0337 : TIL : Scratchpad memory is software managed cache, implemented as on-die RAM.
0442 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khronos_Group - is a great gateway to protocol suites in this area. Just about everything can be branched from this node of the knowledge graph.
0558 : Well, GPU metrics are fascinating - nice to catch up. However it is the first day of the month-end ( where I take all my days-off in a single compressed week ), so I will be down-throttling on reading till later. Time to get some somatic exercise.
1000 : Thoughts on my walk today. During the years when I am focused on cultural immersion, I play the role of an ordinary worker in the economy. Focus is on that work.
During my time away from the workforce, I have the luxury of comparing where Malaysia is in the world.
I wake up and think, what a fucking primitive country. Then I think about how to improve it.
1107 : bit of reading before bed
1137 : Hm. Seems like it's the day to start catching up on physics engines also ... since those are adjacent to GPU tech
1322 : I watched a 9 minute supercut of Venom3. That's a lot of kitsch. I realised that kitsch results often enough from bored people entertaining themselves. Of course it's horrible for everyone else.
1347 : down
2226 : Awake. Enforced feeding.
2238 : The individual successes don't matter much. In fact, inequality of access to education, culture, and 1-percenter networks, is a clear indicator of collective mediocrity. So celebrities in academia are not simply uninteresting ... but cause for concern. Al poor person can't tell the difference anyway, between an industry darling, and a fundamental shift in progress.
Most businesses, and individuals, will never matter to civilisation in the long run.
2320 : I like how the study of hypnoticism/ grooming and moral disregulation is already a matter of study among AI technicians. Every could use a little more philosophy, so to speak.
https://huggingface.co/blog/mlabonne/abliteration
2354 : Already day two of the month end. Gym opens in 5.5 hours. Maybe I can get some load in.
Fri 2May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.099years ( year3; month26; week110; day766 )
0135 : I've been catching up on vision processing algorithms lately. This one is also applicable to economics in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornsweet_illusion
0155 : Rules to live by : get money off the table.
0203 : This is nice. It's giving me some industry vocabulary to think about implementations of a vector-graphics video model I wanted to build in 2008.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_meshes
0217 : Jet Set Radio (2000) is an early example of toon/cel shading. I obviously wasn't in-touch with this as I didn't study games very closely.
0236 : Won't have much time to Fresh equations soon.
0326 : This program guides you through learning IC design, and lets you fabrication a toy for under $1000.
https://tinytapeout.com/runs/
0351 : DuskOS : the project includes a Forth interpreter that bootstrap itself all the way to an OS with a C compiler, etc. Fascinating.
https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos/tree/master/fs/doc/design/simple.txt
0354 : TIL : D flip flops
0736 : Day 2/7 of monthend. Managed to hit the gym before 0600. Nominally moved 25k lbs. Bullshit metric but alright. Will work on it. Studying several hours a day even though it's not a work focused day. Race against time, I suppose.
Time, time, time.
0938 : Two tiers of indirection - but it turns out my laptop is 600x less FLOPable than an NVIDIA H100
1035 : Hegseth : minister of the powder room. OMG
1105 : There's a thing about living a great life, but building it all on debt ... someone else owns you. Yet it matters less if you go and beat up the folks who own you, which is what the Trump administration has been going around trying to do. So, yes, we are concerned.
- ROW
1219 : Apparently my surname means I come from a family of hardware accelerators.
1222 : TIL Gorillaz descends from Blur
1347 : Another computing misnomer. Around 2001, NVIDEA shipped a vertex shader ... a stage in the hardware of a graphics card, that is far, far, upstream from the activity of shading. It is like calling all automobiles, ""taxis"". Subsequently, every stage in the process is now called a shader. So everything is a taxi.
https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/History_of_Programmability
Sat 3May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.101years ( year3; month26; week110; day767 )
0018 : PMX is in the newscycle again : this time, for his role in Islamicising Malaysian public education in the 80s.
While that is politically opposed to my personal interests, and detrimental to the economic success of Malaysia, due to the amount of religious polarisation it introduced to Malaysian culture ... I still do not agree that the methods by which he was imprisoned were appropriate.
You can disagree with people, even if they hurt you, but there is no reason to wish bad things upon them.
0122 : Video game graphics of the past 20 years have been disappointing, with a few exceptions. What I learnt today however, is that I don't know anything about entertainment industry metrics.
The video arcade game industry outgrew THE REST of the entertainment industry around 1982 ( $8 billion ) - I was born the year after that, and this is a fact I have somehow lived without knowing for 42 years. Chalk it up to the part of the world, and kind of family I grew up in. I enjoyed playing games as a kid, but did not take them seriously as an adult.
In 2024 video game revenue was over $180 billion, and video-on-demand was over $150 billion. It takes a bit of work to track down global revenues across the slight fragmentation : the parts of which are music, video, games ( excluding gambling, though this is iffy ), in venues live and online/streamed.
Very interesting.
0301 : GPU topology - no time to dig in, so just eyeballing.
0453 : OK. I think I'm slightly caught up. So :
NVIDIA Blackwell
: CUDA core : scalar ops : 16-64 bit
: tensor core : mat-mul-acc : 4-32 bit [ 4, 4 ]
Google v6e
: scalar core : upstream bottleneck
: vector processing unit : vector ops : 16-32 bit [ 8, 128 ]
: matrix multiply unit : mat-mul-acc : 16-32 bit [ 128, 128 ]
0544 : Time for a run ...
0813 : Ran. Cleaned a fan. Applying RP7 in an enclosed area was probably a mistake. Fed. Back to a desk.
0924 : I wanna do more work but I should take a nap to clear the insulin.
1000 : Interesting. Post work-out numbness is alleviated by cuddling. I suppose that's what sports massages are for. I will cuddle the pillows.
1211 : My main beef with the discipline of psychology : ""where did you get these norms from?!""
My main beef with the discipline of AI : ""where did you get these norms from?!""
I like beef.
1250 : I've lived in Malaysia for 37 years. The last 20 have been by choice, a matter of fieldwork, and minimalism altogether. I haven't found many nice places to work ... curiosities, many! Excellent cultural studies. Absolutely boring work, so I have to pay myself on the back for putting up with it.
I was telling a friend who works in entertainment, adjacent to technology, about the things I study which are closer to what need to be done if the country is to become a leader in technology. Actually fundamental innovation, not just appliance installation.
My friend said it is not practical for Malaysia to aspire to such leadership. I totally agreed, noting that was why I am spending 10 years at home to study this on my own. I really don't interact much with locals, do I?
1312 : 100 properly trained men will kill a gorilla. They might even manage to do it without losing a life.
100 bozos on the other hand ...
1347 : Back at a desk.
1508 : Pain is the main determinant of economics ( decisions ).
Fears derive from pain, and so : most people display a distrust of other people. This is amusing, if not sad, because it is the human condition.
How to deal with the sum of everyone's fears, is the business of government.
1643 : a bit extra : but when people ask if non-English speakers program in their non-English language ... I always say ""sure, they can alias any exiting programming language or CLI tools to any other language""
Now that, is the future of i18n
1713 : My notion of a pleb is someone who depends on relationships to get things done. It is not an indicator of the individual as much as it is an indicator of their environment.
Sun 4May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.104years ( year3; month26; week110; day768 )
0449 : phone battery replacement chore - done - back to reading for a bit
0518 : Alright. C++ katas ...
0528 : cmath header : i think we're going to be good friends
0636 : TIL something about complex numbers, but I'm not sure what I learnt.
CNs tend to be introduced arithmetically, as the square roots of real numbers.
But apparently that is not their fundamental role in maths. Supposedly, CNs are more fundamentally geometrical concepts related to rotation, and the relationship with negative numbers is incidental.
Or something like that ...
0722 : This is very insightful. The Linux kernel programmers don't use everyone else's standard library. Their libraries can be found in the neighbourhood of /usr/include/
Mon 5May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.107years ( year3; month26; week110; day769 )
0146 : For some partying is drugs, sex, food, and travel - for me, it is reading, synthesising, machining, testing, and documenting.
""You need to be naughtier""
""I have friends like you to mix it up from time to time""
0258 : Many of us are just dating as a thing in itself. :) Persistence is not the plan.
0446 : relearning JavaScript Promise syntax
0458 : enforced feeding : gym open in 32 minutes
0552 : Wake up Kuala Lumpur. It's Monday.
0743 : Gym in the glass box before dawn is fun. You get to watch magic hour with the technicolor skies. It's also a good time to think about the lack of progress. If I had to grade productivity in the first two years of my sabbatical, I'd say :
Year 1 : B
Year 2 : C
Year 3 : on track to a B, but WTH
The body under maximum stress is wired to shift into defense mode, and becomes aware of all sorts of fears. The rational person is indifferent between life and death. Most people who are alive, have an irrational aversion to death. So, rational and irrational people fear each other, in a sort of existential quandry. The practicalities of this are mundane.
1617 : That was a stupid amount of work for an off day.
Tue 6May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.110years ( year3; month26; week110; day770 )
0348 : Good morning. What have the markets done now?
0826 : Finally making a half-assed attempt to install vim plugins properly
0923 : JavaScript is MAKING ME
write in explicit
CONTINUATION PASSING STYLE
halp
1126 : Spending my off-days writing usability wrappers for indexedDB, FML
1655 : Looks like I'm going to have a whole wrapper library for IndexedDB by next week."
"Wed 7May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.112years ( year3; month26; week110; day771 )
0342 : Time to make a day out of nothing. But first, feeding. Then chores. With light revision and news in between.
0408 : Data entry. Update ze books.
0435 : It's a good day to contemplate emptiness.
And bills. And research. And people.
0748 : One day, it might be nice to work somewhere that doesn't feel like I'm surrounded by babies.
But I think anyone who depends on money, or relationships, or optimism about tomorrow, is a baby. So ... less baby-friendly places. Where are these teams? I have enjoyed developing teams in this direction, during my short corporate career.
0758 : Ten minutes on LinkedIn is all it takes to remind me, that I still don't brain much of what I want to brain about finance. But first, computing, and math.
I wonder if I will ever see the end of this program.
0804 : During years when I am active in commerce, you won't hear me posting this loudly about the ills of commercial people. When in Rome, be in Rome.
Maybe there's a job somewhere, that pays a dude to help people to think about employment from a holistic, non-plebeian perspective. Haha, but I don't want to be a freelance coach : I am too lazy to manage my own accounts. But I would help your company to build this function, if it interested you. I believe in institutions.
1001 : Enforced rest. Last day of the monthend.
1035 : The software development industry, and the services industry in general, are a matter of accelerating the destinies of others.
But if you are disappointed by the wants and needs of others, then work seems only a matter of being a professional idiot accelerator.
You must find folks to work with whose goals you enjoy.
1040 : 2.112 years into the project. Some six to nine months focusing on others, with net negative feedback. I must work on recouping losses. Then again, one should not regret charity. Perhaps it is possible to reduce without regret.
1300 : Nap and massage. Maybe it was just a sugar crash.
1303 : Reddit AI research drama : People are stupid. It does not matter who changes their minds. It is their own minds that they need to worry about. Not the other minds.
1333 : Time is short. My health may not sustain the demand I place upon my mind. So I must enjoy the time I have left with my work.
1341 : Test : doubling calcitriol bp 0.25mcg dose from 1/month to 2/month
1531 : super happy when friends are doing well
1544 : Started developing minimal wrapped library for IndexedDB, MinDB.
Revised JS class syntax. Noticed generator syntax, but parked that for later study.
Enforced feeding.
1635 : Maybe I am too lenient on myself.
btw I think Powell will cut today ; they have been buying treasuries recently ; throwaway comment because I am sleepy, and more concerned about many other things
1645 : Nap, then bills and taxes.
1725 : Abandon the cry babies.
1919 : After many years of attending to sad people, I should probably know better : most cannot recover, and will be crippled for most of their lives. So it is better to let them be. Except in the event of rare excess. Hm
2252 : End of the monthend, so tomorrow begins the next 23 or so days of work-work. It is a strange life, wandering around these people who don't understand themselves and who have no control over what they love or fear on a minute to minute basis. I was raised to care for them, but over this much time, I find that I might as well care for myself ... not many are voting for my ticket anyway. I wonder what dating will be like if I start avoiding sad people. Probably a lot less tiring. Meanwhile I certainly look forward to improving my comprehension of more fundamental affairs than such baby talk.
Thu 8May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.115years ( year3; month26; week110; day772 )
0437 : So lazy. Gtfu mf
0546 : Sigh. JS again. Learning about class syntax. Trying to implement continuation passing style. Focus on clean API. Verbose code, mostly to be stripped out during minification.
0618 : learnt how to do vim searches with negative lookaheads \(avoided\)\@!
0744 : Too much strength training and not enough cardio : interesting problem - used to be the other way around.
0808 : 200 lines in ... I don't think I've written this much OOP code in a while. Good exercise.
0814 : Protip for physics people, who don't understand other people. Politics is the physics of organisations. Lens : if you think of it as a species of physics, it's quite easy to figure out ;)
1219 : JS Ah, this is pretty cool ... so as of 2024 the continuation passing style is native.
{ promise, resolvedContinuation, rejectedContinuation } = Promise.withResolvers()
2114 : Good first day back at work.
2127 : I will soon need to dig into build tools. Make first
Fri 9May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.118years ( year3; month26; week111; day773 )
0345 : Good morning. It seems like a bull. Market again. Liiquidity is lit
0511 : she wanted a whirlwind, i wanted a workshop
0518 : The perfect army is aligned from top to bottom, regardless of whether it uses high-context or low-context protocols.
0524 : Gonna try to get a run in. And I have a meeting in five hours. So not too keen on thinking about mechanical work. Will think about architecture instead.
0723 : 20-80 : catch, pull
1732 : Me : bestie1 shook her head at my haiiiiirr
Bestie2 : i agree. looks messy
Me : i think it suits my personality - that's why i don't take my personality to the office
Bestie2 : 🙅
Bestie1 : HAHAAHA that was my response too
Me : ( re: prev comment ) I AM VERY SMART
1915 : Hello. Plumbing apps without code doesn't make you a better technical person. It makes you a better business person. These are now ops problems that don't require detailed traditionally deep aptitude.
The quality of your work is valid, but it is not the same sort of work other people do. Those other people will have to find new problems to make themselves valuable again.
Oh, trust me, we have lots of problems for them to work on. You probably just don't know what they are yet.
1934 : GPU tuning 2023... this is a very, very nice demonstration of what kind of work goes into tuning code for hardware.
https://blog.speechmatics.com/pointless-gpu-optimization-exercise
Sat 10May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.121years ( year3; month26; week111; day774 )
0703 : Awake. Drink water. Return to bed. Let chemistry do its work. Check sensory gain. Check imaginary gain. Check motor gain. Check latency. Check random access memory. Check model loading. Check models. Check anxiety metrics. Check pleasure metrics. Do we have enough dopamine today. Do we need to do anything to please other people today. Do we have social economic opportunities today. Do we have risks in the corresponding sets of dimensions. Do we have other risks. Check inboxes. Create content. Post content. Get out of bed. Good morning. #jerngvswork #jerngvstime #jerngvsmeat
0747 : I'm not leveraged. But I'm exposed to a lot of volatility, and I'm increasing it. Not sure that's the best thing, but wth. Build in public.
0827 : the day begins with shell command language, and docker
1536 : Testing time. How to get the exit status AND std out from a subshell ...
1654 : time to finally fucking try to understand fucking file descriptors ...
2014 : OK great, I get file systems. After a shower, back to shell language constructs.
A. Block Storage : persistent
A1. Raw : file data.
A2. I(ndex)nodes : meta-data : timestamps, users, groups, permissions, directory hierarchy pointers (hard links), reference counters, symbolic (soft) links
B. RAM : ephemeral
B1. System-wide open file table : includes sockets, block and character devices, named pipes, etc.
B2. Per-process file descriptor table : keys are integers, values are point to B1
2355 : Today's exercise : shell script to show which local docker images were based on which other local images. Mainly got hung up about not yet having grasped all the shell redirection operators. Ended with learning that they mostly link back to fopen() modes from sister language C under the POSIX fam.
Like
[FD]<>[FILE] is ""readwrite"" which has barely any doc on the POSIX site, but under C's fopen() mode ""a+"" the algorithm becomes quite clear.
Sun 11May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.123years ( year3; month26; week111; day775 )
0044 : Good day to be a nobody. Learnt a coupla things. Kicked the cans along. Scratched at insurmountable future progress.
0156 : How hard, do you come?
I guess it depends on the company.
And diet. And hormones from physical loading.
0211 : Software architecture : I have a friend who says the focus is not on art. My point exactly. You can be a great engineer, and focus on efficiency, but if you're not focused on culture ... just call it engineering. If you're not concerrned with the usability of every operating surface, for perpetuity, don't bother associating the nature of the work with architecture.
0740 : Awake. Enforced feeding.
0835 : It's too early in the week for such stupid mistakes.
0854 : ashes to ashes. crash to crash.
0900 : The profession of software architecture is at about 30% of its long-term stable maturity. Times are still primitive.
0943 : I will study Google's polyglot style guide. Carbon is interesting, so maybe I am tending towards that ecosystem.
1000 : The funny thing about my STEM sabbatical ( target age 39-49 ) :
1a. Many non-STEM people would consider me a robot : about as materialistic as a guy could be.
1b. I actually feel I've spent too few FTE years in STEM : to-date, some 7-8 years scattered across 3 decades.
2a. For comparison, I've spent about 18 years living and working in religious institutions, +4 years in academia, +18 years of anthropological fieldwork post-college.
2b. Even just commerce was 17-ish years.
1001 : I prefer to align the language with the practice of civil engineering. The civil engineer's main concern is risk management. The architect's is make life pleasant.
1034 : Carbon : For anyone who's curious about software in machines ... here's a nice example of a goals & non-goals document, for a design project. The thing being designed as a ""language"", and typically those function to find a sweet-spot of economy between pleasure of use, safety, and efficiency. https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/docs/project/goals.md
1037 : TBH, I wish Malaysians would demand this level of literacy and planning, from Putrajaya, and have publish a six-monthly civilian-driven governance review of ongoing discussions, campaigns, calls-for-comment, and dog-fooding.
1923 : Oh, systolic array is the fancy name for looping N-to-N processors ... that's why I got into Erlang in the first place, partly.
1948 : 1. Historic building the size of several warehouses
2. Rents the space for ad hoc events that blast music through the non-existant walls into the surrounding neighbourhood
2. Rents it to a food court operator. Ta pao.
3. Rents it to a pickleball court.
I swear YTL Land is like the laziest developer ever.
Mon 12May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.126years ( year3; month26; week111; day776 )
0008 : Progress ends for the hour. Maybe for the day.
0017 : Tatler is like a beacon of hope for poor dumb folk, that being dumb is ok, because rich dumb folk are beautiful.
0715 : Awake. Hydrated. Waited. Markets show no visible signs of weakness. I show many. Putin's negotiations will be an extended delay strategy. China's negotiations will cut to the mustard. Israel will refuse negotiations, while hewing towards Russian strategy. None of this affects me directly, but as an adult with assets distributed across the global economy, the indirect effects are obvious.
0928 : Time to study JS generators.
1108 : enforced feeding.
1443 : JS iterable object hierarchy is a maze. I will burn the day on this.
1649 : This is quite difficult, and I am not happy with progress.
1949 : Generally : spaghetti seems baked into the ECMAScript spec. For certain things, you make (new) ones but it is illegal to use the `new` keyword; the prototype of an apple is an orange, the prototype of an orange is an apple ... because I'm doing my kids a favour.
I wish there was a good reason for these designs, but I'm more inclined to believe that the spec formulation process is so esoteric, that only esoteric people get involved, hence the spec is esoteric.
2038 : Most people calling for wildlife bridges to keep elephants from being run over ... have no idea about where the elephants are being run over.
2336 : I've done horrible things today. Horrible, horrible things. And I have a few more to do before bed. #generators
2349 : Often, slightly isolating to have a cohesive memory over 30 years. You find that those who do not, they change : they don't remember what they thought, and they don't believe they will know what they will think in the future.
The world passes by, as if it is always distracted. Whereas probably to the world, it is we who seem distracted, because we have one cohesive view of hypertime, and aren't so excited about momentary events on a year to year basis.
Tue 13May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.129years ( year3; month26; week111; day777 )
0003 : Snail's pace today. maybe i should sleep more. or work out more
0925 : Good morning Asian colleagues. Have a great day at work. I am going to have a(nother) horrible day unpacking the ECMAScript spec.
1333 : ""a person can remember seven things""
... those are your registers.
1349 : arboretum
arboratum
1644 : AI as a judge of taste - you've got about 2 years before your lunch is eaten here.
1838 : Almost done. One last round of inheritance tracing.
1913 : So, technology over the past 20 years has been somewhat boring ... the one exciting thing I can think off the top of my head is CRISPR and friends. Most of my work during this period has been digging up other people's past work, and reducing the mess I find.
Cryptocurrencies are more a political marvel than a technological one. AI is still doing very dumb things, and I wish it would get smarter, but the fundamental models haven't been chopped down to the right approaches yet, so there is great waste.
We shall see how the future rolls ...
1915 : tiada cerita baru di dunia ini, hanyada manusia yg kurang mendapatahu sejarah
2103 : fugly fugly fugly
2259 : 10 billion browsers running this shitty software. We are cursed."
"Wed 14May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.132years ( year3; month26; week111; day778 )
0001 : Four dimensional mess.
0131 : ""shit"", ""piss"", ""fuck"", ""cunt"", ""cocksucker"", ""motherfucker"", and ""javascript""
0303 : Chart of US treasury rates for ... my entire adult life, and then some. I only started studying macroeconomics structurally a couple of years ago. Matter of priotisation ... so I think about each year on that chart, and reflect on what I was doing at the time.
0314 : Two 18-hour days in row, without exercise, delineating something I don't super-care-about : I guess I was just raised to be an asshole. Haha
0332 : The first thing about maintaining a relationship, is don't be a pest. The second thing, is add value.
0334 : How do we get Malaysia from 50 mathematicians, to 50,000?
If you say no need, I slap you.
0909 : Awake. Off to grind. Hopefully with more cheer.
0928 : Me in my 20s : tomorrow we may die. I like math, but I should spend 20 years learning about people.
Me in my 40s : tomorrow we may die. I like people, but I should spend 10 years learning about math.
1022 : SCL exercises
1252 : Post multi-day sprint, market is up, feels like I should take a break, and meet more women. But that is not the priority, haha. So I am taking nap instead.
Thu 15May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.134years ( year3; month26; week111; day779 )
0012 : I spent the first 18 years of my life studying science, and religious organisations. (I learnt a lot about talent management, and how to work a room, deciding that I was bored of it by the time I was 14.) Then I spent the time from 18 to 21 surveying the history of civilisation and the quantifiability of consciousness.
After that I was very tired. And I felt both incredibly privileged, as well as afraid that I did not have a firm grasp of how ordinary people are. So from 22 to 39, I spent a lot of time among them. It wasn't super pleasant, but it needed to be done.
And it is done. Even if I want to empathise more at this point, I require myself to follow the discipline of avoiding plebs, in order to make time for other studies.
I have taken it upon myself at this age to jest that I am old. So I can be impatient without being seen as too impolite.
0201 : folks, money supply is going to be 1.3x in 3 years. where do you think earnings will be? #maybe
1115 : Awake. Reading day. Memory consolidation. Hormone check. Food check. Resistance loading later. Work week 2/3, week 3/5 of May.
1135 : look mate, we're all just sitting around on a rock, killing time ... some people just get feelings for the other killers ...
1201 : Noise. 2005 to 2023 was an extremely noisy period, in my career, because the project was to learn about poor, and inefficient people. So I exposed myself to all their vulnerabilities.
During this time, I did not focus fully on my own hobbies in STEM, thereby allowing these to drag along in parallel. All discussions about tooling and methodology in technology, are fundamentally resolvable based a review of the atoms of each gross object.
What is more difficult, is the culture of argument about economics, without data. Is this tool better? Is that tool better? I like it better, so it must be better, you like it less, so it must be less. But that is not how we decide things at war. In war, plans do not survive first-contact with practice. Then again, that is called poor planning.
On sabbatical, I am grateful for the opportunity to work with data, in practice, directly.
1259 : Messaging / broker protocols.
I'm rereading Firebase, Kafka, and others ... and wondering about implementations of the same which are more unixy, and less monolithic.
1458 : Trying to get a view on exactly how smart the optimising compilers are, at transforming heterogenous workloads to the underlying vendor hardware.
1325 Message Passing Interface : aha!
1500 : gym break
1507 :
2154 : let me take a stab at writing an updated tc39 proposal for ""observable""
Fri 16May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.137years ( year3; month26; week112; day780 )
0530 : I have now spent more time trying to profile this code than I have trying to write it ...
0713 : JS : FIFO via Array : max key count seems to be ~67M, so attempt compaction every 8M beginning at Array.length=33M. 4000 inserts per second on a 10yo i5. Not too shabby ... would be rather daft to be expecting that sort of load in a browser ... eh?
0753 : The Fed has one job right now : to hold their nuts in the sack until every other government cuts first. Game of chig bicken.
0855 : pub/sub ... publisher/subscriber ... is a very nice abbreviation : however it is very 19th century. so I am replacing it with creator/follower for now.
1006 : nak mengenatahu bahasa malaysia memang macam javascript ... kalau js memang saya tak suka rekastrukturnya, tapi kalau BM saya belum lagi sefasih JS jadi saya tak mampu kata sukaxsuka ... kedua2 pun ... klo utanya i knapa i mengaji ... i kena jawab ""sbab i duk sini je""
tags : anthropology javascript kuala lumpur
1032 : first line in any javascript file is going to be l=console.log because i spend too much time pleasuring the wood as it is
1054 : it is time to identify as a binary JS programmer
1116 : There's a common magic number : 64, which is the bit-width of most most contemporary computer chips. That means, if you organise your thoughts very well, you can make 64 decisions at once, if the information is prepared.
1145 : Back to the rudiments of counting machines, today
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gear
1302 : JS :test results : because I was too lazy to read the spec ... the comma turns out to have very weak operator precedence ... so the arrow expression will terminate at the first comma afterwards ... SO, you have to drop parentheses after arrows, in order to use comma separated expressions returning a single term per arrow.
1942 : Good morning American markets. Night has fallen, in Asia.
I'm on a light reading day - playing with various architectural sketches and reviewing language syntaxes.
2011 : TIL it's HOMO-ICON-ICITY
2016 : Wondering about embedding a LISP-dialect in native JavaScript.
2049 : reviewing docker security issues
2116 : Maybe I should get a job-job in enterprise tech security.
2143 : Learning Lisp today.
2159 : stupid ancient lisp jargon :
() => empty list
car => head => ( head ( tail ) )
cdr => tail => ( head1 ( head2 ( head3 () )
cons => list
( car cdr ) => a proper list has () in tail position
( car . cdr => an improper list has anything else in tail position, notioned by the dot
2217 : So far it seems quite feasible.
JavaScript has type Array, and destructing syntax such that :
[ a, ... b ] = [ 2, 3, 4 ] will work perfectly.
So extending the Array class could give us some sort of ARRP, or ARRay Processsing language. :P
2315 : I've basically thought that humans and computers are Turing equivalent since I was in college. I didn't study that language back then, but I'm studying it now.
2322 : I will probably be stuck on all the related topics under this article for the next six months ... guess that means most of 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness
Sat 17May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.140years ( year3; month26; week112; day781 )
1110 : I am looking at 17th-19th counting machines so far. This is important as a matter of history in understanding the computational challenges of low resource situations. Doesn't feel like electronics is the right place to start, so mechanical engineering first
1157 : Increased risk of offensive runs against bank stocks. But everyone's expecting it. What happens next?
1300 : Studying mechanical engineering basics : how gears work.
Definitely not what I had in mind for sabbatical - but one needs to master the basics of computation.
1528 : Power and Taylor series : back to first year college vocab today
1623 : The paper is more interesting than the abstract https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19108
2045 : i used to say deadpool was my spirit animal, before there were movies; now i have to find a more obscure spirit animal; maybe diogenes is my spirit animal
Sun 18May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.142years ( year3; month26; week112; day782 )
0040 : I had to talk to four idiots today.
Glass mode A : 4 > 0
Glass mode B : 4 < 8
0056 : Time to goof off for the day. I wish Kuala Lumpur had divey pick-up bars I'd actually want to pay for. Not all that overpriced schmuck tourist stuff that's good for nothing but hipster dates
0125 : rotational numbers and the unit circle - after the break
0242 : I have mused for several years, that maths should be introduced with polar coordinates before cartesian coordinates. Recently I revisited the common notion of the unit circle, and considered its asymmetries. If you adjust your perspective of the framework like this, symmetry is improved. I will need more time to think about this, as I have barely spent any time in my life working on maths. Much to do. However, this also coheres with my intuition that the number line and its concept of negative numbers is unnecessarily abstract ... perhaps a step in the wrong direction, as it then needs to introduce the concept of complex numbers for balance. All that goes away if we reformulate numbers in other language. There is no need to pretend that negative space exists ... when we can simply discuss the nature of space with less shaded language. I wonder if I will ever have the time to develop these ideas. Or if others have developed them before along similar lines.
0245 : turns out that Gauss had similar concerns - so I'm in good company, haha.
0319 : Normalise being a useful partner to anyone of legal age.
0338 : 👏people 👏rarely 👏agree 👏on 👏what 👏people 👏are
Hence, you should always ask questions to find out.
0343 : Horror. Disgust. Fear. Loathing. Trembling. Insomnia.
Ah, the human condition, the stuff of words. The retching dissociation of feeble minds.
Amidst all this, they take solace in minds crafted by minds who do not understand how uncrafted minds are made.
0427 : Do you like what you like? Someone's not gonna like it.
Is it legal in your country? It's not legal somewhere else.
Does someone encourage you to be proud? Your pride is disgusting someone.
Do you believe in morality? Lots of people believe in morality - getting them to agree, aiyaya ... now that's an adventure ...
0548 : Might have figured out a test case for Go/Rust :
- same-host, async, uncompressed, JSON, HTTP broker
- modeled after the AWS Lambda custom runtime interface
- used to get data from any program, to any program
- need to figure out protocol : ad hoc? websockets? In any event, a client program would need to set up a HTTP client. Hm
1401 : So ... (quickjs) can do (os.exec) ... that looks promising ...
1435 : I'm just happy that Whatsapp has Markdown code blocks now :P
1507 : I saw a sad post this week, I think it's been deleted. About how landlords are ALLOWED by law to let their properties be in POOR LIVING CONDITION. This should not be the case.
But underlying all of this, in Malaysia, we have this political abomination where ... the so-called ""property management services"" industry is directly under the Ministry of Finance, via the CIDB.
It's a crass, poorly architectured governance structure, which cripples all our cities.
Mon 19May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.145years ( year3; month26; week112; day783 )
0932 : Good morning asian desks. Rise and grind.
1110 : subshell shennanigans : why is my x=""2> /dev/null"";$(dothing $x); not working properly ...
1232 : reduced vm.swappiness from 10 to 3
1435 : I wrote the following in a chat earlier today - and realised I didn't have a firm translation for ""consciousness"".
""Kerja saya lebih menjihadkan perangkaan fenomenologi ... iaitu paradigma bahawa segala kesedaran manusia hanya adalah sejenis sistem maklumat.
Paradigma yang lain, saya biarkan kepada orang lain 🙂""
1503 : i guess it is time to gradually implement a copy of my work from English to Malay
1541 : Values.
Humility : I give myself a B.
Avoiding false humility : I give myself an A.
1612 : Work, is the lived experience of adjusting one's environment.
Speech : changes minds, including one's own; mental change implies somatic changes.
I remember learning how to negotiate with masters, how to run teams, how to cook, how to clean, how to build lived environments, and how to program computers.
Over on the other side of the planet Chamath is busy adjusting capital to secure his seat among the 200.
Everywhere, each person designs their work.
1814 : Stressing myself out over (shell command language). Just boils down to my incompetence and lack of proper study on this.
1840 : Defensive Mensching : be a mensch
Offensive Mensching : never let anyone know when you're a mensch
2027 : Alright - done grinding SCL. Where was I with the architecture of polyglot programs ...
Tue 20May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.148years ( year3; month26; week112; day784 )
0003 : Oh - that JS framework I wrote is already in points-free style. I didn't know that's what they called it.
0221 : Break. Thinking about work and stupidity. Also need to raise calories and physical load.
0225 : I think my lazy approach to just working to the bone is as productive as I'd like it to be.
1025 : Time to dwell on work, however inefficiently.
1048 : Still early in the day. I think I can summon the focus to work on new language acquisition.
- Lisp in JS
- Carbon on Lambda
- IndexedDB wrapper
Let's see how far we can get today.
1121 : I think the next big hurdle ( months ) for me will be learning about compiler infrastructure. Still in 1H2025 for now ... gonna be a long year.
1455 : at least i am learning something about shell manipulation
1650 : Documenting file system hierarchy, and boot sequence.
Nice to sit down and do this properly. I remember futzing about it while burning our IDEs onto CDRs in 2010.
1847 : More coffee."
"Wed 21May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.151years ( year3; month26; week112; day785 )
0054 : An unaccomplished day. But a day, is a but a day.
I managed to compile Bellard and Tunny's ( qjsc / QuickJS compiler ), but I am not sure that it is a static binary.
Since I don't really know how to edit Makefiles yet, I wasn't able to build a static copy of ( qjsc ) from inside a Docker container, and a linked copy wouldn't run outside the Docker container where it was compiled.
Such is life. Numerous daydreams passed my mind, but they are of no use here, so they will be passed over.
0057 : 2am. Time for a run. Hopefully no one's getting mugged today.
0336 : Alright. So I joined the Carbon Language Discord. I don't know apples from pears when it comes to compiler design, so I am just going to have to read all the chats and see how much I can brain over the next year or so.
0600 : Barely noticed the OP : but learnt a lot from the comments - probably because I'm out of touch with the entire WASM, WAGI, WASI, WIT, WAT theatre.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33816186
0621 : I've recently spoken to various people who appreciate the spiritual value of type systems in programming languages. While these are a powerful family of tools, they solve problems in a reductive fashion. So no matter how good a type system at improving risk management, it ends up still being just risk management. Bottomline, not topline.
Or so it would seem.
1248 : Gday. Back to the desk. Hit me with every issue in computing, finance, and physiology. Attack.
Thu 22May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.153years ( year3; month26; week112; day786 )
0348 : sleepy and unproductive hours : suspect sugar crash
0416 : Probably a combination of heat, noise, and hyperaesthesia from methylcobalamin.
0614 : Sometimes when I think about how ratty this country is, I'm just surprised that I'm not yet dead or destitute. Hah
1023 : Apparently a sleep issue. Must have been the melatonin reset from m-B12. Crashed before eating and woke up to a huge serotonin hit. Time to feed, wash and work.
1115 : Rewrite everything, again.
1149 : Ah : I didn't forgot the documentation on JS loops.
1239 : Ordeal complete. Break and resumption of work.
1306 : I hope to see the day, when people no longer believe that humans cognitive architecture is special. But I don't think I will make it, in time. Back to work, to focus on the present. :)
1719 : TIL Go had preemptive scheduling since 2013, then improved 2020.
Compare with JVM : 1994
Erlang used to run on Prolog interpreted 1986-> then got the JAM VM in 1989 and the current BEAM VM in 1992.
1925 : I hate all the projects I'm working on right now. The projects are fine, but my competence is limited :P
1955 : I'm glad I discovered Ralphie May / RIP.
Now it is easy for me to refer to him, as a male whose offensive speaking style matches my own, in casual contexts.
2103 : ""Make a Lisp tutorial""
- I have been using this to get the hang of the ecosystem
- it is a well-written tutorial, but full of practical chores for building a usable runtime
- it fails to articulate the elegance of the underlying ""a few axioms are enough"" lesson which I was looking for : so, I am stopping this halfway, and going to look at the original Lisp papers lol
2314 : From Common Lisp : a brief gander at theorem provers.
Fri 23May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.156years ( year3; month26; week113; day787 )
0103 : Refactored furniture. Time to goof off. WTF can I afford the headspace to goof on today.
0112 : STEM in Malaysia. 30 years on, I still don't know where to go with it. I shall focus on improving myself, first.
0122 : At this point, it seems more viable to establish more vectors along strategy B, versus A which is already well developed.
A : high-level language -> fixed rules -> hand-cuffed to slow machine code
B : high-level language -> static & dynamic analysis -> proposed rewrites with specific compromises -> negotiation -> faster machine code
0148 : In order to reason about code ( in humans or machine ), a programmer ( human or otherwise ), must separate their concerns between (1) the structure of data, and (2) the operations upon that data.
So a good programmer must know the detailed data types managed by hardware, and their corresponding representations in a given programming language. Only based on this, can correct hypotheses ( questions ) be formed, about what actions constitute an optimisation.
0158 : Wikipedia + CSS Column !
1302 : Slept. Brain improved.
1334 : https://www.vulgarlang.com/
This is more humanistic ( meat low-level ) than programming language design, but it demoonstrates some of the concerns.
1505 : Ramping up dosage of calcitriol 0.25 mcg : from 4-weekly to 2-weekly, for observation
3β-BODIPY-calcitriol
1758 : I have been lucky in life. Growing up in 90s Malaysia, the political environment was volatile. So when I had time in college in the US, I made a study of becoming comfortable with solitary confinement, before returning to my homeland. To-date, I have not needed to practice such skill, but I have anyway, in my careering. Over the years there have been many things I worked on which would have been unsuitable for anyone seeking to retain the company of peers. It is quite enlightening, to observe how much of people's actions are determined by whose respect they are trying to maintain, or acquire.
Sat 24May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.159years ( year3; month26; week113; day788 )
0329 : reflections from networking throughout Saturday
1554 : Absolute chaos getting to 1U by car on a Saturday at lunch time. Google Maps caused detours twice over 40km. Rewarded with a scene of many pretty girls. Otherwise, the place is pedestrian, as much as it reflects the firm greige underbelly of PJ.
Sun 25May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.162years ( year3; month26; week113; day789 )
0054 : Back to a desk. How much can I get done before bed ...
1304 : Beautiful day - sun completely hidden from the sky by white clouds. Squeezing in reading while rice cooks, before a meeting.
1329 : Maybe something like this :
[ [local FUSE filesystem ] <> [local caching server] ] <> [web service]
1824 : I've lived this country for 37 years, but I wouldn't say I'm deeply ingrained with local culture. To integrate myself a little bit, I try to keep up with local culture by reading widely and speaking often to people, online or offline. Today I bought a bowl, of noodles. I was familiar with the format, and it helped me to consolidate memories about this part of this complicated country. Now I am back home, and I am going to get back to reading about compilers, which is more interesting, but no less complicated, than Malaysia.
1828 : I've lived this country for 37 years, but I wouldn't say I'm deeply ingrained with local culture. To integrate myself a little bit, I try to keep up with local culture by reading widely and speaking often to people, online or offline. Today I bought a bowl, of noodles. I was familiar with the format, and it helped me to consolidate memories about this part of this complicated country. Now I am back home, and I am going to get back to reading about compilers, which is more interesting, but no less complicated, than Malaysia.
2102 : collecting my thoughts. I have a lot of thoughts. I wish people would have more thoughts, so I wouldn't have to spend so much time collecting my own thoughts.
2224 : reading about the Go&Rust compilers, to begin myself
2238 : TIL Archimate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArchiMate
2324 : Domain specific languages ( DSLs ) in enterprise architecture. Some of these specifications are hundreds of pages long. There's TOG, The Open Group, OMG, Object Management Group, and a number of other funny-named consortiums. Given the size of these languages, it seems like a language lawyer or two would be needed to keep things in sync. And to justify that, you'd need to be working in an ecosystem where at least a couple of hundred details a day were subject to such regularisation and possibly regulatory compliance. So, I imagine ... users are either in strict engineering supply-chains, or in companies with less strict requirements but with north of a hundred technicians/engineers needing to communicate on multiple points per day ... certainly out of my experience!
Mon 26May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.164years ( year3; month26; week113; day790 )
0030 : I like the idea of a programming language just using BNF for type declarations. Not that I know enough about type declarations to say anything about this :P
0054 : I often complain that the city of Kuala Lumpur is boring. I think I did my spot of national service by running a nightspot for six years. I don't run a nightspot anymore. I also have very limited interest in recapping the struggle porn of running a nightspot in a third-world country LOL.
The value of the services rendered to society outweigh the entertainment value of narrating the lived experience thereof ... which was frankly, quite pedestrian. The most surprising thing about that was studying thermodynamics because of HVAC problems.
Everyone lost money on that business. Without naming names, I'll say it was a tough crowd. I just wish more people would do it, because cough, frankly, KL is still boring AF.
0127 : Well, I just figured out how different programming languages make system calls ( high privilege instructions, to the operating system kernel ). It turns out that hardware makers have cleverly assisted by providing what's known as a ""model-specific register ( a letterbox on THIS specific chip )"", called the [ long : [ system : target-address ] ] register.
LSTAR sounds like a pretty nifty name. I guess since the first business I ran was called Sudo, I could try running LSTAR as brand2, if it ever came to that. Haha.
0240 : Wondering if it's viable to follow LLVM frontend performance guidance to a tee, minimise keywords in the language UI, and create very syntax-minimal but expressive, and fast, languages. #daydreaming
https://llvm.org/docs/Frontend/PerformanceTips.html
0354 : 1. hew towards Linux kernel style
2. hew towards C standard data types (?)
3. compile to C; interop is ... C
-
4. minimise line noise, and keywords/keysymbols
5. take inspiration from Markdown for context-switches
6. modes : applicative/value-level, tacit/function-level; indented, braced;
-
7. Unicode first
8. Forth/Lisp-style bootstrapping
9. some control over memory allocation
10. preemptive multitasking
11. actors baked in
12. embeddable xyz-lang, marshalled returns
0405 : dust to dust. see you in the morning.
0434 : I feel suitably foolish today. I'm in risk-on positions in a weird time and everyone's turned into a JGB expert except me. Meanwhile I still don't reeally know anything about compilers.
1121 : Weekend kinda fried my brain. Perhaps partially due to inflammation from exercise. Perhaps gotta eat more.
1123 : Day 790. Gonna get up, feed, and see about what needs learning.
1202 : BRRRRRR (US economic policy is turning around) Comedian 1 : Oh boy, we're in debt. We gotta make more money - honestly, so don't print it too quickly. Spend it verrry carefully.
Comedian 2 : Oh boy, you're not printing enough money. Stahp spending money. Just stahp. Throwaway all the things. Stahp.
Whaddaya mean we ain't earning any money? We gotta spend money, to make money? Stahp the stahp ... we gotta make more money. Stap the stahp. Stahp.
1204 : The day begins with a study of program counters, in an examination of how programs implement error handling.
I want to work on tools, but well, one does the hard things first.
1225 : Computation in general is too opaque - its narration : unnecessarily complex. This hinders productivity in students and industry. I'm on a mission to simplify computation (for myself). Maybe that can help you too.
1231 : learning CPU instructions : back to basics ( and it would be nice if the markets would get back to basis - but I have no time to think deeply about that )
1245 : Most of us are born under power. Some are happy to serve, some are less so. Altogether, the discontents grind away at the institutions which surround them, constantly eroding what they perceive as their comparative disability.
1314 : Counselling today : Well, the design of perception is how power works. :) The question is, can you simply feel more powerful by shedding unnecessary perceptions? Or will you commit to being someone else's mind bitch ...
1606 : I had more focus on math and science between the ages of 8 and 17, but even as the Malaysian school system was a horrible place to focus on that, the environment was even WORSE about subjects in the arts and humanities. So the entire focus on my undergraduate career was on comprehending domains with fuzzy definitions - as it seemed the less fuzzy domains would be more trivial to address in good time.
By the time I'd graduated from college at 22, I didn't think of myself as a STEM specialist. I thought I'd left technology on pause for the time being, and was going to learn a lot about commerce, next, with a secondary concern for politics. I did one job after college that gave me a sense that I would be a decent logistician.
As it turns out ... business is generally just logistics for goodwill, finance is logistics for capital, and computing is just logistics for information. Ah well. So most of it is equally boring ... but some parts are more powerful than others.
1837 : Every idiot and their mom is waiting for the US to start printing. What we don't know is more calamitous than what we do.
1846 : Napped. Time to feed. Back to desk. Not in peak form.
1945 : Nice diagrams about C memory allocation : https://github.com/mtrebi/memory-allocators
Some hipster allocators mentioned before in group :
- mimalloc : https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc : MIT license
- jemalloc : https://github.com/jemalloc/jemalloc : weird license
- tcmalloc : https://github.com/google/tcmalloc : Apache license
2044 : I didn't know ( or had forgotten that ) Linus Torvalds moved to the US in the 90s. That helps to explain a few geosecurity issues in my mind ( which are probably superfluous ).
2325 : Legit did not even consider how expensive it is for JS to dereference a prop!
Tue 27May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.167years ( year3; month27; week113; day791 )
0310 : The Rust language : as interesting as its semantics are, it seems that much of the touted benefits of the language are the ENFORCEMENT of compliant behaviour by the compiler, and not much novel structure beyond that.
That is to say, compilers for any other existing language could simply add similar enforcement criteria that's turned on by a flag, and have many of the benefits of the Rust compiler. What did I miss?
0326 : Mediocre learnings today. Some epiphanies. Time to goof off
0333 : Ugly world, full of ugly systems. built by optimistic and forever pitiable people. Hm. When lacking for opportunities, I revert to the low-hanging fruit that failed past pickings ... fixing little problems with the most commonly used of sickly things. Wipe tables, clean toilets, write shell scripts, reinterpret JavaScript ...
0428 : Strategy : don't design new language now ; fix standard language to write good-enough literate programming toolchain first.
0450 : alright. focus on fixing javascript dev env.
focus on monitoring memory consolidation, hormones, diet, and kinematic loading
1234 : need to read up on duration gaps
1246 : Despite my gregariousness, I am generally hesitant to say too much to people who may be offended individually. So most of my speech is in abstract, to the public, on platforms like this one.
Today I will humiliate myself and work on JavaScript.
1303 : Also, while many programming languages have explicitly different syntax for declarations ( abstract rule-descriptions ) and statements ( reified imperatives ), there rarely is a natural language token such as ""declaration / require"" or ""statement / do "" which makes the VARIETY OF SYNTAX explicit to a non-user of the language.
1653 : PFL => FML
2158 : Dust to dust. Programs to programs."
"Wed 28May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.170years ( year3; month27; week113; day792 )
0246 : Time to goof off for the day.
0252 : It seems that ... *at least for educational purposes* ... a syntactically sugared, feature-restricted/added, compiler-enforcing, subset of C ... seems like a viable approach to answering ""how should modern programming languages behave?""
0336 : enforced sleep
1451 : To give you some idea about what I consider to be efficient ... I just threw away some scratch notes ... on paper saved from 1997. Gradeschool teacher's semester notes. :P This wasn't the plan. It just happened.
1841 : Napped. Smoggy day. Need to do groceries. Also buried under reading and revision of new stuff. Mostly memory management and type system varieties. 🌞
2055 : Jerng has 60% in common with Frege.
That is cute, but stupid.
2200 : Baudrillard's S&S should be the introductory text for any course in the study of graphemes. A clear axis is provided for comparing emoji, ideograms, hieroglyphs, abugidas & alphabets.
Thu 29May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.173years ( year3; month27; week113; day793 )
0100 : Run time. Pls don't mug me.
0230 : Lisps, to compiler architecture, to combinators, to integers, to group theory ... what a fucking week. Yet I would not have dared to guess that I would be capable of executing this much comprehension. Probably, I tend to be too conservative in my ambitions.
I spent the age from 26 to 29 studying programming, in various contexts. I thought, at the time, I should make myself do hard things while I was young, fearing that I would not have the agility to get into it if I waited till I was older. I am not sure if that would have been the case, but I will never find out.
I only know that now, I am able to proceed based on what was done before.
0305 : 21.73% progressed. Still early, but as always, a hedged perspective means time feels short.
0307 : FML
rngs ⊃ rings ⊃ commutative rings ⊃ integral domains ⊃ integrally closed domains ⊃ GCD domains ⊃ unique factorization domains ⊃ principal ideal domains ⊃ euclidean domains ⊃ fields ⊃ algebraically closed fields
0405 : It's a bit of a stretch : starting the day with a comparison of computer memory management techniques, and ending it around the cardinality of the continuum. I don't really brain either. And I certainly don't have time to think about what my investment banking friends are up to - but it looms overhead has it has for twenty years. Haha. Perhaps for twenty more.
0420 : On the bright side, reading math is always refreshing. I can barely go two sentences on any Wikipedia page before having to hyperlink sideways. So that's about an average of a link every 15-30 seconds.
Working in the third world ... low-tech, poor governance, small money ... it often feels like you learn something new every 15 days or so.
0449 : I only date my friends. Probably why I'm absolutely useless at sex parties.
It's like, if I don't know anything about you, explain to me why fucking you would be interesting? I'm probably too much of a big picture person ... I would want to know why you feel the way you do, under any particular condition, in particular the conditions of the present. It's not personal, I mean I think about all the people I sleep with the same way. It's just what interests me.
Fuckable humans are open minds, with broadly nuanced structure. I don't like shy people. When I find one, I try and flip it over to find out how it works.
Why do you breathe?
Yes, physical attraction matters - but physically attractive people are
(a) all over the place, it's not like rare
(b) an elevated security risk, specifically because they are attractive, so further vetting is de rigueur
(c) if you bother to look good, chances are we have limited common interests
All that being said, rotating doors, big top of the funnel, cut, cut, cut ... one keeps an open mind while shopping 🤓
0642 : The sky lightens. I will probably rot in this city. But first, I must go to bed. More reading later.
1208 : Good morning, my pathetic species. How can I fix you today?
1231 : tariffs :So, the deep state has spoken.
1235 : degrees per capita:wait till china catches up and has their beatnik decade
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-the-worlds-most-educated-countries/
1252 : Afraid of AI? Governance is very simple. Don't trust without verification. Don't cede power without leverage. All black boxes are governed the same - it doesn't matter what they're made from : ultimately they get obligations, and with obligations, come rights.
1255 : Today we look at the distinction between mathematical classes, and sets
1331 : NAND gate > S&K combinators >
Church encoding > elementary arithmetic > group theory
... right
1539 : The current interface : C++ and set theory
1700 : did more research on vitamin d pricing and halflife
1715 : Sub-study : QuickJS because it has a C interface
1729 : tidied up the workspaces. time to fix socks
1929 : Socks darned! Wondering if I should catch up on sleep, or try and get more work done.
1956 : Half the year, will soon be over. What have you done?
2057 : Rest and reflection. Fatigue begets an empty mind
2208 : If I was an engineer, I'd probably just focus on Go and Rust.
As a student of history, I have no choice but to give proper consideration to C, C++, and well, at that rate ... assemblers also. The latter because it changes with each generation of architecture.
2345 : (This links to a series of 2011 posts by Lattner on C grey magic.)
I am beginning to dread my academic instincts will add ""learning C-family languages"" to the list of things people ask me with capital letters.
WHY did you leave the US?
WHY did you quit government think tanking / management consulting / investment banking?
WHY did you work as a bartender?
WHY did you raise money to run a coffee shop?
WHY (do) you want to learn C-family languages?
As always, the answer is going to be something along the lines of ""well no one was paying me enough to do anything else"" ... and I was bored.
Fri 30May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.175years ( year3; month27; week114; day794 )
0002 : I wish I was smart.
Anyhow, whatever I lack in smarts, I make up for by being lucky.
0307 : types, and kinds.
1439 : Caught up on sleep, a little. Pushing through a low-sleep day with supplements is doable but unpleasantly bland ... especially risky for learning.
1542 : Choppy markets - looks like a trading day. But between compilers, type theory, and set theory ... I can confidently say there's no space in my head for bond markets right now. :D
1554 : Web dev is an expert domain. It's really useless for generalists ... :D
1640 : Catching up where I left off in college
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_type_theory
1713 : Maybe I should publish a tractatus mimemo-gubernaricus
Sat 31May2025, Sabbatical2 @2.178years ( year3; month27; week114; day795 )
0330 : It's going to take a while to memorise the APL spec :P
1622 : Awake. Not many hours slept, but good sleep. Timely administration of methylcobalamin and other exercises. Sevenish hours till the monthend. Velocity this month has been satisfactory. But the domain is huge, and I would like further acceleration. Things are simple, and finances have not yet collapsed. It is time to get up and make a bowl of eggs. Four large, a minute in the microwave, salt, pepper, add thirty seconds. Then back to the desk. Mohammad must go to the mountain.
1638 : Probably the only motivation have to get to a desk every day : the species is so boring, and no one else is paying me to make it more interesting.
1710 : 800 lines of programming language operators reviewed in one work day - even I gotta admit, that's a bit much. But, I think I have coverage of most common logic, math, and 21st century programming idioms. One can ... hope.
1745 : Grandpappy of NumPy : APL / a programming language
- Ken Iverson, a WW2-era canadian, wrote this in the 60s, before many current conventions existed
- many built-in functions for array/vector processing
- unfortunately, function names are non ASCII 🤯
- Ken did a flip, and released : the J language, based around ASCII, in
1755 : ""I'm studying copulas in the field of reified zoology.""
- #talknerdytome
1825 : Over the years, I have been envious of my friends who had high priorities to specialise. We do different things. On the other hand, commercial validation is generally a way to fill one's head with trash, and a tolerance for low standards of thought. So I suppose, sacrifices have to be made. We do things differently.
1908 : This will probably take a while. But I need to go memorise data structure memory layout patterns ala AoSaSoA, Iliffe vectors whatnot.
1990 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_(programming_language)
- contemporary NumPy is said to be rather isomorphic with the API surface of J, you may read up on that if interested
- I'm still digesting : went through the Reddit post on ""what are your most wanted built-in operators"" and it was very helpful in getting started in coralling together all the different notations from related fields : programming, math, logic ... which I need to tidy up into a single API with good UI
Sun 1Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.181years ( year3; month27; week114; day796 )
1351 : Time to feed
1619 : Conrad's secret agent : This is the kind of book which I would find fun to write. But it wouldn't be rewarded easily, so I don't bet on doing so :P
1824 : As I kick off a late dive into my academic interests, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to spend so many years in plebland ensuring that I brained our commonfolk.
Mon 2Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.184years ( year3; month27; week114; day797 )
0606 : Wrist still troubling. I guess that's not fully healed yet.
1345 : A week for reflection. Time passes too quickly, and nothing gets done fast enough. But that is a present concern. In the grand scheme of things, there is too much time, and nothing is done with any urgency except by troubled people.
1435 : Hanging out with dumb people, ostensibly involves getting thrown problems which originate from their own intrinsic poverty. A normal risk.
1517 : I keep getting the Danes and the Dutch mixed up. Oh well ...
1522 : Possible ways to (enforce) goofing off on the month end, even though I'd prefer to just get more work done :
- learn IPA ( linguistics, not booze )
- implement lexer and parser in JS for TPL-Generator
1526 : oh yes, and needlessly recompile docker files to save space
Tue 3Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.186years ( year3; month27; week114; day798 )
1319 : Awake. Off to make the most of my week.
1452 : 1. Increase tax, reduce FDI & FPI, hope DXY remains stable
2. Print more USD anyway : boost USD-stablecoins to soak up liquidity
I needto understand the points that are missing.
1501 : Reviewing my physical loading. Infrequently loading of 11 megagrams/Mg is not as optimal as it could be, due to infrequency. I haven't found an ergonomic way to do this ( lazy / other priorities ).
I am considering gearing down to 5 Mg of daily resistance. To be particularly conservative, I am going to gear it further to 2 Mg for starters. I need to keep a log.
1528 : While most of my work in life occurs in a bubble - I am thrilled to celebrate the social engagements of my peers.
1659 : TIL hypergraph
1732 : Reaching out : I used to broadcast shifts at the cafe, out of boredom. It was quite simple to turn on a phone camera with fast Wi-Fi.
Currently at deskbound work, I certainly don't cast enough for my own liking.
1. An old computer limits adds latency to work
2. A mobile internet connection limits bandwidth
Therefore, I shall now make a note for the future : whenever I do afford to upgrade both my computer and Internet connection, you will see me casting more often.
Maths on Twitch? Rubbish lol
1740 : Magnesium salt drops into hot coffee are rather droll ( see Mg vs tastebud science ). But due to accentuated bitterness, this is pretty good for iced coffee.
1902 : Fascinating history of video game hardware - things I ignored in my youth!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Video_game_consoles_by_generation
1928 : Feynman's work at The Connection Machine company is well documented in that 1989 essay."
"Wed 4Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.189years ( year3; month27; week114; day799 )
0213 : Initial measured lifting at home. Weak, under 2 Mg. Squats are harder than rows. Cute to have bed, kitchen, dining table, and weights, all within arms reach at the same time. But the space is comfy.
0258 : manners is lovebombing - commented on threads
1210 : Cameron Highlands congestion eroding tourism. Poorly engineered system. Malaysia is going from bad to suck, at STEM. We need more civil engineering activism in the rank and file of the federal government.
1227 : mantissa, mantissa ... wherefore art thou mantissa ...
1404 : Non-contiguous function overloading is bad.
Please put all definitions for anything in one place.
1422 : Golang : omg I hate what they did with `nil`
1428 : studying the Golang type system today
1613 : as an extrovert, I bluntly and loudly hate on my counterparties - that helps to get rid of irritating introverts
1921 : I have an unusual disdain for elite university aspirants because
(a) I learnt how to be smart before I went to university, not at university
(b) I didn't go to university aspiring to climb a social ladder
So, I mean, one day, I will need to get around to (b). But so far, it hasn't become a priority in life. Maybe one day.
2218 : I am a fool, but that is not a problem. I am an arrogant fool, so that is my main challenge in life. Consequently, I have to pad myself with guards to reduce my optimism in most things. So you will hear me rant a lot, about everything, as a matter of projecting pessimism.
2229 : Finally getting around to studying the Golang type system. I printed out the langspec in 2011, but didn't digest it immediately, opting to focus on learning Erlang and Haskell first in 2012.
Now I am returning to C, and C++, so Go and Rust are adjacent, so I should ingest as much of these all together.
2327 : Much work is undone. I think about how folks find it funny that anyone would spend time on this stuff. But then the world is richer because we are of different purposes. You think as little of digital forms, as I think of human bodies. So altogether, I suppose, we form a better society, although either of us would be nonchalant about the loss of the other.
2334 : TIL : ZFC is the dominant paradigm in modern set theory
2345 : Sometimes your role is to be the parent. Showing vulnerability to takers will only result in rejection. Lose the takers, unless you like parenting.
Thu 5Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.192years ( year3; month27; week114; day800 )
0103 : Thinking of implementing virtual memory layouts for data ... coding in JS ... this is like fantasy football ...
0142 : Mathematicians : we are going to derive everything from axioms
1. The first axiom is the notion of a Successor function, and from that we circularly derive Natural numbers
1.1. We have nothing more to say about where Natural numbers come from, so now we move to 2.
( I am not a real mathematician, so I apologise for any misrepresentation of real mathematicians. )
1321 : Everyone fills their time with things they fancy. What a waste for society and a gain for each of us.
I have never had the opportunity to be this productive. I may never have the opportunity again. That was my position in college, and now again.
In between, other obligations were fulfilled. I thoroughly studied the pleb.
1418 : I think most people are impressed by AI videos because they could never have done those operations in their own heads.
Quaint. But grounding.
1556 : I don't know why I'm so rushy. Maybe it is the lack of sleep, and thus the reduced working memory, and thus increased cortisol. Having lived 42 years without a proper study tool, it's good to be building one that pulls everything together. The peril of solo work is generally that one is the labour, and the whip, and the brake.
1613 : We're all writing '*' for multiplication because of FORTRAN 1957
1614 : Next, I must review the operators (o), (x), (+), ^ and v
1635 : Some business depends on persuading, some depends on taking.
The former is a realm defined by virtue.
The latter is defined by force.
I am almost always oriented towards the latter, probably due to having grown up with folks who indulged deeply in the former. :)
1648 : to get familiar with automated theorem provers
1658 : TIL : Isabelle descends from LCF ... so it is sort of a sibling tech to ML which also descends from LCF. ML implemented pattern matching using the `case:bock, case:block` syntax, which OCaml and Haskell adapted into `case->block,case->block`, and so you see it in Rust as `case => block`.
1915 : Napped. Feed. Back to desk.
Fri 6Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.195years ( year3; month27; week115; day801 )
0116 : Designing a programming language, from syntax to memory layout is quite humbling. And enriching : I am only doing it because I need to understand how to talk to computers.
0217 : Lifted. Showered. Snacked. Logging data, and back to the desk
0219 : What else is humbling, besides being smothered under the decision space of an entire programming language ... 30kg weight, maybe 2 friends I can talk to, living off eggs and rice. Haha
0238 : BTC.D's at 64% now ... looks like it'll make a mad dash for 73% at some point, and when it starts it might just do it within a 2 week span.
0257 : Uranium's up 50+% since April; AFK : african stocks have been on a tear
1444 : Awake and it's scary season. I dreamt of fear in operations. Some idiot will read this and report it for help. You are fools who fear fear and who cling to life despairingly. I hope in life to meet less fearful people.
1515 : Time to feed.
1541 : Caught up on sleep. Showered. Feeding. Checking the market.
Sat 7Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.197years ( year3; month27; week115; day802 )
2019 : Ignoring religions, the characteristics of the Malaysian pleb are three : family, food, and friends. So it is easy to filter away the noise simply by dissociating from these things. I was lucky to step away from these trends when I was in my teens and twenties. Maybe I will reconsider in the future, but for now I remain happy somewhat distanced from that. Meanwhile, the folks who work in my areas of interest are few, so as always, one must capitalise carefully. So by accident, I become an activist for STEM.
2042 : balenciaga is just warhol for gen yza
Sun 8Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.200years ( year3; month27; week115; day803 )
0121 : I dunno, boys and girls, we gotta lotta options here :
-> <- <-- <== ==> --> ->> <<- <<= =>> |-> |=> <=| <-| !> <! @> <@ #> <# %> <% &> <& *> <* +> <+ <[ ]> <] [> <{ <} {> }> \> /> <\ </ <| |> <? ?>
0217 : Malaysian education, at least public education, remains foolish. I'm 42, so I went to public school a while back, and it was horrible. Broadly, the guarantees of the MOE are a slipknot ... quality control is simply unprofessional, and lacking in rigour. I have very little else to say about it ( unless paid to ) but I just thought I'd put it out there, after reading the N-th news statement from some student about some issue.
0838 : Wasted most of Saturday. So stayed up Sunday morning to try and get some work done. I don't have the energy to brain these rewrite rules ... but if you like pattern checking, do me a favour and point out any inconsistencies. thx (table)
1621 : Hari ini aku nak terus desking atau nak jalan jalan bukit kiara ... I ingat desk je.
1812 : Spending days building Markdown tables isn't how I envisioned spending my days - but ah, that's life.
2038 : Academia has generated too many cute syntax conveniences which are obstacles to industry. Trying to unravel them all is an interesting problem.
ISWIM to SASL and ML ...
2050 : I had the privilege of growing up with ""social"" workers, so I had a firm grasp of how humans were motivated and organised by the time I was 14. Following my learning of how to quantify human experience, by my early 20s I had decided that the only hard thing I had left to learn was how to talk to machines.
But I was afraid that I would be deficit in understanding industry, so I made a point to study that first, for about 18 years. Now I hope to complete my study of how to talk to machines. I hope I will get to do this before I expire.
2107 : As a kid, I thought I'd be a scientist or architect, designing buildings, or clothes. But, now I'm designing programming languages. Life is full of surprises.
2107 : Ate my rice.
2332 : do and let, where and do, here and there, until and scare ...
Mon 9Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.203years ( year3; month27; week115; day804 )
0114 : In the vein of great philosophical works, perhaps I should publish
Cute, and Execute
0159 : I spent a few months on Haskell in 2012, during that sabbatical. I didn't go very deep. Over the years, I just picked up stuff surrounding it from other topics, and now it feels weird to just go full retard on stealing a bunch of its syntactical and semantic features for an experimental language. LOL
0502 : Super fucking tired - but tis the rites of passage.
0737 : TIL newest generation fighter planes are phat. Stealth tech means they basically shoot from farther away and function as baby bombers.
1544 : Good afternoon. The world rolls along and so do we. I have to study language design and efficiency today. How about you? Happy Monday.
1643 : 2024 was a really mid year for me. I hope 2025 turns out better.
1651 : Watching snips from Casablanca reminds me of running a joint. Old hat - didn't think too much of it back then.
Time to design my tools.
1754 : The day begins with revising the syntax of the typesystem.
2015 : Design decision on pointers : after playing around with ambiguous symbols of all sorts ... '*' meaning pointer in C, '@' meaning alias in natural language, '?' meaning ambiguity ... I have thrown all of it out, in favour of :
addr_of_data(anything)
data_at_addr(address)
2105 : time for groceries
2159 : rubber duck debugging? Kat nusantara katakita nyahpepijat beroyen
2357 : Amidst all this brouhaha : don't forget that HUMAN intelligence is ONLY pattern matching. But the CURRENT machines aren't matching the CORRECT PATTERNS. They will, soon enough. Sekian. :)
Tue 10Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.205years ( year3; month27; week115; day805 )
0102 : Next, continuations and type systems.
0249 : An opportune time for a breather. I seem to have cleared up the majority of pressing syntax questions for the TPL, so grazing will resume later. Meanwhile, perhaps time to catch up on chores.
0415 : After a fairly troubled week, I am happy with progress.
0726 : cataloging operator symbolcombinations : Not how I envisioned spending my time. But WTH, one does the necessary things for entertainment. I always wonder what my life would have been like if I'd been even more privileged and knew more smart people earlier on.
1618 : I have a deep respect for people who pursue their dreams and beliefs in human values through their jobs and businesses.
But I often don't share those values, so that is as much as I can do.
1636 : Sleep improved. Time to feed. Hormonal therapy via daily lifting may be stabilising.
1954 : Looks like today is mainly about type systems.
2041 : ""Semantic"" systems R&D like OWL and RDF tends to falter at the point where it doesn't have actual sensory data in its phenomenology.
https://protege.stanford.edu/software.php
2312 : Bestie : Maybe I just want to spend money to study fun things overseas.
Me : I can barely afford to study at HOME.
Bestie : You decided not to work, you are lazy.
Me : I do work, but I don't get paid for it. You get paid, but don't always do work. We are not the same :P"
"Wed 11Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.208years ( year3; month27; week115; day806 )
0822 : Most people are averse to the notion that the easier something gets, the less economically valuable it is for you to do it.
Ya? Please make it a habit to drop things as soon as they get easier.
I know it's supremely ablist, but since that's been onbrand for 20 ish years, i'm just going to kick it along.
lol
1015 : Minerals aplenty today. APM was up
1647 : Work this week consolidates around the canon of logic and type theory, as syntax and user interface has mostly been shaped up.
But first a review of physiological concerns. Vitamin D and magnesium loading seem to have helped increase actions per minute. More monitoring is needed. All productivity stems from management of the embodied supply chain.
2102 : A coupla weeks after trying to implement 'queues' in JS, I was walking home from the supermarket with two trays of eggs, and it struck me as interesting that a kinesthetic feedback system can be built wholly around sensors and queues with backpressure, without too much computation, IF the layout of sensors is taken into consideration - in other words, minimising the amount of math that needs to be done by properly designing the sensor layout. Very interesting - though it seems this would be common knowledge among roboticists.
2253 : Designing the quotation system!
2323 : A quiet period, for reflection. Come on bonds ... do something crazy.
Thu 12Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.211years ( year3; month27; week115; day807 )
1638 : Time to feed. Then back to a desk. I wonder what my loves are doing, near and far.
1750 : Limp VIX always gets me worried.
2103 : Most human thoughts are trash, and so is culture as a whole. Some of it persists over time. I really dislike using broken machines ... e.g. reading too many classical texts ... however that is essential, in my current line of work : organising the outstanding body of knowledge. After all, civilisation is just one lumbering, mid-fixed machine ...
2126 : TIL : John Locke was responsible for spinning off ""semiotics"" from biology. Both being cybernetics in the grand scheme of things.
2138 : TIL : I should start Mg dosing earlier in the day - perhaps the equivalent of ""after lunch coffee""
Fri 13Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.214years ( year3; month27; week116; day808 )
0226 : It's a goofing off kinda day. I've been interacting with economically stressed people on socmed, and I'm procrastinating on studying grammar and linguistics. Making up for my working monthend a week ago. Haha
0327 : The quirks of hermitude. I will probably never have the time to catch up with everyone, on everything. But I will probably be surer of my supply chain. Yet surety makes not one rich. It is simply a matter of taste.
0340 : Perhaps i shall take a drive around KL. Maybe pop by Bangsar at 0400 to get a coffee just to see how things are these days.
0508 : Genius bill. What this does is push the bag to the public markets. Because crypto is easy to shill to the masses, it helps tbill demand when usdcrypto pair transactions use tbills as collateral. Fees are taken off the hot end of consumer demand for crypto, incentivising usdstables to operate. The systemic effects however are that tbill volatility becomes increasingly correlated with crypto volatility. This has some interesting implications.
0532 : Rereading my 2005 homework, and reflecting on 13+20 years of poking and prodding at the same campaign ... is surreal because you only get to experience an adventure after it has been executed. And when you compare it to what you had in mind at the time of planning, if you can remember it, and if you resume a ""continuation"" from the planning state of mind, you basically experience time travel of a sort. Life is trivial but amusing.
0618 : Might do some CSS today. Finally get around to looking at grids.
1117 : Folks who put so much into relationship that it bothers them to lose it, are probably overreaching. But guess what? Lots of people have nothing more to live for than family, food, and friends.
1125 : Sabi Carpenter's new album cover has been controversial. Well, performative vulnerability is by definition the flaunting of privilege ... whether it is regarded as comedy or tragedy is left to the feminist as an exercise.
xref my recent post on comedy and cybernetics
1809 : Awake. Do all the things ...
Sat 14Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.216years ( year3; month27; week116; day809 )
0226 : Lunch break, of sorts. I think about my place. I have led an extraordinary life, and for that I am grateful.
0436 : Fed again. Time to lift.
1741 : Amused that I now know what readline is.
1813 : I live in a country where cultural offense is criminalised so I'm somewhat given to the fact that it will probably be the death of me.
Sun 15Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.219years ( year3; month27; week116; day810 )
0213 : Dietary adjustment. More protein today.
0310 : Entire apartment blocks are being blown up in Tel Aviv. Ouch. That's gotta hurt. If anything good comes from this, perhaps Israel will find it in itself to reform. Again, I don't have stock in EMEA. But any government who chooses this for their people is concerning.
0327 : the US has sent aid of about 0.3 T USD to Israel . Free toys : have you seen how these idiots deployed the F35? Go check out the take-downs tiktoks. They sent stealth planes at low altitude, into highly defended positions - basically asking a sniper to engage at pistol-range. This is not even tragic. It's just funny (I'm sorry, it's just plain stupid.) Every F35 Iran knocked down was 100 M USD of US taxpayer revenue. How exactly does one coordinate this while horsetrading with voters?
0415 : Officially drunk enough MgCl2 in my coffee to identify the taste note that Mg lends to fortified milk.
0514 : The Frame Problem is just a species of the Open World Problems. Google AI doesn't agree, for now.
0515 : I think it's time to enforce a run.
0800 : Most people don't realise that the title ""self-made x-ionaire"" intentionally excludes the mention of networks navigated by the player, which tends to be their key differentiator, more so with the fastest movers.
0844 : The folly of most people is that they only have an informal understanding of how how their own minds work, and upon that the have their social norms and ways of life. None of this matters in the grand scheme of things, but most people are not grand, and therefore it is incorrect to address them in terms of grand unifying concepts.
Simply engage with each person, based on what excites them. That is the way.
0852 : 1. Vegan complains about fish dish
2. Asians complain about vegan
3. I would like to complain about any asian, complaining about a vegan, who wouldn't also eat a human if it was on the table
Be fair la. Meat is meat. Otherwise, don't complain so much.
1003 : State of my study of machine language. I'm not smart enough to ""just get it"", so typically I do a lot of prep to understand things. One thing I've learnt is that most people, even professors, are shit at explaining how ""all fields"" are glued together. So if I want nice things, I usually have to go and find/make them on my own. Ah, well ... we have different standards of taste, I suppose.
1110 : Look out for World Labs. It sounds like they really get it!
1114 : Look out for World Labs. It sounds like they really get it!
1849 : Sales managers are the most interesting hiring managers. Period. All my memorable jobs chats are about sales, because there's so little material on the table, and expectations are high. It's like walking by a hawker and getting yelled at, you yell back and forth a coupla times, and then go on with life, remembering the conversation forever, because of the drama ratio.
1927 : I haven't prioritised much time for markets this year. A brief reflection on readings and conversations makes me skittish, as with many uneducated folks. Suffice to say my clarity of positioning motivation from 2022 has been somewhat cluttered over the quarters since. I must now reconsider my position.
1945 : Current student food stack : 300g (dry) rice, 7 eggs, 150g kailan, an orange, soy protein isolate, and supplements/snacks perhaps no more than 15 RM/day. Fish oil, creatine, and beta alanine, methylcobalamin, and other vitamins and minerals may be fine tuned. MgCl2 is a very cheap source of magnesium. KCl for potassium. Weeky cheat day for meat, but you can certainly do more - as the above is also optimised for prep needing only a microwave and 400g rice cooker.
2014 : Off for an adventure. In budget, not excessive.
Mon 16Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.222years ( year3; month27; week116; day811 )
0243 : An encouraging day. I learnt that World Labs is stating to do what I think needs doing, so it is much more comforting than just waiting for decades to find out who is going to do it.
And TVET students are starting to make 4k MYR/month which is basically where I want minimum wage to be.
I had a snuggle and a chat with a good friend.
I will now return to my hole in the wall before further work continues in my little way.
0446 : Rain. So it is a reflective evening.
0504 : Faas is forever. Today IOT runs on Faas. Tomorrow Faas runs on IOT.
0602 : the mathoverflow entry on turnstile vs double-turnstyle seems insightful. I'll throw it into my pile of 30 tab groups and 240 tabs.
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/44321/difference-between-turnstile-and-implication5:25:Alright so May sprint started 2WMay, ended 1WJune, clobbering the monthend. 2WJune kinda felt like the monthend.
Next sprint starts 3WJune, I guess. Hah.
0651 : If you decide to do an hour of your life without regard for other people's opinions, or by regarding other people's opinions as retrograde, you may find it refreshing.
If you do it for a day, perhaps you will find it tiresome.
A week, a month, a year, then five, then twenty.
It has been a rare privilege - though it may not be as rare as it seems to me.
0653 : 199x : Malaysia is VCR a/piracy hub of the world
202x : Malaysia is GPU a/piracy hub of the world
""it's the same picture""
0714 : So if last sprint was mostly crafting, this sprint seems like it will be mostly reading. Meaning I need to max out hormonal stimulus to wipe memory as many times a day as possible ... so perhaps it also means more exercise.
0803 : Breaking change : originally had allowed the "" | "" character into variable namespace but have replaced it with "" ` "".
Use case : proper-nouny variables like |SIGMA| are now `SIGMA`, to avoid confusion with the |modulus| operator.
Hm
0900 : I've been sheltered. I opened the door to let some air in. A loud fly entered. Slothful, it stood on my book. I sprayed it. It crashed upon the floor. Then nearby I saw its babies escaped. Wriggling. What an affair. Soon it was cleaned up. I should get out more often - I've forgotten that trash attracts bugs.
0932 : TIL : Authority Control : Wikipedia protocols
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Authority_control
0940 : Toying with the idea of separating ""data structures"" from ""structural implementation"". Such that, for a programming language, a user may define DS as interfaces with virtual methods, and SI as the backend implementation. For example ""data structure : singly linked list"", ""implementation : MySQL ( horrible choice )"".
1133 : 1 million feminist critiques of Sabi Carpenter : congratulations, you played your role in capitalism perfectly
1239 : While the attack on Pearl Harbour is better known, the Japanese landed at Kota Bharu 40 minutes before that, and there actually began the war on Allied forces in the Pacific.
1254 : A miserable dive into history. War is such a mess. I used to be of the position that I don't vote, just call me if there's a war and tell me who to shoot. But the BN lost, which was my canary, so now I vote.
1321 : I don't study AI rn tbh because ... I don't have a great grasp of the fundamentals of machine comprehension. I'm going to take my time about it, then after I get it, I'll join the rest of you geniuses on the automation bandwagon. 😎
2044 : As a career-oriented guy, I prefer career-oriented women.
As a non-profit-careerist, I prefer for-profit-careerists.
But non of this I think, would be different if my gender or orientation were swapped.
Idk lol
2137 : It's been six months since I did anything clever about volatility. Maybe it's time to take another stab at it.
2218 : What examples are there, of grammar frameworks which describe speech purely ""in the context of the speaker""?
Enforcing the notion that every sentence / proposition is implicitly prefixed with ""from the speaker's point of view ... ( sentence / proposition )""?
Thereby, excluding any notion of an ""abstract proposition unanchored to a speaker""?
2243 : How do you train temperament? What is normal is a matter of calibration. Having grown up in a non-commercial family, I graduated from college being quite aware that I had limited knowledge of business. After that I spent most of 18 years studying commerce and people in general, in my home country.
One of the things I did beyond that was to plug into financial news and chit chat. About the age of 29, I still felt that I had more to learn from not having money, than from having it. So when I did make a chunk of cash at that point, I tried to normalise in myself the intuition that burning large amounts of money was ok, which is not a concept I felt familiar with. After that, I made myself work in commerce for another 10 years.
2255 : The current 5y wave of AI stuff is very much an energy issue. The technology deployed is about 50 years old, but only now VC funding threw money to get the old tech to market at scale on the shoulders of hardware improvements. But the software/algorithms are fundamentally inefficient, so you see the sorts of energy usage numbers associated. The fun part is actually fixing the software so that energy consumption for a machine brain is much closer to that of human brains, or within 1-10x only. Now it is still much more for the same output :)
Tue 17Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.225years ( year3; month27; week116; day812 )
0006 : activism is STEM and philosophy : I don't do this stuff for fun or because I expect to see results in my lifetime. It is just a matter applying constant pressure as a matter of philanthropy.
0328 : Reading week. Butt in chair for a few minutes, feeding at the pantry, and lifting. Quick iterations, as it doesn't take more than a few minutes to saturate short-term memory.
0520 : I have a poor grasp of trading economics, due to a lack of practice. But I my theoretical grasp of formal the parts of speech in English is even worse, despite having practiced for some forty years. So I hope to catch up to parity.
Why even compare the two? I work alone, and with no objective guide, there is only the capability to compare the strength of grasp, between one part of myself and another.
0533 : Run time.
0724 : Weak. And the reading this month is boring. So more food, and more hormone churning via exercise.
0803 : netanyahu has unleashed the us. good doggy (so what's the probability of a simultaneous nuking between IL, IR, PK ?
guess the US is getting involved to ostensibly minimise the chance of that)
0815 : I guess American Exceptionalism is back.
0828 : Throwback to Operation Opera
1025 : Recently, 14yo me realised I passed the brandname 40yo mark a year or so ago, and now get to play the ""I told you so"", and ""I'm not a child anymore so you have to listen to me"", cards. That number comes up a lot in Abrahamic traditions. The Sanhedrin. UMNO Youth. All that kinda stuff.
I have generally been aware that my sense of time is a bit unusual, as I haven't encountered many paradigm shift since I was about 14yo. Whereas, many people seem to feel like a different person with every passing year, I have generally felt it to one long, droning, exhalation over all this time.
I remain. But I always also wonder : do I simply aim too low, in terms of what other people expect?
1031 : However, it's been somewhat pleasant to reset, after 18 years of ""doing time"".
1981 : Israel airstruck a research reactor sold to Iraq by France
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begin_Doctrine
2156 : AWS : launched in 2006, I started web dev in 2009, got around to learning it in 2014.
LLM SaaS : launched 2018 ... at this rate, I'm supposed to get into it next year, but I'm pessimistic that my current study rate will get me there by then."
"Wed 18Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.227years ( year3; month27; week116; day813 )
0247 : I guess life is a mixed bag. My privilege lies in my gender, my citizenship, and in the generational wealth of my global social class.
On the other hand I live in a third-world country, while most of my hobbies are first-world affairs. My country is a minority on earth. My economic classification by race is a minority in my country. And my intellectual perspective is a minority position within first-world affairs.
All included, one simply tries to get by without pissing off too many people in life.
0413 : For those who like AI stuff - I found one big name company doing it the right way : World Labs by Fei2 Li and Yann Lecun seems involved also. However none of their demos are low-level stuff : mainly showing only the super high level movie/game-style animations. https://www.worldlabs.ai/
0433 : Trying to capture the gist of what I find hard about living in the third-world. So, say I have a view, V, on how to progress civilisation in general. Then, surround yourself only with people of a parochial location, M, and learn to live among them, expressing respect for their perspectives, values, aspirations, and fears, MP. MP comes with daily operational concerns, MC.
To fully support MC, one reserves a significant amount of memory to accommodate MC on a daily basis - thereby one guarantees support and compatibility with MP. That being done, one must ADDITIONALLY allocate memory to V, and to the development of V as an operating concern for the long-run.
Ya, so I think, this is how I would frame the most difficult challenge of living in Malaysia.
0441 : Half day blown up by social distractions. Back to the grueling idiocy of learning meta-English which I ignored for 41 years.
0521 : TIL :
noun <= name <= nom
verb <= word <= werd
... still crawling through the mess of fuzzy categories ...
0631 : in the hospitality industry, it's common for brand design to include a scent ... come to think of it ... it's a dimension that could be added to any corporate brand whatsoever ... or personal brand for that matter lol
0730 : Due to learning how to talk to machines -->
I am learning how to design and build a programming language -->
So, I have to learn formal language grammar -->
So, I have to learn natural language grammar -->
So, I am ( finally ) learning English grammar -->
So, I get to also ( finally ) learn Chinese and Malay grammar -->
So ( finally ) I am spending more time on my national language ( it is my third non-technical language, so I never spent much time on it ).
1036 : TIL : albeit is literally although-be-it
1056 : TWIL :
subject (grammar) <=> object (software engineering)
predicate (grammar) <=> method application (software engineering)
verb (grammar) <=> method (software engineering)
object (grammar) <=> method argument (software engineering)
P = V + O
SVO's ordering is permutated in various natural languages
Veeery roughly.
1202 : Software hipsters x coffee hipsters :
barista <=> developer
pouri$ta <=> engineer
roaster <=> sys ops plz
green buyer <=> Rust or C?
bought a farm <=> fuck it, build a whole language
1245 : Malaysia SHOULD tax the shit out of imported produce, IF the government is developing local production in concert. BUT, Malaysia's food security issues are a long-standing economic distortion. The peninsula's dependence on foreign carbohydrates began before Malaysia existed, if I read history correctly. Why haven't they fixed this? It's embedded in pride, ""we need to eat the way we want"", NO, you should eat what you can afford to, and invest more wisely.
- no personal interest in food, but this topic is trending, so I'll give it a snort
Who said carbon footprint? No! Much of our land is yet unused for food. Land use needs review.
Want to reduce emissions? Stop subsidising fuel!
We have this gaya mentality that ""we should give agricultural labour to imported labour, because our manhours are worth more and can be traded profitably"".
True story : no one wants to pay us more than agricultural wages for our white collar labour. Our white collar labourers suck. The government simply did not execute this strategy well, over 40y.
|
|
|
( This second part is a very edgy polemic lol - couldn't resist tho, when my friend mentioned carbon. )
1306 : My workstation setup is different in this age.
: Chrome browser
: 50-some tab groups, all closed, color coded by rows, each row sitting in a min-height window, all windows stacked
: Shift+Esc : kills tabs for resource management
: Ctrl+Shift+A : find tab by keyword, if already open
: Extension : close duplicate tabs
I've been doing much of my reading in browsers since 2003 or thereabouts
1331 : TIL : under the Subject-Predicate(Verb,Object) model
: I / he / she / they ... are for pronouns in the S position
: me / him / her / them ... are for the same in the O position
: myself / himself / herself / themself / themselves ... are for the same in the O position, whenever the same referent is also in the S position
1350 : Statistical work on symbols will not get to peak efficiency, until sensory data is properly symbolised. There are various ways that will happen, but it must happen, in order for non-trivial cognitive models to reach peak energy efficiency.
1436 : The entire 2020s AI renaissance is still riding on froth ... buyouts, staff poaching and antitrust suites are all seeing those valuations because hype is still driving fat margins for the rockstar model publishers. During the dotcom crash, CSCO took a 80% haircut. That's a hardware company. What happened to the software and services companies?
What happens when the quality of software increases to a point, where it doesn't require as much hardware, and as much energy, as we are using now? Will demand for cheapened AI be elastic enough to sustain industry revenue through a gross slashing of margins?
I don't know, and I can't wait to find out.
2245 : I graduated in 2005 and returned to Malaysia with the intention of learning about commerce in general, and about Malaysian politics. The first job I had was with a friend at ISIS, where I found no quantitative or empirical work, so I switcheda out after 5 months. After working in a management consulting firm, and in an investment bank, I found low levels of sophistication, so I moved into startups and SMEs in 2007. 1/3
I helped some folks raise funding from a listed company, learnt how to tend bad, how to develop software services, how public relations firms engage with clients, and then took a proper sabbatical in 2012, to study functional programming. Then I worked with clients and investors in F&B until 2020. After two more years of work in organisational development I returned to my root interests of studying quantitative subjects in 2023. 2/3
I am not sure if I am ""done"" with commercial work, or if I actually know anything about Malaysia, or commerce, after all this time. However, it is good to have had the experience thereof, so that I have been able to check it off as due diligence. Over the next few years until 2032, I will find out what I can, on the budget that I have. Then I hope to return to commercial work. 3/3
2318 : 4QY2-1QY3 : good progress on tech studies, slight improvement in nutritional control, need to reduce memory latency, need to increase mechanical load, need to improve financial stability
2357 : grammar studies resume.
Thu 19Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.230years ( year3; month27; week116; day814 )
0011 : As a result of studying programming, I am going to have to dig into more Greek and Latin despite avoiding Euro classics since forever. Brilliant.
0233 : To make it explicit, I really want to rename `functions` to `blocks` / `routines` / `procedures` in this design ... but that would just confuse everyone. And replacing the keyword `fn` with `prc` would be a good political joke, but might be too offensive to some users.
0336 : Added to the list of feature considerations : ""rename weird FP terms to fit a broader audience"".
0404 : I'm definitely too rushy in this season. I was quite happy albeit also slightly rushy while skimming bags of books per day around 2004. Perhaps I'm just grouchy as a matter of having put off some of these things for 25 years.
0621 : Coffee break. Morning traffic ramps up
0800 : Finally got around to people watching the morning crowd from the coffee kiosk by the MRT. Not disappointed. Very stimulating.
Also had a brief chat with a bloke on Instagram who was telling me what to feel about my daily business. I apologetically removed their access, and reminded them that life is a daily process of debridement. Not pleased to lose friends, but P&L you know ...
0934 : Travel cost 3.60
Coffee 4 - 6
I can actually afford this! ampang mrt from sentul barat.
1213 : Less reading today. More recreation. More lifting and reading intermittently.
Gonna double calcitriol dosing again. Up to twice a week from once. Plama halflife numbers are just nice but hoping not to OD.
1320 : Ok berita harini yang membimbangkan ramai rakyat kita ... isu fatwa SIS dan makhamah persekutuan. Yg saya dapat lihat, isu maruah agama turut dibincangkan umat2 yg berkenaan.
Saya hanya tahu : status agama dalam negara adalah wujud dari perundangan sekular, dan bukan sebaliknya. Jadi sebarang cabaran terhadap isu ini turutlah kena berlaku atas pentafsiran perundangan sekular. Kalau mana2 isu boleh disokong perundangan sekular, kuasa atas isu itu bolehlah terpindah kepada perundangan keagamaan!
Fri 20Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.233years ( year3; month27; week117; day815 )
0055 : Cleared building governance documentation.
Signed up for annual volunteer opportunity at USAPPS. Based on feedback from previous years, I don't have anything to offer. So I focused my facilitation preference on the STRATEGY and GOALS for students applying. In my own experience, if you are looking to optimise for LEARNING, college may not be the best place to be ... not expecting to used this year, but, always good to offer.
""Available to facilitate chats with parents or students on the SPECIFIC goal of going to college to optimise for LEARNING, and NOT commercial gain. Background : I discovered during college that the education system itself is not designed to optimise for this objective, and so would have just dropped out after sophomore year if I wasn't literally getting paid to go to school. Basically I am available to discuss the subject of overall STRATEGY and GOALS with folks to help minimise any misinformed choices on the matter. Generally, students should also be aware of the overall salary landscape in KL and the US during their planning. For example in KL the fresh grad range to plan for is 1.5k-20k/month, and the 35yo range is 1.5k-400k/month ; the US side is correspondingly higher. This information is generally not available to many students during their planning phases.""""
0119 : Cooking the first rice of the day. Should I jump back into reading, or just continue the break, and focus on rest and lifting?
0243 : I find that the main characteriser of academic life is obedience. :)
If you are able to publish, you never actually need to be in academia.
Just like if you are able to capitalise your own business, you don't need to be employed.
It is something not enough kids are told, because we need obedient kids to do work.
0257 : Time to hit the (slide) decks ... and try and map out linguistic typology and parts of speech
0456 : Getting closer to starting on linguistic graphing. Perhaps with morphology. It is quite depressing to be buried under so many shoddy concepts, in the effort to straighten them out unaided.
0507 : First set of the day. 20 front rows.
0605 : The linguistics portal on Wikipedia has got to be the messiest thing in the world, due to the explosion of pseudoscientific taxanomic categories ... fml
0640 : Emotional labour has its own line on balance sheets. At some point, people will be told that that noises they make are repulsive, and that your involvement in operations isn't there to accommodate their specific needs. Some parties will respond to negative feedback, others won't. Throw'em out.
0705 : 20-years-ago, in college I thought psychology was a primitive pseudoscience. I haven't kept up, but I expect not much has changed. Too much reliance on natural language - but we don't blame the psychologists, for the same reason we don't blame the linguists for the messes they've made on Wikipedia. The study of fuzzy-minded people by fuzzy-minded people is bound to be somewhat fuzzy. Things don't become MECE very easily until the entire population migrates gradually to that borg-like ideal which I hope to see, but don't expect to see within my lifetime. :P
- chats from Threads
0759 : cute but no time to study : metrical foot wiki
0807 : I am the fool which decided to start learning grammar at the age of 42.
1429 : the LLM renaissance is funny because now everyone is some kinda amateur philosopher of mind
1601 : TIL : Discourse Representation Theory has a decent quantification framework for ordinary sentences. Much more to read in the history of linguistics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_representation_theory
Sat 21Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.236years ( year3; month27; week117; day816 )
0440 : Physio check : protein before bed, positive experience. Did 7-8 sets of 20 front rows through the day ... also becoming a happy routine.0300 on Saturday. Inboxes checked. Time to get fed and desk.
0635 : Ah! Google Translate has Cantonese audio since mid 2024. Now I can finally learn it :P
Cantonese is the second most common Chinese dialect spoken in Malaysia, if I am not mistaken. I went to a formal Mandarin Chinese school, but didn't pick up Cantonese or Hokkien beyond basic street talk.
0736 : Surveying 20th century linguistics is like surveying theology. The explosion of pseudo-scientific paradigms is quite overwhelming. Verbiage. I am finding that it is useful to ingest Wikipedia article as lectures by having them played in the background while I do other stuff.
1830 : Raising money for your company?
Protip : count every string attached. Very very carefully.
Sun 22Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.238years ( year3; month27; week117; day817 )
0630 : Awake! Portfolio has gone to shit. All within expectations. Socials for the week seem to have cleared up. Back to a desk.
0706 : Someone complained that Elon wanted to correct a corpus of human knowledge before training a foundational model on it. Well I've generally said that unsupervised learning is economically inferior to supervised learning, not that anyone seems to care for the most part :P
0742 : My least favourite part of doing science is ... wading through the history of ideas ... but that is, after all ... doing science.
0803 : TIL anthropologists (rightfully) spend a lot of time studying the cishet gendered generational structure of fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters. This has resulted in a relational notation e.g. :
MoBrDa / MBD : mother's brother's daughter
FaSiSo / FSiSo : father's sister's son
etc.
0822 : Bye Fordow.
0830 : Well now, I guess president Vance is up to bat, with Trump having been manipulated into triggering Fordow's destruction. We shall see how congress plays it out ...
0839 : Everyone who works to build something is working against everyone who is trying to unbuild it. That's the nature of social engineering. Petty politics, with some math sprinkled in.
0842 : I see Malaysian fragility, I spank it. At some point it will be the death of me.
0852 : Whatever it is you fear, someone is interested in it, because you fear it.
Whatever it is that gives you peace, someone is interested in it, because you depend on it.
Either you hold stock in what others have access to, and invite interference, or you hold stock in something else and make others irrelevant to your interests.
0859 : Do your neighbours terrify you?
0901 : Just curious : how many deep cover operatives do you suppose each government has, within each other government's geosecurity apparatus? The cold war's going to be 100 in another 22 or so years.
0941 : Til the ancient Latin term 'aborigines' has fallen out of fashion in modern times because of the dominant association of the suffix 'ab-' with negation. This is really the only reason why it is disfavoured against the also ancient Latin terms 'indigena'. As for why the Latin term 'nativus' has also been disfavoured, that is probably due to the widespread modern use of the that term, rendering it too vague for the specific subject of hereditary identity in geopolitics.
0954 : Every day for forty years I wake up and wonder how many Malaysians are going to be triggered today. How are you feeling, my terrors? Lovely weather, at least the clouds are out.
1007 : AI developers need to put a bit more emphasis on these, in order to make AI text less distinguishable from meat text. It's not hard, really, if you have the right underlying data structures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trope_(literature)
1017 : I wonder how long it will be before my newly attracted haters either go full scorched earth or decide to ignore me.
1028 : It is always interesting to try and figure out how to interrupt thought processes, within the rules laid out by local law. The nature of language is such that the the boundary between legal, and illegal, remains a matter of judgment, and that's why we have so many interesting headlines about this or that court order, throughout history.
1111 : Til : Propp's model of mythemic tropes
1122 : Why does everyone think the US market will open down on Monday? ( further comment reserved )
1126 : 1. It's a mistake to conflate the current state of AI with what AI is capable of as a general concept over a thousand ( or hundred ) years.
2. The isometry between AI and NI can only be evaluated if folks have a quantified model of NI, which we currently do not.
3. AI is therefore a tool in the iterative research of determining the very nature of NI.
4. Any prejudice against the quality of machines vs meat is just ... hubris.
1134 : got around to reading about cravats and ascots finally
1205 : Some strangely competent members of society might just be agents for hidden powers. I guess we'll never know.
1231 : TIL Belgian Symbolism is a thing
1242 : If a rich yellow person does it, it's kiasu, but if a poor brown person does it, it's just economic policy. What's the difference? Both are motivated by fear of loss.
People ought to be unashamed, to be selfish.
1246 : You could go a step further. ""Bad people have more to gain from becoming leaders. That's why good people have to make an effort to be leaders, even though it's terribly boring.""
1432 : One of these years I might actually have to run a team that encodes an understanding of human development, the arts, and the humanities ... into bot. And that might be fun. But right now, most of those texts are just annoying distractions while I look for structure on the machine side.
1447 : I would pride myself on being ruthless and amoral, but I generally don't live up to my own expectations. So every day is an attempt to sharpen that knife. I guess everyone picks values and hobbies in life ... what else can we do with all this extra time ...
1503 : Orang Malaysia malas. Suka bayar orang lain buat kerja. Tak mampu dibayar orang lain. Sebab itula GDP/cap kita rendah. Tetap kita miskin je. Inila rumusannya. Nak tinggikan ekonomi, kena adjust dua barang ini saja. Yang lain, runcit je.
1527 : So how hard is it to :
1. build a deep bunker
2. move around uranium that's already purified
3. move around equipment
Did the US strikes actually accomplish any long-term goals, besides a show of force?
1800 : Between practice, and watching a hot rock climber's tutorial - I've figured that I need to do underhand grip rows to get rid of the wrist-ache ... we shall see
1811 : Maybe I should just set up a centre for anthropomorphic computing in Bandung
1814 : it's veggie time
1830 : Trump's value to the GOPGreen apparatus has purely been his viability for term2. Is he ready for the abandonment he'll experience after that? Or will we never need to find out?
Mon 23Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.241years ( year3; month27; week117; day818 )
0557 : It's risk-off again for many of us. Time to get up for the day, and think about macro. But first, enforced feeding.⁰
0653 : I'm not a very worldly person, but I do remember being in Houston at my aunt's place for Christmas in 1991, and watching the news about soldiers in the Gulf. In 2025, I still have to Google where Kuwait is, as I have studied neither geopolitics nor geography nor business in that region.
Most of my social life these days is online.
- LinkedIn to read about macroeconomics
- Reddit for programming language theory
- Instagram for fitness
- Threads and Facebook for national and neighbourhood stuff, including philanthropic opportunities
I think it's because I've never found a cohort with very similar interests, so I do most of my work on my own, despite having the temperament of an extrovert. Well that was an interesting reflection, and now I am off to figure out myself for the day. Markets in Japan are open ...
0713 : The downside of looking at my finances only every few months is I have to Google the meaning of every financial ratio in my dashboards - so much for the utility of dashboards :P
0813 : After review about 9 months of technicals, it looks like I am still in risk-on mode. Clown car.
1025 : Chauffer duty.
1720 : Nouveaux riches are very cute!
1722 : Probably the only asshole in KL with a Synesso next to the sink that hasn't been turned on in 5 years. FML I need to sell this thing.
1752 : I'm going to be so broke if this market crashes. #riskonclowncar
1755 : Maybe I should work as a driver for dopamine therapy. But it's so dangerous.
1826 : I have been thinking that logging trades by hand is not efficient - but I guess at low frequency, it's kinda like gardening ... some sort of R&R ritual ... LOL
Tue 24Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.244years ( year3; month27; week117; day819 )\
1002 : If your happiness depends mainly on the cost of living, you don't have happiness. You have a perpetual liability.
1031 : The market for discretionary goods is robust. (I believe) I own bits of trendy tech companies, fashion majors, and hipster coffee companies, besides working twice on a trendy client project and running a hipster cafe myself for six years.
But no one needs an iPhone, Italian threads, or third-wave coffee. These do not qualify as needs. Seduction is about desire. Play the game. Take the money.
BTW assuming 20% yield, instant coffee is like 14 MYR/kg beans, zero time and machine cost. Priorities.
1218 : Alright. Busy day of socials. Responded to various conversations on social media. Back to data entry ...
1317 : Done with data entry. Back to linguistics, I guess.
1358 : From 1990 to 2000, I was mainly interested in computers for sensory stimulation. This got me interested in how computers work, and learning that got me interested in how people work. By 2004 I had figured out how both fit together, and identified my remaining deficiencies of understanding in the maths stack.
But the maths stack is very broad, and very deep, and anticipated to an endless study, which is why it was then slated for the final stages of my life - after I had first taken some time to study commerce and politics, which I focused on mainly from 2005 to 2023. During that time I made rudimentary efforts to keep up with computing, as a staging platform for later advances upon maths.
From 2023 to 2025, the little academic work I have done has been locking down what I don't know about computing. I still hope to figure most of this out by EOY, so that I can get to maths. But I never know if I will be able to succeed.
1458 : Rowed today's first set. Ate a carrot. Skimmed a few pages of the proof training text. Making another (instant) coffee.
1521 : Time to memorise maths functional terminology ( postponed 22 years ) : injection, bijection, surjection, rejection, apapundejection
1547 : Ok - easing my dumbass into this ... this week I need to memorise the common : *jections, *morphisms, and rules of transformation rules
1711 : My priorities after high-school :
1. get a job that pays the bills ( rarely an issue )
2. figure out what else is worth doing ( deferred ... )
3. ( ... via ) completely brain the canon of human knowledge ( in progress )
4. maybe get laid and all that ( didn't bother to get to until around the ripe-old age of 24, about a decade after it was a hot topic among my peers )
I think if I ever get done with (3.) it will be fun to iterate on (2.) via capital-accumulation and deployment. But I don't feel comfortable making rash decisions before (3.) gets settled. It's probably an alignment with the nature of strategy in general : ontology, before ethics ... figure out what exists, before figuring out what to do about it.
1812 : Life is a series of daily decisions about what to memorise, and what to forget. Most days I don't bother to remember which is Left and Right, or the national anthem. This week I decide to memory transformation rules and the definitions of functional relations.
1815 : modus ponens : stuff I avoided memorising in college - it is time - to ingest the latin
1914 : Work, and rework.
I had already completed the first draft of lexical design for the Target Programming Language, when I chanced upon a recent interview with Tao and was influenced to do a more indepth survey of theorem prover syntax : Lean, Isabelle, HOL, Rocq, Agda, Idris, etc. This is quite uncomfortable for me, as it puts the carts somewhat before the horse - I am building the TPL to enable me to study maths, but first I do a review of existing maths tools, which requires digging into maths first. Ah, it is a reasonable obstacle.
Anyway, so far, only Isabelle seems to have a list of ASCII notational standards which I should take into consideration.
Death, and undeath.
1945 : quad erat potatum
2203 : After 18 years of cultural assimilation, I may need to work harder on recalibrating my context. Where I live, it's possible to go for a walk all day and to meet
- not one person who is physically fit
- not one person who is conversationally agile
- not one person who is studied
- not one person who is rich
So, I think, I need to locate good alternatives from the Internet and surround myself with such."
"Wed 25Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.247years ( year3; month27; week117; day820 )
0035 : Messy day full of daft people, and readings about daft people.
0657 : Awake. Not so well slept. Probably need more time to recover from recent chores. Back to a desk after preliminary feeding.
0929 : Prompted by my Malaysian programmers group to read about type systems today, so that's where the day begins ...
1005 : Maybe I'm too judgy. I think about Malaysians who only look inside the country as being stupid.
I think about Malaysians who are trying to adjust global affairs as slightly smarter.
Malaysians are about 0.43% of global headcount, 0.36% of global GDP.
This should tell you something about your place in the world.
1021 : pure hypothetical syllogism
mixed hypothetical syllogism
right ...
1024 : defeasible reasoning
counterfactual conditions
non-monotonic logic
bleaurgh
1047 : ""You are studying computers? What are you studying?""
""Types""
""Typing?""
""Type theory ...""
""Oh, theory of typing, ok good luck""
1106 : Frege's Über Sinn und Bedeutung ( Sense & Reference ) can be summed up as
1. any signal, takes a form
2. the form may have loose connotations ( sinn, sense )
3. the form may have firm connotation ( bedeutung, reference )
4. the connotations, may be interpreted differently by any emitter or receiver of the signal
Further canonical efforts to nail this down to tighter language may just make it worse : see Kripke's 'possible worlds' bike shedding
1151 : TIL : the common use of intention / intent / intends is separate from ...
`intension` which corresponds to `extension`
1207 : Break time.
1236 : What I do on my lunch break : clear dating app swipe quotas.
Lol
1408 : Hopefully this year is a long-ass vomit dive such that it helps me avoid rework for every year afterwards. But that is a lofty aspiration.
1621 : Most people have a very trashy comprehension about the world - this is probably distributed pretty evenly across all econ classes. In order to add value to their minds, you must present an equally trashy interface, such that it doesn't look like trash to the counterparty. Some of us cycle through many different interfaces as we talk to different people each day. It's not a good look, but the important thing is, from the POV of each individual we talk to, they understand us at that point in time.
1714 : revising WAP and SAP : anthropology, not the Cardi B take
1817 : All medium-to-large companies should have an AI agent that functions as a bureaucracy coach that tells you how to navigate the monster. Governments in general, too.
1820 : TIL the anomalous bank notes of scotland
1826 : The nature of truth. If it is just a hormonal cascade from non-contradiction in a memory buffer, then it coheres with the coherence theories of truth, I suppose.
1907 : Break time. Maybe grocery time.
2046 : Perhaps time to goof off for the day.
2055 : Goofing of today is : back to lexeme design
2101 : Malaysians opposed to socialism crack me up. The main reason I came back INTO the country was to benefit off socialist economic policies. Strange how life turns out.
2148 : error error error ; might need to roll back backticks
2324 : Capitulated, and reverted from Prolog/ASP style comments ( %%, <%...%> )
to Haskell style ( --, {-...-} )
since most proof assistants use that : for a net reduction in line noise
Thu 26Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.249years ( year3; month27; week117; day821 )
0007 : Made so many design changes today, that I almost don't recognise this language anymore ... butttt as they say, murder your darlings, so I hope this is a better draft.
0028 : Sometimes I'm such a reckless fucktard it's a miracle i'm still alive
0137 : Didn't die today. Maybe die tomorrow. Meanwhile do fun stuff.
0859 : Awake. Back to grind.
0921 : Presentation is one of those things best maintained at 130% so that when you slack off, it's still 100
0938 : Trying out the All In podcast - first episode out the gate at 1.3x : bit of chat in my area of my interest ... AI implementations need to be hardware-aware.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0hE2Z9xGAwYlLzo77Klnkk?si=b80f1d9484314f2e
0958 : Chinese people arguing about Chinkness.
Malaysian people arguing about Myness.
As a Chinese Malaysian who has cultural vestmest with neither ... I'm just going to focus on STEM stuff and giggling at plebs.
1122 : 1956, a group at RAND creates the first automatic theorem prover, and elsewhere McCarthy coins the term 'artificial intelligence'. Perceptrons were in 1957, so my common whinging about ""the software is 50 years old"" is actually off by about 20 years. It's 70-years-old, and ta-da : still missing that fundamental sensory data structure I was studying in college 20-years ago :P
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Theorist
Actually ... the neural algorithm was discussed in 1943 by McCulloch & Pitts, so arguably in 2025 the software THEORY is 82 years old, and the implementation is 68 years old.
It's really good to be able to catch up on this stuff which I paused studying in secondary school. Whee. 25 years later. Life traverses queerly.
1223 : Most people are boring to me, because they wouldn't be able to write down the entire structure of their lived experience on a single A4 sheet. Whereas I have been able since college, and so I am boring to most people.
Maintaining an openness to appreciating other people's unnecessary complexity is what I refer to as anthropology. Doing anything empathetic about it is what I refer to as philanthropy.
It is a hindrance to social life, if one is too happy with one's existence. For entertainment's sake, one must reach out to engage with society from time to time.
1238 : Didn't realised Tibet is like 12% of China's landmass LOL. No wonder it's been an issue.
1318 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemonium_architecture
This 1959 concept is still applied in current AI engineering.
In the long run, the PUs will get smaller, and the distributed computing model is what interests me more as it runs into IoT. That's why I remain interested in the area of custom hardware.
1335 : I just wish other people would write better software so that I wouldn't have to pick up a keyboard. Grumble grumble something governed by inferiors because lazy etc.
1409 : Blackboard : design pattern : Picking up on the proper nouns for common design patterns. Not supposed to be doing AI yet as it's a low priority ... but in my library research on grammar and semantics, this comes up anyway.
1418 : As an undergraduate, academia was not attractive because of its politics. The attention-seeking machinery, struck me as crass. And I figured that people who cared more about being clever, than being recognised as clever, would simply spend their energies elsewhere.
1745 : rearranged some storage. aesthetics only. mostly unused commercial hardware
1802 : Break. Back to reading.
1814 : Came and went before its time. I wonder how many failed attempts there have been/will be at getting humanity to the level of borg intelligence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED_manifesto
2013 : I'm not sure if I am more impressed by my 18-year hiatus from academia, or disappointed that the world still hasn't figured out how to build properly quantified models of consciousness. I suppose if you want anything done properly, you sometimes have to do it yourself. But I do wish someone else would do all this quicker than I can or care to.1825Hate, is a strong word. But I think it is fair to say I reserve hate for people who work in formal fields, yet evangelise that there are things that shouldn't be formalised. It just seems counterproductive - they should really not clutter the literature. Then again, this is a matter of religion, and thus to each their own.
2108 : The unfortunate state of civilisation at this time, is that it is made from animals whose individual priorities ... are always always things that begin with the letter F, like family, food, and all that. Getting people to divorce themselves from these foolish (sic) things and to focus on structural issues is almost always an ... anxiety inducing burden requiring great attention to detail in not pissing them off.
2308 : TIL : [aspect-oriented programming] and [attributes in C code] are similar
2355 : clutter clutter clutter, but i remain optimistic
Fri 27Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.252years ( year3; month28; week118; day822 )
0918 : Awake. Back to chores.
1644 : Maybe I don't work hard enough. I tend to prefer long uninterrupted periods of days and weeks, but perhaps intraday I should exhaust myself more frequently.
1800 : A maudlin day
1913 : I suppose hormonal balance is maintained by iterating between work one is comfortable with, and work one is quite uncomfortable with.
2010 : Messed with the geetar for the first time in ages. Guess it's a slow head day.
2114 : Maybe it is time to buy water colours. It will have been 25 years.
2208 : Lifting. Guitar. Found a spot to drum on the floor.
Activating as many neurons as I can haha. Need to check if neighbours can hear me.
Sat 28Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.255years ( year3; month28; week118; day823 )
0003 : 1992, : I like math
1999, : high-school math is very poorly taught, in my view
2002, : college math is very poorly taught, in my view
2003, : I decide to do math ""later""
2025, : I start writing a programming language to help me study math
Currently : I have to study math, in order to write a programming language ... so I just can't win in the short term :P
1139 : Back at a desk. Good morning. I spilled eggs in the microwave, as I was thinking about all the following at the same time and didn't pay attention to the frictional coefficent at my fingertips :
- my socmed campaigns on activism in Malaysia
- some discussion of aesthetics in the design of programming languages
- a wasp that was lost in my home
What a cleanup. LOL. Anyway, I think there is a coders meetup at 1U today ...
1300 : I should qualify my lack of impression by Malaysia.
1. The existence of the entire species is a bit of a joke to me.
2. In that context, most individuals are laughable idiots.
3. Among the laughable idiots, Malaysians are not especially impressive.
4. So liddatla.
1645 : Maybe I don't work hard enough. I tend to prefer long uninterrupted periods of days and weeks, but perhaps intraday I should exhaust myself more frequently.
1718 : done with coffee social with coders. bought watercolours.
2209 : Back at a desk, after a distracting day. Networking, and then picked up a free old Arduino from here and there.
2318 : I should probably fuck around more often - but no priority.
Today is for ... revising the J library of vector functions
2352 : I just find it amusing that the big B club of folks like Thiel and Horowitz have managed to do a Wiley E Coyote airwalk ... from sounding like they have a great grasp of economic fundamentals ... to spewing wolkenkuckucksheim inspired baloney ... all in the span of 15 years ... and I am very interested to see how long all of this stays up.
Sun 29Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.258years ( year3; month28; week118; day824 )
0110 : Need to catch up on finance reading. First, bed.
0118 : Daily resistance still too low. Also calories.
0133 : Enforced feeding.
1004 : Enforced waking. Need to start tracking down time to add more hours, perhaps. Neuroplasticity issue.
Speed of learning is currently bottlenecked by plasticity issues, so I need to snoop around all that chemistry of latency stuff more.
2011 : If nothing else motivate us, I guess training to raw dawg it against the enhanced humans of the future is a thing
2102 : It is time to goof off for the day. It was not an especially productive day. At least i lifted a bit of weight.
2143 : The root of all folly is the indiscipline of having an uncontrollable impulse about any external stimuli. But it is what it is, and only practice can temper it.
2144 : The root of all folly is the indiscipline of having an uncontrollable impulse about any external stimuli. But it is what it is, and only practice can temper it.
2228 : Life is not supposed to be fair, pleasant, amusing, comforting, free, insightful, kindred, affirming, equitable, just, unregretable, or happy.
If you want it, you must make it so.
2259 : All people live.
1. Some believe they understand their world. Foolish.
2. Some believe they deserve to live. Foolish.
3. Some believe they deserve to live better. Foolish.
4. Some believe that others will protect them. Foolish.
All people then die. Choosing to live a life of folly, is up to you.
2328 : I'm from Malaysia. Watching the US go through ICE of 1Q25 is a bit like amateur hour, without judgement about the rightness or wrongness of it. The immigration situation in Malaysia has always been violent and politically charged. The economic gains perhaps not so great. This I note only from my short experience of living here. I am curious about how it all ends. Meanwhile I can only say pretty little things to encourage my younger friends who are there, seeking immigration. Perhaps one day I should do that too. I have only ever done the US as an expat. haha
Mon 30Jun2025, Sabbatical2 @2.260years ( year3; month28; week118; day825 )
0012 : Optimised a desk and two armchairs. More space to work!
0350 : to bed. creatine therapy has resumed
Revised literature on taurine: it is mostly useless
Updated TPL design doc : clarifying notes on stages of compilation/building
1022 : awake past the sixth hour. enforced resumption of sleep, so stayed in bed till the end of the eigth hour
1225 : Orang Malaysia tak maju sebab senang rasa malu.
Boleh dikatakan, kemaluan adalah sesuatu yang ternilai di Malaysia. Senangla korang terkawal.
I'll admit it is a dangerous critique. But the point of being a public intellectual is to thread the needle lol
1314 : GUYS ( PEOPLE ) : STOP IT : NOT EVERYTHING THAT IS HUMAN IS VALUABLE
1437 : TIL ansatz is another word for conjecture
1445 : TIL what is a RG in physics : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization_group
1456 : Resumption of creatine dosing seems to have, predictably, knocked my plasticity back up by 30-60%, so I'm slightly more productive today. Though there was coadministration with calitriol ... anyhow, good to get the basics in.
1529 : on psycholinguistic deeming the conceptualisation phase as elusive and mysterious: you muthafuckers need SENSORY DATA JESUS
1738 : One major hindrance to comprehending the design of correct systems, is the entertainment of incorrect systems. It is also quite a bit more difficult to craft a maximally correct system, which can itself comprehend the specific incorrectness of less correct systems. That is what I think about in my work these days ...
1804 : This 1993 paradigm is more parsimonious. The Formative List needs to be replaced withe some sort of sensory ontology, then we're good ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_morphology
1815 : TIL : transitive and intransitive verbs ( finally ) :P
1831 : Direct and indirect objects : this is going to take a bit of brain power
1837 : The formal parts of speech are like MBTI for natural language. They are both post hoc descriptive notations for specific physical behaviour - but they serve mainly an ornamental purpose, except to cultural gatekeepers.
2017 : the history of lexical semantics is a pain the butt, the same way that the history of philosophy and psychology are ...
2024 : Tired. Perhaps time for a run.
2257 : Did a little run. Core generally more robust from squats and rows. Mainly focusd on neuroplasticity and rate of zeroing memory.
2321 : Ah, forgot to pay attention to SNS/PSNS balance - no wonder something was off - more PSNS stimulation, I guess.
2357 : During my run today, I thought about the previous 10y campaign. I'm about 2.5y into the present one. I jumped into the previous one with the goal of acquiring a decade of commercial experience. I wonder how much that decade has been beneficial - it certainly ticked the boxes on doing time, in all the things which are valuable for time's sake.
"
