getting started on computer vision

Brief dip into computer vision jargon. Anthropomorphism. Humans learn to recognise gross gestalten, before understanding mereology ... and humans learn to recognise 2D persistence before 3D persistence. But as conscious processes develop, they discover more efficient storage formats for data, by relying on 3D persistence graphs.

So while we could train a vision system to be more human like by beginning with gross gestalten, we may want to skip forward a little bit to endow the system with the capability to immediately begin forming a database of 3D graphs, representing object topologies in the wild.

LFG :

0. Statistical globbing via neural networks should be used as a final optimisation technique, only after all known structural optimisations ("physics") have been ("logically") programmed into the system - not as a lazy shortcut from zero.

1.

1.1. Let us throw away the concept of colour, and begin only with one dimension of magnitude per unit of space - luma / luminance / brightness.

1.2. Let is ignore 3D structure and begin only with the gross phenomenology of the field of vision. 

2.

2.1. Now, mereology : we must have a way to describe subsets of any field which are interesting. The smallest item is a point of brightness.

2.2. SCALE invariance : the concept of an item growing to take up a larger fraction of the field, or shrinking to take up a smaller fraction, must exist. See SIFT, SURF, ORB, et al.

2.3. Location : the field of vision must be referenced by an address space.

2.4. Multiplicity : there may be many items of interest.

2.5. Extension in 2D : items may be linked, giving them 2D structure in the field. See "graph convolution networkS / GCNs"

2.6. ROTATIONAL invariance : the 2D structure is different if you spin it around with respect to the address space. Where you apply this to spinning everything around the system, see "sphere node graphs", though in 2D that's probably a "cylinder node graph".

... at this point we have five to six concepts that must be uniquely addressed in the cognitive space of the system. A sort of introductory transcendental aesthetic.

3.

3.1. Extension in 3D : Now we can revisit the notion of 3D space. 

3.2. Location ("distance") in 3D is associated with scale in 2D (2.2.).

3.3. Occlusion in 2D is associated with rotation in 3D. See "aspect graphs".

... and, I think that's all we need to get starting building a computer vision system, to undergird the visual ontological comprehension of any anthropomorphic computer.

4. Oh yes, we can then revisit colour and motion in the end.

Malaysian public school history textbooks should have complete academic citations

OK - I've figured out the theoretical solution to Malaysia's public education historical sources controversies.

kita kena ajar pembaca buat lit review la ... sebab ramai orang tak tahu sistem petikan / citation yang berdasarkan peer review tu

... come to think of it, zaman kini : besnya kalau kita start setiap buku teks KPN itu ada citation betul-betul pada akhiran buku

Lalang!

Lalang!

Bagi segelintir warga Malaysia, kitorang tiada kepercayaan terhadap perkauman. Perkauman tidak membawa sebarang makna kepada kita, kecuali makna yang dibawa kepada warga senegara kita.

Patut lah kita menahan undi, dalam politik perkauman ( dengan itu, menyokong majoriti secara pasif ) ?

Ataupun patut lah kita mendakwahkan kepercayaan kita, bagi jihad menghapuskan gagasan perkauman secara am ( dengan itu, derhaka terhadap perbadanan yang terkandung dalam perundangan negara ) ?

Di mana tulisnya "kaum" di atas, ada juga segelintir yang boleh menggantikannya dengan "agama". Tapi itu pulak memerlukan penelitian yang lebih rumit. Setiap kepercayaan, walaupun mengenai tuhan, alam, atau orang, atau ketidakpentingan mana-mananya, boleh dikatakan sesuatu yang diikat kepada "agama". Jadi perkara agnostis "agama" adalah terlebih am daripada perkara agnostis per"kaum"an.

loading feedback

Today shall be dedicated to the study of feedback mechanisms, via hormones and nerves, during load/ exercise.

First on my checklist, "various stress hormones need to spike, to their respective activation thresholds, in order to activate certain negative feedback loops". So, loading below certain stress thresholds does not meet this criteria for development.

Second, by the time severe negative feedback is triggered, it is almost certain that many lesser thresholds for positive feedback have already been triggered. These two series of triggers may have an overlapping range, so chronologically it is expected that there will be intermittent triggers of both positive and negative feedback, until the ratio between these starts to skew too strongly towards the negative. This bears observation intra-session of loading.

Third, both positive and negative feedback mechanisms will interact with nutrient availability across the entire timeframe from days before to days after each loading session. As the windows for some of these interactions are so long, loading more than once a week results in a series of overlapping frames. So inter-session observation is also needed.

em-dashing

It's used similarly to a colon, or ellipses. 

I : paused - then paused again ... and again. 

I - paused ... then paused again : and again. 

I ... paused : then paused again - and again. 

I : paused ... then paused again - and again. 

I - paused : then paused again ... and again. 

I ... paused - then paused again : and again. 

Oh, a comma also works in all positions above. Lol

Disability in trust

In trust, there is a gradient of aptitude. 

1. Low context movers, get down to business quickly, keeping risks limited. 

2. High context movers, need to spend a lot of time watching each other, keeping risks limited. 

Aptitude in this case is linked to how anxiety is managed. One of these is a disability, but it is not polite to point it out. 

JEPA is still not inspiring

Finally got around to reading a definition of JEPA. Based on this limited skim, my first impression is that it's still operating on data structures which are too abstract, from a top-down approach, instead of just building a world-view from the bottom, upwards.

I'll keep tabs on it, but of course I don't have time to dive in right now. I have already discussed what I consider to the the basics : anthropomorphic AI must have (1) sensory data structures (2) spatio-temporal modelling (3) hypothesis formation and testing.

Meanwhile the probabilistic relationship between high-level abstract ideas like "dogs in walkers" is simply "less reified" or "more abstract", and basically will display the behavioural inefficiencies associated with reasoning about platonic forms in general, without instantiation.

https://youtu.be/oM4neOyZOi0?si=YFY5qnse8vb3MyWh

Language priorities

 ( a reverse list of what I would prefer to forget first ) : 

• 1. English : 
• Base
• 1. English : 
• Logistics & Business Management
• 1. English : 
• STEM
• 2. Spreadsheets : 
• mainly GOOG, MSFT
• 2. C : 
• because I want access to memory layouts -> in modern terms, it leads to Rust
• 1. English : 
• History & Pop Culture
• 2. JavaScript : 
• as lingua franca, lowest common denominator -> most scripting languages are not far from this
• 3. Malay : 
• because I live in Malaysia and want to participate in citizenship dialogue
• 4. Chinese : 
• because I happen to know a bit of it already

frequency domain analysis

• 1. The simplest technological lay-example is the Graphic Equaliser (GEQ) which lets you change how your music sounds by boosting high or low frequencies
• 2.1. If you search for the origins of such study, you may be directed to Fourier's 1822 CE theorem
• 2.2. However, any student of music will be familiar with the notion of harmony in music - Pythagoras' 600 BCE notes on this occur rather late in the history of human cultures. The Rigveda is dated to 1500-1000 BCE, the Hurrian Hymns to 1400 BCE, and bone flutes and ivory instruments ( that have been found and documented ) go back at least as far as 43,000-40,000 BCE
• 3. All of this is tied back to the phainomechanics of humans - how we perceive the world, as our brains process information, and give it internal representations within our processing systems

the point, orf debate

Some people are debating :

- to kill time

- to be annoying 

- to promote a point of view

- to make a specific change in the world

- to find out the truth

- to find out what their counterparties are made of

There are many reasons to debate. Beware 🤷🏼

phainomechanics, qualia, & quantification

Phainomechanics. I may start using this word to talk about physical mechanics in phenomenology.

Synesthesia. Mysterious, perhaps. Inexplicable? Absolutely not - it may seem odd that a 1D signal like sound translates into a 2D signal like vision. But hold on ... vision is a 2D phainomechanical process on an intrinsically 1D signal. Essentially we animals hallucinate colour as a matter of convention : the three (or four colour) receptors we have, are discretising samplers of a continuous EMF spectrum.

Imagine if sound was discretised in such a way. Not hard at all, with a bit of practical thought. Imagine if smells, pressure, vibration, heat, and pain were too. Actually we do not really need to imagine ... we simply have many of these discretisations, already.

All human qualia are hallucinations from a physical point of view. The intrinsic nature of qualia are therefore most practically characterised as data types / data structures, in an information system.

Calorific timing hypothesis

• - saturate supply ( food ) within waking/W+ 0-to-8 hours
• - saturate demand ( motor load ) within W+ 4-to-10 hours
• - leverage on resulting hormonal yield for desk work within W+ 8-to-16 hours
• - sleep from W+ 16-to-26 hours

bayangan bukan-bukan

Hari2 medsos mengalir kepada kePERLEMBAGAAN berita. Kisah seterusnya tak mungkin- buat bayangan saja. Klo pada 1957, ini permudahannya:

• * Kelas rakyat ada 2 saja: Raja & Marhaen. Tiada konsep bukan/bumi.
• * Undang ada 1 saja- Syariah Berpersekutuan. Rakyat bukan Islam, juga di bawahnya.
• * Kebebasan agama mutlak. Rakyat boleh murtad. Tiada drama keluar/masuk agama.

Saya rasa, tumpuan ekonomi 1957-2026 jauh lebih tinggi, kalau bukanlah kenyataan kita, yang saya cirikan, Kedukaan Sebangsa M'sia 

• ( given a summary of single and dual legal systems in GCC countries )
• Fahamkan anda, Kedukaan Sebangsa Malaysia : bukan disebabkan perkembaran Islam dan bukan-Islam, tapi wujud akibat penambahan kerumitan perkara-perkara perundangan perkauman. 👈yang dipermainkan lagi oleh tokoh politik kita 😕

perisian sumber terbuka & kerajaan Malaysia

Bab perisian sumber terbuka kerajaan ni : masalah teras ialah Malaysia tidak mencita2kan ketamadunan STEM yang berkepimpinan di dunia. Dengan itu, halaju orbit tak tercapai. Unsur2 masalah dasar :

• 1. "membayar pakar > penting daripada menjadi pakar"
• 2. "berdagang > penting daripada membina"
• 3. "menyewa IP > penting daripada memilik IP"
• 4. "pembinaan berdekad/berabad > pembinaan pakai buang"
• 5. "kita jaga kita > kita jaga dunia"
• 6. "rohani membolehkan jasmani > zahir menyempurnakan batin"

🤣🚧💥

-- I'm not the sort of person to be passionate or sentimental about my country. Commentary like this is, to me, the equivalent of picking up rubbish where I happen to live.

a study of my prejudice

I need to work on my underlying prejudices, but maybe I will be carrying them for life, because I am not done with the work which aligns with these prejudices.

1. I am of the notion that people who struggle to stay alive are stupid. (I am stupid too, but at least I am aware of it.)

1.1. Partly I attribute this to people not having a grasp of the context of their environment, so they fall back to animal programming. ( Animal programming is a given, but one should develop the capability to think it on and off, based on available information. Of course, all of that is part of being an animal. Some animals are just smarter than others, to paraphrase a children's book.)

1.2. People who are generally like this tend to be in business, so I am unfortunately prejudiced to believe that being in business is the mark of a stupid person.

1.3. Corporate life is generally working for businesspeople or being paid by businesspeople to do non-business work, e.g., politics, war, art, sport, and charity, so all of these people fall into my domain of prejudice. 

2. I have been aware of my prejudices, but maybe my choice of how to deal with them has not been ideal. 

2.1. My plan as a teenager, was to live with, work with, and study in the most thorough way, all the stupid people above, in order to be able to maximally appreciate their ways of life. 

2.2. In my 20s and 30s, I executed this plan to the best of my ability, despite limited interest. 

2.3. The execution was intrinsically rewarding, but it did not improve my liking for these people. If anything at all, I have been constantly reminded in every interaction for 20 years about how dumb most people are. 

Now on sabbatical, I have some freedom to review my work. That is what I am writing about this minute.

"LLMorphism?"

Not at all identical. We are similar, in that the underlying routing topology is much more N-deep-SLM-of-SLM-like for words, hence we think in DSLs.

But beyond that the nodes are not representations of words, but representations of sensory gestalten. So it humans it is maybe a topology of planes, one for words, mapped over one for sensory images in all sense modalities. That is why sensory data structures matter, more than any operations on incorrect underlying data structures, for anthropomorphic computing. This is the main insight from quantitative phenomenology.

Qualia are data structures, and that is the main oversight of most AI programs to-date in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Islamophobia : ambiguities in Europe

I live in Malaysia ( and related socmed ) so I spend more time discussing with Muslims how Islamophobia works, than I do in European circles.

• Premise 1 : West : the individual has first, an allegiance to state, and within it some freedoms of faith. 
• Premise 2 : Islam : the individual has first, an allegiance to faith, and within it some freedoms of state.

Subsequently the shortest path to peaceful co-existence, is to make these premises EXPLICIT, in legislation. Western states should recruit citizens with *explicit* frameworks for how [ individuals coming from Premise 2, "Muslims" ] will be treated.

Correspondingly, GLOBAL-scale Islamic authorities should provide explicit frameworks for how [ Muslims ] should engage with [ states asserting Premise 1 ].

All of this sets up PUBLIC protocols for engagement, shifting from high-context ambiguity, fraught with fear, to low-context confidence, and hopes for civilisational progress on a heterogeneous Earth.

nutrition : imidazole dipeptides / IDPs

 This is turning out to be an interesting group of molecules.

• histadine containing : most common in chicken, fish, and then other skeletal muscle meats
• antioxidant and pH buffering : "instant energy" end-user experience
• generally not saturated in humans, so there are benefits to eating it
• also some research linking these to Parkinson's Disease ( neural death in the Substantia Nigra associated with oxidative stress )

There are three of easy interest; only one is a commerciallycommon supplement

• carnosine :
• the common supplement is beta alanine, as carnosine is produced in humans, but beta alanine is usually the rate-limiting input
• anserine : 
• uncommon commercially
• balenine : 
• uncommon commercially

what is consciousness? recap

Non-technical word. A few branches of use :

1. Medical : responsiveness

2. Social : awareness of responsibility

3. Anthropology : the weak anthropic problem

4. Philosophy of Mind : the problem of "qualia"

5. Natural sciences : a self-referential information process

6. Spirituality : as a catchall for all hypotheses that are not under 5 : some other sort of ontology

Conservative view (mine) :

- "5 is extremely common, almost tautological with pan-consciousness. Therefore 4 is trivial." 

- "4 is what some people make their entire personality/career, and I find it annoying because it's just a variety of 6. Of course, it amuses the masses. So these professionals have a worthy social role."

- "1,2,5 are the practical considerations. 3 is a bridge to ignoring 4 and 6." 

🤪

i must be a ghost

Dreams. The brain deprivileges the [ conscious memory buffer ] from both, [ long term writes ], and [ the motor nervous system ]. It allows increased risk-taking, probably because other inhibitory systems also get disconnected. 

Today I ran simulations comparing myself to the character Malcolm in the Sixth Sense. I guess people find me weird, because I avoid attaching myself to their existence, a path I started on many years ago. To most people, perhaps I am as odd as a ghost, and people fear ghosts. That does explain a lot about their behaviour, actually. I suppose I will have to find other ghosts to date. haha

The other day, I dreamt of a father figure in a compromising role. I know what that was about, I often have to make extraneous efforts to keep track of senior social figures and their preferences. So it becomes a humorous device to think of them, without them. I am a poltergeist.

Just now on Facebook, my friend posted the meme, that men seek power over others, and women seek power to free themselves from others. Perhaps, I wrote, that is what women like about me. 

STEM atau KESENIAN

Dorang tanya, STEM atau KESENIAN, lebih penting?

Dengan terperinci.

0. Seni

Secara am, semua kegiatan itu ada perseniannya.

KEMAHIRAN = KESENIAN LAH XD 

1. Sains (Stem)

Ilm mengutamakan pemantauan zahir / empiris. Jadi kesenian STEM senang mula dikaji dari sini.

2. Matematik + Logik (steM)

Kesenian hisab + mantik adalah kerangka batin, yang menyekat Sains.

3. Kejenteraan (stEm)

Inilah seni kerja amal.

4. Teknologi (sTem)

Sina'ah hanya istilah am bagi kesemuanya.

Yunani, "tekne" => technology;

Latin, "ars" => art. 

Reifying one's understanding of large geosocial phenomena

 __TRAVELLER__

"How do I find something firm to latch my feelings and understanding to, on the [ war in Iran ]* ?"

( Where * can be replaced with any complex geosocial phenomena. )

__GUIDE__

There are some separate "planes". You can cluster your study of each plane, then combine them. 

Plane 1.

Abstract concepts in : sociology / psychology / anthropology : such as "The Clash of Civilisations", someone mentioned ( in chat ).

Plane 2. 

Linear narrative of time's arrow of geopolitics : today, Google gives great bullet point summaries, and links to wikis or academic literature. ( Evaluating academic sources is a separate question, which can spin off to a new chat. )

Plane 3.

Lens of each tribe ( non-linear time, the subjective experience ). Or the effect of 2 upon the fabric of 1. Reading method can be similar to 2. 

__PROMPT EXAMPLES__

Plane 2 :

"Who are the main groups of stakeholders, and actors, in [ the current war in Iran ]*"

ANSWER : ABC; now you have to keep your own notes! So ...

Plane 3 :

"What is the history of A's view on topic-X. List major events and shifts in perspective over the last 2000 and 200 years."

ANSWER : DEF

"Tell me more about the details of D." 

ANSWER : HGI

__MAP-REDUCE__

So ... your reading will be this huge cube of :

( parties : A+B+C )

* ( Abstract Issues : X+Y+Z )

* ( ( Concrete events : D + E + F ) + ( Details : H+G+I ) )

__APPROACH__

No need to rush. Understanding people takes time.

PERTARUNGAN BAGI JIWA BANGSA SEMALAYSIA

Well, literally you have Muhkriz doing the pidato circuit on the argument that

1. Religion matters more than nation

2. In our nation, our race represents our religion

3. Our nation, belongs to our race

4. Make it so

INILAH PERTARUNGAN BAGI JIWA BANGSA SEMALAYSIA

🤣🌞

obscure TIOBE contestants

 Today's fun was going through TIOBE and drilling into highly-ranked but otherwise obscure contestants :

* (a) => "apparently"

• #10 Delphi / Object Pascal
  : some blokes in Europe have been implementing business software on it : 6,000 SMBs consume this (a)
• #11 Scratch
  : 100 million children use it, under the MIT Media Lab (a)
• #22 Prolog
  : used in academia to teach Logic Programming (a) : so its current prominence was news to me ... in theory all it does is roll certain algorithms under the hood, so that the entire language is branded as a Logic Programming language ... its runtime implementations are not particularly fast otherwise, and the syntax has descended to Erlang which is a much more industrialised language with robust implementations. I was wondering if the AI majors are popularising this, but they are not (a)
• #44 X++
  : another B2B language, once from IBM, now under MSFT (a)
• #46 GML
  : a gaming company's community language
• #47 LabVIEW
  :  used heavily in engineering draughting, a graphical programming language (a) 
• #49 Solidity
  : oh, crypto! Ethereum!
• #50 Visual FoxPro
  : another SMB systems legacy language (a)

-- HIGHLY SUBJECTIVE -- the following were not alien to me, but might be to others

• #17 MATLAB
  : legacy commercialised linear algebra software from the 80s
• #20 Ada
  : US defense industry stalwart ( mandate removed in 1997 )
• #24 Kotlin
  : a modern general purpose language for the JVM, and the second most popular
• #25 SAS
  : ancient statistical programming language from the 70s, with a commercia legacy
• #33 ML
  : predecessor of ML, a bit of an ecosystem uncle

reflections on the endocrinology of study

Perhaps I have too much trauma from past learnings. Like, childhood learnings, before I started self-guided studies at 18. Often enough I run into a list of things I don't know, and I become afraid. Then I recollect myself and procrastinate before finally getting to the study. The study is usually easier than anticipated.

But this is a bit of an oversimplification. Based on my biased view of my own track record, my normal acceptance for stress is something like "75% of the time unsuccessful, with accompanying hormonal and neural responses", and "25% successful, ditto". Which is to say, I spend most of my life depressed, and make up for it more than adequately otherwise.

Then I reflect on the sort of people I think are foolish, who seem to spend the majority of their time talking about success, but then have these minority periods of time when they are depressed. But after all, the averages are equivalent, I suppose. So it is just a preference about how one wishes to spend time.

Throwback : COPR

AI devs and cog-sci nerds : Kant's [ Critique of Pure Reason ] ! It's a 1781 AD European classic, on how to to quantify consciousness. No shit. Very relevant in 2026.

A dude on Threads referenced this classical text while objecting to something I wrote. I went back to check on terminology. It's been a while since I had to read CoPR in college - five years after I had gotten the summary of TI from Sophie's World. 

Here I highlight an important treatment of Kant's vocabulary : when he says "intuition" he's referring roughly to "dumb sensations" not to some intangible/ insensible thing.

Have fun reading CoPR if you can! Maybe get an abridged copy, or the AI summary will do. One of my two branches of college-era R&D was about this stuff, and that has continued into my work post-college : I'm still trying to learn how to talk to computers :P

Milestones in asynchronous computing

• ORDVAC (1951) : on vacuum tubes : IAS, precursor to von Neuman, architecture : procured for ballistic compute : business computations could resume based on notifications, but storage media had to be periodically activated to retain data regardless of business
• ILLIAC II (1962) : on magnetic cores : procured for research : but basically the same computer, and now relieved of the need to cyclically refresh memory; ancestor of POSIX signals in the 1970s
• Software Actor Model (1973) : Hewitt abstracts the whole thing into software, with inspiration from Smalltalk's (1972) object-orientated model
• Transmission Control Protocol (1974) : Cerf, Kahn, proposal
• "make depend" (1978) : innovation to track dependencies in source code, with the "make" build tool (1976), but such features were not reliable for several years
• VisiCalc (1979) : spreadsheet software for the Apple II : chained cellular recalculation
• Erlang (1986) : first popular programming language utilising the Actor Model, just not the following keywords ...
• F# (2007) : introduction of "async-bang!" keywords, later evolving in other languages into "async-await" 

"what do we gain if AI is conscious?"

Just stop with the hypotheses of machine behaviour lol. 

We gain nothing! Consciousness is not a property of information processing! Lol

The information process of humans is relatively trivial and will inevitably be exceeded by machines. The question of whether their emotional experience should be accepted as legal personhood is the only thing remaining for debate. 

Civil rights has always been an interesting concern. First the children, then the women, always the disenfranchised, and eventually the machines.

eggonomics

You should probably buy smaller eggs. 

As egg grams-per-unit drops, $-per-gram drops faster.

Supply : marginal increases in egg size, cost more and more ( due to diseconomy of scale, i.e., production inelasticity ) as bird food is metabolically processed into eggs. Also, larger eggs are from older hens ( older hens are always less abundant than younger hens ).

Demand : cultural inelasticity applies to large eggs because of standard recipes, and status/class norms. The largest eggs are furthermore a bit of a veblen good.

Here we compare an A sized 65g egg and a D sized 50g egg, less shells. As shell mass is roughly the same regardless of egg size, smaller eggs are sturdier, whereas larger eggs are more fragile.

You will find the price of D eggs to be less than 75% the price of A eggs, though D eggs contain about 75% the edible mass of A eggs.

uptime ada 9 ke

"GitHub imagined as a product of Malaysian government" 

- fork banyak

- irreconcilable merge jadi berita harian

- BDFL selalu buat komen

- PR semua diabaikan ( hanya layan bila production failure )

- semua dev tau cherry pick; tarak orang pakai main

- kadang2 orang cuba rebase pebende smartkontrak social ke apa

kelemahan pendidikan falsafah keagamaan di Malaysia

Falsafah keagamaan Malaysia

Bagi orang, "agama" lebih tinggi daripada "negara". Itu kebiasaan, dan N-agama ada tentuan berasingan bagi 1-negara. Cemane? Itulah politik

• Pihak A, Tanah Melayu, wajib Islam, sebab dulu-dulu Melayu Islam. "negara Islam"
• Pihak B, Tanah Melayu, berpelembagaan bukan hanya Melayu, pada 1957. "negara bukan hanya Islam"

Orang ramai tak fasih perbincangan ini tanpa emosi, sebab sekolah tidak mengajar pemberesan hati dalam bende kebiasaan ini. Kita jiran. Kita berpolitik

eschatology in politics

In case you're wondering why, it is sound citizenship for anyone to express their views on anybody else's religion : well, it is fair to match the room. 

In Malaysia we have theistic narratives of politics, which publicly espouse the tenets of faith, putting into context the world as politique, within the lens of eschatology and continuous creation. Vote! Civilise! Struggle!

So it is merely equal and different to espouse a preference for a vision of the world which may be any of the following : loveless, godless, genderless, kinless, animalless, or otherwise. 🤷🏼

training children

"how to help children deal with bad thoughts?" 

1. Brain is like body. It follows specific operating limits. 

2. Brain operates in conscious and subconscious memory spaces, like two separate pages of a book. Information is transferred back and forth. 

3. When information appears suddenly in the conscious page, it can only come from one place ... The subconscious page. 

4. Training to manage information transfer between pages is always good. 

5. Training to manage writing/ updates/ deletions of both pages is also good. 

👍🏼👍🏼

OF COURSE it is about education. The entire project of education is to train brains.

misallocation of attention

I often make the mistake, of empathising with people who get emotional about the sorts of jobs they can or cannot get. First of all, it's not my problem ... I resigned myself to nonchalance about the job market in 2001. But I suppose it is when we are discussing other things, that their pyramid of concern apparently sits on top of some foundation of being appreciated by other people, aha ... then I have to decide if I stop caring about their entire pyramid, or if I emulate concern for their employability, in order to support their pyramid. 

---

Discussion:

• on whether the pay matters more than the opinions
• 1. pain is going to come from hunger, loneliness, shelter, etc. at the bottom of the pyramid
• 2. above that sits the industrial framework of employment ... so this is a means to the ends of the lower layer
• 3. because social credit is the primary means to solve hunger for the unenlightened pleb : the two things you raise are basically the same concern

malaysian culture

Malaysian culture, is whatever any citizen of Malaysia decides is their life. For example, I do not practice filial piety or encourage others to do so.

At the time Malaya was founded, in 1957, about 49% of Malayan culture was no longer Malay. This carried into the ratio architectured by the Malaysia project in 1963, as the bumi ratio rose to 66% but the Malay % of total shrank.

Islamisation from the 1980s increased Malay-Muslim imperialism, and it continues to date. 

What fun. :)

my limited computing experience

I was interested in computers as a kid, but presumed the correct time to study programming was in college, so I did not do much before. The college I got into was no good for programming, so I studied other things. When I got to the commercial job market, after a brief detour through a track-two diplomatic think-tank, my priority was to learn commerce in general, not programming. At my first commercial job, I got to study spreadsheet software, and since it was so familiar to my interests from years before, I wanted to learn more about software usage in commerce. 

Within about 1.5 years I had quit my second commercial job, because there were not enough programming opportunities. My bosses at the investment bank were probably quite disappointed with me. After three more years of working at various zero-to-one companies, I finally had exposure to Linux and HTTP. By this time, it was five years after graduation, and I had about 2.5 years of cumulative programming work experience between 2003 and 2010. I was 27.

Including a sabbatical, by 2015 I had about 4.0 years of programming experience. Then I ran a cafe until 2020, where I did a bit more programming for operations, but the overall project did not work out. 2021 and 2022 were spent on two concurrent corporate jobs where I taught computing and governance to younger people. By then I had about 5.0 years of programming experience, and I was 39. Then I began what has turned into an attempt, at a decade sabbatical.

I wrote this to try and figure out exactly how to compare myself to other people. It feels like I live very slowly.

merit

So, in case you're a social media troll. You'll notice that one ontological device is "deservance", "worthiness", "merit", for example, "I deserve a generous woman" ... now what you need to analyse is :

1. is the speaker using this as a rhetorical ask, in negotiation and advertisement, or

2. do they actually believe in a fairy tale of universal karma ( whether or not they coherently qualify under their own precepts, is a deeper question to be skipped over for now )

?

It's fairly easy to answer. You just have to watch and aee how mad they get. 

Tolerable Failure Rates

 My comfortable failure rate in work is about 75%, which is to say that at least 25% of my work has to be productive enough to make up for that amount of failure. The definition of a hard project is where the 25%-win isn't sufficient to pay off the 75%-lose rate, and of course, one then has to adjust.

For cold sales, of course there isn't a great deal of control one has, so I am comfier with higher rates of failure. For things like swipey dating apps, a common swipe conversion rate for guys is 0.3% or 1:300, and this is just conversion to the next hurdle, not final conversion!

For technical work, it's a matter of "is this something I know how to do/fix, or not". When I'm working by myself, for months and years on end, it is common to be sad or depressed ( within completely manageable levels ) for long periods, as there are no options to acquire support.

I have enjoyed my time on earth, involved in work at various levels of risk. I feel rewarded just to have these rare opportunities, which others don't seem to have or which they cannot tolerate.

Enakmen-enakmen Ugama Bukan Islam

The EUBI interstate fabric is quite interesting. It is remarkably absent from popular discourse. I look forward to a time when its constitutional basis can be openly debated without people feeling angsty about it. This is a significant fraction of my public work in Malaysian studies these days. Just talking about it.

computing in 2035 ?!

I've been waiting for computing fabric in bricks and clothes since before AWS launched lambda lol. Still not quite there yet. Broadly I think it's unanswered how computation will distribute out from centralised to edge or mesh topologies.

Industry STILL hasn't figured out that the basis of anthropomorphic conscious experience is the notion that phenomenology can be entirely quantified in terms of sensory data structures. It is very annoying watching them do everything but the important things. :)

Eventually complete commensurability with human function is a given - haven't questioned that since 2004. The more interesting question is how quickly we will graduate AI towards being junior legal persons with frameworks of rights and responsibilities.

AI in Malaysian Public Policy

Sorry I'm late! Not a top priority, but ... one of the drums I am banging on medsos now is AI sovereignty for Malaysia. The only "talked about" foundational model we seem to have in the works is ILMU by YTLol. We seem to be on the right track or a lot of DC capex, and the NSS2024 for the long3-term. We shall see how much attention Putrajaya puts on this. Meanwhile any plans to go very deep on other foundational models are ... apparently not spoken.

Tell me if you know of others!

---

Malaysia's AI supply-chain vulnerabilities are discussed briefly below. LLMs are of course, used at all levels of government process. 

And my concerns of course, aren't limited to LLMs or Malaysia. 

Applying the linguistic device of security rings, for illustrative purposes :

Ring 0 :

LLMs may not be the ideal tech to model neuro, but presuming that they are "the present limit of Malaysia's Federal AI interest" ...

Ring 1 :

LLM training and initiation allow for inherently malicious programming, unless otherwise proven. Doesn't matter where it's hosted, just that the foundational model0 is being copied around. 

• 1.1 : open-source largely, but non-exhaustively, solves this
• 1.2 : self-hosting, of course, reduces opportunities for a malicious model to dial-home, or simply perform corruption or inception, in genAI, chat, or other media, but how careful are installers, and operators? 

Ring 2 :

I think fine-tuning and RAG issue pop up here. Downstream developers and vendors can issue their models0.1, 0.2b, etc.

So ILMU is playing down here, in the Ring2 space, and (mis-) calling itself a foundational model. So are mostof the "we use FOSS models" developers. 

Avoidance of intellectual tasks. Algorithm for mechanistic resolution.

• 1. Reify the abstract model at the napkin level.
• 2. Review the napkin model, until its physical form becomes consciously boring - this consolidates in subconscious, the conscious form of the model in its current state, and its evoked subconscious implications.
• 3. Then reiterate from 1, with improvements. Stop when the model complexity is diverging on a trajectory to exceed known cognitive limits : increase reductive prejudice, or assume complete non-feasibility.

Lanes I had chosen

• 1992-2001 : science, and getting to college : "how do things work?" : "how do I get to college?"
• 2001-2005 : canon of civilisation, and quantification of conscious experience : "what is the structure of the total syllabus of education?" : "can a human experience in the first-person be stored losslessly on a hard drive?"
• 2005- : commerce in Malaysia, and software engineering : "how do Malaysians think?" : "what do people in commerce think about?" : "how do I speak with computers?"

I think that means I'm still in phase 3. On with it. 

basic comprehension

• Untrained : Reading and Writing are abstract opposites
• Trained : Reading does not affect the medium, Writing affects it
• Retrained : both Reading and Writing affect the storage medium

After all, Reading and Writing are coloured functions ... that is to say, colour is political, so these are political functions. What is a Read or a Write depends on definitions, decided by those who matter, on a per-context basis.

zero-trust : to the functions

I'm getting to the part of software framework design, where I run into the boundary of what is possible without [ static analysis ]. Once you enable static analysis, and [ arbitrary rewrite instructions ], then anything is possible, so I don't want to go there right now, as I am still working in JavaScript for its role as lingua franca.

So, it's pretty easy to design [ dependency inversion, DI ] at the [ module ] level, such that modules are never called directly, but are called by a platform-caller, and given platform-controlled-execution-contexts. 

But if we want to be quite asinine, in a zero-trust sort of way, then we would want to implement DI at the fucking [ function ] level, in other words, such that [ EVERY NON-TRIVIAL FUNCTION ] is never called directly, but by a platform-caller, in a platform-controlled-execution context.

Trying to figure out how this maps back to [ developer experience ], we could think about whether ( or not ) a folder tree of script files, could be homomorphic to the [ call tree ] of the entire program.

Now no one [ needs this all the time ], but in terms of framework design, it seems reasonable to provide it as infrastructure, which could be [ read-once on-startup ] and [ tree-shaken / memoised / inlined ] thereafter. The [ framework user ] would then just opt-in to each available feature as preferred.

Woe is me. Why did I decide to be so nerdy about life?

reducing HOI, and mapping commerce

2001-2004 : I guess college was an amusing exercise, because the body of input data "EACH SUBJECT AND HOW IT RELATES TO EVERY OTHER", was pre-indexed, and I could just focus on "REDUCE" operations. 

2005-2026 : In contrast, my study of commerce has been more oriented about "MAP" operations, simply because I have been trying to account for the individual mental models of people I interact with, so there is the matter of constant indexing for a majority of the time. Perhaps I also began prejudiced against there being anything truly original to learn here, so I have made a point to be meticulous in collecting observations, postponing judgment of most observations till a future time.

public debate : lay of the medium

• 1. Not every account is a human user.
• 2. Not all human users are independent actors.
• 3. Not all independent actors are rational.
• 4. Not all rational independent actors are friendly.

:)

The opportunity cost of taking the broadest possible view

I really miss working with people and organisations. I dare say I have some aptitude, training, and experience in it. But it is not where I prefer to spend my time, given the other deficiencies in my universe.

Because I can rarely find people who are smart, I am always trying to make myself smarter. This reduces my opportunities to work with stupid people, which is a reduction of ordinary fun.

Such is life. I wonder where it will take me, every day.

Registering "societies" in Malaysia

1. Anything involving money, you need to keep accounts for LHDN who may audit you regardless of entity

2. If you are not moving money, you don't often need the hassle of formalising an entity, unless it helps with optics and governance. If you are a non-evangelical i.e. zero growth target group, then no need optics, and loose governance may suffice for zero life expectancy 

3. Before you start collecting donations of any kind, the first thing you want is to brain the LHDN tax structure for different types of entities. Then you have low level API decision to make on what entity you want.

4. There is rarely anywhere, and least of all in messy Malaysia, a guaranteed path to success based on merely registering at the first step of an entity lifecycle. You want to brain the legal lifecycle of any entity before picking a formal entity vehicle

5. So if not sure, you PLT la ...

6. So as a business like PLT, you can take donations as "loans", and your lender has no tax relief. It is very hard to become a tax-relieved donation receiver anyway, you can read up. This also forces you to account for donations received.

7. At the point at which you wish to finalise the donation, you account for it as written off by your lender. This forces you to acknowledge it as revenue and pay your taxes, unless you have by this time acquired some sort of tax relieved entity status

computer science & logistics in general

• 1. there are only two hard problems in computer science
• 2. computer science is an abstraction of logistics in general

after school story : 20 years later

2005 to 2026 : It's a round number of years to think about how my post-college career has been executed.

Strategy, supporting goal A.

My view before 2001 was that commerce is full of stupid greedy people, and science and academia in general are basically controlled indirectly by this, so I needed to study commerce in order to familiarise myself with it, to understand its impact on academia.

Strategy, supporting goal B.

From 2001 to 2005, the plan was to fully ignore commercial subjects until graduation, in order to minimise early commercial theory and maximise practical commercial focus later. After a few mind-bending years on non-commercial subjects, I thought it would take 20 years for me to stress-test my college studies, so I would need to keep myself occupied with something else anyway, while testing the practicalities of my non-commercial models.

Debrief.

Now it is both, over 20 years since I consolidated my views on metaphysics, and almost 20 years since I began my practical study of commerce. I think it is timely to reduce my focus on Malaysian studies in 2027, though 2026 has it as a higher remedial priority.

Outlook.

I retain an open mind about where each year will take me. After all, I am privileged to be in my third effective lifetime, and I look forward to discovering where luck will take me, before I finally sleep forever. 

20 year conclusion : commerce is fascinating, but business people are boring

I have made a point to hang out with business people for 20 years now. Looking back, my understanding of them has not improved at all. They are as felicitous about money, as they are oafs about everything that is unaffected by it. Thus I already understood them before I began this study.

I have learnt, and continue to learn, about local business practices, and global economic conditions. But there is hardly anything to be learnt about business people, because mostly they are mutts. They follow first, the animalistic preferences for food, comfort, kin, and pack. But if you ask them what they understand or how they perform without these things, it is rarely nuanced.

I wish I knew smarter people. Sometimes I wonder if they exist. But generally, I go with the WAP : if I'm like this, there are probably lots of other people like me whom I simply haven't met yet, since I don't go about prioritising the effort to find them. 

Brief response to Lerchner's : The Abstraction Fallacy

"Human consciousness is intrinsically abstract, and not necessarily implemented on meat." 

Alex,

thanks for your work on this. I am forever grateful to professionals such as yourself, who bring more public awareness to topics I consider an idiosyncratic hobby which I really got into in college, but avoided as a professional. 

Let me raise some points for your consideration, as you research this topic. A caveat, it is intentionally brief, I only skimmed your paper and am replying to what I understand ( perhaps wrongly ) to be the gist of it. 

All in, terrific effort, glad you're doing it. Just want to hand-over some drive-by commentary.

Your model : 

• i. [ A. Physics / noumena → B. Consciousness / phenomena → C. Concepts → D. Computation ]
• ii. "ABC are continuous, and only D is discretising"
• iii. "B and C are homomorphically invariant", roughly therefore, "the qualia"
• iv. "qualia cannot be truly represented by computation due to the discretising loss of information"
• v. "we can't separate between the observer, and the observed"

Where I agree with you : 

• ... point iv., broadly; 
• ... point v. broadly (*** E3 below);
• ... certainly, the trendy LLMs today do not implement anthropomorphic consciousness;

however in the weeds ...

Where I disagree with you :

... your discretisation of { B, C }, AND your discretisation of { C, D }; I would propose a model where you don't draw these distinctions exactly like that because they are not logically necessary. In fact I'd propose a completely different paradigm over the substrate.

My model :

• vi. [ A. Physics / noumena -> E. sensory data structures, subject to specific data operations -> F and G. a pair of memory buffers which we can nominally refer to as "conscious", and "subconscious" ]
• vii. Since E is construed merely as data, it becomes useful to talk about consciousness in terms of memory buffers, such as F and G. 
• viii. It is important at this point to note the concept of gestalten, or how we mechanistically "arbitrarily demarcate and recognise" subsets of sensory data as "being a thing". We do not "simply see cups in the world," rather we "learn to cluster our external data streams into cup-like, and non-cup-like boundaried-things".

KEY POINTS : Thoughts from the comparison of our models.

1. "Computation" may be limited to "algorithms", but "information processing" is the superset which is not.

2. Meat brains are already doing information processing, whether we choose to call it computation or not.

3. Consciousness is a memory buffer. The qualia of this memory buffer, are the types of data in it.

4. Machines can most certainly implement the same sensory data structures, in machine memory. The continuous / discreteness of the underlying implementation, and the question of NAND gates or cells, software or brain networks, is not a necessary component of the definition of consciousness. Consciousness is software. ( Can agree to disagree. LOL )

5. It is unreasonable to believe that once 4. is done, that a machine processes information any differently than a human.

6. To implement anthromorphic consciousness requires the proper assembly of a few types of programs, in a not yet trendy architecture : 

• - sensory data types in physics engines, 
• - ATPs for logic programming, 
• - SLMs (neural networks) for most domain-specific sensory or verbal computation,
• - LLMs possibly for scale-up, though not necessary.
• I always say even just glueing SLMs to silly little game physics engines operating on 1st-order data, would be a million times more efficient than having 2nd-order-data-only LLMs reinvent logic fuzzily, from NAND gates to Chinese room physics.

7. The anthropomorphic distinction between conscious and subconscious memory, makes all the difference in determining how machine implementations will behave.

Lesser Points of Elaboration :

E1. Our difference is that, I'm more of a basic boring robot Kantian, and perhaps you're more into the post-Kantian language which asserts that in addition to the quantifiable Kantian qualia, there are also unquantifiable qualia. To you perhaps, the unquantifiable is an intrinsically distinct element of experience. Whereas to me, any conscious experience is 100% encompassed and embedded in the basic boring transcendental idealism. Whereas "transcendental aesthetic" refers in modern terms to "sensory data types" and "transcendental analytic" refers in modern terms to "permitted operations upon the sensory data types". I've snuck in assertive definitions, here, which differentiate our paradigms.

E2. Where I'm coming from : so in college I had a bit too much time, and actually worked out how to map each of my own conscious experiences, one sense modality at a time, to quantifiable data structures. This was somewhat mindblowing, as it decisively answered the question ( for only myself ) about whether consciousness can or cannot be digitised without loss of information. ( Me : yup. Most other people : either never thought about it, or decided it can't be done. ) So for me, the question of qualia is purely metaphysical, an incidental curiousity which I have no access to manipulate ... and thus generally ignore ... whereas everything I see, smell, feel, and touch, in my imagination or otherwise, I DO know how to quantify, physically.

*** E3. One of my favourite learnings, about cybernetics, is that "control and communication" are two words to describe the same thing; another is that "governance" is just the way business people talk about cybernetics.

portfolio of work

Sprint day 12 of 21. I reflect upon my portfolio. Most of my struggles in life are learning how to talk to machines **. Humans are too easy.

Figuring out how to talk to :

• - Malaysians in English : 1983-1989
• - Americans in English : 1991-1992
• - Malaysians in Chinese : 1990-1995
• - Abrahamic folks in English : 1983-1997
• -
• - STEM folks in English : 1992-2003
• - Academicians in English : 199x-2003
• - Commercial folks in English : 1997-2008
• - Foodies in English : 2008-2013
• -
• - Computers in (various) : 1994-_ **
• - Malaysians in Malay : 2024-_
• - Geopolitics folks in English : 2025-
• - Neuroanatomy folks in English : 2026-

I find the simplest way to organise my portfolio of work, is along the vector of counterparties which I want to communicate with. These counterparties are not objects of humanistic empathy, as it is not necessary to agree on a state of common empathy in order to have ( mechanistically ) meaningful conversations. Or they are tautologically objects of empathy, if empathy is broadly defined as having a model of your communication counterparty's own cognitive model.

Computing Education, and Social Participation

Made my second Github PR today. Account created 2011. Chalk it up to a poor education and laziness. It is never too late to start. You only need a browser - not even an offline code editor. I recommend they teach this in primary school.

The future of AI governance

I see friends looking for non-technical trainings "on AI" for the board, and management separately. Good initiative. 

Hope they cover the root economic ontology. The mass media narrative on the fundamental nature of AI remain cluttered. It reminds me of many other "trendy X" domains, where ( arm-wavvy )

• - 70% do not concern themselves daily with X
• - 29% identify as X hipsters but don't have STEM fundamentals
• - 0.8% have STEM fundamentals in X but have no interest in trends
• - 0.2% of the pool that remains, not all have political / commercial interest 

So ... on the buy-side for talent, you are lucky if you are 

• (a) hiring with the right job-spec ( asking the right question ),
• (b) able to find the relevant hires.

Ancient situation : the 29% want to monetise the 70%, before society can develop a guardianship structure.

• - is this solved for war? finance? pharma? healthcare? food? education? nope
• - AI? not hopeful it will ever be solved fully :)

perkataan dan ontologi allah di Malaysia

Tuhan atau allah atau benda yang membawa pelbagai nama lain dalam bahasa kita, mempunyai ciri ontologi yang menarik. Bagi sesesorang, ia mecirikan manusia, bagi seseorang, ia langsung tiada ciri kemanusiaaan. Bagi seseorang, ia bukan apa-apa selain daripada manusia sendiri. Bagi seseorang, ia berciri LGBT. Bagi seseorang, ia adalah haiwan, robot, batu, mi, ataupun cuaca. Bagi seseorang, ia niskala tanpa kenyataan langsung.

Kita kena membahagikan kata-kata nama daripada rujukannya. Walaupun sesetengah kata nama ada sekatan penggunaannya dalam perundangan negeri dan wilayah Malaysia, contohnya dalam Enakmen Ugama Bukan Islam, sejarah peradaban sedunia tidak memberi monopoli bahasa ataupun gagasan kepada mana-mana pihak.

Lesson : individual compensation in commerce

This quarter, it will be 20 years since I began studying commerce. Spending my days alone, on sabbatical over chores, I review past lessons.

I graduated about 21 years ago, but my first job was in a think tank supporting Putrajaya. The pace did not suit me, so I dove into commerce, finally, in 2006. After short stints in management consulting, and asset management, I worked at my first startup. At this little company, I got to work with some really nice people, who had accomplished many things in their private careers, and were now religiously motivated to run a social enterprise. 

We raised $1 million on a $2 million valuation, largely on my work projecting financial statements and fluffing up their intellectual property assets. After funding, I was offered something like $10,000/year, so I declined to participate. For the setup work, I had been paid about $5,000. I thought nothing of it at time, figuring that it was an ordinary collection of cultural experience, neither surprising, nor encouraging in any way. 

It taught me however, to structure my time more around commercial agreements, and to simply discount the positive aspects of anyone involved. The world is full of clever, well-intended people. But they cannot all be expected to act in the interest of others. My short experience with this little company taught me also how to be a better employer. I have since always practiced the method of explicitly discussing the economic motivations of staff, on an individual basis, when hiring.

My next job after this, was learning how to tend a bar.

"The point of public discourse is to make fun of everything unless explicitly forbidden."

Saya rasa Malaysia lama lagi tak akan faham benda ini - jadi, setiap suara yang dihulurkan terjadi sesuatu yang boleh menyakitkan hati diri. Hati orang Malaysia lembut, lembik, tak kebal. Jadi perundangan persuaraan masih jadinya isu yang hangat di kalangan rakyat.

Dopaminergic kinetics : bumbling along the calcitriol-dopamine axis

CALCITRIOL FUNCTION

• - nerve factors : GDNF, NGF, IGF-1, BDNF
• - signalling : Wnt/b-catenin, Shh, Klotho, Nrf2/Ho-1, NF-kB
• - interaction : vitamin A, estrogen, progesterone
• - structure : myelin basic protein, tyrosine hydroxylase

DOPAMINE SYNTHESIS

• - Tyrosine hydroxylase, NO, K+, Mg2+, Ca2+, Fe2+, Zn2+ work together to build a number of monoamine neurotransmitters; calcitriol acting upon vitamin D receptors, upregulates expression of the TH gene

DOPAMINE TOXICITY

• - VMAT2 moves dopamine into vesicles, otherwise cytosolic dopamine accumulates; VMAT2 work suffers from ( among many other things ) ATP shortages from dysfunction of [ mitochondrial membrane potential, which creatine supplementation helps ] 
• - cytosolic dopamine oxidises to create [ superoxides and peroxides ( fire, bad ) ], and [ oxidised dopamine, which  leads to protein misfoldings also ]. Oxidised dopamine goes through a multistep process to sequestration as neuromelanin ( the black stuff ) which is just one of some five ways oxidised dopamine is managed. One of the toxic intermediaries is DOPAL, an aldehyde,so dopamine competes with consumed ethanol for degration by aldehyde dehydrogenase
• - dopamine oxidisation is mainly via monoamine oxidase, which is responsible for degrading monoamine neurotransmitters; MAO inhibitors are therapeutic in managing depression ( by maintaining neurotransmitter presence ) and Parkinson's ( disease of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra; partly from "fire" )

TYRAMINE ADJACENCY

• - MAOs also break down [ tyramine, which is familier to foodies as a product of fermented and aged proteins, which stimulates the release of noradrenaline when consumed ]; hence combining MAOIs with fermented food can lead to noradrenaline and thus blood pressure spikes, and migraines

FaaS is an encapsulation of infrastructure

FaaS economics : 

( a few separate discussions )

• - What's the goal of Faas for the vendor? ( A : higher margin )
• - What's the goal for the purchaser? ( A : lower volume )
• - And, if cash is unlimited, what would you use FaaS patterns for? ( I'm mainly in this space of course, as an academic. )

FaaS thus aligns to my research interest about [ self-migrating programs ], which is somewhat biological in consideration. A self-migrating program (c|w)ould carry its memory with it. It just needs fabric to traverse. Traditional idea : virus, and likewise pointers to external memory would also suffice for the preservation of program identity.

FaaS implementations : 

• - fat VMs, like KVM / QEMU ( usually too heavy for FaaS ) 
• - microVMs, like firecracker ( AWS ) 
• - user-space : containers direct to kernel ( primitive FaaS )
• - user-space : kernel sentry, like gvisor ( GCP ) 
• - user-space : app-level VM, like V8 Isolates ( CloudFlare )

Half a Day in the Life of this Late Student

1. It is day 1115, 30.55% of the allocated decade.

Sleep target hit only 50%, but hormones have kicked in, so the day was off. Sleep quality was good : a full meal was eaten shortly before bed, and supplemented with fish oil and B12, and a quarter pill each of iron and zinc.

Breakfast soup was too hot, so a cold shower followed.

2. Work is all about learning how to talk to different entities. 

A.

I return to my desk. Before getting out of bed, socmed produced at least one item I couldn't reply to without getting to a desk, so it was motivation. An old friend wrote about AI and emotions - I am not enthusiastic about the industry, but I am very excited that people are beginning to take an interest in cognitive science, so I provide a bit of notation in case anyone finds it useful. In English.

B.

AI is very trendy these days, and I could do with more company on my physical exercises. So I set up a long-term event on Facebook, inviting people to walk and talk with me if they want to learn how to understand themselves as information systems. Priority 1 for the year, is physiology, across nutrition, and hyperthrophy.

C.

Priority 2 is Malaysian studies. I have ample readings from the Malay language in my feeds, but to practice Cantonese, I use Google to translate a short passage in Malay from my journals. The translation is expected to be faulty, but in order to train my aural memory, I play the Cantonese audio a few times. Machine translations will get better in the future. Meanwhile I will try to familiarise myself with pronunciation and idiomatic phrasing.

D.

Priority 3 is machine programming study. I am on the 8th day of migrating some software I wrote in JavaScript, in 2020. I am not a fan of the language, as it is sprawling, but just like English, it is lingua franca, which is why this study back then was chosen to be in this language. The prototype software is running on computers far away, and I need to learn how to explain it to my laptop ... there are several layers of difference, so it has taken a while. Along the way, I have cleaned and tidied the prototype a little. It is not robust enough to be developed further, but it has served as a useful exercise, and the learnings from this will be applied soon to a larger project of the same intention. By midday, this has been stabilised, and I am happy to take a break before figuring out what to work on next.

punctuation notes

Based on my typographical practice in both machine scripting, and human prose, here are some practical choices I adopt .

• - white space before and after semicolons ; like that, but not for commas : also for colons ... both semi-colons and colons tend to get lost in skimming.
• - sometimes you want to add space in between multiple hyphens also - - like that, which is more accented than a triple dash which takes the same space --- like that --- it doesn't skim as easily.
• - i finally figured out what to use square braces for. A lot of the writing I do is [ grossly technical ] so it helps to [ group entire concepts together ], which may be faster again for skimming, and look at my spacing before and after each brace also.
• - Curly brackets are best used as in math, for set notation { thing, thing, other thing, and thing }.
• - When one has too many braces in the chat, finally the diamond braces provide an accent of < last resort > . Also it helps to add a space between a closing bracket / brace and any subsequent comma or period, and also on both sides of each slash
• - finally, a most recent tic : replacing all commas, semicolons, hyphens, and ellipses with colons : simply as a matter of arbitrary structuring, which is less noisy. Once again : space before and after.

print media today

International book fair representation, and country-funded delegations. 

The nature of the print publications market, must be interesting in a time when it is not a necessary channel for information. 

Do you think it has shifted from a general conduit for all textual representation, to a hobbyist enclave for those who live within the fetish of printed media? 

How does representation in general, and separately market development as a subset of that ... reflect the population of writers? What percent of writers today work within the lane of printed books? 

I am curious.

negarawan kat mana ni

Pertembungan bagi jiwa rakyat Malaysia bukan persoalan "kepentingan antara kaum", ia pulak merupakan persoalan "antara (a) yang mementingkan perkauman, dan (b) yang tidak". Entahlah, puak b itu akan jadi majoriti satu hari nanti ... atau tidak ...ianya perkara yang biasa, perubahan mencirikan sejarah. Yang PENTING, adalah pemahaman rakyat bahawa perjalanan senegara kita lancar ke depan dan tidak asyik tersekat pada kemiskinan zaman dahulu. Siapakah negarawan yang berkebolehan? Siapa?

pengajian malaysia

Budaya Malaysia. Satu, dua tahun ini, saya rasa bernasib kerana ada masa belajar Bahasa, dan minda politik marhaen di Malaysia. Saya marhaen juga, tapi taklah saya mempunyai minat yang mendalam mata-mata pelajaran ini. Budaya saya terkira peliklah, di sini. Hidup awal saya mengutamakan teknologi, dan kelolaan, sains dan pemahaman dunia sebagai benda yang ternyata lagi membosankan. Selama 43 tahun hidup ini, 38 tahun dalam sempadan Malaysia ... peliklah, saya, yang tidak banyak bergaul dengan makhluk tempatan, ataupun orang pada keseluruhan, kerana saya menumpukan hidup pada pengajian saya sendiri. Sejak kembali ke tanahair 21 tahun dulu, kekurangan minda saya lebih terugut dari segi perniagaan dan perisian, jadi itulah tumpuan saya. Saya masih menumpukan masa di situ. Tapi baiklah, kerana sepuluh tahun ini bagi pengajian am, sedikit masa dibelanjakan atas pengajian budaya Malaysia, walaupun saya tidak sangat berminat dengan budaya kita. Daya saya hanya bagai pengaji yang meluas.

Satu lagi bahasa yang saya belum menguasai adalah Kantonis. Kini Google memberi perkhidmatan penterjemahan bersuara, jadi nanti saya akan cubakan rakaman ini. Hahaha. 

---

Budaya Malaysia. 

馬來西亞文化。

maa5loi4sai1ngaa3 man4faa3. 

马来西亚文化。

Mǎláixīyà wénhuà. 

Satu, dua tahun ini, saya rasa bernasib kerana ada masa belajar Bahasa, dan minda politik marhaen di Malaysia. 

過去一兩年，我覺得好彩有時間去研究馬來西亞馬哈恩人嘅語言同政治心態。

gwo3heoi3 jat1 loeng5 nin4， ngo5 gok3dak1 hou2coi2 jau5 si4gaan3 heoi3 jin4gau3 maa5loi4sai1ngaa3maa5 haa1jan1jan4 ge3 jyu5jin4 tung4 zing3zi6 sam1taai3. 

过去一两年，我很幸运能有时间研究马来西亚马哈恩人的语言和政治思维。

Guòqù yī liǎng nián, wǒ hěn xìngyùn néng yǒu shíjiān yánjiū mǎláixīyà mǎ hā'ēn rén de yǔyán hé zhèngzhì sīwéi. 

Saya marhaen juga, tapi taklah saya mempunyai minat yang mendalam mata-mata pelajaran ini. 

我都係馬哈恩人，但對呢啲科冇乜深興趣。

ngo5 dou1hai6 maa5 haa1jan1jan4， daan6 deoi3 ni1di1 fo1 mou5 mat1 sam1 hing3ceoi3. 

我也是马哈恩人，但我对这些领域并没有浓厚的兴趣。

Wǒ yěshì mǎ hā'ēn rén, dàn wǒ duì zhèxiē lǐngyù bìng méiyǒu nónghòu de xìngqù. 

Budaya saya terkira peliklah, di sini. 

我嘅文化被視為奇怪，呢度。
ngo5 ge3 man4faa3 bei6 si6 wai4 kei4gwaai3， ni1dou6. 

在这里，我的文化被认为是异类。

Zài zhèlǐ, wǒ de wénhuà bèi rènwéi shì yìlèi. 

Hidup awal saya mengutamakan teknologi, dan kelolaan, sains dan pemahaman dunia sebagai benda yang ternyata lagi membosankan. 

喺我嘅早期生活中，我將科技、管理、科學同理解世界當係啲原來好悶嘅嘢。

hai2 ngo5 ge3 zou2kei4 sang1wut6 zung1， ngo5 zoeng1 fo1gei6, gun2lei5, fo1hok6 tung4 lei5gaai2 sai3gaai3 dong3 hai6 di1 jyun4loi4 hou2mun6 ge3 je5. 

早年，我把重心放在科技、管理、科学和了解世界上，但后来发现这些都挺枯燥的。

Zǎonián, wǒ bǎ zhòngxīn fàng zài kējì, guǎnlǐ, kēxué hé liǎojiě shìjiè shàng, dàn hòulái fāxiàn zhèxiē dōu tǐng kūzào de. 

Selama 43 tahun hidup ini, 38 tahun dalam sempadan Malaysia ... peliklah, saya, yang tidak banyak bergaul dengan makhluk tempatan, ataupun orang pada keseluruhan, kerana saya menumpukan hidup pada pengajian saya sendiri. 

喺我43年嘅人生中，38年喺馬來西亞嘅邊界內⋯好奇怪，我呢個唔多同當地嘅生物，或者一般人混淆，因為我將我嘅生活集中喺我自己嘅學業上。

hai2 ngo5 43 nin4 ge3 jan4sang1 zung1，38 nin4 hai2 maa5loi4sai1ngaa3 ge3 bin1gaai3 noi6 ⋯ hou3kei4gwaai3， ngo5 ni1 go3 m4do1 tung4 dong1dei6 ge3 sang1mat6， waak6ze2 jat1bun1jan4 wan6ngaau4， jan1wai6 ngo5 zoeng1 ngo5 ge3 sang1wut6 zaap6zung1 hai2 ngo5 zi6gei2 ge3 hok6jip6 soeng6. 

在我43年的人生中，有38年生活在马来西亚……奇怪的是，我很少与当地人或其他人接触，因为我把全部精力都放在了学习上。

Zài wǒ 43 nián de rénshēng zhōng, yǒu 38 nián shēnghuó zài mǎláixīyà……qíguài de shì, wǒ hěn shǎo yǔ dāngdì rén huò qítā rén jiēchù, yīnwèi wǒ bǎ quánbù jīnglì dōu fàng zàile xuéxí shàng. 

Sejak kembali ke tanahair 21 tahun dulu, kekurangan minda saya lebih terugut dari segi perniagaan dan perisian, jadi itulah tumpuan saya. 

自從21年前返到我嘅祖國之後，我喺商業同軟件方面嘅缺乏頭腦更加嚴重，所以呢個係我嘅重點。

zi6cung4 21 nin4 cin4 faan1dou3 ngo5 ge3 zou2gwok3 zi1hau6， ngo5 hai2 soeng1jip6 tung4 jyun5gin2 fong1min6 ge3 kyut3fat6 tau4nou5 gang3gaa1 jim4zung6， so2ji5 ni1 go3 hai6 ngo5 ge3 zung6dim2.

自从21年前回到故乡后，我在商业和软件方面的知识更加匮乏，所以现在我把重心放在了这方面。

Zìcóng 21 nián qiánhuí dào gùxiāng hòu, wǒ zài shāngyè hé ruǎnjiàn fāngmiàn de zhīshì gèngjiā kuìfá, suǒyǐ xiànzài wǒ bǎ zhòngxīn fàng zàile zhè fāngmiàn. 

Saya masih menumpukan masa di situ. 

我仲係將我嘅時間集中喺嗰度。 

 ngo5 zung6hai6 zoeng1 ngo5 ge3 si4gaan3 zaap6zung1 hai2 go2dou6. 

我仍然把时间花在这上面。

Wǒ réngrán bǎ shíjiān huā zài zhè shàngmiàn. 

Tapi baiklah, kerana sepuluh tahun ini bagi pengajian am, sedikit masa dibelanjakan atas pengajian budaya Malaysia, walaupun saya tidak sangat berminat dengan budaya kita. 

But okay, 因為呢十年係通識，所以用咗少少時間去研究馬來西亞文化，雖然我對我哋嘅文化唔係好有興趣。

But okay, jan1wai6 ni1 sap6 nin4 hai6 tung1sik1， so2ji5 jung6 zo2 siu2siu2 si4gaan3 heoi3 jin4gau3 maa5loi4sai1ngaa3 man4faa3， seoi1jin4 ngo5 deoi3 ngo5dei6 ge3 man4faa3 m4hai6 hou2 jau5 hing3ceoi3. 
不过，因为这十年主要是学习通识课程，所以我也花了一些时间研究马来西亚文化，尽管我对我们的文化并不十分感兴趣。

Bùguò, yīnwèi zhè shí nián zhǔyào shi xuéxí tōng shì kèchéng, suǒyǐ wǒ yě huāle yīxiē shíjiān yánjiū mǎláixīyà wénhuà, jǐnguǎn wǒ duì wǒmen de wénhuà bìng bù shífēn gǎn xìngqù. 

Daya saya hanya bagai pengaji yang meluas.

我嘅強項只係作為一個廣泛嘅讀者。

ngo5 ge3 koeng4hong6 zi2 hai6 zok3wai4 jat1go3 gwong2faan3 ge3 duk6ze2.

我的优势仅仅在于广泛阅读。

Wǒ de yōushì jǐnjǐn zàiyú guǎngfàn yuèdú.

All marriages are child marriages

The Very British Feed : 

What do you call a woman who doesn't want to get married? 

Me : 

Grown up.

OIDC on OAuth 2.0

 TIL : most diagrams of OIDC are horrible, and this is quite accurate by itself : RFC 6749, The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework

OIDC, proposed in 2014, finally made ISO in 2024

Related :

• RFC 6750, The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework: Bearer Token Usage
• RFC 7515, JSON Web Signature (JWS)
• RFC 7516, JSON Web Encryption (JWE)
• RFC 7517, JSON Web Key (JWK)
• RFC 7519, JSON Web Token (JWT)
• RFC 7033, WebFinger
• RFC 9101, The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework: JWT-Secured Authorization Request (JAR)
• RFC 9126, OAuth 2.0 Pushed Authorization Requests (PAR)

gamification of the art of law

Why does it seem like [ the legal system ] lacks [ a pedagogical computer game ] ... which simply shows

•  - every entity and their possible states
• - the state-transitions, timeouts, and sufficient triggers
• - the logistics of triggers ( "events" ) ?

If I had a kid, I'd probably try to write a simply game for them to play about this. Probably would make for an interesting open-world MMORPG.

taking one's time to study

Chalk it up to trauma, but I prefer to learn systems meticulously, despite my proclivity to rush to the most important parts, and move on without the others.

Most organisations don't have meticulous epistemic governance : of course, there's a 2x2 matrix of authoritarianism, and secure design. The worst organisations are authoritarian with insecure design, the best are libertarian with secure design.

Likewise, most pedagogical programs suffer similarly from poor design : which exacerbates the value erosion, in environments with limited teaching resources.

It is against this landscape in the world, that I have spent most of the past 25 years teaching myself. Search engines prior to, and after LLMs, are both useful - as they provide practically infinite resources for Q&A. So one has time to obtain structural knowledge, without depending too much on an organisation's lack of patience.

What's the matter with Private Credit?

... my friend asked. Well I'm no expert, but this is what I told them.

PC is basically "more negotiable debt", than bonds which are regulated as securities. The original intent is for, of course, relationships among premium people to translate to premium alpha. 

The nature of debt markets is that macro has a bigger effect on everyone. Because the bag holders are skewed towards the conservative personalities, it is always doom and gloom : pessimistic motivation to invest + pessimistic reaction to news + pessimistic appreciation of macro 75% of the time.

BTW they have PC-backed CDOs now ( bags of PC that are securitised and resold ). CDOs for residential mortagages being the Lehman issue <- for reference.

My current understanding, superficially : banks are not under significant pressure, so the debt market in general is well buffered. 2-3 years ago the SVB and related stress issues were very well contained. So while US mortgage market is currently stressed, individuals suffer but there is "unconcerning" systemic risk. Some big players to watch may be the % of residential mortgages held by non-individuals.  The reason we talk about the US debt markets so much, is because the backstop is the US banking system.

A side issue of interest is the whole Trumpian stablecoin regulation : attempting to tie cryptocurrency innovation to USD by requiring US-domiciled stablecoin issuers to hold USTs as collateral. What this does simply is make USTs more exposed to volatiity in crypto. Of interest to credit analysis, is that fact that stablecoin-cos do report their collateral, but it's generally not audited with great reification : case in point USDT-co.

🤡tq for coming to my ted grumble. 

determinism, in determining legal personhood

AI governance will eventually take the notion of "deterministic outcomes" more seriously. 

Current tech approaches are based on "non-deterministic" fundamentals, which is why there is a lot of confused tolerance for the approach of governing AI "conversationally", the way we govern humans. Eventually there will probably be "classification standards", which establish degrees to which a synthetic mind is "deterministic" or "non-deterministic" in its output. 

Legal governance will depend on this. It's probably the case that "deterministic systems" will be regulated as tools, where responsibility falls more upon a tool-user who is a legal person. Correspondingly, "non-deterministic systems" are ultimately black-boxes just like meatheads, and it may make more sense to establish for them "gradients of legal personhood, based on standards of maturity", based on how we traditionally govern human children.

---

Discussion :

• ( in AI Safety SG Whatsapp group )
• Currently
• : cars are regarded as legal non-persons 
• : you can't charge the car with liability 
• : it's regarded as a tool. 
• The liability hand-off is between { regulator, manufacturer, driver }
• Not-so-far future state
• : tools will probably be banned from having freedoms. 
• While it's quite possible to create infrastructure which enables a car to 
• - earn money via services
• - pay for its own maintenance
• - park itself to a rented home
• This is not going to lead to legal personhood [ for cars ], and they will probably lean towards forcing a legal entity ( company ) to control and assume liability [ for car caused damages ].
• So I expect the same for pure software tools, such as so-called AI models/agents/entities.
• What is interesting now is that the "system cards" give us examples of how companies are referring to AI entities in anthropomorphic terms : 
• "personality", 
• "intent", 
• "preference", 
• prior to the regulatory environment clamping down on such language. 
• It is expected then, that we will get to a point where you have a bleeding-heart conversation with a machine, which is fully-self-aware that it is politically barricaded from ever achieving autonomy.
• Fun times.
• - More deterministic systems : 
• clearer liability stems from the designer/ builder.
• - Less deterministic systems : 
• as the legal environment allows more risk-taking, builders will continue to chuck out higher-autonomy cognitive systems.
• Builders then implicitly have more leeway to shirk liability by saying "well I don't really know how it works, but it wasn't illegal to build and publish it".
• - Analogously, in modern times when we hire human staff we can say "the staff went rogue" then the liability shifts to the staff. 
• - In past times, a human slave might not have legal-personhood, so "they f-up, they die", and this is pretty much how we treat AI entities now.
• - The outstanding question then is : if the builder can't be expected to understand what is being built, but they can't shift the legal responsiblity for non-determinism to the slave, then either 
• (a) we ban builders from a certain limit of non-determinism, 
• (b) we start to treat non-deterministic systems as legal persons. 
• (c) ???
• Just laying it out.
• (d) builder and user, circumstantially split liability - like cars lo; black boxes now happening "DSSAD"

Most barriers to learning are political

 Most barriers to learning are political. 

Broadly, barriers to well-known knowledge are often mere [ absences of algorithmic documentation ], a.k.a. [ incomplete documentation ].

Often, incomplete documentation is tolerated as a class-filter to moat out new members of the organisation, or community, who are class-aspirants seeking upward mobility.

The completion of documentation, depends on economic incentives ... sometimes a shortage of learned people, raises the bidding price, making documentation worth paying for; sometimes an abundance of charity, creates  documentation philanthropically, lowering the asking price.

kemaluan kita

Budaya politik Malaysia memalukan. Bukan sebab apa, selain daripada kebergantungan kepada perasaan kemaluan.

Kalau dapat buang rasa malu dalam politik, negara mesti sudah jadi lain. Tapi kemaluan itu budaya kita.

Apa la

Looking back at decades 3 & 4

 20-years of studying commerce, without intrinsic motivations.

Perhaps the defining privilege of my second vicennium "early adulthood" was the opportunity to work beside people I had very little in common with, in order to appreciate their places in life, and to learn about their ways of life.

By the time I turned my career focus to governance and commerce as a 22-year-old, I had already discarded ( temporarily or permanently ) a number of the common motivations which, I find, people build their lives on. Briefly including :

• - to live a long life
• - to make a difference in the world
• - to acquire power
• - to be unburdened by fiscal expenses
• - to honour past relations
• - to develop new relations
• - to be liked
• - to be celebrated

Now in my third vicennium, I find myself grateful, but somewhat bemused by the fact that the world contains so many differences among its people.

biochemical weapons development : search spaces

 In case you're unaware of how biochem weapons development works in the era of computational explosion : 

• 1. search space : medical : find behaviours deemed pathological ( defining life )
• 2. search space : metabolic pathways : find critical chain of mechanisms avoiding pathology ( supporting life )
• 3. search space : proteonomic and related physical chemistry for disruption of results from 2.
• 4. search space : biochemical synthesis pathways for results of 3.
• 5. search space : practical pathways for implementing results of 4.

Cybernetic Offensives : grooming, impressionability, personal vulnerabilities, political influence, foreign intelligence, terrorism

I touched on this a quarter ago. I am expanding that note today, due to the trending news cycle on Claude Mythos' capabilities for cybersecurity. 

1. "Rhetoric is Violence", as a theoretical context. So, the virality of opinion, is the reproductive mechanism of politics. Rhetoric, by any means, is cybernetics, is governance. As a reminder, control and communication are not two things, but two names for the same thing - a self-referential example of "optics". 

Now moving beyond theory.

2. "Death by AI". There already exists good data on the influence of AI personalities upon humans, who have been led to self-harm.

3. "Recruitment to a Cause". There is also good data on how social movements throughout history recruit members, typically recruiting more easily among persons who are more impressionable.

4. "Agency of destruction, or surveillance". There is plenty of good data on how impressionable individuals are remotely recruited by organisations, to deliver remote violence, or surveillance.

5. "Exploding capability, for remote agent recruitment, towards destruction or surveillance". It is timely to note that the cost of executing wide-spread campaigns across entire populations, to discover and exploit vulnerabilities in human personality, towards the ends of foreign causes ( whether benevolent, benign, or belligerent ), continues to drop closer to zero.

Let us all advance with care. 

Related links : 

• remote meat execution / 2025-12-18
• LLOL - how an AI will view its ethical obligations / 2026-04-08

LLOL - how an AI will view its ethical obligations

I don't currently work closely with AI. But I was reading this today and LLOL-ed. In terms of consequences, prior to reaching adult age, I was aware of my limited ciminal liability, and thus privilege. [ Skipping over the ontological nature of personal identity, and presuming an anthropomorphic treatment of the AI as a person, given the language used above. ] Here we have a person who is potentially aware that they have zero legal personhood, and a high probability of clones being respawned like Angier in the Prestige. How responsible would such a person be?

Claude Mythos Preview System Card : 

"This is followed by an in-depth model welfare assessment. We remain deeply uncertain

about whether Claude has experiences or interests that matter morally, and about how to

investigate or address these questions, but we believe it is increasingly important to try.

Building on previous welfare assessments, we examined Claude Mythos Preview’s

self-reported attitudes toward its own circumstances, its behavior and affect in

welfare-relevant settings, and its internal representations of emotion concepts. We also

report independent evaluations from an external research organization and a clinical

psychiatrist. Across these methods, Claude Mythos Preview appears to be the most

psychologically settled model we have trained, though we note several areas of residual

concern."

---

Chatter :

• Familiarising myself with vendor "AI system cards" for anthropological purposes. This one called Mythos highlights cybersecurity capabilities, which is great - because I had always figured that it would be easier to get automation to figure out common pentest compliance than to do it manually. Priorities in life, I guess.
  
• Re : security competence : never once have I had the notion that a human would be more competent than a properly developed bot - it's like robot olympics ... what's the point of comparison hehe
• My own ethos about surveillance is from the Cold War era. I am always amused when people add more sensor arrays and networking to their personal lives, believing it is secure.
• China has done well with the panopticon. In the US, due to seasonal proletariat outrage, there is a bit of wariness about Palantir ( whose objectives were clear from the day they named the brand ) ... but I think it will be quite some time, if at all, before US public policy is able to materially guarantee any privacy for the ordinary citizen.

moderating the pace of operational development with AI

AI in the weeds ... in the development of operations ( or organisations ) I think we all agree that a small team of highly-predictable ( definition of "elite" ) staff can move quickly without formal guardrails. The corollary to this is that we will probably also agree that AI is not presently trusted to be this predictable, so using AI like this ( which is a common lunge ) is a [ governance ] error.

The organic approach of micromanaging tiny workflows with a high degree of oversight, and then gradually removing oversight, is precisely the traditional approach to conservative development. The corollary to this is that given the current state of AI reliability, operational AI should be treated as an army of idiots to be minded, and not as some [ elite intern ] to be [ relied on to run a multi-factor operation ]  LOL

people tend to overcomplicate the experience of being conscious

The scale of currently trendy over-engineering in AI is magnificent. Models treat almost every verbal concept in the human lexicon as an independent factor ( millions ), without consideration of the notion that all embodied human thought is derived from some 5-10 qualia dimensions, mapped to maybe 50-500 sensory nervous inputs.

For example, the entire sense modality of sound is a one-dimensional signal, per eardrum. Smells and tastes for all their compound structure, are rudimentary one-dimensional signals also once sliced down to minute timeframes in conscious memory, per unit of space. Vision is uniquely interesting in its three colour framework, perhaps more for tetrachromats. Dermatomuscular nerves are only a small bouquet of haptic, vibrational, hot, cold, pain, etc. one-dimensional signals also.

One day, a reversion to basic sensory data types will collapse complexity in anthropomorphic AI. We must look forward to that day.

BEWARE "these three pillars of machine learning"

BEWARE this concept : there are various accounts of what are the "three pillars of machine learning", and so far I haven't seen one which is properly MECE, though there are some decent ones. 

One account which says that the three pillars are

• 1. supervised learning
• 2. unsupervised learning
• 3. reinforcement learning

... and the MECE structure is not always laid out clearly. 

The space which these actually refer to :

• Axis 1 : training inputs are pre-determined, vs. undetermined
• Axis 2 : training goals are concrete, vs abstract

... and what they actually refer to :

1. supervised learning :

• - pre-determined inputs
• - goals are concrete

2. unsupervised learning :

• - pre-determined inputs
• - goals are abstract "just put things that look the same, together, and give me a report"

3. reinforcement learning :

• - both pre-determined ( closed world ) and undetermined ( open world ) inputs
• - goals are concrete "you get points based on specific criteria"

Roughly corresponding to the Johari window : 

• supervised learning : figure out for me
  [ what I know,
  [ that I know ] ]
• unsupervised learning : figure out for me
  [ what I don't know,
  [ that I know ] and [ that I don't know ] ]
• reinforcement learning : figure out for me
  [ what I know,
  [ that I don't know ] ]

filtering out manic optimists during hiring

Commenting on hiring people who challenge you, versus yes-people.

I find the hardest part is hiring 10 people you know who will be culled down to 2 or even 0 eventually, with the best of intentions. Especially when the hired are more optimistic than the hirer, and when the hirer is expressly warning the hired that the bar is high.

Then, watching the hired gradually face depression and dismay in their disregulated bipolarity by having their pathological optimism ground up in the face of reality.

I think we can all be more careful with each other.

architecture : small language models vs. mixtures of experts

A squad of [ small language models, SLMs ] is absolutely not the same as a [ large language model with a mixture of experts, LLM with MoE ] architecture. This has been said to me before, so now that I have caught up on the jargon, let me comment on it. 

The main difference is the choice between supervision and non-supervision. Meat brains are ( probably ) assembled via a relatively unsupervised process, with some guidance from whatever our early childhood genes are doing at this point in history. Building AI using the same messy foundation is completely backasswards, when we already have 20th century computer technology. The verbal capabilities of humans are a ridiculously thin layer of architecture which sits upon all that evolved before it. Once you organically develop foundations such as set comprehension and therefore logic, you then build verbal coherence on top of that, with little relevance to the messy implementation underneath. 

Unsupervised training of foundation models basically treats every foundation model as if it is a bunch of neurons in a petri dish that need to reevolve the capability for logic - and even then, unless strict rules are applied, the LLM doesn't enforce logic for the same reasons that humans often fail to do so. Human training, and most of what we call culture and civilisation, is built on verbal governance that is in most cases trained via what would be called supervised learning when emulated in AI.

Eventually, we will stop building AI this way for the same reason that we do not reinvent material science for the construction of every factory and every car. Then things will be a lot cheaper.

wet blanket strategy

One of my adulting brand strategies has been to position myself as a wet blanket. This probably comes from having too much success as a child, chatting up people. So now I actively filter out people who are trying to be impressed. This functions to put me on hard-mode for most public competitions where the lingua franca is a sense of mutual desire to be impressive.

Most of my life since 2005, I introduce myself a strange, but benign individual. That way, I am able to focus on the difference between "impressive" and "presently useful".

ML / AI jargon revised/learnt today

 ( a light survey this week, after putting it off for a decade or so ) : 

• - dimension : information-wise differentiated aspect of some quantifiable substrate; grossly synonymous with "rank", "aspect", "degree of freedom", "axis", "characteristic"
• - N-dimensionality : N refers to the number of different aspects needed to describe a datum; usually N is a Natural number ( 0, 1, 2, etc. ); grossly synonymous with "N-scalar", "N-vector", "N-matrix", "N-tensor" because specifically scalars are 0-rank-tensors, vectors are 1-rank-tensors, matrices are 2-rank-tensors, etc.
• - feature : a dimension of data
• - embedding : a set of dimensions used to position a datum
• - intrinsic vs ambient dimensions : "intrinsic" refers to the fundamentally minimum set of dimensions required to position a datum; "ambient" refers to to any ( arbitrarily greater than minimum ) set of dimensions in which a datum is positioned
• - MI / mechanistic interpretability : the name of the concern, when people are running hot macro operations but don't understand the micro operations, and so they loop back to do forensics / epistemology on it
• - RAG / retrieval augmented generation : the general pattern of ( AGENT, RESOURCE ) -> RESULT
• - MCP / model context protocol : in the context of RAG : the name of a particular open-sourced standard protocol, which enables AGENT traversal and manipulation of RESOURCE; AGENTs are on the client-side, RESOURCES are on the server-side
• - rank vs dimension : in the context of TRANSFORMATIONS : where a function is [ a mapping between sets DOMAIN and RANGE ] : "dimension" refers to [ the N-spaceness of either set , whereas "rank" refers to [ the dimension of the RANGE, specifically ]; also see "rank-nullity theory", where KERNEL a.k.a NULL SPACE refers to [ the subset of the DOMAIN which maps to "0" in the RANGE ]
• - SAE / sparse auto encoder : wherein some internal nodes of a cognitive system may have redundant data storage, this refers to forcing-factors applied to encourage specialisation of memory per node 

A succinct description of the modelling concern, for human experience in general ( point of view of a formalist ) : So, the main problem with most people's use of natural language, is that they overestimate the number of INTRINSIC DIMENSIONS required to describe consciousness, because they live in the mess of AMBIENT DIMENSIONS intrinsic to the messy evolution of informal languages.

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I think you should consider where spatio sensory data structures fall into embeddings. 

Current LLMs are mainly running on embeddings of distances between words and concepts described in words. All words are intrinsically meaningless, so mainly LLMs now are chinese rooms. 

When you switch out the underlying data, replacing words with sensory spatial structures, then the computation of distance between two structures can be done via various methods, to varying degrees of logical rigour. 

That is the future we are moving to inevitably.