college

College has been on my mind a lot. I pinged a bunch of profs from 23 years ago about recent news that reminded me of the exact same shit I was staring down back then. Always figured AI would break a lot of heads so I wouldn't have to be the one to do it. Breakage will continue for another decade I guess.

When I got to college in the US, from Malaysia, i had never seen so much money in my life. Just sweeping floors and minding reception desks, and I was already sending spare cash to charities in Africa for a well, because I didn't know what to do with the excess. 

The thing is though, at the same time, now I didn't say it too loud back then, but a lot of the people around me were dumb as shit. It was absolutely not inspiring that way, and I really worked my ass off just to figure out how to not be what the system said was correct, because it was so obviously FOS.

I generally don't expect other people to share my views. Even at 40 I attended some orgy full of hot people on drugs, and the first thing it reminded me of was what I hated most about college. The boredom. Tooth gritting boredom. But for others, that was the life. They missed that the most, while the thing I miss the most is a having a library open all night.

The world is the sum of our parts. Sure, I like a good fuck. But there are more important things that people aren't doing, and I enjoy some of those things more, I guess. Different things are important to different people. 

anti-stalking law in Malaysia

Effective 2023, act 574, section 507A, which surely includes, in its breadth, repeatedly texting on any media or commenting upon someone in social media :), so long as any reasonable person ( common sense weasel clause ) would know it would distress the recipient of such treatment. 

kindergarten politics

"I am surprised at X in my backyard, is there any way to stop X?" 

I mean, yes, at the risk of being arrested for public disorder. Merely the nature of things. Things only change if people care enough. 

keutamaan perkauman

My view of Malaysian politics as it stands is "asalkan perkauman diutamakan" vs "asalkan bukan tunggang perkauman".

Roughly that puts us at

Type A : Perkauman - UMNO, BERSATU, PEJUANG

Type B : Agama, Geopolitik, Kesamarataan - every other party

moral orthogonality as a liberal art

The rudiment of chauvinism is moral orthogonality.

1. Identify the moral agent. 

2. Identify the moral agent's axis of virtue. 

3. Assert to the moral agent an orthogonal axis of virtue. 

There is literally nothing more to trolling, revolution, or the corruption of youth. 

liberal art education x AI

Re : Frey 

I agree with the direction but for fundamentally different reasons, unless this turns out to be a case of linguistic confusion

(1) I'm not a human exclusivist, as I figured out around 2004 how to map all my qualia to quantifiable data structures

(2) the tradition of the "liberal arts" is originally tied to capitalism not humanism - "skills for nonslave humans"; on the other hand, the tradition of a "liberal education" carries more of the modern notion of humanism; both meet around the junction of participative democracy, but one term is thousands of years older in context

(3) the contemporary liberal arts are more like trivium, natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, macroeconomic allocation, geopolitics, law, and engineering (including medicine) sure, but it really is a different thesis.

Or I'm just splitting hairs? Haha. Maybe analytical/ quantitative phenomenology will become a liberal art, in the future. :p

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Src :

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/boardops_i-agree-with-the-direction-but-for-fundamentally-share-7465906933401554944-nIlI/?

Discussion :

I spent my undergraduate career rudely complaining about this to my professors. Basically nothing has changed since 2003 🤣

PMXI pool

Sanusi, Rafizi, Hamzah + JAG wildcard ... we have not had any serious technocrats, and JAG is about as close as it gets.

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Hot take : I would vote for this :

PM : Sanusi

DPM : KJ

Also this :

PM : Abang Jo

DPM : Akmal Saleh

Why? Because I almost never do things if I feel the outcome is easy to predict. 

conditioning inadequancies

Adequate physical conditioning ends with inability to stand.

Adequate mental conditioning ends with inability to think. 

Adequate social conditioning ends with inability to speak? 

Haha

My approach to the Ivory tower

Since I was a child, business done by ordinary people has seemed trivial. I thought, all of us can do it, and it is not something to be considered hard. At 43, I still have this view.

But around the age of 16, I developed an appreciation for cultural anthropology. This arose from recognising that communication is hard, and that its hardness is structural, but rarely impermeable. In college, I considered a traditionally academic life, but I found my peers and professors all to be ... insufficiently ivory ... too commercial, perhaps. So, I made a point to practice anthropology by living with them, while attempting to be ... ivory enough ... in my spare time. It was a period which I have always been grateful for. I considered stopping halfway through the program, but decided to finish it for convenience.

Then around 22 I turned my attention to collecting commercial experience, which I viewed as necessary, in order to be credible in such society, even though I did not find such society intrinsically interesting. I lived among them until I was around 39, taking only about a year out of 17 to be uncommerciably academic. 

Now, attempting a decade of academia, I am not sure that I do a clever thing. But I am rarely sure that any of the things I do, are clever. TBF mainly they are simply interesting. 

the university and its daemons

And AI will increasingly become good enough to facilitate university level discourse, coaching, and grooming. This was always going to happen. Just a question of when. The university as a machine proceeds, with its goals, though methods may change. Maybe goals will change as industry changes also. 

Top universities are fundamentally about political laning, not knowledge, anyway, though the two are related. Only one of the two pays, so the payers have it. 

quantitative phenomenology in canon

It's been a bit disheartening to be reminded, that many clever people still have not the training, which allows them to map their emotional and other personal phenomenological experience to objectively quantifiable data structures. I wonder in what decade or century, this becomes a canonical liberal art. 

next gen lang?

Maybe it is time for a new generation / paradigm of programming language which is tailored to natural language users and environments. Mainly it has to have two things, a control flow that automatically handles exceptions by cleaning-up to a default arena state, and control flow for verifying success within an arena so that it becomes a save-point for progress between arenas. Maybe start like this. 

menggelistis / gedik / manja

My updated translations : "coyness arising from anxiety; descriptive of both childish social incongruence, and signalling in intimate relationships" 

LLMs - intuitive?

There is one outstandingly wrong, critique of most LLMs : 

"they don't have an intuition". 

Well, intuition is NEARLY ALL they have - just open it up and look at the data structure. This is because they are trained as probabilistic consolidations of all past uses of each word in known history, vis-a-vis "unsupervised learning". What they do NOT have is rules, because they are not trained with hard counterexamples, vis-a-vis "supervised learning", let alone trained to have strict rules, vis-a-vis "logic programming". 

on the merits of denying intelligence

Thanks for the thoughtful comment, haha. Without getting too much into the weeds, I think : Each of our perspectives on what AGI / or "I" in general means is shaped by unique personal experience, a bound set for each of us. These sets may or may not be commensurable - we don't currently know if the categories or your experience, and the categories of mine are even comparable. This has political consequences, mainly related to how seriously we take each other's speech.

Some of the technological steps you mentioned however, I must say are "operational improvements" which improve cache hierarchy and introduce compression in some cases -without really changing the overall "architectural" approach employed by the currently trendy transformer gang. 

I think it remains useful to query both, other humans, and the results of what we can make machines do ... in improving not just "what we think intelligence is", but also how we can communicate what we think it is.

the ambiguity of knowledge

A parent asked, if others had asked their children, what their children wanted from education - and how to judge if the child's preferences or the parents' preferences were better.

I elected to share a canonical rant : before I went to Year 1 of elementary school, my parents asked if I wanted to study in a school with two, or three languages. I said two, because I wanted to be lazy. They sent me to the school with three. So for the rest of my life, I have been wary of fools asking meaningless questions.

Aside from that, of course life has provided many disparate experiences. Many have involved speaking with people who tell me, nicely or otherwise, that they believe I am not well-informed or well-opinionated. The problem with me, I find, is that while I am quite willing to accept these views, and submit to compromise, more often than not, I find that I should have paid less attention to them, because the speaker was foolish. I can only speak from my own experience, which is quite limited.

I do not believe this makes me intelligent, but sometimes intelligence is something you have whether you want to have it or not. And others lack it, whether you wish they had it or not.

And sometimes you are just stupid. :)

maths has an ISO notation

Day 1 back at elementary number theory ( day 1155 of sabbatical2, day ~15,547 on earth ). I am revising this slide on the notation for exponentiation and logarithms which I made year ago.

• after a bunch of catch up on software engineering, I am finally turning to focus on remediating my poor foundations in number theory
• a quick look around the internet will show you that this "has always been, and continues to be" an issue for many students of maths; folks also decry other notations like dx/dy, and the visual non-symmetry of notation for differentiation and integration
• I think, a pet idea of mine henceforth will be  : someone should make an ISO standard for canonical mathematical notation, and then republish all past mathematical texts ( or have a way of translating them automatically ) to the canonical mathematical notation; all mathematicians would be of course free to use non-ISO notation anywhere they liked. ( oh wait, they've been doing it since 1992, and the latest is here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_80000 )

TIL :(or am reminded, because I probably forgot) : 

• (1) there's an ISO for maths notation, so speculation about notation optimisation should just target that, 
• (2) the notion of "antilogs" we studied in highschool are already deprecated in scientific writing, 
• (3) the etymology of "logbooks" is the same as that of "knots"

orang kebencian

Jenis orang yang paling saya benci, bukan tertumpu kepada mana-mana negara, atau kaum, walaupun ada banyak jenis ini persekelilingan hidup saya. 

Iaitu sesiapa yang dahpun dorang diajar sesuatu oleh ibubapa atau gurunya, dorang ingat pula orang lain kena ikut cara itu. Bila tak ikut pula orang lain, jenis orang yang saya paling benci akan rasa gelabah. Dorang seakan-akan petu ... yang mat saleh panggil karen. 

"Kan, saya sudah buat apa yang disuruh, kenapa orang lain tidak menjunjung perbuatanku? Mana pengiktirafan? Aku mahu respek! Cara saya mulia! Saya seorang yang berjalan lurus! KORANG, tak beradab!" 

Karen puteh ada, karen cina ada, mana-mana jenis karen pun ada. Tapi ini kerangka mengenali penyakit itu, secara am.

Saya tidak sebut pasal kemahuan seseorang. Tapi pasal orang yang kemahuannya, diterima dari ajaran, dan bukan dikerjakan sendiri.

electrolytic muscle function, and disease

At rest : 

• [ neuron and muscle independently : sodium-potassium pump (slow) : pushes out 3Na+ for every 2K+ pulled in, maintaining negative voltage inside the cell ]

Firing : 

• [ neuron : ( due to upstream stimulation) opens sodium gate, Na+ inflow sends current to calcium gate, Ca2+ enters neuron, triggers acetylcholine release into synaptic cleft ] 
• -> [ muscle : acetylcholine from synaptic cleft, opens sodium gate, Na+ inflow sends current to sarcoplasmic reticulum, which releases calcium, which causes contraction of the cell : (fast) K+ leaves cell to restore negative voltage inside the cell ]

Muscle Diseases, and ordinary states which become diseases if not reversed within ordinary timeframes :

• - Ca2+ : 
• too much outside cells, "overshields" sodium gates of BOTH neurons and muscles, both become "understimulated" ... and subsequent to neuron stimulation, Ca2+ enters neuron slower, dumping acetylcholine slower, furthering muscle "understimulation"; 
• too little outside cells, "undershields" sodium gates of BOTH neurons and muscles, both become "overstimulated" ... and subsequent to neuron stimulation, Ca2+ enters neuron faster, dumping acetylcholine faster, furthering muscle "overstimulation"
• - Mg2+ :
• too much outside cells, block Ca2+ entry to neurons, reducing acetylcholine release, "understimulating" muscles
• too little outside cells, Ca2+ entry is less blocked, increasing acetylcholine release, "overstimulating" muscles
• - K+ : 
• too much outside cell, K+ cannot leave quickly, cell may become "overcontracted" - ditto "overexcitation" of neuron at early stages, but  at later stages, sodium gates fail, neurons and muscles both weaken; 
• too little outside cell, K+ leaves too fast, cell may become "hard to contract"
• - Na+ : 
• too much outside cell, Na+ enters quickly, cell may become "overexcited", ditto for neuron; 
• too little outside cell, Na+ cannot enter quickly, "underexciting" cell, ditto for neuron; nervous system may overcompensate with erratic voltages, causing "erratic excitation"

The Cartesian Product Bubble

I'm guilty of avoiding AI over the past decades because the techniques I've heard about still seem rather primitive. The last decade in particular has been characterised by VCs throwing obscene amounts of money at a fundamentally inefficient approach.

After noodling around in the current tech for a week or so, just to make sure I understand what's going on, I think it's safe to say that the the titular concern of this post stands firm.

An analogy. At the heart of trendy LLMs is a giant Y times Y list of known words in English ( also other languages, but nevermind those for now ), forming an enormous 2D table. It's Y times Y because both H and V axes have the same list of words - sure, half the table is redundant, so you can think of it as a trangular half-rectangle of unique pairs. If you lookup the junction between any two words, you find a WINDOW to a realm of many, about 10^(3 +/- 1 ), dimensions of information about each pair of words.

Based on the "best" available public information, this is the data structure for storing everything the LLM knows about the world - which it knows ONLY FROM READING TEXT ( except for MLLMs, which we'll also ignore for now ). Even in the case of MLLMs, sensory spatio-temporal data can be understood to be stored within the realm accessed by each WINDOW.

Of course, when you ask an LLM a question like "What is the meaning of life?" it doesn't need to peek through ALL the WINDOWS and all the realms above, rather it only has to peek through a subset of windows, W_n. However it's still fundamentally inefficient, because : it doesn't JUST look at W_n and answer your question. 

Oh no.

It looks at your question, goes to a set of windows, W_n1, takes a peek, grimaces in deep thought, spits out ONE word, then pats itself on the head and goes to W_n2, a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT set of windows, spits out a SECOND word, and goes on and on until W_nM to obtain M words. While there is a cache, this is exactly what it sounds like - quite a bit of work.

I'm not a very smart fellow, so I'm probably going to be wrong about this. But, it would seem that the thin red circle that I am drawing around the entire architecture that drives most of our current AI tech is going to have to collapse, and be replaced by more efficient methods soon enough.

When? Who knows. I've been waiting since 2003, and "they" haven't figured it out yet. Some of "them" are pretty close, I think. I like the JEPA and MLLM approaches, and am eager to see where they end up.

One thing's for sure - if you create a model of the world based on this Cartesian product approach to windows upon a realm of thousands of dimensions, and have to crawl through the whole library, to peek through a different SET of windows, once per answer word ... even if it gets you the correct answer to a question, it's bloody tiring.

And to BUILD that library of windows to that realm ... it still takes WAY more money than it takes to build a human brain.