A thread on STDs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

EBV/mono is a cousin.

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

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

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

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

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

People are Architecture

Picking your peers is a matter of architecture. Just like ... how books are displayed to remind oneself of what to think, even if they remain unread. When we design spaces, we are designing the data which hits a brain that interacts with that space. Any persons allowed into the space are part of what the design allows for that space. The presence of each person in the space changes what data his the brain that interacts with that space. It's just information systems architecture all the way down. From a friendly discussion.

On Addiction, and its Mastery

 Addiction is a mental loop. It tends to be associated with dysfunction. While it is "bad" if the object is culturally offensive such as alcohol, it is "good" if the object is culturally acceptable. For example, it is deemed OK to be addicted to people, in fact people who shun such addictions are regarded as dysfunctional. We use concepts like love, and loyalty, to discuss such addictions.

I did a study of love when I was in college. I wanted to know how flexible my emotions were, so as a matter of experimentation, I tried to fall in love with an apple. I figured it was possible, and thereafter regarded love as something that can be switched on or off, with training. Many people have found this story and the ensuing behaviour offensive, but that is OK I guess.

More recently, I analysed the concept of love among humans into

• friendship
• sex
• contracts
• addiction

I think, my study in college should be rightly rephrased as a study of addiction. If you learn to turn the behaviour of addiction on and off at will, the addition of this feature to your mental life can be somewhat liberating.

The Malaysian Social Contract : between Affluent Malays and the Chinese

IT'S TODAY. Ok, doing community service by raising awareness of government proceedings - not interested? Please unfollow or keep scrolling. Here's a #showerthought I had yesterday, from a sociological standpoint.

One of Malaysia's cutest achievements is the tacit social contract between the rich Malays and the ... the Chinese! (Contextually ... who's left out of this arrangement - the poor Malays, the Indians, and the indigenous non-Malays. I suppose they are watching the main drama. What is that? Well ... )

The main drama : 

1. most Malaysian citizens : are economically immobile Malays

2. most Malaysian politicians : are economically mobile Malays

Why don't the non-(2.)s resent the (2.)s? Furthermore amidst widespread and intense suffering across all races, why haven't the (2.)s been challenged by revolt? The answer as we all know is in the social contract. But the most important device in this social contract isn't often talked about. It just comes up ... every once in a while. We must now introduce :

3. the largest Malaysian minority ethnicity : the Chinese

Implicitly, as it has turned out, Malaysia's social contract involves (3.) agreeing to be piñatas for (2.). How so? Basically (3.)s are decoys. Given any negative economic event, (2.) will point its finger at (3.), thereby directing the wrath of (1.) at (3.) instead of (2.).

This works brilliantly - (2.)s are able to withhold health, wealth, and almost every other non- religious semblance of respectability from (1.)s, while getting away with it scot-free. (2.)s meanwhile are complicit in this arrangement because they'd rather be the medium-sized-fish in a small pond, than small-fish back in China. What keeps the pond (Malaysia) small? (2.)s of course, they maintain (1.)s in a perpetual state of economic duress, so that they can't compete with the (3.)s.

Oh my fucking  █████  god. If this was the first time you read about it, you'd be like "what the BBQ flying fish happened here?" But I don't know, most Malaysians grew up in a world already defined like this. We were born in it, moulded by it. We didn't see the light until we were already studying sociology at the dinner table, by then it was nothing to us but boring ...

Sebenarnya #RakyatGagal : Bukan #KerajaanGagal

Kebelakang ni ada beberapa pihak yang sibuk membawang dengan suara-suara #KerajaanGagal la, #kerajaanini, #kerajaanitu ... oi, korang tak sangka waktu dulu bila permulaannya status Darurat ... kan kerajaan sudah gagal? Baru-baru nak bising? Sebab sekaranglah baru kau susah. Sebenarnya (.my ya), sudah berpuluh-puluh tahun kita orang hidup dengan kerajaan-kerajaan yang lemah dan tidak sempurna, tetapi barulah korang terasa, sebab akibat kegagalan sekarang amat teruk. Bila ada kegagalan yang kurang teruk, korang buat tak tau je ... ok kan? Cukup makan, kan? Sekarang tak cukup. Habislah kau. Sekarang tolong jangan bising lagi ... buat sahaja apa yang disuruh kerajaan. Kalau nak bising, you tunggu selepas darurat, dan you gugurkan sifat ketidaktahuan anda mengenai perihal pentadibran negaraku. Jangan saja nak gugurkan ahli politik ini atau itu ... gugurkan sifat kau keseluruhan. Mungkin satu hari nanti, tidak beberapa lama dari sekarang, zaman politik baru akan lebih menyeronok. Tapi nanti kita observe lah sikit ... kalau sifat orang ramai tidak beberapa beza dengan sifat dulu tu, cam tu kita stuck saja dengan kerajaan yang sudah gagal, sekarang gagal, dan pada masa depan akan gagal berturut-turutan. Entahlah ... inilah kehidupan rakyat ordinary. Kita lepak je. 

Avoiding Product-Market Fit

 I was speaking with an acquaintance who works at large company which I have peeked into since 2011. I find myself explaining again my aversion to working on "predictable" business models - some companies have interesting operations at the tactical level because of strategic stability, but that stability also provides very limited opportunity to do any work that is more interesting than winning the next knife fight.

Perhaps I should reword my copy to say, when it comes to working on strategy, I am only interested in businesses which have yet to achieve product-market fit. Finding anyone who wants to invest in these is a whole different discussion. As for me, I already wrote off my life for work like* this, fifteen years ago. There isn't much else to look forward to, for me. I don't think the other stuff is very interesting. 

[* Albeit, it wasn't specifically this kind of work in commerce - but rather this kind of work in general; to pay for it, one needs to participate in commerce; and some commercial work is specifically that kind of work, I suppose. ]

Confused about the business case for high-risk innovation R&D? Check out the concept of "good is the enemy of great." I believe that mantra has a successful rate of engagement, so you may find it easier to understand.

Or try this: "avoid product-market fit for as long as possible, if the fit isn't defensible".

On Gazing; Aside, Body Language

 On gazing. I was telling a friend, I spend half my life worrying that "my stare is too intense", due to various complainers. So generally I have a program to regularly reduce eye-contact duration with conversationalists who are new to me. In reaction to this, I have had feedback from potential investors (who later become er, friends), that my body language during pitches was not sufficiently robust due to my sporadic eye-contact. So in conclusion, I must say, it is best to just imitate the eye-contact pattern of your conversational partner, based on second-to-second feedback. Most people do not actively manage this. But some people do.

As for deception, we have to assume that anyone may be smart enough to lie through performance of whatever body language they presume to be suitable for the event.

So body language, like other language has to be read as "what the subject says," in the broader context of "pay less attention to what people say, than what they do."

I actually don't know how many content-warnings to slap on this one

CW: death and taxes

Ok, I just observed another ABC drama in that very dramatic entrepreneurial group. So you have a community builder (CB), and an antagonist (A), where A is going and making long complex arguments that CB is a waste of space.

So it was a bit of a challenge to figure out how to tactfully tell A, "OMG, stop doing that!" If the CBs stop working, there will be no communities left, and when there are no communities, then there will be no cannon fodder left for entrepreneurs to innovate on!

It's a bit awkward living in Malaysia, not really knowing how to carry myself without offending people because you know, it's not exactly a grade-A market for ... various things, GDP, innovation, deep tech, and all that. You don't want people running around saying "don't listen to X, he's a B-grader" because a B player in a C market is doing ... pretty good, and you don't want the C players focusing on the Ds, and the Fs. Bs are good. It's kinda relative. At the same time you have to keep people conscious of this fact without saying too often "oh har har, glass ceiling, bitch, your ecosystem is cratered no matter what you do, hur hur hur". 

Later on in my reflections I was just thinking about how I'm supposed to think about all this. High-risk startups are like restaurants - they are individually expected to fail; anyone who gets excited about the individual companies is a moron; you have to bet on the asset as a class - and you do NOT spend your time trying to convince these morons to believe other than how they believe, because, then you would have no one left to run these companies ... cannon fodder is essential, precisely because no one knows where the cannonballs will land.

Onward, in war ... and love, I suppose, FWIW. 

Intermediate thoughts: It's better to focus on a B player in a C market, than on a con. // In a C market, it's better for C players to focus on B players, than on a con.

Analogously: children should be encouraged to play - it is more important to play by children's rules than to play by no rules at all.

Traditionally: in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

You're looking for advice on building a marketing platform for F&B businesses?

/Q&A in a forum/

Just got back to a desk. Had to go register for a new water meter just now LMAO. Let me try and answer your concern directly ... hmm.

You want [F&B businesses] to use a [marketing platform] to gain [membership] from their [customers]. 

We need to take this apart a bit ... 

1. Do F&B businesses want to be associated with platforms? Would platforms have a negative or positive perceived value to an F&B business - negative meaning that even if you paid the F&B business, they wouldn't want to be associated with a platform? This is up to you to research. 
2. Do F&B businesses want members? I rarely hear these two words in the same sentence. 
3. Do you think your concept of membership benefits the platform more or the F&B business? What is the end game for the platform? What is the end game for the F&B business? 

I'll give you an example that has come up in conversation recently. Let's take UberEats and similar businesses as an example. For every food vendor that UberEats signs up, they get closer to their end game of running a monopoly in the horizontal of online order origination between eaters and vendors of food. However, no matter how many items a vendor of food sells on UberEats, they will never achieve a monopoly in any horizontal, or vertical whatsoever. The incremental benefits are severely asymmetrical in such a case. 

How would you build a platform, which enables an F&B business to become a monopoly (in any subspace)?

Go for it!

Hard Choices and Censorship (in JavaScript)

I think I'm ready to lay down some rules, a sort of style guide, for this framework I'm writing for Node-on-Lambda.

* How to Deploy Functions in this Software Framework *

-   ALWAYS use arrow function expressions (AFEs), UNLESS there is a specific 
    need to refer to a function as `this` from within its own body ... and to
    a less significant degree, if you need the function's `arguments` array.
    Heuristics: prefer terseness; explicitly state intentions.

-   ALWAYS use async functions, UNLESS there is a specific advantage to force 
    synchronous responses. Heuristic: prefer decoupling.
    
-   Use generator functions ONLY when there is a specific need for such
    functionality. (Note added for completeness. Did we miss any other type of 
    function?)

* How to Deploy Promises in this Software Framework *

-   ALWAYS use the following taxonomy:

    (   Promise ( 
            ( fulfillFn, rejectFn ) => {}   // an `executor`
            
        ).then(
            onFulfilled ( value )   => {},  // a Promise is `settled`1
            onRejected  ( reason )  => {}   // a Promise is `settled`2
            
        ).catch(                            // sugared  .then()
            onRejected  ( reason )  => {}
            
        ).finally(
            regardless  ()          => {}   //  No argument is ever passed.
        )
    ) 
    
-   Do NOT use:     `resolve`   in place of     `fulfill`
                    `resolved`  in place of     `settled`
                    `result`    in place of     `value`
                    `error`     in place of     `reason`

    Heuristic: prefer standards (the etymology is complex; I have a slide).

-   ALWAYS enter both arguments of Executors, and .then(), EVEN IF one argument
    will not be used. For minimal line noise, consider using `_`, `f`, `r`, 
    `onF`, `onR`. Heuristic: terseness; explicitly deny options.

-   ALWAYS use `await`, and therefore `try { await } catch (e) { handler }`
    UNLESS some of the above is more succinct. Heuristics: terseness; explicitly
    state intentions.

Tomorrow's Industrial Organisation

Try it fullscreen.

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Now that food delivery apps are popping up like mushrooms, I'm looking forward to their eventual demise - and to some innovation as the market consolidates. Without repeating too much of what's already been written, here are some brief thoughts adorning a Venn diagram.

1. From gigs and employment, to small business leadership

I expect to see INDIVIDUAL delivery riders maturing along this trajectory. Digital platforms that enable this are going to be minting it in the long run, as this is a whole new microenterprise segment.

2. Sacrificing margins in order to grow volumes

I expect highly leveraged SUPER-APPS like Grab will have to embrace their advantages in digital infrastructure, and to forego some margins in order to grow volumes exponentially.They will have to either make way, or go deep on the capital inefficiency of the physical layer - and if they do this wrong, they become Wal-Mart and die. Or they become FamilyMart, and survive!

3. Vertical integration while capital is scarce

Traditional E-COMMERCE is on a collision course with super-apps. Many people may not notice, but it’s less a question of whether Grab can kill Lazada, and more a question of whether Lazada wants to turn around, federate with other horizontals, and bite Grab. The e-commerce incumbents have a more efficient capital structure to begin with.

Thanks for listening. I'm just up late, and working on my own ... so it's nice to have someone to write to.

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