noosphere : syllabus architecture

Chit chat with a professor I used to be on a committee with. 

"I found a useful word today - it talks about the sum of human knowledge in the context of environmental epochs.

My concern as an undergraduate was that some syllabi ( my school in particular ) didn't have an authoritative view on how a student was to traverse the sum of it. That's how I ended up on the edu committee ... as I was spending all my free time figuring that out."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere 

stupid trade-offs

 stupid ( read ironically ) trade-offs :

• - dropping the commonly accepted aversion to death, for the commonly avoided "every day is a good day to die" policy
• - dropping the commonly accepted reliance on community recommendations, for the commonly avoided dependency on personal capacity
• - dropping the commonly accepted monetary measure of security, for the commonly avoided "being happy, simply via summoning the neural state of happiness"

co-guested : capitalism and socialism

One resolution for the capitalist-socialist dilemma is a formalised caste system. Individuals or corporate entities may access different insurances and opportunities, based on formal registration by caste.

Capitalists may argue that making it opt-in is basically a free market system. But what I am proposing is essentially larger government infrastructure platform, which hosts both people who :

• 1. want to be boring for life, with limited downside 
• 2. people who are willing to risk everything

Is tuition necessary? It depends on your objectives

Is tuition necessary?

In another group, someone asked if paid tuition is necessary, for students already attending "expensive" private or international schools.

My response :

The origin is decades/centuries old, and part of Chinese cram-culture. Basically the student has no occupation beyond passing a specific high-level exam which kicks back as wealth for the entire family : so the student is a vehicle of investment.

How this is relevant to the PRESENT : is really up to you.

• A. Some families value credential laddering, and the collection of branded-school certs as a superficial class marker.
• B. Some families are less concerned about the class-marker, but see it as a means to the more concrete end of becoming powerful and wealthy via working for/with elite social networks.
• C. Some families are neither concerned with social-markers, nor wealth and power, and they may instead value :
• C1. intellectual achievement / knowledge
• C2. a certain lifestyle / tribe : which may be commercially oriented, or less so
• C3. sensory art and beauty
• C4. other

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

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.

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 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 :)

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 )

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.

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. 

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".

24C kira jimat ke?

Bab suhu kerajaan ke 24C (pejabatnya). Tolong sebarkan.

1. Sebenarnya, perasaan nyaman tidak bergantung hanya kepada suhu (T), tetapi kepada kelembapan relatif (rH) juga. Contohnya, tetap pada 26C, rH dalam julat 50%-80% mengakibatkan perasaan yang AMAT berbeza.

2. Masalah pembaziran tenaga dalam kejuruteraan udara ("HVACR") bergantung berat kepada ketidakhadiran PENEBATANAN SEMPURNA bangunan dan bilik. Lagipun KEBOCORAN udara amat memahalkan tujuan kenyamanan. 

SOFR, IORB, EFFR

 US monetary policy studies : 

• 1. Borrowers of cash, sell repurchase agreements (repos). Lenders of cash, buy repos. Repo sellers put down USTs as collateral. This market determines the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR).
• 2. The Fed lends to banks, charging Interest on Reserve Balances (IORB). Banks lend to banks, determining the Effective Fed Funds Rate (EFFR). 
• 3. Positive IORB-EFFR @ IOER spread, and positive IOER-SOFR spread, signify ample market liquidity.

AI governance, job security, and growing the pyramid

So ... in the general study of governance ( same root word as cybernetics ... both referring to control systems ) : auditability is a big deal.

If you don't have time to check everything a population of staff is doing, then you need a way to maximise proof of correctness. That's where various systems and system maintainers come into place. That's just what peoople will shift work to, since the lower level work is getting automated.

We don't lose jobs, we raise productivity ... if, and only if, work at the bottom level is increased fast enough, and safe enough, to grow the pyramid.

BNM : metaphysics of money

2025 Working paper by BNM on Syariah ontology of modern money, and relevance to CBDC 

https://www.bnm.gov.my/documents/20124/826852/ahmad-et-al-2025-wp325.pdf

Here, BNM appears to take an EITHER-OR stance on the ontology of money : 

• - either it's a COMMODITY, with intrinsic value, 
• - or it's a DEBT INSTRUMENT, merely a double-entry item.

** THIS IS INCREDIBLY NAIVE **

In modern monetary use, each transaction is a CONTRACT between THREE parties.

• 1. The ISSUER of money, a.k.a. bank, controls its BASE SUPPLY
• 2 & 3. OTHERS who use money, are counterparty to 1, and needs 1. to be sane

I skimmed the paper, and may go back for a deeper read later.

Pivots : 2005, 2025?

I committed most of 2005-2025 to studying poor people. 

I am wondering if it is now a suitable time in life to focus on studying the rich.

Hypothetical metric for comparing development

• A: by geographical area
• B: take GDP, normalised per Capita, Real i.e. InflationAdjusted, USD
• C1: take share-of-assets, by population quartile
• C2: take share-of-income, by population quartile

Compare : B*C1 and B*C2

Ruler : Plasticity

Need a sort of ruler for neuroplasticity, since it's rather hard to gauge : most occupations don't require huge amounts of this, so generally people ignore it.

First draft : acquiring a neutral preference between

• : living v dying
• : wealth v poverty
• : social : integration v solitude
• : kinematic v verbal : activity
• : minute v day : max energy output
• : out v  in : water
• : environmentally abnormal : cold v heat
• : sensory v symbolic : processing
• : MECE vs leaky : abstraction

Hm

 People often miss the P&L impact of mental health. 

If something bad happens, and you are disappointed for 20-seconds, you have 1% the cost of someone who remains disappointed for 34 minutes.

Individually, P&Ls consist of experience lived as { time } x { quality of experience, per unit of time }. Of course, the weight of past events upon present experience is a function of memory latency and plasticity. That is a matter of mental health.

Many other examples can be given.