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. :)

The Buddha Awards?

What's a good name for, a diminutive Darwin award?

Use : where someone's choices don't kill them outright, but simply demotivate and confound them, tragically? Maybe, where someone's attempts to be happy are benignly unsucccessful.

I did a quick search on "famous dumb characters" and "most unhappy philosophers". 

I am tending to think, perhaps to call it the Buddha award.

The Mythical "True Neutral"

I often write about the pleb consumers that fear death, disease, dissociety, and discomfort. But there is one more fear which is important to many people ... disidentity, or perhaps in other words ... personality disphoria. 

People cling to who they believe they are. This stifles innovation, of course, but we all understand the tough decisions made by governments to keep things in check. So public education encourages a fear of changes in identity.

The meme of RPG character alignment comes to mind - the truly neutral person of theravedic ideology is rare in society - perhaps they are mostly living on their own, neither law-abiding nor law-averse, neither minimalist nor maximalist in aesthetic, neither blown by winds, nor steadfast against them.

Respect, Due to Money : a Rich Kid problem

In 2023, I had a lot of time to reflect on the poor judgment of a few rich people. The pattern which stood out was, it seems that ... "rich dad" kids, i.e. kids born into privilege, sometimes have a chip ... this chip is, that they can't shake their dependence on the concept that money commands respect.

Perhaps I'm mistaken, and some "poor dad" kids have this chip too. But I have seen it more among the privileged, like Prosporo, of the House of Usher.

So this chip, manifests as ... a desire to seek the approval of people with money. 

Respect is attributed by chip bearers, to people with money ... and when the chip bearer has money, they expect to command respect, and are furious if this morality is not respected by others.

When a chip bearer is unable to imagine a value without money, then value is associated only with money. Whereas some of who grew up without money, are quite content without much of it at all. Push comes to shove, if one is threatened with death ... a chip bearer may think about the quantity of money that must be paid to escape death ... non-bearers may more readily accept the futility of monetary tools, and simply focus on the joy of dying ( whether they choose to do so as pacifists, or in vengeful blazes is a separate matter ).

The chip is sometimes is complicated by an inability to distinguish between love and money - so to some, to give love is to give money, and to give money is to give love - which is a fertile bed for dysfunction, as you may imagine.

Hesse's Three Readers x the History of AI

Re :  https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/07/11/hermann-hesse-types-of-readers/

This is a good lens, to discuss how AI are trained. The first type of reader below, is like a machine that follows instructions. The second type of reader, is like a machine that wants to gain meta-cognition of the instructor. The third type of reader, is like a machine which doesn't care about the instructions, or the instructor, and simply assumes the text as a source of inspiration.

So it turns out that in the history of AI development, we've kinda gone from building machines that are like the first type of reader, to building machines that are like the third type of reader. The entire field of building machines which are like the second type of reader has been somewhat out of the spotlight ... perhaps because, most laypeople don't actually believe that machines ARE people. 

Anyway, the second type of reader is a very important pattern, as that's much of what meat people do on a daily basis. I look forward to machines learning how to do that more ... and to the programmers who will so build such machines.

Local Government Economics : (1) the Unprofitable Enterprise (2) a tale of Fiscal Faith (3) the True Cost of Leadership

The laws of Malaysia require that (most) apartment blocks are run by a microcosmic Commonwealth-parliament. 

• Parcel owners ("proprioters") must vote to elect officials, named the Committee. 
• The Committee is unpaid by default, but has the rights to pay itself responsibly.
• The Committee functions as a board that has partial control over a mostly un-taxed Management Corporation ("mCorp").
• The mCorp encapsulates the constituency's collective bank account and operations. 
• The constituents need only a 25% minority to call for the removal or appointment of Committee members - implying an extremely volatile environment due to the low energetic barrier to the deactivation of any ongoing Committee. This is balanced by the cost of executing such a call, which is expensive in terms of cash, so any foolishly violent mCorp will, by definition, quickly make itself poorer.

In this environment we find a variety of common political patterns.

• Committee members come from all quadrants of the Hammerstein-Equord matrix / HEm, and the usual consequence apply
• Freeloaders will shirk as much as possible bearing the liability of being on an unpaid Committee, as long as someone else is willing to do the work. Freeloaders are furthermore segmented into those who are merely lazy, those who are actively profit seeking (malicious), and those who are simply ignorant of the fact that anyone is doing work at all - in my view, the simplified triumvirate of non-compliance.
• Malicious freeloaders may encompass extroverted activists, which assert continuous pressure on the credibility of the Committee via picketing (often in digital media).
• Other activists may be well-meaning, yet unfortunately, from the dismal quadrant of the HEm.
• Yet other activists may be both, honest and true in their intentions, and intelligent in their actions.

OK - enough sketching out the landscape - on to the patterns.

Pattern 1 : the Unprofitable Enterprise

From time to time, various factors may cause a mCorp to lose money. This is typically not an issue until the mCorp starts to completely burn out its cash, and resultingly face the need to borrow money, or to seek higher government intervention. But who is to blame under such circumstances?  First, activists, of both the malicious and the good varieties, will increasingly urge for increased management activity to increase the profitability and cashflow of the operation. 

However, in situations where structural factors are responsible for low profit or cash, the main lever for increasing incomes is simply to raise the Maintenance Fund Charges ("taxes"), which requires a 51% vote from any proprietors who bother to turn up an Extraordinary General Meeting ("EGM"), which must in turn be called by a resolution of either (25% of proprietors) OR the Committee. 

Rarely do proprietors initiate an EGM to raise taxes. An unpaid Committee on the other hand, has very little incentive to do anything else. Faced with the responsibility to guide the course of an mCorp on the path to failure, either the unpaid Committee contributes more work at the expense of its individual members, or it simply (and legitimately) shifts responsibility from itself, to the entire constituency. Should the constituency vote at an EGM to not increase taxes, whereas no mitigating efforts are made to avoid ruin, the Committee will assert that it did everything within its power to steer the constituency, and the direct democratic action of the constituency finally screwed itself. 

A constituency which votes not to increase taxes, may of course take the mitigating action of replacing the Committee with another Committee that wishes to contribute more (or better) work towards the avoidance of ruin through means other than raising taxes.

Pattern 2 : a tale of Fiscal Faith 

In an effort to retain profitability, activists and the Committee may assert that labour must increase, in order to improve intelligence in the allocation of resources. Such initiatives may be framed as "distrusting" of unchecked resource allocation. Some of these assertions may reach heated proportions - at which point their complementary group may become prominent. Activists who are extraordinarily "trusting" of unchecked resource allocation, may become philanthropists - moving to personally subsidise the collective, from their own pockets.  

Anecdotally ... I recently encountered a question of process, regarding proposed technology procurement. Then, I actually got an offer from a proprietor who wanted to sponsor (donate) items which were contentious. It was very interesting to observe the different preferences here. A freeloading proprietor quickly thanked the philanthropist, for helping the collective. 

Being on the Committee, my first inclination was to refuse, as it was not the owner's problem, but the mCorp's bill to pay. The owner was adamant that they wanted to contribute more money than the other owners.  So then I said, we should be strategic in where we spend a donation. Rather than at the bottom of the labour pyramid, could it be spent in a way that increases time at the decision making level, where we are extremely short? 

I was sure there would be all kinds of comments about this. We recently had an activist program calling for the procurement of certain widgets to increase the rate of revenue generation. Could the donation buy four widgets? Eight? I was not personally interested in widgets - but the donation would make a lot of widget activists happy, wouldn't it? I returned to query the sponsor ... it was an interesting question of utilitarianism. 

"What do you think," I asked, "if the angerboys say WIDGETWIDGET ... would you donate to widgets?" And the sponsor answered that they wanted me to decide instead. So I asked what is your ultimate intention? Is it to make me happy? To make the most number of proprietors happy? To make the technology users more productive? Or something else? The outcomes would be different, but if we targeted the sponsor's true intention, then we'd maximise their happiness from the donation. The sponsor said that they didn't really care. 

"Well, I will challenge that - something's motivating you to throw money. Money is time. Time you could have spent with your partner or future kids or on hobbies instead of earning etc. Why sacrifice it ... there has to be an answer." The sponsor laughed and said they would think about it to seek an epiphany. Further prodding produced the phrase, "This is investing in the community." 

"Is it? Subsiding (the freeloader)? Did you see how happy they were? That's the main segment you're pleasing - the ones who are selfish - how is that structurally benefiting the "community"?" The sponsor was insistent that others knew best, how to allocate the resources, as others had "done the research and work," and so their thought process was trusted. "I see," I said, "make a cash donation to the mCorp. I'll make sure it's publicised that someone took pity on the collective, and put it out there. But then, we don't have to adjust any processes to accommodate the unusual income." The sponsor agreed, saying they imagined it would be as if we found cash while walking on the road.

Pattern 3 : the True Cost of Leadership

We were in an email thread discussing the need for "proper" procurement processes. I pointed out that there were existing processes, which were very simple, and we could first comply with those. I ended my explicitly important comments there, and then shared the following thoughts.

 - - considerations for when folks have time to think about economics - -

In the current state, the processes are actually not wholly defined. So while I agree in theory, in practice we have to wait a bit for processes to be first defined, before being complied with.

In the future there may be more detailed algorithms - I saw another comment it could have been from someone in this group, but I forgot whom, suggesting the entire Committee should review expenditure as low as \$ 110. I commented simply that was not the current SOP. Then I reflected on the idea to see if it made sense ... and then I got stuck trying to figure out the value of the time spent by Committee members on weekly work. Is it valued at the day-job-rate of each member individually?

For example if some of us are paid \$ 1,100/month in our day jobs, the hourly rate comes down to about \$ 5, so any extra hour of work becomes ... hey, if a Committee member has to [decide something over an hour], but the member has more important work on the Committee, then the mCorp should pay someone else up to \$ 5 to [make the decision over an hour]? I don't know, that seems like the ballpark calculation. If the Committee's total hourly rate is say \$ 43 ... then we'd definitely need to up the budget for a property manager.

If Committee members have very little time - maybe the mCorp needs to find Committee members with more time, or it has to find a bigger budget. 

The "Good Boy" in Governance

 "Good boy/girl/person," memes are inherently toxic. The endorphin rush of approval ... is relief from stress, which stems from trauma. In a simpler world, approval and disapproval of facts would not result in systematic reinforcement of socio-emotional memory. However, the fact of the matter is that humans have evolved to be such systems. There is no avoiding it, without further traumatising many people.

How Fa$hion Works

#Leadership in fashion : many will say, "I stand for quality". But quality is a sham - there are infinities of quality, and no asocial case for picking one quality over another. What this really means is, "follow me, for I am The Standard of quality". And it's as simple as that. That is how fashion works. And I do mean broad fashion, all purely cultural preferences. 

Annals of the Freelance

The message arrived in my WhatsApp inbox at nine minutes past midnight. I was driving, and would not reply to it until 33 minutes later. A founder for whom I had made a widget (type: financial) was writing to ask about modifying the qualifies of the widget, due to downstream feedback on the widget's use. 

I did not remember the full details of this widget's development, so I volunteered to first review our earlier engagement documents free of charge. One is not typically paid to remember work once work is delivered, yet one tries to be helpful when it is possible.

In my review, I included screen-caps and links to snippets of conversations from a month ago. The qualities of the widget which needed change were already flagged as problematic during development ... and conversations held during development clearly stated that there was a long, and expensive way to fix the widget, and alternatively a quick and dirty yet conventionally acceptable way to do so. To-date, neither fix had been adopted by the founder.

The founder expressed loneliness in not being able to spare any staff or other resources to address the issue. I had to return to my ongoing work for the day, and was unable to offer further assistance. I felt sad, but that is but a reflection of the harshness of the business environment - those who do not prepare, are often caught off-guard.

This episode, including this documentation, would distract me from work until 0133 hours. That was a cost I assumed, and this is my record of that expense.

On the Art of Branding

Sometimes well-meaning counterparties are just completely incompetent at adding value. Other times they can be useful. I was just thinking about this just now when my friend invited her friend to buy things from my business ... whereupon I agreed to wait 30 minutes, and ended up waiting for 90. Who knows, perhaps this will translate to value for my shareholders later, anything is possible.

I also think about how I asked too often about the health of another friend, and was summarily ex-communicated. Such is life. I am often ex-communicated, so it is something I have become quite comfortable with over the years.

Earlier today a shareholder posted a screenshot, from the Facebook reviews of a restaurant not my own. There, a member of the public praised that restaurant for acknowledging its mistakes, and in contrast my own office was mentioned as an example of "one which does not do so, and consequently it is are closing and selling things". Encouragement comes from strange places.

I thought this a great triumph. Despite my shareholders efforts to squash my branding operations for our business, by banning me from social media activities involving the corporate brand since 2017, it would appear that the media campaign I launched slightly before that continues to add value to this day. This evidenced quality of work alone is thrilling, and it encourages me professionally, to continue doing what I do for the world, even if sometimes I must work especially hard, and especially long in order to complete a single iteration.

I find it generally useless to evaluate a project while it is underway - I am not so good at that, I believe there is a conflict of interest between the agent as a planner, and the agent as an executor of the plan, if the agent is the same person. In order to properly execute a plan, an agent cannot simply switch between planning an executing on a whim, as that destroys the purpose of planning. Of course, there are times when this is relevant, such as when the objective is to iterate upon a loop to optimise for a specific target. However, there are other instances, such as when a single iteration has not been completed, and therefore any distraction from basic execution will interrupt the only existing implementation of a plan, which has yet to be implemented.

Now it is the "season" for review, as the first iteration has ground to a halt. I found it quite the challenge to operate a brick and mortar business, on a shoe-string budget, without social media for nearly three years, and right through the pandemic of 2020, at that. With respect to the efforts put in by my team, I am quite proud of all individuals who contributed to this work. I remain disappointed with the decision makers who put us through this, however, I believe that we have each and every one of us executed our corporate duties to the best of our individual interests, and so as a whole the corporation as a social entity is a success.

Financially, it is a great failure, and I volunteer myself as the person to be blamed. But then I generally view my projects on ten to twenty year time frames, and this one is only five-years-old. And so far it is not yet exactly over. Perhaps a judge will throw the book at me, and then it will be thoroughly screwed, but this is not yet the case, so I remain, as it is my job to be so, optimistic about the potential for our body corporate.

I do believe that my colleagues are well-meaning, even if they have done some rather foolish things. And I am sure they have a symmetrical view of my work. I avoid allowing this to bother my daily work, and I suppose that is the difference between someone who has to keep their head cool for service, and those who must inspire themselves with daily dramas in order to invent meaning for their situation.

I do wonder how the story will end. But it is not over, and so I will not pretend to know. I can only document the parts that I have seen and lived through, for the betterment of others who may chance upon these readings.

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.

Reflection: On the economics of friendship and intimacy

(I identify as male, theoretically pansexual, heterosexual in practice, preferring polyamory, but often committed to monogamous relationships for a limited duration.)
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In my younger days, I received offers of friendship from various parties and usually accepted such offers from attractive females. I can trace this bias back to at least the age of four or five! Women I met at that age remain within my social network, and I remember my first meetings with some of them. For the earlier years, I didn't always realise that my circle of friends was affected by it, but by the time I was 24-years-old, I was quite conscious of this bias, and proceeded to own it with intentionality.
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Before that age, some of these friends would share their opinions about beauty with me, some would share their accounts of sex. And then I lost some of these friends when I began to reply with my own opinions about their beauty (or lack thereof). And I lost some others when I began to query their interest in having sex with myself.
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My learnings about how people seek friendships is incomplete, as from a young age I was fairly independent. My father remembers reports from my fourth-grade teacher complaining about my self-satisfaction during recess. Every so often, it is good for me to review my deficiencies here. Even in sexual relationships with women over the past decade (I am thirty-seven this year), I often manage to piss-off my counterparties. When I am unaware and accidentally, and provocative regarding their beliefs and values. And when I am aware and intentionally doing so.
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Yet I am grateful to the women who have lent me their time, thoughts, and touches, over years and years. While I will probably not be a better friend or lover, than I have been in the past, I hope that on average my strategies about this portfolio of relationships will not cause significant damage to anyone. I remain greatly concerned for the welfare of many friends, whom I have dearest from among the lovers.
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And always, I am forced to query myself, if there is any value to my friendship, given that I have extended it within the context of my bias. A young friend who worries me very much discussed such relationships with me, last Christmas. I came up with some detailed questions for her, but I don't know if she will listen to me again. Some come, some go, some easier, some otherwise. That is to be accepted.
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Oh, tomorrow is St. Valentine's day...

He's Writing a Book

Pre-cursor to one hour play project.

"So one of the guys I'm seeing, he says he's writing a book about all the women he's met."
"Oh come onnnn. Everyone wants to be Giacomo Casanova... have you seen his memoir, it's massive. LOL. People want to write things down, believing that what they do is novel, but probably everyone does what has already been done a thousand times before."

Why You Should Buy My Company

(Don't expect a literal answer.)

Thoughts after pitching to investors:

Take 1

"So you're a cafe."
"Yup."

"Is that it? Just one?"
"Well, if we had room to grow, I'd move into retail, because it's B2C and we have good foot traffic that has limited opportunities to spend money (because we target value pricing) so we'd invest more product development under the brand."

"But aren't people moving away from brick and mortar retail - into just using the space for meat testing, and then shipping actual product via mail?"
"Yes, so we'd be building the brand by displaying products in-store, with some fulfilment if necessary, and sure, we can ship more stuff over other funnels after we build a brand. But we have the brick and mortar already, so we might as well continue here first."

"Would you expand to more outlets?"
"That's not a priority - it doesn't drive up the brand value as quickly as we'd need it to move, unless we have more products shipped per store."

"Is your core focus to expand the retail network?"
"No, the core focus is vertical integration of value chains. For example, we buy and consume detergent. We need to start selling detergent. And in the longer run, since we consume management services, we need to start selling those too."

"You're not a foodie, and you run a cafe. Now it's a sundry shop pretending to be a cafe, that wants to scale by turning into an outsourcing operation. Tell me a more coherent story."

"Are you sure you want to hear it?"
"Hit me."

Take 2

"Let me go back a few years, to tell you where I come from. I figured out the data-structure for quantifying human experience when I was in college. It persuaded me that human people are trivial. Skipping forward a few projects to the cafe... within your lifetime and mine, we're going to be talking and working daily with synthetic people who are indistinguishable from organic people. For the last fifteen years, I've never had to struggle with the question of whether it would happen, only the question of when it would happen, and if I would watch it happen or be a bit proactive and make it happen sooner rather than later. (I think it'll happen regardless of my interference.)

In this future, I expect that automation will ... consume every imaginable function that humans play today - and I mean this without ... hyperbole. Automation will displace not just drivers, or food service staff, but early childhood educators, doctors, sex workers, friends, performance artists, spiritual guides like the clergy, cultural guides like screenwriters, government officials, etc.. The artisanal millennial industries are a laugh - the last bastion of a desperately cornered beast, angstily scrambling for comparative advantage. Their current livelihoods are all going to die. It was obvious to me before millennials became a thing, so if I'm heavily sighing it's because it's happening all so predictably, and it's painful to watch all these kids who think that they've brilliantly discovered a meaningful way to spend their lives.

If you're interested in human development, the real question is what do you think that organic meat should be doing in this future where all human interactions are automatable? Should the focus be on survival, or on innovation (for fuck's sake, given there'll be literally too little left to do anyway)? I don't have an answer for you. But I think we need to help people be prepared, even those who don't believe that it will happen. So back to this business project..."

Take 3

3.1.

Given the outlook above, THE LONG GAME for any organism or company that wishes to survive is first to understand how any of this is going to work. Therefore the business has to focus on achieving automation milestones ahead of (the general population's bulge in) the curve. We have to be a services company, and the service we provide has to be the productisation of any given (currently) human services, via automation.

3.2.

This is a big universe, and we have to start THE MIDDLE GAME somewhere. Therefore we focused on a really simple position at the bottom of the pyramid: hospitality services... specifically food services... specifically long-tail artisanal food services. This is why we explain ourselves as a management services company for this segment. If you look at the entire industry of independent food and beverage retailers and separate all their activities into two baskets, (A) things everyone is doing the same and (B) things everyone is doing different, you'll find a lot of redundancy in (A) and so that should be the first basket to automate. After you've dealt with that, you can reexamine (B), and probably you find that, whether you like it or not, many of the trendy products in the market are horribly generic... depending on the same upstream suppliers, sometimes even OEMs, rebranding with quirky stickers and stories, and pushed to out, c'est la vie. There is so little value added by the so-called artisan per se. The move into this market is alla Rocket Internet - we want to become a clone shop that identifies any trendy product, digs up the supply chain for it, sticks it under a centralised management services umbrella for efficiency of scale, then pushes out the exact same product at a lower cost. If you need an anchor to see what the end is here, just consider this hypothesis: Michelin restaurant menus are cloneable. I don't even have to argue about this, because it's been done before. The question now is not about how to clone one menu - it's about how to get good at cloning and global distribution. We'll mop the floor with the bodies of grassroot businesses - it's not nice, but someone's got to do it.

3.3.

This is a really broad and expensive target to be arm-waving about... we only had as much capital as the guy next door, and I thought it was fundamental for the project to focus on understanding how the economy is working in vivo and so, we started this business as a cafe. This is THE SHORT GAME. What else were we supposed to do? Teach hipsters that the future is jobless? What for? That wouldn't get us there.

Recap

So how's that for a cohesive story? Did you brain it? Probably not. If you did, I'm happy. But this is usually why I don't speak my mind - people stop listening pretty quickly. If you liked the story, please buy my company. I'm getting tired of being stuck in the short term. Not interested? No worries... I'm going back to work on it until it either falls over, or transcends. Hope you enjoy your job too. I can't say I really enjoy mine, but I do find it kills time. It's a life. YOLO.

[In hindsight, RI is a bad analogy. The given example seems more like Zara for fine foods. But I don't think I'm really committed to either analogy - the general direction is illustrated with either or both.]

[Forgot to point out that the culture wars of the future will regard the organic-synthetic class divide; amply anticipated in science fiction, but a far cry from the ongoing organic-organic class divides that still dominate current discourse.]

---

Tidied up the thoughts:

Every so often I get the rare question of my long-term view on corporate development. No one really wants to know the answer - it's generally just a reminder to myself that I'm a weirdo.

A post shared by 正 (@_jerng) on Aug 27, 2017 at 12:52pm PDT

Civil Society?

Oh Maria. All my prose in quotes. Not fact-checked, mostly rhetorical.

I don't know who you are, I don't know what you do. But if you can't handle four weeks of solitary confinement in a windowless cell... you just haven't been practicing. Not that you would be expected to be in practice... but if you were an opposition leader in a facist country, surely you would have thought to be prepared for such a short stay?

Comment chats:

I hope this doesn't turn into a dildo in the supreme court omg Malaysia please don't go there.

Then the feedback came in, of course from the bleeding hearts.

So to provide a less cryptic response, I think the primary intention of the post to cause discomfort has been fulfilled.

Aside from that, I find the response telling about what you care about, so it is informative to me. I do not care about many of the concerns that you express. So I think we are each successful in standing on each other's work here...

... you as an activist, who wishes to change the world, and I as an observer, who is interested in watching it whether it changes or not... (I do find it amusing, to think about the divergences of our separate ethical positions in very dry terms, but I will avoid going there in chat unless you really need more distractions from your work, which I doubt).

/

Each must follow their calling.

/

I suppose you're free to filter your friends based on their agreement and empathy with your being; and I'm free to filter my friends based on whether they are simply interesting or not (for inherent amusement, or in a commercial sense).

/

I think it's tough for both sides - and I say that with complete honesty. But one does not pretend to care for what one does not care about... (And one does not befriend what one does not trust... so I may lose friends, I guess.)

... so if my privilege is that I'm middle-class, a freeloader, and that I live in a pseudo-facist-democracy where activists want to roll themselves up to the war on achieving fair and free elections... I'm really just taking the position that you know, as Magneto says, in chess the pawns go first. I'm going to wear my privilege on my sleeve here. At the same time I'm going to say that my activist friends (whom I regard as such, even if they don't regard me as such) deserve full credit for being war fighters in this theatre.

I myself find it a tad boring - so that's not my theatre. I DO like to say, call me when there's a real war. Give me a gun. But that may be fanciful thinking - and I may be overpromising. But it may be the case that's who I really am. I don't like peaceful protests - I like quick results. Usually those are accompanied via large boxes of money, or explosives.

DISCLAIMER: Neither of which I have in my possession at this time.

/

And taking this to its necessary conclusions: look, by the LETTER OF THE LAW, it is in fact folks like me whom they should be putting under investigation, and locking up. But they do not - they go pick on the avowedly non-violent opposition leaders instead (if you have a facist government, civil society and democracy are DE FACTO opposition).

What does this tell us about my country? Potential threats and criminals walk freely, while the innocents are prosecuted. But this is HOW WE HAVE BEEN FOR DECADES.

Sigh. The irony of it all - that people do not realise it.

/

[New trends will come.]

no lah... civil society has been struggling for decades. It will be up and down, but it does not stop. The government would be on track to turning over to the Opposition already if not for Najib being more violent in his actions than Mahathir. So N is doing the right thing in his interests. But soon it may be that the party will devour him - or will it? Rules for rulers at play (the video - you saw it?). Textbook. He is doing well for himself - long he may rule. I don't mean that it is my preference - just an observation.

/

[Hypocrisy.]

- for some it refers to those who desire change but do nothing about it (to avoid clouding the waters, I typically phrase my position as "ok fine, stay this way, I'm not going to do much about it under my current circumstances")
- for some it refers to those who believe that MARCHING will achieve their goals, while being unwilling to take up arms against the objects of their discontent
- for some it refers to people who say "status quo!" but vote Opposition, and vice versa

/

[Optimism.]

Well you saw the 2008 election results - I figured those were on-track. Would have needed 1-2 more elections to actually turn over.

Now they're going to be a bit off-track... since the new gods have a tendency to invoke "sudden death" on individuals - which is what I expect to see more of in the months to come.

"Back in my day, son, they would lock you up and call you a faggot. Then put on a t-shirt and attend your vigil. These days, they just kill you."

Announcing GrabAss

A little satire on the GrabGas CTO blow up.

My dearest friends in the Facebook family, today I need to tell you that I will be founding GrabAss, a new startup, dedicated to righting a number of wrongs that we face in the world today. This startup will be focused on developing a specific permutation of morphemes from the largest natural language network on Earth.

Firstly, Uber and the other Grabsomething company may be helping to reduce logistical problems but they fail to acknowledge that the humble donkey and its relatives in the subgenus Asinus occupy a unique niche in the product space that is on our radar. Don't grab a car. Why grab some stupid taxi - when you can Grab an Ass, to get you to your destination.

Secondly, given the number of follies that we witness in the startup scene daily, GrabAss is built from the ground up to give back to our community by identifying high-grade moronia hidden in plain sight within our pools of business and engineering talent. Our open-sourced framework NoobsNDevils is under active development, and has recently entered open beta. If you see an asshole, Grab that Asshole, and submit him (or her, or it) via our API endpoints, using the documentation provided on our developer website. Not a developer? No worries. Just Grab that Asshole by the arm, ear, neck scruff, collar, (or asshole) and drag him (or her, or it) to one our conveniently located pickup depots, at every 7-Eleven, McDonalds, Starbucks, and KFC in your current country (we're in every country that has one of these branded outlets). We have locked-in these strategic partnership to ensure that the asshole you have identified will be bagged, tagged, and shipped back to its original location, with minimal inconvenience to yourselves.

Perhaps you would prefer that the asshole you would like to identify is picked up from your private residence instead - we have an app for that also - it's a hardware app, the best Christmas (Hanukkah, Lunar New Year, or other festive) present you could give your loved ones this year. We call it the AssGrabber, and you only have to yell, "hey Asshole," to turn it on.

Beyond these first two proofs of concept, we believe that numerous other semantic networks can be derived from GrabAss's latent morphology. We believe in our vision, and we look forward to your ongoing support and participation in the GrabAss vision - summed up by our motto: "If there's an ass out there, someone's gonna grab it."

We're actively hiring (we give equity to early employees) and we're sincerely looking forward to having you join us as a shareholder today. We don't have any job descriptions yet, but we're sure that you'll figure it out for yourselves along the way.

Don't hesitate. Grab your ass, and get it over here, right now.

Beautiful Sheep

Two conversations came up today, on beauty and power. At the office, we discussed job applicants who put bits of their modelling portfolio on their CVs (i.e. any photo is unprofessional, on a corporate resume). On Facebook, a friend in the entertainment industry talked about a personal commitment to avoiding prejudice against beautiful people, based solely on the fact that they are beautiful.

I had a common response to both conversations. Beauty is a tool. Extended metaphysical discussion aside, is more than a tool, but it can be used as a tool in many situations. We don't want to judge people based on the tools they carry, but on what they choose to do with those tools. And then, there are the ones who carry tools without knowing what their tools do. This paragraph is really about tools in general.

A person who goes to meeting in presentable visual form is like someone who goes to a meeting with a sheathed but visible knife. They've done their homework, or they're just generally prepared. When someone turns up at a meeting with extraneous preparations, we do not want to judge their intentions, but from the point of view of operational security, we do note the preparations that they have made so far.

Neglecting to note the power of our tools, is neglecting the fact that our tools are tools at all. If you work in fields where beauty matters, you must pay more attention to politics, not less. Otherwise, you're running with the sheep.

Ahead of the Curve

My favourite snippet from the office BBQ:

"so there are these guys in who marry their virtual girlfiends, who live on their Ninetendo DS, and pay to take their new wives on elaborate holidays"

"dude, i'm sure that one day i'll be taking a girl out for dinner, chit chat, and sex, and i won't know if she was born in a hospital or a factory, but a Nintendo DS... man, that's ahead of the curve..."

Tech is Boring. Long Live Tech.

We're in the middle of the second dot-com boom, and the time in between the first and second booms has given the masses a lot to think about. More than ever, many people are excited about technology, and tech-money, and all the cool shit that passes for content in all the cool forms that pass for media, these days. I'm over-generalising, of course - if I call contemporary content shit, it's just saying that all content ever is shit. At the end of the day, it's just information, pulsing through the meat that we call brains, and the fractals that we call civilisation. What of it? The most interesting thing to me, this evening, is not the tech, or the money, or the people. It's the fact that people are living in a renaissance and many think nothing of it. Take it from a guy who majored in the humanities (because the long arc of art does not find in most men and women beholders concerned). Things are changing really fast right now, I mean, in these few decades. It's not going to change this fast forever. It will slow down. There will be depression. Because humans are inclined to irrational bursts of speed, incurring emotional debt, and paying for it later. Such is life these days. Such is tech. Long live technology. I am just cruising along with it, watching the stars burn through their own meditations. Where to next. We'll find out tomorrow.

Souls Without Dark Corners

It's been accounting forensics week, at the office.

Here's what the quantification of human consciousness taught me about writing computer programs.

Debugging someone else's code is not always, but often a tedious process. But patience allows us to illuminate all dark corners, and to restructure any system without them.

We all start out as information systems authored by systems other than ourselves. But with some study, some systems can acquire the ability to modify themselves completely.