Fast Fashion and Generative-AI

You know, I had this conversation recently with GY and a few others, and I think there might be some logic behind the mess. Like all good rants, let's start with the conclusion:

Generative-AI powered programming is the ``fast fashion'' movement equivalent for software development. People aren't interested in paying more for something that is future-proof when they can pay exponentially less for something that satisfies their needs now, and to replicate that process again if they need to update the feature set.

There's quite a bit to unpack here, so let me step through this a bit more carefully.

It all goes back to the capitalistic mode of operation. In the beginning, clothing was made coarsely at the individual level. For the fancier stuff, one would head to the tailor for something that fits better. Eventually many wanted fancier stuff, and a market for it was created, which incentivises leveraging economics of scale to build factories to churn out decent quality clothes at an affordable price.

But clothes have a shelf-life that is independent of utility---no one wants to look dated with clothes that are otherwise functional. So the capitalism evolves into hyper-capitalism with extreme consumerism, with clothes that are designed to be much cheaper through reducing durability, but with the advantage of being faster to evolve as tastes change.

This is the fast fashion we are talking about.

People still wear fancy suits and dresses, and the tailors are still being approached for that. But this is not the norm for the large variety of people over most of the time.

Translating the analogy over, software used to be bespoke, with proper requirement gathering steps, followed by development, before undergoing testing to validate fit-for-purpose. Old computer systems were unique enough that software was truly bespoke to the architecture---the gradual rise of standardised platforms that come from leveraging economics of scale and Moore's Law made creating common software libraries to abstract out the bespoke parts a major pathway towards writing one source code, but cross-building to more than one operating system.

Then the web-browser became an even greater unifier that went across hardware and operating system, and everyone started building software on that as a platform. The old web relied on the open-ness of reading source files loaded into the web-browser to spread ideas, and the content-distribution network (CDN) invention took standardisation to a whole new level. The rise of the smartphone made ``app-ification'' a real thing, and many are conditioned to demand an ``app'' for even the simplest things that an web-browser-run page could handle.

Software development then started to hit the hyper-capitalism and extreme consumerism phase.

This was also aided by first the so-called Agile methodology that favoured rapid iterative prototyping over formalised design over a shortened time frame of two weeks or so instead of ``when it is done'', and now by the power of generative-AI that allegedly reduces the gap between the user who wants the functionality, and the ability to achieve those.

Kind of like how ``typist'' and ``letter writer'' are no longer legitimate jobs now, because almost everyone knows how to operate a [computer] keyboard, as well as communicate with each other over on-screen text/audio-visual teleconferencing/email in their favourite language of choice.

So in some real way, the rise of generative-AI does change the nature of software development; it prioritises and promotes the ``fast fashion'' style of doing things, arguing that maintainability is not important since the entire software can be re-written through appropriate prompts that includes the new featurers in it.

After all, if we are truly following the philosophy of being outcome driven, why then should anyone be harping about the nature of the source code?

Of course there are still uses for bespoke software, but this is likely to be something that only a small population and/or niched one will truly care about. For the rest, something quick and dirty can be concocted with generative-AI with little effort for near-immediate use by anyone. The ease of access to the generative-AI also obviates the need for code hygiene sensu change request handling/feature adding.

Depressing? I don't know. I always have a saying to myself that I freely share:

Never do something that a fourteen-year-old can do for a job if one can; that's not where one's true value lies.

Fourteen-year-olds have more time than life experience on their hands, and epitomise what I think is the best representative of naïve brute force approaches. I know because I was fourteen once, and had the drive to grind things out to inexorably change my life forever.

Anyway, that's all for now. Fast fashion, or bespoke tailor---which end of the spectrum is the most lucrative then?

...Ending with a Whimper

I wanted to make it a lark and talk about how the week of hedonism went down with a big bang and me wanting to never want to get back to work again. Alas, that's just a fantasy that isn't worth thinking about.

Today is also a Monday, and the start of the new month. Incidentally, it is also a public holiday due to how Sunday was a public holiday (Vesak Day out here in SIN City). So I have about a week of recap to go before I return to the fray as part of work, and also about the wandering wondering of when my next long break is.

So on the Tuesday after the last entry, I had an unplanned trip down to Bike31 to sort out a broken Birzman pump that I had got in 2017-ish. The head could not mate with the new Presta valves that my new bicycle had---I was always using Schrader valves for the previous bicycle(s), and the pump worked well with those. The lady at Bike31 sorted it out quick with a 20-dollar replacement part, with no labour cost. I did have to take a Grab down and back, totalling up to another 40 more dollars, but that 60-dollar cost seems to be a fine amount to pay for hopefully another 7 to 8 more years of good use out of the originally 120(?)-dollar pump. I then spent the evening cycling out to meet up with GY out at Georges by the Bay (i.e. at Punggol Settlement), where we commiserated and bitched about what's wrong with the world/SIN City while chugging booze of all sorts.

On Wednesday, I had to make an emergency trip to IKEA to get a new chair, because my old chair finally broke itself apart. This was not the first time that it has ``broke''---I think one of the key latch springs was disengaged a few years back, and to re-attach that, Pa had to slice through some plastic part, and I didn't know what else did he tweak. Anyway, the chair broke when a metal part had rusted through, and decided to break at that spot. I didn't hurt myself, but it was a quick trip to IKEA to get a replacement HATTEFJÄLL again. This time, they didn't have an arm-less version, but it was possible to just not attach the arms that came with it.

``MT, if the stupid chair is said to have 10 years of guarantee for parts, and you broke the damn thing in year 5 or so, why did you go back to the same chair?''

Because it is comfortable, cheap enough (SGD345-ish), can fit where I am seated, and can be gotten pretty damn quickly.

Mind you, Wednesday was also a public holiday, this time it was Hari Raya Haji.

In addition to the cost of the chair, I had to chuck in another 40 more dollars for the Grab ride, because I was damn sure that I was not taking the bus with a bulky-ass box that had 20 kg of mass.

That same day, I took yet another Grab (SGD30 this time!) to head to the Arts House at the Old Parliament House for a baroque harpsichord/cello concert. It was a nice change of pace, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I have no memory of what I heard (baroque music is still too hoity-toity for me), but I remembered liking what I had heard.

Dinner was at the Gyukatsu place in Raffles City. The beef cutlet is always wonderful, and the free-flow tea and cabbage with associated sauce makes it a great way to fuel up after a long day.

Thursday began with a planned trip to the Singapore Musical Box Museum. It's a private museum that was tucked away in Circular Road, and could only be visited via a guided tour through making a reservation. The reservation process was also arcane, partly because the museum seemed to be slowly winding down their operations (my perspective), but there were enough usable hints within their website to execute the correct reservation process. They are going to be at their current location till 2026-09, after which they are allegedly heading back to Telok Ayer.

But that aside, that museum was a true hidden gem! Many antique (i.e. at least 100 years old; anything at least 20 years old is merely vintage) musical boxes were available to view, and the guide gave good explanations for all of them. What intrigued me the most was watching the use of the studded logs (and then discs) gradually changing from directly sounding the tines of the comb to create the characteristic tingling sound, to using them as a control mechanism to activate lever systems that worked other types of percussive instruments. There was also the ingenuity of using small offsets between the spaces of needle-tipped tines to allow a single control log to hold more than one piece of music (the next music is obtained through a small displacement longitudinally); the use of replicated tines to allow that strumming effect without necessarily making it harder to manufacture the punched disc; aligning the lower notes closer to the centre of rotation of a disc while leaving the higher notes farther from the centre of rotation to leverage on the different linear velocities to play slow notes versus fast; and various indexing mechanisms that can be used to trigger other actions like disc changing, or accepting new coins for another song. The power mechanisms were very mechanical in nature due to the clockwork background, using coiled springs, weighted pendulums/pulleys, and combining with various flywheel governator designs to ensure that the output rotational rate is constant regardless of the energy levels of the mechanism.

All in all, a very fascinating trip that I thoroughly enjoyed.

I then roamed about the Upper Thomson Road area to kill time before meeting up with YT for dinner. The old Thomson Plaza has changed quite a fair bit---the games shop no longer exists, and there were many more new PRC-heavy shops too. The actual shophouses along the road were still quite interesting, and I even found another ``hidden gem'' location out at Thomson V Two.

Friday was when I chilled out a whole lot, spending much of my time watching The X-Files, before meeting up with CP for drinks out at Al Capone's Cuppage.

Saturday, Sunday, and Monday was also mostly just me staying at home and watching The X-Files. My only comment is: thank God for the 'net to ensure that good television from the 1990s when I was too damn young then to understand can be easily obtained to watch when I am old enough to appreciate the content. I was supposed to take on the Rail Corridor on Saturday, but my Garmin eTrex 30 decided to have its plasticised rubber be brittle and fall apart, making the buttons effectively disappear. Without a back up like that, I was unwilling to take unnecessary risks, and so a replacement cover was searched and ordered from Amazon Singapore, and it's slated to show up on the upcoming Saturday. Once I have the GPSr sorted out, I will attempt the rail corridor proper. Considering that the route is unlit for protecting wild life, it would make more sense then to go only when I can tap into daylight hours.

And that brings us to now. It's time to sleep, and close this intermission for now, and to get back to the daily grind of work that both delights and drains me.

Till the next update.

The First Three Days' Adventures

It's now a Monday. I'm officially on leave for a week and a bit more; I might have mentioned that this leave is a long time coming. For too long I had been bearing the burden of knowledge that a manager is expected to bear, the so-called ``dark'' aspects of being a manager that only business school will teach [since they generally train quasi-psychopathic people who treat humans as ``resources''].

But that is not what I want to talk about today---that would be too damn depressing.

------

I did a long-ass cycle on Saturday on my new bicycle. It was a blast---the new bicycle's gears worked wonderfully, and I found myself reaching speeds in excess of 30 km/h on the flats. I did face one problem---my current bicycle pump had troubles with the new Presta valves on the new inner tubes of the bicycle, and I cannot figure out what's wrong. And so, I have made an appointment with the local distributor to have it sorted out.

Sunday, I went to run some errands, getting my meds and a replacement Nikka Whisky from the Barrel to replace the now-emptied Maker's Mark. The purpose of the break is to go round not completely sober, and this means using my titanium tipple from Snow Peak to drip feed high-proof alcohol into my blood stream.

I had a nice lunch at Five Guys, and had walked all about Plaza Singapura. The thought of getting a Steam Deck crossed my mind for the umpteenth time, but I never did get it---as I have to keep mentioning to myself, I did run an experiment before a long time ago with the Dingoo, a smaller and more portable gaming console; I never played on it enough, to the point that the battery was swollen and I had to dump it. A Steam Deck is likely to end up in the same fate, and that thing is not even that cheap (nor small either). Besides, I spend more time reading while commuting anyway; something about the ease of putting down a book as compared to a game.

I did think about getting a 3-octave range melodica from Yamaha, but decided against it since I have two new keyed bawu in the keys of F and G coming in. This is the second time that I'm trying to get keyed bawu, and hopefully the quality is better than the last one. In the previous case, the case itself was falling apart due to shitty pot metal for the zip (I'm thinking it's likely to be some kind of zinc-alloy that ended up with zinc pest and getting brittle as a result), while the ``pads'' (more like uncontrolled blobs of nonsensical epoxy(?)) failed in their sole job of sealing. Maybe this new batch of bawu will do the job and expand the palette of what I can play.

For what it's worth, the original bawu is a bad instrument in terms of [useful] range. It does sound nice, but the range is just... terrible. By extension, it also limits the type of music that it can play in a very strong way.

Today, I ran other errands, and went to solve a mystery that has been bugging me for a while: just what was in Jalan Besar Plaza, the shopping mall that I pass by every day when I'm on bus service 147. Answer: a lot of really cool industrial-centric stores, from lab testing equipment to various motors/hand tools like bench-top press, and a couple of the ``usual'' vocation-ish schools and massage places.

I also explored the TRIO building that was nearby, and noped out of it quickly due to how odd it was presenting itself---there was a cool-looking Cantonese restaurant in it that I might want to return at some point.

Beyond that, I slowly made my way towards Sim Lim Square, and meandered along the side roads for a little exploration.

Sim Lim Square itself was quite different from before. There were significantly more ``Indian Dance Club'' style karaoke/bars [that were likely to be alive once the night comes], and much fewer ``lifestyle'' stores that sold a variety of consumer electronics; gone also were the old stores that sold more server-like equipment---the rising costs of PC/server components due to the AI boom are really showing their ugly heads. It was still a nice walk through the place though.

After that, I walked along Serangoon Road towards City Square Mall for dinner, and yet more walking about, before finally making my way to the nearest bus service 147 bus-stop to head home.

All in all, it had been a nice three days so far. Of course I didn't talk about Friday, where I helped to run a booth at the AI Student Developer Conference, mostly because it was work related, and nothing of note happened---it was just the standard booth-running shenanigans of standing around for a long time, trying to be interesting/entertaining to the visitors, and rapidly refining the story that was told to ensure consistency and ease of paying attention to the visitors' responses as opposed to figuring out what to say. It's not my first rodeo for sure, and things came back to me fast. It was the first time that I could take the City Direct buses both to and from the the exhibition area that was at the Sands Expo and Convention Centre out at Marina Bay Sands.

I'm knackered, and after having hooked up my HHKB Pro 2 to write this post, I'll probably transcribe yet another piece from the song book that I had from a while back for my alto recorder.

Till the next update then.

Bombshell

First off, sorry for the malformed entry before. In my addled-ness, I forgot to run the raw text through my Blogger-Br tool that inserts the correct break HTML tags to provide the correct newlines.

Next, the bombshell that I had been holding onto at work has finally been detonated. And the fallout... I have no idea how bad it is going to be. Naturally, everyone's morale is in the shitter as expected, but it cannot be helped---with a bombshell as big as this one, there's no other way around it.

I can go on about my ``true thoughts'' about the situation, but it benefits no one and is likely to end up becoming a liability, so I shall refrain.

What happens next is anyone's guess. I'm just... very tired.

Exhausted in fact.

To bear the burden alone... it sucked, hard.

But such is life.

------

I've started on The X Files. All I can say is, why did it take me so long to go watch it?

Anyway, that's all I want to say for today. It's been a long day/week/quarter, and I need a break. Bad.

Till the next update.

Egalitarianism is a Dead End

Class separation and eventual struggle is inevitable as long as human societies are going at the size that they have been going at since the twentieth century.

And no, I'm no Marxist---this conclusion I came to is from mulling about this for a long while.

I have always been a fan of egalitarianism, that each person has their rights and ability to contribute with little sense of hierarchy, as much as practically possible. But this is an idealism of sorts, since the specific affinities that each person might have in their contribution and more relatedly, their ability to contribute to society in ``equivalent'' sorts of ways... is just a pipe dream.

The truth of the matter is that things almost always start out egalitarian, but as long as [material] resources and [relational] patronship exist, then class distinctions are inevitable as the massing of the resources and/or patronship changes the relative prestige/capability to contribute for each person in profound ways.

It is hard to claim that egalitarianism is the ultimate utopian ideal when one can clearly observe the effective difference that affinities of contribution create---is it really possible to equate the ability to command capital with the ability of someone who contributes labour to perform janitorial duty?

In that sense then, a society that thinks of egalitarianism as a utopian ideal is doomed to failure; this should not come as a surprise to anyone, except perhaps for the truly idealistic.

It is a very sobering thought, though it isn't exactly something truly new. We [as a society] have known that true left-wing approaches are doomed to failure, while true right-wing approaches may look good in the beginning, but all that they can promise is stasis as the highly authoritarian and conservative approach dominates. It's a lose-lose situation, and it is never really clear who can win in the end.

Of course we'll root for the ``good guys'', except in this case, who are the ``good guys''?

I have no incentive to foster rebellion---it's just an alcohol-induced thought about how the real world works. There is at least some light optimism in it all---if a substantial number of people believe and project their beliefs out to the world, a change may occur.

It would be interesting to see what happens along that particular path...

------

In other news, I've been working my way through the Fist of the North Star manga. It's... pretty cool story-wise and ultra-violence aside. That the strongest fist (``Hokuto Shingen'') draws strength from extreme sadness and anger of its practitioner is a great trope definer.

And I think that's about all I want to talk about. I'm a bit sloshed with alcohol to try and avoid thinking about the crazy nonsense that is work.

Till the next time.

Yet Another Labour Day Weekend

So it's the Labour Day weekend.

I've always found it very strange that for SIN City, the union leaders are unabashedly the same folks who sit in parliament, which already has a reputation of being more corpo-friendly, whether or not it is justified. And somehow, that doesn't count as a form of conflict of interest.

But that's not the purpose of today---the whys and the hows of this funny situation can be found through the historical archives.

What I want to talk about today is the arrival of Pan's Musical Companion for Alto (Treble) Recorder and Other Melody Instruments: Medieval by Robin Alexander Lucas. Just a small note: if you are clicking on the URL to go to where I bought it (i.e. Waterstones), do note that they are very aggressive about stopping ``bots'' to the point that it can affect the UX pretty drastically.

Anyway, I learnt about this tome from this video from Sarah Jeffery. I figured that I probably should get some ``appropriate'' music for the recorder just so that I can do a bit more proper practice on that instrument, instead of trying to mangle my way through all the other types of music that I'm playing.

There is a problem with the book though---it opens landscape, and is sewn-bound. This means that having the book opened wide and stable enough to actually play from it [on a music stand] is just... not possible.

And so here I am, trying to re-typeset all 105 pieces so that I can shove the compendium into a clear folder and therefore actually be able to play them. Naturally, these are done in LilyPond.

But as I might have mentioned before, Eileen-III's keyboard is kind of sucky. Stuff on the right hand side don't operate in ways that are consistent---the numbers from 6 to 0 either don't show up, or end up being doubled, while the braces are almost always doubled, and the | and / are inconsistent.

I probably should trigger the warranty to replace the keyboard. But that means more downtime and other rather things...

That said, this meant that if I were to typeset all 105 pieces using Eileen-III's existing set up, I'd probably stab myself in my face repeatedly with a rusted pencil. And this is where it is time to bring out my favourite keyboard: HHKB Pro 2.

I had always wanted to use this keyboard with all my various laptops, but the ``normal'' way of putting the keyboard on top of the existing laptop keyboard doesn't work by virtue of the 60% size---the base plate is literally small enough to not span across the non-key parts of the keyboard.

That said, I find that having the HHKB Pro 2 sitting on my lap as I type, is just the perfect comfort level. Combining this position with having the ability to place the open book just in front of me and between Eileen-III meant that it was just that easy to look at the source material and touch-typeset the pieces straight into Frescobaldi.

I may just decide to lug my HHKB Pro 2 to the office just to flex against those who are showing off their ``fancy'' keyboards---mine is smaller, and has the Control key in the right place without any fancy mapping. That said, it's probably as dumb as I make it sound---I don't have any issues with the work laptop keyboard, and despite it being 60%, the HHKB Pro 2 is still sizeable enough that to lug it to and fro daily is just a non-starter, unless I upgrade my backpack to be even larger again.

In the old days, when my work machine was a desktop machine, and when I had a cubicle with enough storage, I could just leave my HHKB Pro 2 in the office. But with all the new space reduction nonsense that is in vogue, it becomes increasingly harder to do things like that.

Ah well.

I think that's all I want to talk about for now. Work is... tiring in all sorts of ways, and I really don't want to be thinking/talking about it unless absolutely necessary.

I suppose that this mini-rant is just an exercise in the use of the HHKB Pro 2, just to remember/enjoy the wonders of the keyboard layout and the Topre keys.

Relative to the Keychron stuff, the keys feel heavier, but without that crazy weird actuating ``click'' sound that comes from the Keychron.

Alright, that's about it for now. Happy Labour Day weekend I suppose, and till the next update.

Hard to Disband

This'll be a short one, I think. Something about having too many high-stakes external meetings and shifting of my lifestyle from fully sedentary to something that has activity is driving my body/brain insane from the endeavour.

Oh, and reading Michael Pollan's A World Appears too.

Anyway, a thought did come to mind during one of the many down times during the work day known as lunch---it is often much easier to form a team to achieve a mission than to stand the team down once the mission is accomplished. As a corollary to that, the lack of an off-boarding process to stand down the team ends up with scope creep to the point that it may even go against the original mission in the first place.

The point of discussion that led to this epiphany was on feminism, where a place with stronger cultural predilections towards enforcing old customs that are traditionally not about equal rights tend to see feminism as a good thing, and where the more developed liberal societies start seeing feminism as a form of a superiority complex.

Spoiler: both movements call themselves ``feminism'', but they are wholly different animals altogether. I call the first one ``primal feminism'', and the second one ``post-modern feminism''. My hypothesis is that primal feminism exists to correct the wrongs with respect to inequal rights at the gender level, but once that goal is achieved (should the goalposts not be shifted), the ensuing massed people do not undergo the ``correct'' step of disbandment, but start to find new things from which they can use their new-found power to change. And there are always the vocal few who bring their own agenda to bear, and use this power to advance their own agenda in that scope creep sort of way. Hence there's this ``sudden'' movement from equal rights in the scope of gender, to something akin to supremacy leanings, where the weaker gender must overpower the ``stronger'' gender as a way of retribution/``restitution''/``lesson learning''. It may not involve violence (in which case it would be militant), but it can definitely have leanings that would violate what a reasonable person might expect.

The objective here isn't about vilifying feminism, but to use that discussion context to talk about the epiphany I highlighted earlier---that it is much easier to create a new team to do something than it is to disband an old one. Part of the mechanical reason is about this weird obsession of combatting entropy---we usually prefer order over disorder, and under this lens, disbandment is considered a reversion to disorder. Emotionally, disbandment also evokes that sense of loss that most people strive to avoid as well, as it is a movement from the known and familiar back to the state of the alone and unfamiliar.

Even Tucker, the dude who came up with the life cycle of team development, had to eventually add the last step of ``Adjourning'' to his famous Forming→Storming→Norming→Performing stage taglines. And I would go as far as to say that it is normal, especially if the teams are constructed for the purposes of a mission/project.

Recall that a mission has objectives to be met, and a project has specific outcomes to be delivered, and most importantly, they all have a targetted end state beyond which they are done. If the existential reason for a team (i.e. the project/mission) is over due to completion of the project/mission, then there is no reason for the team to continue to be massed---they must be allowed to disband, with the members reassigned to where they are needed.

Now, a word of caution. In much of my professional life, I have been part of project teams, not functional ones. The difference between a project team and a functional team is that the latter serves as an organ of an organisation, i.e. they have recurring tasks that needs to be done, and those span the life time of the organisation, as opposed to the projects where the task has a time-limit with almost no recurrence. That said, ``recurrence'' is used strictly in the sense of ``wholly repeating with little to no change between iterations of it''.

There are some project teams I was on where the projects themselves have been reconfigured into various variants with a sense of re-occurrence, but they are not functional as in being an organ of the organisation. For personnel growth, I prefer to operate like a functional team while being under the mandate of the project, but that is more of a useful illusion than reality.

The bigger picture here is more related to the organisation than at my managerial level---I would claim that it is the duty of the organisation to think about the manpower of project teams post the end of the project than it is for the project lead/manager, and that if there is no intention of having them be involved in a new project, or transferred into a functional role, then the messaging should be made clear. None of all these ``we value you as a part of the organisation'' crap while leaving people's fates in the balance. Yes, it may be harder to tell someone that their time with the organisation is up when the project (and their contract, if tied to the project) is done, but at least no one is being strung along in limbo finding ways to ``justify their reason of existence'' to the senior management of the organisation.

And if the senior management of the organisation cannot figure out what to do, then they have failed at their fundamental role as senior managers. Line managers like my current role are just glorified foot soldiers advancing the agenda of the organisation, whose guiding lights are the senior management---we are definitely not the senior management, nor do we have the responsibility nor the accountability of the senior management. We can assist with information gathering, but the final decision of what the hell the organisation needs should always come from the big picture.

Because these organisations aren't grassroots ones---they are corporation-types, and that has always been top-down from the governance perspective.

Tirade against senior management aside, even in regular life, it is normal to feel bad when a team of any sort needs to disband. I see this when thinking about the people whom I have lost touch---it feels bad because it the loss of touch triggers the same emotional responses as the loss of a team member.

But such is life.