To say that the past week-and-a-half is a roller coaster is a bit of a cliché, but it is an unfortunate consequence of my lack of imagination in the use of the English language. Let's see what I can say here today.
I've bought a new 22-inch 16:9 monitor from Dell (P2219H) that can swivel, and is primarily set up to be vertical in nature. No name for this device, though it can technically be called ``Eirian-V'' since its role is similar to the Eirian series of devices---but I'm not going to. The problem I was facing was the reading of certain PDF forms of e-books that had the two-column layout. On a normal screen, no matter what resolution and dimension, if we keep it in the usual landscape format, each column ends up taking up at most one quarter of the screen by width. It is basically unreadable. What I needed was something that had more physical dimension in the height department. I could get a tablet like Eirian-III, but I didn't want to have to lug it around with my hands just to read the document---I have grown used to the smaller form factor. Eirian-IV has superior pitch density, but even then, it can be a challenge to read really tiny text that was supposed to be ``normal sized'' in a more traditional A4/letter sized setting. And so, the monitor was obtained.
Edythe-III is still hale and hearty, but her 3-year warranty is almost up. And if the behaviour of Edythe-II was of any indication, it was clear that I needed to get a replacement soonish. At the same time, Elysie-II was starting to become a little... unstable, partly because of age, partly because of hardware (old school spindle HDD), partly because of software (Windows 7), and partly because of circumstance (it was hard/impossible to head out to the venerable Sim Lim Square to source for parts, with the COVID-19 pandemic raging and stores closing left and right). So I decided to spend a little more than what I had originally saved for and get a new iteration of Eileen, now known as Eileen-II.
So, what's Eileen-II?
She's an Alienware m15 R3, with an Intel i7-10750H processor (6-core, 12MB cache, up to 5.1GHz with Turbo Boost), 32GB DDR4 RAM at 2666MHz, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super 8GB DDR6 discrete graphics card. Her screen is 15.6" (1920×1080) with a refresh rate of 144Hz, and her storage is a 1TB SSD.
Her specs are on par with Elysie-II in many ways, except for a slightly better parallelisation capability with 50% more cores and a faster secondary storage, and a much more portable form factor (laptop vs desktop). She's pretty portable for a stronk person like me, but I think I may actually need to use the provided carrier bag instead of whatever I had---she is a little larger than the 13" laptops that I have.
For a portable machine running the specs like the beast that is Elysie-II, Eileen-II runs surprisingly cool. Let's hope this continues.
------
On more different matters, it had been quite trying for the past week-and-a-half. Work had some extra certification thing that needed to be done to address a tender, and I was tasked to get it with a colleague. The whole process was a little harrowing, partly because the item that we were getting certification on wasn't exactly directly aligned with my interests/area of work/domain of expertise per se, and partly because of the super shortened duration we had to actually prepare for it, even though we managed the expectations of that to have two attempts instead of the one that was originally envisioned. Then there was the need to book a time slot to actually take the certification exam---it had to be online proctored, and the only time slot that fit the original planned schedule was at six in the morning (or any time between three and six in the morning in roughly fifteen-minute intervals). Thankfully it is now over; well it had been over since the Wednesday just passed. I passed by the grace of God---the score I had was exactly the one needed to pass, no more and no less. Just to be clear, this was one of those exams that the passing grade was a ``high'' percentage that was not fifty percent.
The Friday before, I had a near breakdown. I don't know why---suddenly I felt completely useless for some reason. I felt as though I would just fade away if I didn't pay attention to myself. I think I was just overwhelmed with the stress of not willfully failing that certification exam, and the combined stresses of a general lack of coping mechanisms (no Chinese Orchestra rehearsals, no meet ups with friends, no more confidante in general) with additional social stresses (what is the new norm for me now that I am a believer, am without a wife-to-be-candidate, basically having my life rewritten to the past) meant that I just sort of lost sense of where I was. I mean, yes, I'm a believer now, I know God is with me because I've chosen to walk with Him in my life, but I'm still a neophyte in the ways of Christ, and more importantly, I'm still a mortal.
Given all that I felt, I did something pretty uncharacteristic; I posted a plea for reassurance on my ``wall'' in Facebook.
I am really heartened by the responses that came in. Friends, colleagues, and even acquaintances started coming out of the wood work to send me private messages, asking my well-being, and giving me really positive encouragement that I had indeed impacted their lives in a positive way during the times when we were walking closer together than now.
I teared up. I tear up still. I wasn't expecting all that love and concern to come in like that. Don't ask me why---I don't know. I've never really had these kinds of feelings before.
It definitely helped ground me back into reality. That I was, and am here.
------
On yet another note, I've also bought some Oval-8 finger splits by 3-point products. They are for my two pinky fingers---they have a mild form of swan neck deformity. They only show up when I need to be playing the dizi or when I'm going for the pinky-notes of the right hand (instrument C♯, C, B), in which case it is bad. Most of the time I don't have to actually ``stretch'' my fingers, but under those circumstances highlighted, I have to, and it is a problem. The Oval-8 finger splits block the middle joint from bending backwards, which allows me to safely stretch out the pinky without jamming the joint up. It is super useful. I first learnt of them at the Flute Forum on Facebook, and bought mine from Fu Kang, a Singapore company.
And that's about it for now. Till the next update I suppose.
Saturday, July 25, 2020
Sunday, July 05, 2020
``Rightness is a Dynamic Process, not a Static Declaration"
``Rightness is a [dynamic] process, not a [static] declaration.''
This is is a working hypothesis that I have right now.
I am saying this because I think we are now in the age where the so-called ``optics'' of the statements are more important than the actual understanding and conclusions that are drawn by the person involved.
There are two parts in the inherent problem: one is the bullshit reaction that is currently known as ``cancel culture'', and the other is the equally bullshit reaction of ``virtue signalling''. Whatever part applies, it ends up with the same outcome---people either parroting the catchphrases of the day in an echo chamber, or more likely, practise self-censorship out of fear of their own lives in the face of near-total ostracisation of the various segments of society that they believe to be operating in.
From the previous paragraph, you can easily tell what my thoughts are with respect to these two really toxic types of reactions; yes, I think they are bullshit. No one other than Jesus can claim to be perfect and make no mistakes whatsover in their past---the reason for that is multifold:
That is bullshit. More importantly, ``cancel culture'' commits the cardinal sin of attempting to conveniently forget about the historical context, and therefore making it easier to repeat the same stupid mistakes in the future as we start to forget what the lessons then that had been learnt from blood.
The other bullshit is ``virtue signalling''. Look, I get it---we all want to appear to be wise, correct and right in this age of extreme hyper-survelliance culture. But ``virtue signalling'' is an actual sin, because it only shows a veneer of being aware of the [social] issues of the day, and demonstrating a superficial attempt at righting the perceived wrongs, but without actually having a significant impact at all at dealing with the underlying root cause. Take the whole brouhaha regarding the attempts at renaming ``blacklist/whitelist'' as well as ``master/slave''. I am well aware that words have power, but words also have context to be taken into account. The context here is a technical one, and forms a jargon that is well understood; how does a technical term used in a technical domain reinforce oppression is something I cannot easily understand, especially when the proposed terms to rename to often make things more obscure. At that point, why bother with English words then? Almost any English word can be offensive to someone---taken to its logical extreme, shouldn't we just rename every single technical term to a mechanically generated one comprising a Hungarian-notation inspired sigil for the semantic identity followed by some fixed number of digits to ensure that we offend exactly no one?
Isn't it also the fault of the person who takes offense to think about why he/she is taking offense over something that wasn't meant by the author to cause offense in the first place?
It is similar in problem to the whole ``community conduct'' fiasco---there has been many an open source project that, in some socio-political virtual signalling context, decide to come up with a code of conduct that had very strong [American politics flavoured] social justice overtures that are at best irrelevant to the code at hand. Someone on /. mentioned before that if someone demands a new code of conduct for an open source community and summarily refuses to use the ACM Code of Ethics, it should raise as many red flags as much as possible that what was at stake was not about decency but about pushing some kind of political agenda.
But all that aside, back to my working hypothesis.
I think that everyone has the right to change their views with respect to new information that come in, and that they be allowed to exercise that right. Only God has perfect information at all times (which is funny because ``time'' may not mean to God the way it means to us); the rest of us are operating on a very strongly Bayesian-type world that we have to take in evidence to modify our a priori assumptions to produce an a posteriori effect, i.e. to change our mind. Only God and His prophets can declare an unassailable static truth---the rest of us will have to slowly make our way there through the dynamic process of gathering information via observation, then altering our perspective based on the weighing of the evidence against our intuition, and doing this iteratively.
``Cancel culture'' and ``virtue signalling'' are not helping us along these lines, because they basically demand that all of us act with the omniscience that only God possesses.
And that is why for this blog, I have this very important disclaimer since the beginning:
If I was wrong in the past, and I learnt about it in the future, you bet your ass that I will acknowledge the mistake in the future, but I will not alter the past to act as though I was right. I think that is the single most dishonest thing that I can do.
This is is a working hypothesis that I have right now.
I am saying this because I think we are now in the age where the so-called ``optics'' of the statements are more important than the actual understanding and conclusions that are drawn by the person involved.
There are two parts in the inherent problem: one is the bullshit reaction that is currently known as ``cancel culture'', and the other is the equally bullshit reaction of ``virtue signalling''. Whatever part applies, it ends up with the same outcome---people either parroting the catchphrases of the day in an echo chamber, or more likely, practise self-censorship out of fear of their own lives in the face of near-total ostracisation of the various segments of society that they believe to be operating in.
From the previous paragraph, you can easily tell what my thoughts are with respect to these two really toxic types of reactions; yes, I think they are bullshit. No one other than Jesus can claim to be perfect and make no mistakes whatsover in their past---the reason for that is multifold:
- They did not know any better then as a person;
- The social context was different then, making the actions then acceptable but may not be acceptable now;
- Even if they knew better and their specific social context didn't enforce the currently unacceptable behaviour as acceptable, they could've made mistakes that they have since learnt from.
That is bullshit. More importantly, ``cancel culture'' commits the cardinal sin of attempting to conveniently forget about the historical context, and therefore making it easier to repeat the same stupid mistakes in the future as we start to forget what the lessons then that had been learnt from blood.
The other bullshit is ``virtue signalling''. Look, I get it---we all want to appear to be wise, correct and right in this age of extreme hyper-survelliance culture. But ``virtue signalling'' is an actual sin, because it only shows a veneer of being aware of the [social] issues of the day, and demonstrating a superficial attempt at righting the perceived wrongs, but without actually having a significant impact at all at dealing with the underlying root cause. Take the whole brouhaha regarding the attempts at renaming ``blacklist/whitelist'' as well as ``master/slave''. I am well aware that words have power, but words also have context to be taken into account. The context here is a technical one, and forms a jargon that is well understood; how does a technical term used in a technical domain reinforce oppression is something I cannot easily understand, especially when the proposed terms to rename to often make things more obscure. At that point, why bother with English words then? Almost any English word can be offensive to someone---taken to its logical extreme, shouldn't we just rename every single technical term to a mechanically generated one comprising a Hungarian-notation inspired sigil for the semantic identity followed by some fixed number of digits to ensure that we offend exactly no one?
Isn't it also the fault of the person who takes offense to think about why he/she is taking offense over something that wasn't meant by the author to cause offense in the first place?
It is similar in problem to the whole ``community conduct'' fiasco---there has been many an open source project that, in some socio-political virtual signalling context, decide to come up with a code of conduct that had very strong [American politics flavoured] social justice overtures that are at best irrelevant to the code at hand. Someone on /. mentioned before that if someone demands a new code of conduct for an open source community and summarily refuses to use the ACM Code of Ethics, it should raise as many red flags as much as possible that what was at stake was not about decency but about pushing some kind of political agenda.
But all that aside, back to my working hypothesis.
I think that everyone has the right to change their views with respect to new information that come in, and that they be allowed to exercise that right. Only God has perfect information at all times (which is funny because ``time'' may not mean to God the way it means to us); the rest of us are operating on a very strongly Bayesian-type world that we have to take in evidence to modify our a priori assumptions to produce an a posteriori effect, i.e. to change our mind. Only God and His prophets can declare an unassailable static truth---the rest of us will have to slowly make our way there through the dynamic process of gathering information via observation, then altering our perspective based on the weighing of the evidence against our intuition, and doing this iteratively.
``Cancel culture'' and ``virtue signalling'' are not helping us along these lines, because they basically demand that all of us act with the omniscience that only God possesses.
And that is why for this blog, I have this very important disclaimer since the beginning:
All views expressed in this blog are #1 mine and mine alone unless otherwise indicated and #2 are consistent only at the time of publication of the particular entry. Specifically, do not take my views as the views of the general populace, and do not attempt to chastise me for taking a different stance from before. However, if you realise that there are factual errors, do not hesitate to inform me through the comment box---comments are moderated and if you would like me to not publish your comment, you can say so from within the posted comment.I represent no one other than myself on this blog; I state my own views from my own perspective, tempered with what I know at the point in which I wrote the entry.
If I was wrong in the past, and I learnt about it in the future, you bet your ass that I will acknowledge the mistake in the future, but I will not alter the past to act as though I was right. I think that is the single most dishonest thing that I can do.
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