A M3h Day?

Today isn't a good day. I don't know if it qualifies as a bad day though---maybe it does?

Who knows?

It started off quite comfortably. I was keeping the last TTRPG stream of HololiveEN running in the background while devouring more of Digital Filters (3rd Edition). It was still pretty much okay and seemed to be on track to being a good day.

Then it started to get a little too hot, and I ended up taking a nap, which was interrupted randomly by some spam callers on the land line, and other random shouty sounds all over.

Eventually napping was not possible any more and I pulled myself up from the floor and put away the mattress. Then I was just sitting here and feeling strange flips in my stomach as my head felt a little dizzy.

Couldn't tell if it was something to do with the caffeine dose (too low/too high?), or just due to the stupid heat. Or maybe even the restlessness from being too sedentary for too long.

Most likely it is a combination of all of the above. Easier answer that is technically correct, but explains almost nothing---that's the machine learning way of answering things after all.

So now, as I sit here and stare off into the distance, I just wonder what the heck happened so far.

Ah well. Maybe I should go out and walk or something.

This is a short entry. Till the next update.

Movement and Observation

I'm at the point where my list of things to write about is shrinking ever so slightly, due to me generally staying at home, and also not wanting to keep bringing up the mundane (like how many pages of a book/series I have read). It is easy to get some material to rant about from scouring the various news websites, but at some fundamental level, I don't really enjoy doing that [scouring] much.

If I am going to write about real-world happenings outside of my immediate, personal experience, then it is my duty to actually do enough research to make it as informed a piece of writing as I can to avoid being one of the many misinformation/disinformation spreaders that I have expressed distaste for. But doing all that means that I may inadvertently raise the profile of this blog of mine to beyond the small handful of people who are still reading it---I'm not sure if I want that, or even am remotely ready for that.

Meta-discussions aside, I did think of something to write about while going on a short walk earlier today: movement and observation.

I don't move normally as compared to most people, and by that, I don't mean that I do funny walks or anything of that sort. When I move from one point to another, I am usually quite focused on my surroundings, with the focus level proportionate to how unfamiliar I am with the place. At the lowest focus level, I let instinct take over my vision, relying on a lot of peripheral vision and instinctual facial recognition to take over the navigation process. This means that even at the lowest level of focus, my visual arc tends to be much larger than expected. This reliance on my peripheral vision is why I prefer glasses with wider lenses that do not compromise on that, which leads to lenses that extend much farther out along the frame, which itself is much closer to the width of my head than not. In addition, the glasses itself sits higher on my face so as to bring the lenses closer to my eye, which also increases the effective arc of corrected vision.

Leaving my visual cortex to the instinct level also means that I can often identify familiar faces faster than I can process consciously. So if you are someone that I might know, it is more likely than not that I have identified you already when you appeared within my visual range. Now whether I choose to recognise you is a different story, and relies on the processing of the higher levels of consciousness above that of my instincts.

Apart from making extensive use of my peripheral vision (and lowering my level of conscious control to that of being instinctual), I also use lots of eye and head movement to further increase the amount of surroundings that I can see. I rely a little heavier on eye movement since it is quick and less confusing to others, but I do use head movement to increase it much further even as I am continuing my forward ambulation. Think of it as the extended version of ``look left, then right, then left again before crossing the road'' principle. With these combined movements, I can cover much of the 360 ° that I can observe, leaving about the rear 30 ° or so uncovered. There is usually no need to do that, but if I am in a really unfamiliar place, I will physically half-turn my entire body with the right amount of foot pivot to check my six.

I don't do that action most of the time because for most places, it's not as necessary to be that observant. Covering that remaining 30 ° is important if I'm in a completely unfamiliar place for two reasons:

1. It establishes a view to remember should one need to backtrack later on; and
2. It demonstrates to observers that one is actually aware of one's surroundings.

That second point can be quite important from the safety perspective---one can spot more dangers earlier if one were to look around one's surroundings more, and showing that awareness raises the threat-level (and opportunity cost) for the opportunistic perpetrator, under the ``most violence is committed among familiar people, and non-familial violence is often predatory in nature'' principle. Showing that one is actively looking out makes one look less enticing as a prey for such predatory people, which raises one's safety by a bit. Of course, it also means that one can pre-emptively know if they are setting themselves up for a bad encounter through the observation as well---most times the best self-defense is to avoid being in such a situation in the first place.

Apart from the observation arcs that I talk about, I also use quite a bit of ``reflective elements'' to further increase what I can see. ``Reflective element'' use here means checking out things that reflect light, like mirrors that I pass by, or windows that have some kind of reflection, even camera output displays; essentially anything that extends the normal direction of view in one way or another. It's habitual at this point. Effective shadowing/stalking requires one to not do any suspicious actions when under observation, and sometimes while trying to maintain a low suspicion, the perpetrator may need to make up for lost ground during moments of non-observation. So an effective way of applying the suspicion pressure (and give oneself more time to react) is to use as many of such ``reflective elements'' to increase the duration of observation.

With respect to actual movement, I have a tendency to just walk straight ahead with as little ``wobble'' as possible, keeping on the left side of the route (SIN city rules, sort of). If there are any obstacles, I can end up doing some kind of irimi movement to continue my general forward movement, though with what most would call a ``dodge''. This is often the case if there is just too many people to do my more usual action of just stopping and looking at the other person to see what he/she wants to do in terms of movement. I don't mind giving way to people; it doesn't hurt me in time, and more importantly, allows a more fluid movement since I can always make up the ``lost'' time in the stop through my usual fast movement.

Years of aikido and jujutsu training have taught me how to keep advancing no matter what gets in the way, which includes how to break my falls. There has been instances where I did execute some kind of breakfall on instinct thanks to the slippery ground, and from those instances, I truly got away lightly. I foresee that this will continue to serve me well into the future should I live that long, since one of the leading causes of really big problems from being old is actually bone breakage, particularly of the hips.

You don't really want that.

Anyway that's all I have to say for now. It's a little different from the usual ranting and existential mulling. Till the next update.

Buzzing Thoughts

Bear with me. I'm going to try and capture some rather fleeting thoughts before this buzz goes away. If things are incoherent, well, deal with it. Sorry not sorry.

I went back to my favourite bar for an afternoon of drinking [Guinness] and reading while eating some of my favourite bar grub. It has been slightly longer than a month since I was there, no thanks to all the ``no dining in'' edict that accompanied the ``Phase Two (Heightened Alert)''. I somehow managed to down 6 glasses of my favourite stout, and read some books, while getting a nice buzz.

I've not had such a buzz in a while, considering that I have not drunk anything alcoholic for a while ever since I have more or less cleared out my stash.

I was honestly afraid that I would somehow get myself actually drunk drinking my usual amount at my usual pace after not having drunk in a while. Thankfully, that did not happen.

What did happen is that I have this nice buzz. Combine that with some very positive energy 1980s mando-pop music, I feel innervated (not enervated---I swear these two words are somehow worse than flammable versus inflammable). There's just something about some 1980s mando-pop that makes it all bubbly and full of positive energy, something that I didn't realise that I was badly needing until today, partly because of some of the bad news that I have been hearing from my friends, partly because I allowed myself to start wallowing in the seductive thing that was nostalgia.

Oh no... the thoughts I want to capture are slowly disappearing---gotta go faster at the expense of coherence!

The manager of my favourite bar is leaving for greener pastures soon---her last day is next Monday. Naturally, I should show up to give her some support. I don't know her well enough to be able to call her by name, but her presence was definitely something to look forward to, if nothing but for a familiar face. I saw the owner of the bar [franchise] today, and it was still the same dude.

Tangentially relatedly, my worse fears regarding my favourite sushi place after seeing that all the steel kitchen equipment have gone missing have been realised---they are on an indefinite hiatus until this nonsense of a pandemic [control measure] is stabilised.

Leaving leaving leaving---everyone's leaving. Nothing new, possibility always expected, but still painful when it happens. I really don't like dealing with endings. It ain't over yet though, considering that Kiryu Coco's last day as a Hololive talent is coming to an end post Jul 01, which is like Thursday.

I really don't like dealing with endings.

A recent discussion with a friend plus some 1980s mando-pop optimism and being buzzed made me think very off-handedly about being in some kind of boyfriend/girlfriend relationship---the allure is still sort of there, but (as I have grown to realise) that kind of feeling of need/want decays increasingly faster over time.

It got to the point where when I see a nicely dressed woman with some body-con dress, the only reaction I had was just ``cool dress'' and stop there, not even interested in stealthily checking her out more. The reason is really simple: I don't even know who she is, so why should I even be bothered with being physically attracted to her.

Yabai yabai yabai...

...or is it really やばっ? Not being physically attracted to women is good right, since it means I won't fall into that big sin of sexual immorality and what-not?

Eh, who the heck knows.

I was thinking a little about my situation while taking the bus home from my favourite bar under the influence of the side conversations of the bar [franchise] owner and manager about how I am still on a year-long sabbatical, the 1980s mando-pop positivity, and being buzzed. One word kept coming to mind: walking-dead. Okay, it's hyphenated, so sort of cheating, but who cares? The walking-dead---that seems to be what I am.

Just moving through physical existence waiting to fulfill all the obligations that I still have remaining before turning my metaphorical switch from ``on'' to ``off'' permanently and calling it a day. Sure, some people might be a bit upset, but most of them are too far to really give more than a slight damn about the fact that I have gone away.

Harsh but in many ways I believe to be true.

It's as though I have already experienced what I wanted out of this life (the whole ``不在乎天长地久, 只在乎曾经拥有'' type of mentality that I have said before on many occasions. If I claim that this life is just a phase that I am passing through, and that I truly adhere to the mantra of ``不在乎天长地久, 只在乎曾经拥有'', then logically I should grow a spine and just be content with all that I have experienced and just be ready to be called home to the LORD.

Funnily enough, I feel as though this time, I am actually content to a large degree, despite this weird feeling that there is some yet undiscovered mental lock that I have not breached open.

Alright, I am feeling the buzz going away and regular cognitive functions returning. I'm going to end here for now and go run the hair clipper to lop off the month's growth of hair before my shower. The Animorphs series still has some 18-ish books left, and I hope to complete it so that I can move on to something else.

Why? No reason other than just to check a few things off the list. That's what my reading list is for---to motivate me to just move through works to check things off lists so that I can have a sense of achievement. It's my way of playing a game that I have set for myself---no direct comparison with other people because I really can't be arsed to get trapped in competition for something that doesn't matter at all.

Alright, till the next update then.

``Making''?

A-hem, excuse me while I gather my thoughts after watching the last Kiryu Coco meme review before her graduation before I begin.

Okay, I think that's a good enough breather.

A recent series of remarks between me and an acquaintance got me thinking about the difference between ``making'' as an industry and ``making'' as an art. The context is that he had created a reference chart about various suppliers for a specific resource supply with some measured characteristics, and remarking how despite them all calling the specific supply by the same term, had differing properties and wished that his reference chart could help others who needed that information. I commented that it was a great idea to do up such a reference chart, seeing that there really wasn't any standardisation organisation that would prescribe requirements and standards to be adhered to for reducing the variability the way like how how one exists for steel to make it easier to find what was needed.

I'm not sure if the said acquaintance had misunderstood my point, because the reply was along the lines of ``this specific resource isn't like those graded metals; they are processed by Master craftsmen that `transcend standards and regulations' '', which sounded like offense was taken against what I was saying.

Politely, I declined to continue the dialogue---I couldn't see what there was to say. But it did get me thinking about this interesting point that was made in rebuttal: the transcendence of standards and regulations because they were done by Master craftsmen.

``Making'' always begins as an art---it always starts with the first form/version, the prototype. This prototype may begin its life as a bunch of ``design by committee'' meetings, but ultimately, it needs to be put together by some craftspeople. Usually the ones who build the prototype are some kind of Masters in their own right, since they are the ones with sufficient experience and knowlege to know how to put the prototype together. There may be some semblence of a plan, or even a blueprint, but changes to these are always to be expected---it is the prototype after all.

Now, if the prototype is completed and the process stops there, it remains as an art. It is vacuously true with respect to transcending standards and regulations for reasons that I will articulate in a bit. So in this sense, art by Master craftspeople do transcend standards and regulations as claimed by my acquaintance.

``Making'' as an industry is really ``making'' as an art with two more properties:

1. Consistent replicability; and
2. Scaling.

To achieve the first requires the outlining of the steps needed in the making process---this allows labour of different skill levels to replicate as close to the prototype from the Master as possible. It also requires measurements to allow the labour to know just how close (or far) from the mark they are and adjust accordingly to maintain consistency. These are then refined over time, and when the refinement is of a sufficiently economically viable degree will it be possible to scale to large numbers without failure.

From the perspective of a consumer, an object made as an art has greater sentimental value over an object made from industry, since there is a stronger sense of imparted skill from a Master artisan in an art than that of an industrially created object. This, I agree with.

From the perspective of an artisan who is sourcing for supply though, I would say that it is in the producer's interest to have their resource be ``made'' from industry to ensure the consistent quality, which helps to reduce the uncertainty, giving the artisan more time to spend on expression than to control for the quality of the resource.

But I suppose I can see why this perspective of mine may not be agreed with by my acquaintance, and I think it is just a simple difference in perspective. In my mental model, my ``art'' relies heavily on replicability since it is a performance art---the art is in the execution of the expression/concept each time the music is being played. So in my perspective, a consistent quality instrument (the resource supply for my art) is of paramount importance.

My acquaintance's art is a non-performance based one---it relies heavily on the final outcome, since the execution is done only once before it is permanently set. So for my acquaintance, the consistent quality of the resource supply is less important since it is part of the artistic process to work with whatever it was provided.

And that's that on ``making'' from industry and ``making'' from art.

Till the next update.

First Jab and a Dose of C++

I mentioned previously about having locked in my vaccination slot some time this week. It's the end of Saturday now, and is thus at the end of the week.

Needless to say, I have taken my first dose of Comirnaty, more better known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, which is also known as ``tozinameran''. It's sort of like the mess that is N-acetyl-para-aminophenol, also known as ``Paracetamol'', also known as ``Acetaminophen'', also known as ``APAP'', also known as ``Panadol'', and also known as ``Tylenol''. Bloody hell of a mess. I'll just stick with ``Comirnaty'' from here-on, because that's the exact trade-name vaccine that I took.

The slot I had was an afternoon slot nearby, and it progressed smoothly. Registration was quick, information regarding potential side effects dispensed professionally in both a verbal manner and in a booklet published by ye olde MOH. The injection itself was straightforward, a quick intra-muscular jab to the left deltoid muscle, just like any other vaccination injections that I have taken (diphtheria, tetanus, Hepatitis B, just to name the ones taken in the recent decade). A short observation period of 30 min was practised, where I just sat on a chair in the specially cordoned off area reading Digital Filters (3rd Edition) by R. W. Hamming, a dead-tree book, chosen over Eirian-IV deliberately in case I needed to be swooped off to the hospital in an ambulance in case of anaphylaxis---it's easier to stow away a dead-tree book over an e-reader, with less chances of it actually being ``accidentally misplaced'' along the way.

Eh, there was some slight soreness in the muscles more distal than the deltoid muscle (but not the injection site itself), and my resting body temperature was a little raised compared to normal. However, the elevated body temperature was well within the variation I often experienced when the ambient temperature/humidity was worse than normal, so all in all, everything was still within acceptable levels of normal.

The vaccination centre's out-processing station gave an A5 paper print-out indicating the next appointment slot for the second and final dose of Comirnaty, which is a nice redundancy in addition to the SMS confirmation on initial booking and the appearance of both slots in the Health Hub web site. While I'm not usually a fan of being unwillingly co-opted into digital systems, I am quite pleased with this slightly more transparent recording of such vaccination information. It reduces the leverage that some power-hungry citizen-facing civil servants use to bully the less-able citizen just because of the information asymmetry.

Now, if the information that is stored in such governmental databases have a strong protection scheme to keep it only to government matters, and making any retrieval attempts by care-givers be one that is based on explicit consent of the patient per defined set of treatment transactions, that would be peachy. As it stands, I'm not sure if there are strong enough patient protection schemes of data in place (think the HIPAA of the United States), and frankly, am unwilling to do the legal legwork to discover what the current situation is.

Anyway, apart from the print-out, there were also some other freebies that were provided: a box of disposable face masks and more hand sanitisers. Eh, I appreciate the thought, but really, am leery about the hand sanitisers, not because of potential quality issues, but that for most of us, good handwashing habits with old-fashioned soap can work wonders for way less cost and damage to the skin. Antiseptic levels of hand sanitisation are probably much more useful if one is going to potentially work with open wounds, or in related contexts where one is likely to be mixing up with body fluids. Mechanical removal of whatever is mounted on the surface is usually easier and less harsh than trying to chemically kill stuff.

I mean, I should know. I have been battling bullshit staphylococcus aureus bacterial loads on my skin for a long long time. Antiseptics and antibiotics are really not easy to keep applying---plain old washing with a simple soap was good enough to reduce the infection (and associated inflammation) by a stupidly large degree for a fraction of the cost.

Digression aside, it's way past the 48-hour base line check point that I am worried about, and seeing that things are well, I think things are fine. I will not start on some crazy physical activities though, just to lower the exposure from the risk of some other low-likelihood side effects involving the heart. This is probably less important now as compared to the second dose of Comirnaty, since the body's reaction to that booster shot is supposed to be much quicker and more intense relative to the first.

And that's about it. I didn't feel like doing all the ``bragging on Facebook'' stuff that other people have done---just feels weird to be doing so, seeing that it really isn't some kind of achievement of my own merit, since all I did was literally sit around until it was my turn to go get vaccinated from the freely provided once by the government. Doesn't even help with persuading people to go get vaccinated if they haven't done so since I had been bombarded with such ``bragging'' posts for the past months.

Last I checked, still human though, so I thought it would be nice to make a note of it here on my blog, where I paradoxically quietly shout into the public void.

------

Speaking of the public void, I started on a mini-project today, working on a faster-than-Python solver for grid-based tiling problems in C++. The last time I used it for any period was back in 2002--2003 for course work, where the main standard for C++ was C++98 and pre-C++03. Times were different then... using namespace std; was the norm (it shouldn't!); the parse was broken when it tried to make sense of std::vector<std::vector<int>> t; (one had to write it as std::vector<std::vector<int> > t; instead); auto didn't exist (which made iterators a bloody pain in the ass to use); it was still mostly C with classes as opposed to being truly object-oriented; and the STL was clunky to use as it tried to preserve a certain C-ness despite being more object-oriented than C ever could be.

I'm not sure which C++ standard I'm working with now, probably just C++11 at the minimum. g++ --version tells me that it is version 10.2.0, which suggests that some parts of C++20 are implemented. Using some google-fu, I ran

 g++ -dM -E -x c++ /dev/null | grep -F __cplusplus

and it told me that it was #define __cplusplus 201402L. So I suppose we are on C++14 or so by default.

Eh, any version of C++ above C++03 is better.

``But MT, why are you suddenly going back to C++?'' It's not a case of ``suddenly'' going back to C++, it's more of ``better review C++ despite having been programming in Java professionally for the past decade''. One reason is because Java and C++ are the two largest object-oriented languages in existence (while I can still C even in my sleep, it is getting to be rather niched/dated in general for modern computing platforms), and the other is that ever since Sun Microsystems got bought over by Oracle, governance over the Java programming language and its tools have been all over the place, making its future very awkward.

The principles of Java's ``write once, run anywhere'' are excellent in this era of massive computational power and virtualisation, but its different enterprise programming frameworks and associated certification (now mostly only Oracle) combined with a movement towards web-technologies has made it run a strange race against the interpreted language gang led by Javascript/Typescript. C++ is still an important language for infrastructure, not necessarily enterprise, and is still a good language to learn when there is a need to get closer to the metal compared to the other languages like even my favourite Python. C++ also ties to cool hardware more readily than Java, like GPUs, and can thus be more interesting to work with.

So it is still important to keep my toes wet with working with C++ despite not really having done much with it professionally over the past decade.

Well, that's about it for now. Sorry for sneaking in some technical mumbo-jumbo. Till the next update.

Nostalgia

Mmmm stupid o'clock. Hello again.

Nostalgia hits once more when the night is cool and quiet, with nothing but the stupid engine sounds of a motorcyclist who seems to have something to prove.

There was once a period of time in my life that I had similar emotions of sitting and facing the window, and just ruminating. Actually, that's not quite right---there are a few periods of time in my life that I do so.

I have a tendency to like to set up my machines in such a way that I face a window head on, especially if it is in a residence like when I was studying in the US for my PhD-turn-masters and was rooming with John. Part of the reason was security related---with my machines set the way I said, they are much closer to the wall, which makes it harder for a casual opportunist to actually see it from afar, having to instead come really close so that he/she can actually see what machine it was and decide if it was really worth the break and entering.

The other part is that I not-so-secretly enjoy looking out of the window when I can. Something about the intermingling of safety from being indoors and the expense of the outside that really appeals to me.

It's the same now even as I am spending much of my time in my room while on sabbatical, with a separate [foldable] table set up with Eileen-II on top, and the vertical monitor set up to the side for reading. One key difference is that I cannot really look out of the window during the day due to the excessive amounts of solar radiation that comes in---the blinds have to be down and covered.

But during the morning, and the late evening/night, the blinds are up, and I can enjoy whatever scenery I can see outside, even though it is significantly less diverse as the four seasons that I would witness while I was in the US.

Nostalgia. I miss the random hotpot parties that John and I pulled together during the winter months, grabbing some other friends over to share as well. It was always a blast---there was enough enoki mushrooms since we bought like four to six bunches of it, a much larger (but necessary!) quantity compared to what most people would purchase (and then complain of its inadequate amount), sliced meat and various meat balls were plentiful, as was the napa, an important staple for hotpot.

Then there was the curry that we made when YT sent the care package that included the instant curry sauces. And the other crazy food-based hijinks that John and I partook. And of course, the hikes and geocaching that we did in between the craziness that was grad school.

Man, thinking back, I miss all those fun moments. It's really different to be spending time cooped up indoors due to the pandemic. It's also really different to not have a close enough friend to go do crazy things with.

Digging deeper back into my undergraduate days, I still remember the random late night walks up Squirrel Hill to grab some stupid o'clock steaks, the late night walks about campus, the winter night watchings on Flagstaff Hill, that deep night adventure in Schenley Park, the annual countdowns in downtown Pittsburgh, random wanderings among Morewood Gardens and Wean Hall trying to get homework done in homework parties... the list goes on.

So many wonderful memories that I lived through, not as an observer, but as an active participant.

It had been nice rekindling lots of the old friendship with friends years after I have graduated with my annual returns to various parts of the US to visit. But I have not done so for quite a while now, the last being in 2018. From the looks of things, it might very well be the case that I won't be travelling out for a visit for quite some time to come too, partly because of the pandemic's nonsense, partly because of the changing attitudes within the US making me a bit more leery to travel, and partly because I am likely to not have as much disposable income soon if I choose to walk away from climbing the corporate ladder.

It's a bit like being given the ability to fly and see many wonderful things, only to realise that in the end, that ability was just temporary, and one is doomed to dwell as a surface crawler in the scum pond that one had always been in.

Nostalgia. This isn't the first entry titled such, and I very much like to re-cite what I wrote in the first eponymous entry said by Richard Rose, from After the Absolute by David Gold with Bart Marshall:

The most painful thing on Earth is a pleasant memory. This nostalgia that sometimes comes over us isn't an accident. It's a message. It has something to tell us. We're programmed to indulge in life, but this haunting nostalgia is a sublimal message from another plane... Touching it, you touch the Eternal.

Some fifteen or so years after I first came across that quote, I still agree with what it says, and more importantly, have a somewhat deeper appreciation of what it is trying to say. To me, it sort of conjures up an aspect that comprises the soul, that is, the ability to make memories, to retrieve them, to interpret them, and to project them, a sort of imbued timelessness to what is normally a very sequential perspective of causality.

Nostalgia. I think I will indulge a little in it tonight, thinking of happier times that had gone by. I'm just a little amused that it had taken me so long in my sabbatical to really start thinking back onto the good old times. In part, I need to thank John again---despite living much farther away from me now, it is his recent somewhat depressing shared image about a person looking at a missing person poster on that featured person stating that ``no one is missing you'' that triggered me to realise that there are indeed people and times that I miss.

Well, that's all I have for now. Till the next update.

A New Tempo Is Coming

Soon, July will be arriving, and with it, a new tempo of sorts will happen in SIN city. By then, many of the school-going aged children would have their first dose of the vaccination done, many of those in my age group would also have their first dose started already, and the non-citizens who aren't in the high-priority list would be starting to register for their vaccination.

I mean, with a public announcement of a target like this, it is a clear indication that the tempo is being shifted. Of course, there have been duds like the ``Goal 2010'' pronouncement, various declarations of being the region's ``X Hub'' for various values of X, though for the latter it is better to say that we have varied results instead of outright duds.

Aspirations are good to have, but they really need to be backed by sufficient heft in terms of socio-economical support, and political will. No sense trying to push for some level of excellence but then hamstringing the effort by not committing enough resources, appropriate manpower, and more importantly, a sufficiently long-term sustainable plan. That last part, the ``long-term sustainable plan'' used to be the hallmark of the excellence of SIN city, but has recently lost much of its lustre due to gaffes, missteps, and most likely, a lack of usable ``best practices'' because SIN city is heading out into an unknown territory where SIN city is a trailblazer, a position that is hard to excel in traditionally due to the more staid and plodding modus operandi that eschews risky innovation for safer incremental improvements.

Anyway, tempo change. It is not necessarily one that has a clear forward route for the reasons that I had articulated earlier, but it does have some somewhat manageable in-between milestones that can be what the local Chinese media like to call a 强心针, or morale booster, to prevent a total rout, not that the denizens of SIN city are actually capable of such an action. I am rather concerned that the usual gang that pushes the ``new industry ${some-decimal-number-larger-than-4}'' and/or RIE2025 have been quite silent throughout this---I want to say that the pandemic has thrown a large enough spanner to slow things down, but a part of me thinks that they are brewing something that can make good use of this tempo change to push certain agenda forward.

We do live in interesting times indeed.

Another thing to look out for perhaps is the current summer escapade fever of the Western nations---it is sort of similar to the situation this time last year, except that effective vaccines exist now. How that plays out in terms of global pandemic control is something to be observed, and this includes looking out for newer more transmissive versions of the underlying SARS-CoV-2 virus and their mutations. To be fair, it isn't just the Western nations---any country that tears down their lockdown-esque regulations both internally and externally need to be observed carefully as well. How all these affect globalisation in the long run is still quite unknown, with predictions of it pivoting towards a glocalised set up (i.e. highly localised workforce working at global scale through leveraging upon digital technologies) being the mainstay.

But it's just media prediction. Cynically, it could be a way of pandering to the current workers' thoughts that would ultimately have its narrative altered when large enough vested interests decide to go more strongly on the offensive to change the mindset back to something that benefits them more.

Personally, I still think that the office is still an important place to work, not because I side with the employers' notion of control vis-à-vis ``out of sight, out of mind'', but because I think that having a place to do official work (i.e. an office) is an important factor for social mobility. Working from home as an option should be provided, but should not be mandated, because sometimes the workers who have the good abilities may not live in conditions that is conducive for working from home. Working at an office discriminates the economically less capable from those who are more capable (assuming the same role), since it provides the same working environment for all who work at the same role. It doesn't matter if a worker lives in a shared apartment with other people, or if he/she lives in a studio on his/her own---everyone is given the same working environment. That's a benefit for the worker, despite the inconveniences of commuting.

Another benefit for the worker is the clear demarcation of what is work, and what is not work, since it requires the employer to provide the tools and other resources that is necessary to get the work done. I raise this as a being a benefit for the worker because in situations where work from home is mandated, employers may choose to under-compensate the employee by claiming that since they are not travelling to the office and that they have more flexibility, then they ought to be paid less, despite having to absorb more of the capital and operational expenses themselves. To me, that isn't right.

So, given the situation in SIN city, how will it all play out? Who knows...

Till the next update.

Tyranny

I had wanted to write something about tyranny, but realised that if I followed through with my original line of thought, there was a high chance that I would be painting a large enough target on my back such that the particularly vocal and vociferous minority would overwhelm the stupid algorithm through a carefully coordinated raid and there would be no recourse for me, since I'm no multi-million reader blogging superstar that the big G would try to protect.

Welcome to one of the first signs of self-censorship that I have to take on myself. I don't think it's the first though, considering that I have been writing blog entries here since 2006.

I can talk about them obliquely though, which can still raise my target profile, but at a less obvious rate. So here we go.

Alright, let's begin with a paraphrased definition from Merriam-Webster:

tyranny

1. oppressive power, especially oppressive power exterted by a government
2. a rigorous condition imposed by some outside agency or force
3. an oppressive, harsh, or unjust act: a tyrannical act

In the Bad Old Days, tyranny is enforced through physical force---can't argue with anyone who has a Big Weapon that can threaten one with bodily harm.

That is still true by the way. In most places that we think of as being under tyrannical rule, the main enforcement is still through physical force. It may take the form of a direct threat of bodily harm to oneself, or it may take the form of indirectly harming one through harming one's family---the principle is similar.

Now, consider this: not everyone is some oppressive bastard hell-bent on total control. More importantly, tyrannies cannot exist if the one doing the oppression is in the extreme minority. So what enables a few people to tyrannise a majority then?

The answer, surprisingly enough, is through the rigid application of rules with no practical means of fixing the rules should they turn out to be ``wrong''.

There are two halves of the answer that need addressing, but let me first talk about the principle behind being a successful tyrant. It's the military concept of ``force multiplication''---a single tyrant doesn't have as much leverage as an army of them that are controlled by the single tyrant himself/herself. Thus, while there may ``only'' be one tyrant, there are many enablers under that said tyrant that end up creating a tyranny itself.

Enablers are formed when there are rules that need to be applied with no room for interpretation whatsoever. Interpretation allows free-will, and free-will is one of the ways to break through a tyranny. By making the rules rigid, there is the psychological safety that an enabler can hide into by saying something to the effect of ``look, it's not me who wants to do this, but you know, rules are rules, and we have to follow the rules because it says that we must do this''. It's a cop out, kind of like how execution firing squads sometimes have guns loaded with blank cartridges to give some moral escape through the reasoning of ``hey I didn't fire the killing shot''.

That alone isn't sufficient, because it would mean that much of the law-based systems that we have are tyrannical. Well, they are in some sense since there needs to be some level of consensus on how the society ought to be run before it can be run. But what separates a tyranny from not a tyranny is the crucial second half, which is having no practical means of fixing the rules should they turn out to be ``wrong''. There are many variables in that statement, but the most important one is ``practical''. Having a formal system to vote representatives of the people, combined with a lack of impingement of the exercise of free-will in the choice, and allowing actual freedom of options to choose are what makes the way ``practical'', assuming of course that the representatives chosen can actually pass new rules (laws) to update/fix the old ones.

If at any point the yay/nay of a rule is solely determined by a small group of people who cannot be practically rotated out, then we have a tyranny.

Modern social media platforms and other ``free'' hosted platforms are tyrannies under this definition. The rules are rigid (enforced by algorithms), and they cannot be practically changed (can't re-program said algorithms and/or petition for a reprogramming with any hope of success without using other external sources of tyranny). Thus, when using such platforms, it behooves one to be careful to not trigger the algorithm's enforcement, because for the vast majority of us, there is just now way to appeal against it.

These rules are often abused by other people who intend to oppress others too. And that's why I have to self-censor my original line of discussion on it.

The more astute should have this in mind now: ``hey MT, by your definition, isn't God's law a tyranny then? Rules are rigid, and there's no way to change them.''

Yes, they would be correct. God's law is a tyranny. But the big difference is that God Is, and God is not human. He outclasses us in every way that we can measure, and is unknowable. His Will creates reality. To violate God's law is some sense, trying to violate reality. No, don't bring up Leviticus without looking at what the New Testament has said. I keep emphasising that there is a reason why the Bible comprises both the Old Testament and the New Testament.

``But MT, if the reason why we accept God's law despite it being a tyranny is that God outclasses us in every way, then why the same reasoning cannot be put on an algorithm?'' Because while the algorithm may not be easy to explain (see the mess that is from artificial neural networks) within the lifetime of a human, it can be explained in a finite amount of time, because they are still finite systems representable as a large system of equations, and are substantiated by mathematics. God is self-substantiating; He is His own truth. Can't beat that in terms of class.

But that said, just because God's law is a tyranny that we ought to accept is no grounds for accepting the tyranny of anyone who claims to be enforcing God's law---this is a very subtle nuance that most people will not catch. My current understanding of this is this: for the non-believers, they will be cut off from God in the end times, regardless of whether they follow God's law or not; but for the believers, as long as they keep their faith and truly repent, they will be with God in the end times. As to who counts as a believer and who counts as a non-believer, the ultimate arbiter is still Christ Himself, and not any of us yokels who still walk on the earth.

Alright, that's enough out of me.

Till the next update.

Dark Side of Obsession

You know, once upon a time, I thought that the crazy otaku culture as represented in Megatokyo was a tad too much exaggeration.

Recently, I spent some time looking through some imageboard websites. I have heard of the types of toxicity that they have, and frankly, have been used to it before no thanks to being alive and active [in lurking] on such websites in the late 2000s. The boards that were on VTubers were quite alarming---despite much of the entries being quite polite and sticking to facts, there were a few that were more unhinged, and seemed to demonstrate the type of uncontrollable otaku behaviour that Megatokyo caricaturises quite satirically.

In particular, the so-called ``idol culture'' is pretty unnerving, and that's coming from an Internet veteran. I understand somewhat why someone would want to have some kind of celebrity worship, but how that level of fan-dom degrades down to the depravity of wanting absolute control over their idol's behaviour, clothes is a little beyond me. Stalking, doxxing, and the like have their incidents raised in the mainstream media every now and then, with the usual demonisation of video games and whatever the latest trend in hating describes.

Ultimately though, they don't ever come close to the root of the problem---how to help socially maladjusted people develop less perverted social/parasocial relationships.

I mean, I'm a fan of some of the VTubers, but to me, they are just another type of artiste, with their entertainment artistry based on their Let's Play-esque streams, conversations, and in-universe lore, and all within what they want to project into their performance persona. Outside of that, I have little interest in knowing what colour underwear they have, whether they are married with children and the like, because such information is completely irrelevant to the entertainment they are providing. As far as I know, they are humans, and with that come the usual trappings of what being a human means; I am well aware of what that means despite all my rants and ramblings, and knowing specific information is just minutae that doesn't add to anything of the entertainment.

I get bits of it: some people like knowing that the cute anime girl avatar talking on-screen has her voice actress not wearing any underwear, but to me, that's literally putting on more ``entertainment aspects'' that the VTuber isn't really selling. There are some VTubers who play the lewd card quite heavily as their gimmick, and with those, I respect their choice, and they are usually aware of the consequences of such choices. But there are many who play it straight, and to have themselves be put in such an awkward position is just wrong.

I want to say that curious speculation is par for the course for any celebrity that we know, but then there's that line of decency that separates naughty speculation from being a true menace. And I think that line of decency is defined by the amount of effort being placed in taking action to speculate more, or to confirm said speculation. Most people aren't that unhinged, but in terms of harm done, all it takes is just one bad actor to make everyone look horrifically bad.

It has happened before, and it will happen again.

Because such bad actors are excellent scapegoats for society to act seemingly responsible and push out all the evils onto the things that they dislike. It doesn't matter if the bad actors could have been saved had they been provided with a way out---salvation has never really been part of the modus operandi for much of society, which explains why much of what we call human justice has been largely based on punitive and retributive principles instead of rehabilitative ones. Slapping a fine, a jail term, or execution is just so much easier than going through the process of diagnosing/correcting the problem before offering continual support and observation to ensure that the problem doesn't return.

The price borne by society for each of these possible outcomes though... it is not as obvious.

No, I'm not advocating for/against death penalties---that is out of scope. What I am advocating is for society to treat its members better. We are out of the woods with respect to basic survival (for the most part), and we should start thinking about improving the quality of life instead of just focusing on industrial output alone. The simplest way to think of this is that for a producer to succeed, he/she needs to have consumers to sell to. If there are no consumers left to sell to, there won't be a market left, and with that, the producer must fail.

People who cannot differentiate between idle discussion from perverted obsession are likely to have an underlying issue that is not looked at. Help should be readily available for such people, and social stigma against getting such help should be minimised so that we, as a society, obtain a net gain.

But that won't happen without some kind of revolutionary occurrence. Remember that it is easier to slap on more rules than to take a step backwards and reduce them.

Till the next update.

An Open Secret

It's an open secret by now, but let's just quickly talk about it, as well as a companion tool.

youtube-dl is a tool that allows the downloading of streaming videos into a single container file. It had stayed mostly under the radar for quite a while, despite being in existence since 2011. It's recent rise in mainstream popularity comes from the DMCA take down from the RIAA, which was eventually reversed after a fight with the assistance of the EFF, of which a better summary of the details may be found in Github's own blog entry from 2020-11-16.

It's a useful tool.

A related tool is avconv. It's like the audio-visual version of ImageMagick, providing at its core commands that allow manipulation of source audio/video streams, with a heavier focus on codec and container file transformation.

It is also a useful tool.

But funny enough, like all things relating to video/audio, only the source code is made available---to actually use it requires one to do some compiling locally. This is the same with The LAME Project.

The whys of such a strange occurrence may be found in the long-time campaign of the RIAA/MPAA to smear as many tools that manipulate sound/video as being agents of piracy as possible. Now, whether piracy actually hampers the media company businesses or liberates the consumers from the cabalistic behaviour of the middlemen to create a monopoly/oligopoly against free market principles is a large topic of research in itself that I won't go into detail due to the many confusing arguments that is deliberately pushed by the lobbyists keen on helping to preserve an antiquated model to avoid having to innovate in the face of new technology.

I will hint that the fight between these lobbyists and technology has a long history that makes a really bizarre bed-time reading. It's sufficiently long and twisted that I won't even try to find URLs for suggested reading.

Back to building from source. It's usually quite straightforward when I already have Cygwin set up. Cygwin is close enough to being POSIX/UNIX-y that most sources can be built directly. There are some minor issues every now and then, usually revolving around O/S detection strings since the output of [say] uname -a often yields a string that has no ``Linux'', ``BSD'' or anything that remotely looks UNIX-y. That tends to screw up some of those auto-configuration scripts that prepare the system-specific include files/compilation options. And that's where having know-how with the POSIX/UNIX system comes into play---just need to roll up my sleeves and tweak at the sources so that it can be compiled.

There are also other compromises, like not having access to any assembly code for super efficiency, mostly because the ABI is different enough in Cygwin as compared to regular POSIX/UNIX. It's usually not a problem---if I really wanted some kind of efficiency, then it's off to the virtual machine we go, and even then, things are usually not that clear-cut anyway, since the best efficiency improvements are often at the algorithm level, with other lower-level optimisations only helping with the constant term. Constant terms are critical only in situations where latency is important---for batch processing, it's usually not that big a deal if the overall run-time is ``reasonable'' (usually means around the 5 min mark or so).

Anyway, that's all the rant for now. Till the next update.

Light and Dark

Light and dark. No, not a moral quandary-type exposition, just literally talking about colour relationship of background versus foreground from the perspective of the terminal emulator of the command line interface (CLI).

The CLI is my most comfortable way of operating a computer. This has been true since my first interaction with it back in the days of MS-DOS, even with the existence of DOS Shell, Windows 3.1, and beyond while staying within the Wintel ecosystem.

The CLI is straightforward to work with. I can expound more of its virtues, but that can be for another post for another day. The quick summary of why the CLI is straightforward (as compared to a graphical user interface (GUI)) is that it is a serialised interrogative type of interaction as compared to the often limited smorgasbord of pre-defined capabilities that is offered in the GUI. This means that the CLI has a built-in read-eval-print loop (REPL) that is akin to how people normally interact with each other.

Now, the CLI and the terminal emulator have gone hand-in-hand ever since it was possible to actually use a CLI with a computer. Old school terminals used to be teletype printers, literally having a typewriter hooked up to the computer to present output while accepting input from the attached typewriter keyboard. Later terminals started using cathode-ray tubes (CRT) which showed the output text as rasterised pixel elements upon a phosphorus mask.

Critically, these CRTs have a default screen colour of dark, which is normal because the phosphor mask is not stimulated by the fast-moving cathode-ray. This is the origin of the traditional ``light on dark'' background for terminal emulators. There is also another practical reason: the cathode-ray striking the phosphorus mask isn't usually the most precise, which means that there is a chance that the collimated cathode-ray can cause a bleeding effect into nearby pixels. So, any lit pixel isn't really as square as it is predicted, but is really somewhat Gaussian distributed with the median being where the pixel is supposed to be, but with light bleeding elsewhere. This means that if the entire screen starts off as being of a light background with dark text, the overall effect is that the dark text will seem much thinner than if the reverse happened.

The evolution towards LCD displays have reversed the operating principles of the CRT. Instead of starting out unlit before having active elements lit, we are seeing that the displays start out being completely lit, with each pixel having filters to alter the colour and intensity of the backing light through filtering. Since the display starts off with a light background and requires effort to change the light background to whatever filtered colour [that isn't white], it became the start of the so-called ``white background saves power'' movement.

Independently, the era of LCD displays also heralded the widespread use of the GUI, with the CLI often appearing in the form of a terminal emulator as opposed to being the ``native'' interface. With most of the GUI being coloured and distinctively not dark, the dark text on light background concept became more dominant.

Recent developments of display technology to that of LED ones (not LED back-lit LCD) has reverted the trend towards ``dark background saves power''.

The LCD/LED displays with their higher precision as compared to the CRT have mostly solved the bleeding colour problem. For me, however, the bleeding colour problem still exists, and here is the big reason why.

I use really tiny pixel fonts. We're talking about 8×8 or 8×16 levels of tiny. I use that a lot for programming because I like seeing more of the source code on-screen, from different sources. Back in the old days, this was fine because displays then weren't of that high a resolution: 1024×768 was considered to be high resolution, especially for a laptop. And that is with a screen display of around 13" diagonally. Rough math says that this is about 1024/(13/5×4)~98 dpi. Compare this with [say] Eileen-II, who has 1920×1080 and has a screen display of around 15" diagonally: 1920/(15/18.36×16)~147 dpi. One might think that this means that the modern displays are 1.5× more dense, but the real ratio is more like 2.25× (you need to square the linear dimensions).

This means that the modern pixel is about less than half the area of the old display pixel.

Qualitatively, it means that if my eyes are getting tired either from staring for too long or from bad ambient light (or a combination of the two), light bleeding into dark becomes a real issue.

So while I generally love light text on dark background, as time go on, I find myself gravitating more towards dark on light background.

Which, after a bloody long diversionary exposition, comes to what I really want to say.

To set that up in Cygwin's mintty, do:

mintty.exe --fg=black --bg=gray100 --cr=black

That gray100 is a way of getting the #ffffff version of white, as opposed to something that is more ``traditional'' which normal humans would call ``off-white'' (#ffffff is called ``bright white'' or ``bold white'' in old school terminal nomenclature). I had tried variants using the old school nomenclature but got nowhere with it, until I brute-forced my way to this solution.

Incidentally, now that I have two diametrically opposite terminal set-ups, I needed a way to tweak my options file in vim to ensure that the syntax colouring isn't fubared. I already used an externally defined environment variable to signal to vim that I was in dark background mode, but the hard part was how to find this out from the terminal in the first place. This hack was done because I could not find any portable way of doing this.

In this context though, I cheated through the use of MINTTY_SHORTCUT: mintty would set that particular environment variable when it is launched via a shortcut. All I did was to make sure that my short-cut for the dark text on light background option was labelled correctly and did some shell-script trickery to set my indicator environment variable.

Works like a charm.

------

In other news, today is the day where up to 2 people are allowed to dine in at a single table in SIN city. The temptation to run out to my favourite bar for an entire afternoon of chilling is high, but it has to be arrested for three reasons:

1. Avoiding the inevitable crowd due to 脱绳猴子 syndrome;
2. Uncertainty of whether my favourite bar (or other favourite food places for the matter) are open for this;
3. Extra risk reduction due to my first vaccination dose being scheduled some time this week.

As promised in a previous post, I am also restarting my OMAD. The weigh-in this morning was sobering---my raw mass was about to get past the 80 kg psychological marker. I have been cheating [myself] by having not done weigh-ins for many days throughout this month.

Time to stop cheating myself. Gotta give my dude future-me a good start.

Alright that's about it for now. I would want to write more, but it's already past the kilo-word mark. Till the next update.

Walled Garden

In the real world, we live in different geographical locations, and with that come their own set of rules/regulations that are usually quite localised. We call these rules/regulations as ``laws'', ``cultures'', ``social norms'', and the like, depending on the type of rules/regulations we are talking about. And at some level, the rules/regulations that are enacted are arrived at by some kind of consensus of all participants---this is true even in the case of authoritarian systems since those who are in power still have their own metaphorical paymasters that they need to please.

When people dislike certain rules/regulations, they have several choices of action:

1. Grudging acceptance;
2. Malicious compliance;
3. Passive defiance;
4. Aggressive defiance;
5. Walk away.

Not all of these choices are safe for the person to take depending on the situation. The notion of safety usually comes with numbers. While the numbers in terms of capital is often the usual narrative, fundamentally the sheer numbers in terms of the number of people can triumph any imaginary numbers like capital; we often hear this in the form of ``voting with your wallet''.

Keep that in mind as we shift our focus to that of the software platform.

Software platforms are walled gardens, no matter how open they claim themselves to be. They are walled gardens in the technical sense---what counts as being ``on'' the platform is wholly determined by a specifically set of logic written in the program code. Yes, there is the data-driven aspect through account creation and what-not, but those are book-keeping---the rules/regulations are the immutable program code from the perspective of the participants. The difference then between the open source software platforms from the closed one is the revelation of the underlying rules/regulations, and more distinctly, the ability to change those rules/regulations in whatever we want before we spawn off a new instance of the software platform with the different rules/regulations.

He who controls the code, controls the rules/regulations, and inevitably controls what goes on in the software platform.

In the real world, the laws of physics cannot be changed and so everyone operates from the same basic rules of reality. We owe no one (other than God) for the existence of these rules of reality. In a software platform though, one owes the existence to the software platform operator. Put simply, what I am saying is that dependence on reality is ``free'' while dependence on a virtual reality that is the software platorm is not---one is at the mercy of the operator.

So if the operator decides to change the rules, there is nothing that one can do from within the software platform. The only way to effect any change is to do it in the meta, i.e. falling back to the real world to demand for the changes wanted.

For better or worse, software platform operators now are very capitalism-centric---anything that improves business will be the right action to take; that is literally their agenda. Hence all the pandering to the latest trends, the virtue signalling to the most vocal troublemakers, sometimes to the detriment of their original audience/clientiele---it doesn't matter if one has the moral high ground, or well-thought up explanations. If that particular action can cause the software platform owner to lose capital, it will be penalised.

But despite all these side effects of the software platform, they are still popular as a dependency for many people to make a living. Part of the reason is due to the reduction of the expenses and effort required to run a similar ``reality'' that the software platform is offering. A classic example is the use of online marketplaces like Amazon.com to perform online sales instead of the late 1990s trend of running one's own shopping web site to sell one's wares.

A more recent example is the rise of audio-visual content creators using various streaming platforms like YouTube, Twitch.tv, or Spotify to showcase their work and receive remuneration. Prior to the existence of such software platforms, the only way to do so was to somehow engage with the broadcasting authority, obtain the necessary licences as well as equipment/space, before finally having the opportunity to actually do what was intended. The alternative then was to approach someone with an existing broadcast network and then pitch the content to see if they were willing to run it, thus shifting the risk of governmental regulation to that of the broadcast network owner. All these processes took lots of time, effort, money, and some amount of networking.

Nowadays almost anyone can put up whatever audio-visual extravaganza they had put together, though if they want to make money from it, the rules get very complicated and blurry.

And that's part of the problem these days. Software platform rules are supranational, and are maintained by both program code and meta ``code of conduct'' rules that are enforced first by people and then by more program code when the scaling gets beyond ridiculous. This is somewhat necessary because there isn't a world government that provides a single source of universal Truth with respect to what counts as legal and illegal with respect to behaviours on the software platform. For the individual who chooses to use the software platform, they always have the option to choose a different one if the current walled garden proves too heinous to operate in, though there will come a point in time where there is no other garden to escape to thanks to the monopolisation effect that comes from consolidation due to network effects.

For companies that are built upon using the softare platform as their uhh platform, they have much less options. Being larger than the individual, they are therefore a much larger target for any form of negative/postive action, and as such, they have a tendency to play it conservatively. In the context of creative content creation, this means nerfing the creative part of it, since being creative necessarily means pushing [hard] against the boundaries of what is considered mainstream/acceptable.

So for a truly creative person, being constrained by such a situation may not be the best thing, even if the company itself provides many other exciting support that can help the person to grow their presence (and thus value).

Why am I suddenly randomly ranting about this? No idea. 🙂

Till the next update.

Team Octopus

It started off as a joke. The team that I was in was small, and I had the most rounded set of skills to help pull things together. Then it became somewhat emblematic, and I discovered just how cute they can get. And now, having my small army of them, I find the motif super endearing, and am seriously considering how I can incorporate it into my emblem. It is also rather coincidental that one of the comfy vibe HoloEN girls has that as her theme.

I am talking about octopodes of course.

Let's first get the pluralisation out of the way. I like switching up between ``octopuses'' and ``octopodes'', and have used ``octopi'' erroneously in the past. It is at times like this that knowing the etymology of a word becomes rather useful. With the rise of portmanteau creation thanks to both the mainstream media and the meme-infested social media, word origins have deviated largely from their Anglo/French/Greek/Latin/Roman roots and have ventured into uncharted mongrel territory. It is to the point that even the native speakers of English face the conundrum of having to decide which ``native'' form of English to refer to.

The venerable Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (and its current electronic version) remains the most authoritative, but its historical and descriptive nature has made it less useful in prescribing correct usage. There are versions of the OED that are a small subset of it with different editorial intent, but these days hardly anyone uses these dictionaries any more, preferring to use either the crowd-sourced Urban Dictionary for modern Internet slang, or whatever auto-definitions that the preferred search engine throws up from the use of ``${word} definition'' queries.

Argh, big digression! Back to octopodes.

I love octopodes. There's something strange about them that makes them endearing as well as terrifying. Their tiniest forms look adorable, while their biggest forms (think about a 3 m diameter disc) can look a tad scary. And they are squishy-looking no matter the size. There's an otherworldly aspect of them that makes them so interesting (no legs, no tail, just arms), and scientifically, they are also quite fun (highest brain-mass-to-body-mass ratio, sneaky escape artist, tool user). In cartooned versions of them, they fit roughly into the shape of a ball, and are just cute.

They are also tasty when prepared in some ways (sashimi of an octopus arm, commonly mistermed as a ``tentacle''), and terrifying when prepared in others (boiled into a soup).

I have a lovely giant octopus plushie, and a small takoyarnie army that Chara had put crotcheted together for me. There's also a small motley crew of adorabilis of crotcheted critters as well, and looking at them never fails to put a smile on my face.

They are currently waiting patiently in storage till the day comes where I would like to start work again, preferably with some kind of office space, be it a room or a cubicle. Working from home for me is just painful, no thanks to the constant reconstruction work outside, and the hot and humid environment itself. Besides, I don't really like subsidising the company for power and communication without an associated compensation.

It's a banal post for sure, but not every blog entry has to be an angry rant about some social fault. If that was all that I could see of the world, I'd better off be dead sooner rather than later---it would be darker than any darkness I could lay out for myself.

That's all for now. Till the next update.

Revenge of the Random Construction Work?

I build stuff in the form of software. I am quite understanding when it comes to realising that some types of work requires a little bit of extra structural stuff first before being torn down and replaced with the final bit.

But even my understanding fails when it comes to the massive amounts of rework recently in my neighbourhood.

The pillar walls of the nearby block have recently been undergoing quite a fair bit of hacking and replacement. Why that is needed, I have no idea.

Work on the inter-block covered walkways have been randomly started/stopped throughout this period, leaving the mostly metal skeleton lying about. Why that particular work schedule, I also have no idea.

The covered walkway linking my cluster of apartment blocks to the Hougang Village area across Hougang St 61 recently had its road-spanning roof mounted, while its counterpart on the other end of the same street had its removed. This particular work has been delayed for at least three times---it was supposed to have completed by last year, which got pushed to early this year, which got pushed to God knows when. Yes, I understand that ``management debt'' of bad labour control with respect to workers finally rearing its ugly head from COVID-19's complications, but I don't understand why work on it is still spotty, with no obvious completion.

Meanwhile, they somehow had time to:

1. Repave the sidewalk parallel to Hougang St 61, raising the height by about 3 cm;
2. Add a weird ``bicycle only'' lane to that said repaving, without adding appropriate lane markings for crossing points to the road crossing areas;
3. Add `p' and `q'-shaped metal barriers in pairs along some (not all) feeder walkways to the now divided pavement, restricting the available width;
4. Tear down the metal fixtures that used to comprise the hang out area closest to the opening of the Neighbourhood 6 Park;
5. Replace all the fancy cast iron garden benches with fugly rectangular stainless steel ones that had sharp ass corners;
6. Have someone shove fertiliser and water the grass that grew in between the concrete floor of the parking areas;
7. Install ``digital surveillance advertising bulletin board'' beside some (not all) ground floor elevator lobbies.

Honestly, I just don't get it. I'm not even going to play the ``请有关当局……'' card.

I'm not angry just... disappointed.

The construction process is so drawn out. If there is concrete involved, I can sort of empathise, since there are specific [weather] conditions that are needed to get the chemistry right so that the pour is of the correct form. But it doesn't seem to be the case: a lot of the ``improvement works'' seem very poorly coordinated and haphazard. At this point I cannot even tell if these ``improvement works'' are really sufficiently well thought out to actually do improvement, or is it some kind of busy work to prop certain industries/companies up.

It's at times like this that I wish I knew about the Town Council's inner workings, or more specifically, how the precinct ``improvement works'' processes are carried out. Do they take dressing from HDB, or from MND, or from the council members? If it is from the council members, do residents in these apartments have a say? If yes, how do they get their say; if not, why don't they get a say if they are really lease-hold ``owners'' of their apartments as repeatedly stated in the Housing and Development Act (Cap 129)?

Normally I'm less interested in thinking about these things out loud, going by the simple principle of ``live and let live, unless the other person's manner of living is adversely affecting mine''. And that condition was triggered with the hard-to-justify amounts of loud-ass work noise today. Battling the heat and humidity is bad enough, and now I need to deal with noise pollution as well? I mean, yes, I have noise cancelling headphones, but those are bloody hot to use in a non-air-conditioned place like where I am.

Urgh.

Speaking of non-air-conditioned, I am now wondering if the next developmental phase of public apartments under the HDB scheme will move towards having a centralised cooling system with ``sealed'' apartments by default. As the climate gets crappier in the tropics, it may prove to be more energy and space efficient to centralise the heat exchange in one place out of direct reach of individual apartment dwellers. The current way is for anyone who wants to have their unit air-conditioned will need to set up their own heat exchanger, with the hot side facing outside. But the places in which these radiators may be placed are very controlled, and often end up being an entire column of it from one floor to the next. Since hot air rises, this means that the bugger who lives on the higher floor is likely to have his/her radiator go at a much lower efficiency as compared to someon who has set up his/her radiator at the lower one. I know that the higher floors have a tendency to experience better air flow from wind, but with the construction schemes these days, all the buildings are crammed so closely that there just really isn't any such wide spaces to effect good convectional movement of heated air.

Who knows? I'm not even sure if I can live long enough for climate change to affect me to the point that a solution is desperately needed, as opposed to being ``merely'' definitely needed.

Oh, the bloody banging has stopped. Back to doing whatever I was before I decided to rant.

Till the next update.

``And I Felt That in My Kokoro''

Yeah, I know it's stupid o'clock. But so what? Aren't you, the reader, here because you are somehow a little interested in what I have to say, otherwise why would you be here in the first place?

Perhaps you are concerned and just want to keep an eye out on me. Or perhaps you are a troll, seeking an opportunity to stick it in when you find that I am down. Or perhaps you're one of the few humans left who stumble around random blogs to read things.

Or most likely, you are a web-crawling bot.

Anyway, this entry really isn't about you, the reader, even though it is written for you, the reader.

It's been an odd day. I felt mostly alright, playing me some Amid Evil (and finally completing it) while having Ninomae Ina'nis's 2-part sponsored drawing stream running the background as the comfy background setting.

But some time in the middle of the day, I did get hit with a somewhat unexpected feeling of just sheer tiredness. It's a strange type of tiredness, partly induced from staying up a tad late (I've been sleeping past 0100hrs for the past few days), and partly from the atrociously hot and humid weather.

I also had this intrusive thought of just walking away from all the usual communication platforms that I am available on and not return.

Because what's the point [of staying on these platforms]? I am a disembodied symbol with associated aggravated text, a damn symbol, not even an avatar or even a [recent?] photograph of myself, a damn symbol.

Needless to say, those whom I have been communicating with are merely text appearing next to some picture avatar too small to be recognisable as a person other than the rough pattern of colours that I cannot easily say to be of a person's face.

Nothing feels real anymore. I can't easily tell if people who have been interacting with me are really caring (or even enjoying the interaction) or is it just from some social obligation they feel from a vestigal sense of responsibility from once being friends. To be fair, it is not a criticism on their actions, but of my own increasing inability to want to engage.

The increasing amounts of disengagement (or equivalently, the increasing levels of hermiting up) puzzles one side of me that is still trying to explain things and reassure the rest of me. It is frustrating because it has revealed a still undefined problem that I was hoping that the sabbatical could also help define (and thus lead to a solution): what was it I wanted out of my interactions with people? So far, I have only succeeded in figuring out two preferences:

1. No children from me;
2. Spouse is optional, which really is a muddy-ass decision---a straightforward ``no need'' or ``sure let's find one'' would have made goals much easier to set.

But I haven't figured out what it means for the varying levels of friendship I have tried to maintain (with varying levels of success) over the years and continents.

I suppose at some fundamental level, I had lost my best friend for more than a year, and the lack of actual human contact from COVID-19 has made it hard to recover from that hole, since the more usual forms of socialisation is gone. Technology can only get that far, and even then, I am not the only person to be affected [negatively] by all the nonsense that is COVID-19.

Perhaps part of the problem is that it is already hard to engage with me to begin with, and that is with all the usual social structures/interactions in play; it's hard, but not impossible, thanks to the role that social cues play. But with all these isolation, disinformation, fear-mongering, uncertainty, and doubt, all those useful social cues have gone away, leaving behind the generally hard engagement.

I am not contrary for the sake of being contrary; I just have different interests from the mainstream. I am bookish, I like to talk about stuff that I like passionately. I can be opinionated (but have mellowed out significantly over the past 20 years), and I can learn to be empathetic, though my tolerance to fools and arrogant people isn't particularly high. But I don't share that common ground called ``pop culture'' that helps grease the wheels of interaction.

In short, I am scary on a good day, though much of that scariness can be considered self-inflicted. On a bad day, I can be really mean.

Where was I going with all that rant? I have no idea---I plead the stupid o'clock defense.

``Go seek professional help MT! You already know that it can help, and you have been given some tips on where to seek them in SIN, so why aren't you doing it?'' To that, I don't have much of a response other than ``What's the use when I literally just need to keep alive until my parents are done with their time on earth? It's not like I am ambitious and have some kind of dream that I need to achieve or something---to not be prematurely dead seems good enough for me. I may be feeling miserable, but it really hasn't been a nett negative to my quality of life, so is there really a need to do so and face the stigma, the additional financial burden, and their associated amplified ramifications when I can get away with just being content with what I have, despite the crazy.''

The system has failed us, the only question is what are we going to do about it. The important question for me is, what am I going to do about it?

All I know is that I'm going to go sleep now, and when I awaken tomorrow, I will feel better. Not every day is a bad day; there are still small victories to look forward to. The world can crash and burn while we are powerless to affect it, but we can totally and completely affect our own sphere of influence. So it is better to just do what I can for myself, and let God deal with the rest in His time.

Till the next update.

Morning Posts Being a New Norm?

It would seem that a recent trend of mine is to have my writing ``quota'' of the day done in the morning. It's not something that I was actively trying to do; it just turned out that way.

Perhaps it is related to how I have a morning shower, and the whole ``shower thoughts'' concept kicking in. To be fair though, my showers tend to be very fast, think navy shower style---quick wetting with fixed ``high'' shower head, soaping up, then rinse off. So the time available for those ``shower thoughts'' is much lower than what most people would regularly think of.

However, sometimes even with a short period of time like that, it is possible to have some interesting thoughts that I would like to think further afterwards, which may lead to either a conversation of sorts with mum or end up as some kind of entry here.

That said, this entry isn't reflective of that particular process though.

Anyway, I recently read the translated version of Siddhartha: An Indian Tale by Hermann Hesse while simultaneously watching Pavolia Reine's Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors playthrough in the background. Siddhartha was alright, and I could relate to the protagonist's mental struggles about his spirituality, but I'm not sure if it is something that others may find easy to relate to. Being originally put on a path of safety before deciding that it was more important to head out to learn for oneself only to find that the original orthodox path was unfulfilling and that the originally ``bad'' paths had more to offer, before realising that both paths are limiting in their own ways the way any form of distilled knowledge being incomplete and then heading out into the world only with one's self is just a life-path that is strangely familiar to me.

Too strangely familiar to the point that it actively scares me a little.

A-hem.

The weather yesterday was surprisingly less hot, with the internal temperature not really extending 32 °C. No fear though, the next couple of weeks are projected to still be warm and humid. I am rather excited nonetheless though, because some of the stuff that I have ordered [online] should be arriving from July onwards; always a treat.

I am contemplating getting a meshed camping chair with arm rests to act as a kind of collapsible reading chair so that it is more comfortable for me to read dead-tree books. But I'll need to do a bit more research on that.

Alright, I don't have anything else to add for now. Till the next update.

Coffee & Shahnameh

The more astute would have discovered an anomaly for yesterday.

There were two ``normal lengthed'' rants instead of one.

The reason for that is simple. Drug-fueled frenzy, or more specifically, caffeine infused righteous anger.

I think I drank too strong a coffee yesterday. No wait, I meant to say, two too strong cups of coffee.

My single cup of coffee has the same amount of caffeine as a mug [and change] of coffee.

It is a lot, though not as much as that time a long time ago when I accidentally shoved eight table spoons of instant coffee into my body through a single mug of water.

That was bad.

------

I recently read The Epic of Kings or Shahname by Ferdowsi (translated by Helen Zimmern). It's kind of like that Mahabharata of the Iranians in the sense that it is legendary in nature, with heroes of might and magic. The style of story telling is a mix between that of the Old Testament and The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night---there were epic fights with the intervention of ORMUZD against AHRIMAN, and there were the obeisance rituals that were more similar to that of the mythological projection of Arabic culture, though with a much stronger Iranian slant.

It's a pity that like the Mahabharata, I can only read the translated version, which is in prose (as compared to their source materials of being epic poetry), and likely to be severely abridged to fit into the sub-500 pages. That said though, it is still definitely worth a read, if only to learn more about the legendary beginnings of another culture.

I don't know why I like epics of old that much. It's not like their stories are of a complicated nature---recall that writing and mass distribution of such works was not a thing before the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440 CE. So stories with bloody complicated intertwined storylines (or what I would call ``of high Kolmogorov complexity'') prior to 1440 CE are unlikely (not impossible!) to be widespread by word of mouth, the main means of information broadcast back in the day. It was not that writing didn't exist, but that writing was often too burdensome to be spent on banal things that didn't involve taxation and the gods.

But I suppose epics are fascinating because they demonstrate a highly developed sense of imagination and fearlessness in exercising that imagination. I mean, it's not like we don't have any epics these days, but it's more like the more we know, the more constrained we feel to have things grounded into reality. We have the benefit of the [digitally] printed word, and rabid fan-bases that create entire knowledge bases/wikis to document every scrap of information, making worldbuilding more cognitively tiring due to the need to ensure that any intricately created feature/gimmick is sufficiently consistent with the rest of the canon of the world. Old school epics have worlds that are built ``simpler''---they use several big ideas and keep the fancy things to that level, relying on the fallibility of mortal nature to provide the dramatic movement that is necessary for the narrative. In many ways, the old school epics, by virtue of being first, define what will eventually become clichés for future work.

Mmmm...

Ah well. The wheels of time continue to grind in spite of our efforts to push against it some times---it's just the way it is.

And so, I shall stop this entry here.

Till the next update.

Defeatist Thinking from ``Social Media''

Defeatist thinking is a very easy trap to fall into, especially in this age of hyperconnectedness. It's not even about the selective projection of only the good things that one has going in one's life, but the sheer numbers of them that is the main cause of defeatist thinking.

I have, on many different occasions, taken breaks from the so-called social media, not because I have shitty friends (that's uhhh... a different story for a different day), but because all that deluge off ``good vibes'' (or ``how fucked are we from a scale of 1 to ${insert-villain-of-the-week}'') keeps appearing and appearing and appearing like some broken record that either makes me feel like I have failed completely (because I'm not doing as well in comparison with my ``peers''), or that there is no point in trying to put one's best foot forward because the world is going to all the different hells simultaneously anyway.

It's easy to blame it on the nefarious ``algorithms'' without further qualification, but I will do an iota better than that by explaining how the ``algorithms'' are to be blamed.

Remember my rant on agenda? The summary of that post is, corporate entities make the choices they do because they are ``good for business''. Social media, for all their original lofty goals of ``connecting people'' and ``expanding people's connectivity with others'', have devolved into yet another way of mass marketing/advertising, with the key difference of people voluntarily offering themselves to be advertised to.

Businesses thrive on maintaining some kind of relationship that is more than transactional. There are many business books that begin with talking about how having a so-called die-hard hard-core ``whale'' customer group is important in ensuring that the business can thrive. In many ways, this concept is sound---a business that chooses a sufficiently general niched area to operate in can net nearly 100% of the market by serving the needs of their customers as compared to one who tries to over-expand into multiple not necessarily related markets.

The pre-Internet days of businesses relied largely on informal networks that are maintained by influential people in an unaccountable (as in, not recorded formally anywhere) manner. Thus, all that business networking was actually important, as was interacting with middlemen whose sole purpose was to act as the matchmakers between service/product providers and consumers.

Nowadays the idea of a business networking session is considered quaint, and only because its highly localised reach is deemed to be less useful as compared to the globalised nature of the matchmaking that is provided for by the social network. Part of the reason why social networks are of such a great draw come from the fact that those old-school informal networks that were originally unaccountable are now quantifiable in some manner.

And anything that is quantifiable can be worked with using data mining and machine learning processes. This shouldn't be new to anyone living in the second decade of the twenty-first century---data mining and machine learning uses lots of statistics, and statistics are the OG of making sense out of quantifiable things. This is, of course, where the nefarious and nebulous ``algorithms'' come in.

See, the problem is that algorithms are, by definition, deterministic. The input are well-defined, the inner operation are also well-defined (human readablility/understandability notwithstanding), and their output are also well-defined. All these well-definedness means that for the same input and same model, we expect the same output. The main reason why it sometimes is stochastic instead of being deterministic is only because of the relaxation of the computation technique used to ensure that a good enough answer is produced in the limited time instead of the perfect answer being produced some impractical amount of time later---such relaxation of computation methods often rely on stochastic outcomes over a deterministic one.

Now the reason for raising all that is to point out that for most purposes and contexts, these ``algorithms'' are not innovative at all, no matter the hype. This means that they can only interpolate, and never extrapolate. Now to be fair, there are ways to break out of this through the use of more stochastic techniques to explore areas of the search space that are not well-spanned by the training/observed data, but from the business perspective, these are generally not good investments from the ROI perspective.

Relating the behaviour of such ``algorithms'' back to my earliest observation, it means that what we see in our social media feed [in its default non-reverse chronological state] is based on strong association of so-called related topics as opposed to being an actual objective temporal snapshot. And this acts as a type of bootstrap to a loop where reactions to these related topics are further related, which lead to other reactions to these related topics... which ends up drowning out anything else that isn't related to the topics at all.

It helps the companies running the platform for that social media because now they can specify a nice demographic to talk to investors/their customers (not the participants of the social media platform, mind you) and get money. And money is often really good for corporate entities, especially when they are large enough that they literally cannot afford to not get more money.

And so, the cycle repeats itself, and as a low-level individual, one just keeps on seeing the same bloody thing again and again. ``Good vibes'' stories like being married/pregnant/x-month age of child keep appearing, and general anger against the ``big bad world'' keep appearing as well.

God I sound more depressed than usual.

As I mentioned in the beginning, it is very easy to fall into such defeatist thinking traps. And funny enough, the way out of it is to stay away from such biased systems, ideally for good. But the value proposition of pre-corporate-centric nature of social media platforms [of providing a means of connection/communication with friends across a wider area] still hold, so it becomes a case of balancing between one's sanity of being repeatedly hit with marketing/advertising friendly materials or to cut off communication forever.

It is a hard choice to make.

Anyway, till the next update.