It's a late entry, relatively speaking. And a short one too, as will be noticed.
I have been marathoning Tome 5 of the SCP Foundation (2017-02-01) dump, and have finally completed it just now. It's a guilty pleasure-type reading for me, and so far, that means some 2500+ crowd-sourced creepypasta-esque ``special containment procedures'' of the SCP Foundation, often written in a technical style that reads almost like a safety data sheet of sorts.
I still have 7 more tomes to go from that 2017 dump. Note that as at the time of writing, we are now well into the 6000 series of SCP indexed numbers---my old MOBI dump goes up to 2999 ``only'' before heading into the more story-like sections as opposed to special containment procedure articles.
I love reading SCPs, but at some point, they start to blur. The 2017 dump is probably the most that I want to go for in this universe---that's about 36k+ pages of fiction. Considering that this is 2021 and the dump was made in 2017 (though not necessarily downloaded then), I average about one tome a year, give or take, so it will be at least 7 more years before I even complete this entire dump.
I'm satisfied.
I'll be reverting to a less aggressive reading schedule for Tome 6, going back to reading other things as a primary, like Before I Let Go by Marieke Nijkamp, though I may end up reading Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (20th Edition) a little more aggressively after Before to ensure that I actually get more progress from the 440/3790 that I currently am on. Text in Harrison's is much denser than the SCP tome---double columned, and about 25% of the font size used in the SCP tome. This one, I don't want to finish in 7 years---I will feel a bit too stupid, though to be fair, it is the textbook on Internal Medicine as used by the very same people who study to be doctors, so a multi-year affair is totally reasonable.
Besides, it's edited by Anthony ``Chief US COVID-19 Slayer'' Fauci. It's truly damn worth a read.
Alright, gotta send this out before the day rolls over to August. Time really flies.
Till the next update.
Saturday, July 31, 2021
Friday, July 30, 2021
More Tuning of Eileen-II to Beat the Heat and Clock
Okay, I've run this configuration for more than 2 days, and I think that things are mostly stable. So let's talk about what I did, and how it all turned out.
First, recall the specifications of Eileen-II. Next, recall the use of power limiting as a means of controlling the thermal load to ensure that the keyboard doesn't melt my fingers---the CPU can handle 100°C, but my fingers don't like the resultant temperature (which is less than 100°C for sure, but I don't have a working infrared sensor to report what the actual key temperatures are) from it.
Recall also statements made about stability issues when CPU VID was less than 0.500 V, and the associated setting of the offset to −35.2 mV (on CPU Core and CPU Cache) to stop that weird screen-blanking nonsense.
Finally, recall the most recent summary of the experiment, and the one preceding it, with the more interesting point on how the lowest observed CPU VID was 0.486 V (it has since dropped to 0.480 V without crashing), which is less than 0.500 V.
Now, with all the background work linked in, let us begin.
The current fairly stable configuration with tolerable subjective keyboard temperature is the following (in ThrottleStop 9.3):
While it has been reported in many articles on undervolting that the CPU Cache and CPU Core values should be the ``only'' ones to be undervolted to have the best cooling results, it turns out that doing that alone will lead to general instability. Careful tests with undervolting all other aspects of the CPU package equally has resulted in using much lower offsets with nearly-equal stability.
That is not enough though, because the Intel graphics driver likes to crash randomly. As noted in a previous quick summary, I updated the old version 27.x drivers to the newer version 30.x ones. I don't think that is sufficient though, and one of my hypotheses is that when undervolted, if the integrated GPU doesn't get enough work, the voltage drops, and it becomes less responsive, which panics the device driver. So one other thing that I did was to pull up the ``Power Options'' from Windows Settings, and changed the ``Minimum processor state'' when ``Plugged in'' from the original 5% to 15% of the current power plan's advanced settings.
So far, I have not experienced any BSOD crashes, and this is from more than 2 days of continuous operation with workloads spanning from idling [at night], to watching YouTube videos [continuously] to playing Grim Dawn while watching YouTube videos [for a few hours].
What I did observe though is that sometimes, ``Desktop Window Manager'' decides to grow really fat in terms of memory use, often hitting the 5+ GiB range. This is a known problem, and all the ``fixes'' described are, in my humble opinion, pretty bullshitty.
I do have a working workaround that does not involve doing very strange and scary things. It does, however, require one to get Process Explorer. Once downloaded, run procexp64.exe as Administrator, and in the application, look for dwm.exe. Right click on that, and select Restart. There will be some confirmation dialogue, but just choose the option that allows one to proceed. That rogue process will get killed off, and automatically restarted, giving it a much lower (~100+ MiB) memory use, all without having to restart or reinstall Windows, or roll back to an old version of the Intel graphics drivers and what-not. Process Explorer can be closed after that---its use is done after the restarting of the dwm.exe process. This same workaround can be used as many times as it is necessary to do so---this particular experiment run has seen me do this at least twice at the time of writing.
And so, now I have a slightly more performant Eileen-II without burning off my finger tips even as the bloody weather gets increasingly hotter and more humid.
That's all I wanted to write for this entry. Till the next update then.
First, recall the specifications of Eileen-II. Next, recall the use of power limiting as a means of controlling the thermal load to ensure that the keyboard doesn't melt my fingers---the CPU can handle 100°C, but my fingers don't like the resultant temperature (which is less than 100°C for sure, but I don't have a working infrared sensor to report what the actual key temperatures are) from it.
Recall also statements made about stability issues when CPU VID was less than 0.500 V, and the associated setting of the offset to −35.2 mV (on CPU Core and CPU Cache) to stop that weird screen-blanking nonsense.
Finally, recall the most recent summary of the experiment, and the one preceding it, with the more interesting point on how the lowest observed CPU VID was 0.486 V (it has since dropped to 0.480 V without crashing), which is less than 0.500 V.
Now, with all the background work linked in, let us begin.
The current fairly stable configuration with tolerable subjective keyboard temperature is the following (in ThrottleStop 9.3):
- Setting of two profiles at −78.1 mV offsets for all components (CPU Core, CPU Cache, System Agent, Intel GPU, and iGPU Unslice);
- Turbo ratio limits for active core counts for the ``Bursty Performance'' profile (profile #1) set to 50×, 49×, 47×, 46×, 45×, and 43×;
- Turbo ratio limits for active core counts for the ``Continuous Performance'' profile (profile #2) set to 37×, 34×, 32×, 31×, 29×, and 26×, as determined from experimentation with a final more aggressive nerfing on the all-core multiplier;
- Disabling the ``Thermal Velocity Boost'' option for the ``Continuous Performance'' profile while leaving that option on for the ``Bursty Performance'' profile;
- Setting both profiles' ``Speed Shift---EPP'' values to 255;
- Setting ``More Data'' option on;
- Enabling ``Nvidia GPU'' in the Options button;
- Checking the ``Alarm'' checkbox, and filling in 16 for the ``DTS'' box, and 87 for the ``GPU °C'' box, while leaving both ``Use Profile'' options to 2;
- Have the PL1 setting set to 25 without clamping, and PL2 to 35 with clamping, and a Turbo Time Limit of 28, all under the TPL section.
While it has been reported in many articles on undervolting that the CPU Cache and CPU Core values should be the ``only'' ones to be undervolted to have the best cooling results, it turns out that doing that alone will lead to general instability. Careful tests with undervolting all other aspects of the CPU package equally has resulted in using much lower offsets with nearly-equal stability.
That is not enough though, because the Intel graphics driver likes to crash randomly. As noted in a previous quick summary, I updated the old version 27.x drivers to the newer version 30.x ones. I don't think that is sufficient though, and one of my hypotheses is that when undervolted, if the integrated GPU doesn't get enough work, the voltage drops, and it becomes less responsive, which panics the device driver. So one other thing that I did was to pull up the ``Power Options'' from Windows Settings, and changed the ``Minimum processor state'' when ``Plugged in'' from the original 5% to 15% of the current power plan's advanced settings.
So far, I have not experienced any BSOD crashes, and this is from more than 2 days of continuous operation with workloads spanning from idling [at night], to watching YouTube videos [continuously] to playing Grim Dawn while watching YouTube videos [for a few hours].
What I did observe though is that sometimes, ``Desktop Window Manager'' decides to grow really fat in terms of memory use, often hitting the 5+ GiB range. This is a known problem, and all the ``fixes'' described are, in my humble opinion, pretty bullshitty.
I do have a working workaround that does not involve doing very strange and scary things. It does, however, require one to get Process Explorer. Once downloaded, run procexp64.exe as Administrator, and in the application, look for dwm.exe. Right click on that, and select Restart. There will be some confirmation dialogue, but just choose the option that allows one to proceed. That rogue process will get killed off, and automatically restarted, giving it a much lower (~100+ MiB) memory use, all without having to restart or reinstall Windows, or roll back to an old version of the Intel graphics drivers and what-not. Process Explorer can be closed after that---its use is done after the restarting of the dwm.exe process. This same workaround can be used as many times as it is necessary to do so---this particular experiment run has seen me do this at least twice at the time of writing.
And so, now I have a slightly more performant Eileen-II without burning off my finger tips even as the bloody weather gets increasingly hotter and more humid.
That's all I wanted to write for this entry. Till the next update then.
Thursday, July 29, 2021
Definitions by Inclusion/Exclusion?
``How does one develop a sense of `normal'?'' I asked myself this morning as I stare out of my window into the coterie of trees immediately in front of it as the quiet chirpings of birds can be barely heard in the background.
Context: I was listening to the cover of Goodbye 宣言 by Takanashi Kiara, and thinking about the definition of ``normality'', and linking it back to how we have prescriptive definitions of various forms of ``abnormal psychology'' but no definition of what ``normal psychology'' is. These thoughts came from the recent news that Simone Biles (US Gymnastics representative in this year's rendition of the Japan 2020 Olympics) has withdrawn from her events citing her mental health concerns, and more importantly, various people who criticised her decision.
No, I'm not going to talk about mental health today. I've talked as much as I cared to with however little I know, and I think that's good enough [for now]. Instead, I would like to talk about ``normality'', how we define it, and the associated ramifications.
Apart from various mathematical meanings of the word ``normal'', I posit that the layperson's definition of ``normal'' is more of a definition by exclusion than a definition by inclusion.
A definition by exclusion is characterised by providing a set of properties that, if present, excludes the object from being part of the set. So statements like ``If you have X, then you are not normal'' fall into this category. Definitions by exclusion are often used to reduce the the rate of false membership---if a set L of properties of exclusion has even one that is applicable for the object being considered, then it is immediately excluded. So the final set as defined by exclusion with L is the really small number of objects that fail to trigger any property in L.
Conversely, a definition by inclusion is characterised by providing a set of properties that, if present, includes the object into being part of the set. Suppose then we have two statements, statement A: ``If you have X, then you are normal'' and statement B: ``If you have Y, then you are normal''. A person &alpha can claim membership by fulfilling statement A and not fulfilling statement B, person β can also claim membership by not fulfilling statement A but fulfilling statement B, and person γ can also claim membership by fulfilling both statements A&B. The only person who cannot claim membership is when he/she cannot fulfill both statements A&B at the same time. Definitions by inclusion end up reducing the rate of false exclusion---if a set L of properties of inclusion has even one that is applicable for the object being considered, then it is immediately included. So the final set as defined by inclusion with L is the really large number of objects that can trigger any property in L.
The more astute reader will realise that there is really a bit of trickery involved in these definitions. In both definitions, the set of properties L are applied in a disjunctive manner. If f(x) is a boolean function that returns true if some property p∈L is applicable to x, then the only time that f(x) is false is when there is no such p∈L where p is applicable to x. Thus on its own, we expect f(x) to return true for ``many members of x'', since of all the possible boolean outcomes of L with n=|L|, we expect only 1 out of 2n (i.e. the one case with all n elements being false) to not be a member.
The tricky part comes in the definition of the set whose membership we are determining. In the case of exclusion, it is the complement of the set. So what began as ``many members of x fulfilling L'' ends up becoming ``many members of x are part of the complementary of normal'', which ends up becoming ``few members of x are normal'' after pushing some of the negations in. Conversely, this does not happen in the case of the inclusion.
So clearly, the definition by exclusion is too strict, and cannot be used to define normality, because that would mean that most people are not normal, which contradicts the layperson's definition of normality (that it satisfies some very vague notion of being an ``expected'' behaviour, or ``standard'', or ``generally acceptable''). Conversely, the definition by inclusion is too lenient since almost everyone is normal, which sounds great in theory (it fits the layperson's definition of normality), but it does paradoxically provide an excuse to not look out for those who have issues (and are thus ``not normal'').
There are at least a couple of ways to rigorise this, but I am uncertain of their practical applicability---that last bit can be considered a good thing, because it can form an argument against automated rule enforcement over human society in general. One way might be to start with L the set of properties (we'll use the definition exclusion for simplicity's sake), and on it, define a new set S whose members σ∈S are defined as σ⊆L, which is fancy notation for saying that each member of S is some sub-set of properties of L. Then we define f(x) returning true when all properties of a set σ∈S are met. This relaxes the strictness of the exclusion definition, since it only excludes when all of a particular subset of properties from L is met, as opposed to any one of the properties in L. If L has a cardinality of n, then S potentially has 2n members, and we choose how many of those 2n members are to be excluded/included.
The catch of course is that that 2n is one very large number that shouldn't be laughed at---it doesn't matter if one wants to use the properties for a less rigid exclusion or a more discriminative inclusion, the same quagmire of defining these subsets cannot be run from. One can apply some simplifying assumptions by saying that up to r<n properties need to all apply before it happens, but this number is still asymptotically exponential the larger r is.
But then again, most people just ignore this rigorisation and stick to the shortcut of defining by [simple] exclusion or inclusion. The predominance of which definition choice is largely determined by a society's value system. Those that value more individual choice will tend to use definitions of inclusion, and those that prefer a more homogenous society will use definitions of exclusion.
Are either forms of definitions for ``normal'' considered good? No, neither are, and that is, like most cases, due to the extremism innately encoded. But a fairer means of defining normal is prohibitively complex, with the effort taken incommensurate with the outcome (which is to operate within society).
Why do something theoretically correct when the vast majority will do fine with the laziest application?
Context: I was listening to the cover of Goodbye 宣言 by Takanashi Kiara, and thinking about the definition of ``normality'', and linking it back to how we have prescriptive definitions of various forms of ``abnormal psychology'' but no definition of what ``normal psychology'' is. These thoughts came from the recent news that Simone Biles (US Gymnastics representative in this year's rendition of the Japan 2020 Olympics) has withdrawn from her events citing her mental health concerns, and more importantly, various people who criticised her decision.
No, I'm not going to talk about mental health today. I've talked as much as I cared to with however little I know, and I think that's good enough [for now]. Instead, I would like to talk about ``normality'', how we define it, and the associated ramifications.
Apart from various mathematical meanings of the word ``normal'', I posit that the layperson's definition of ``normal'' is more of a definition by exclusion than a definition by inclusion.
A definition by exclusion is characterised by providing a set of properties that, if present, excludes the object from being part of the set. So statements like ``If you have X, then you are not normal'' fall into this category. Definitions by exclusion are often used to reduce the the rate of false membership---if a set L of properties of exclusion has even one that is applicable for the object being considered, then it is immediately excluded. So the final set as defined by exclusion with L is the really small number of objects that fail to trigger any property in L.
Conversely, a definition by inclusion is characterised by providing a set of properties that, if present, includes the object into being part of the set. Suppose then we have two statements, statement A: ``If you have X, then you are normal'' and statement B: ``If you have Y, then you are normal''. A person &alpha can claim membership by fulfilling statement A and not fulfilling statement B, person β can also claim membership by not fulfilling statement A but fulfilling statement B, and person γ can also claim membership by fulfilling both statements A&B. The only person who cannot claim membership is when he/she cannot fulfill both statements A&B at the same time. Definitions by inclusion end up reducing the rate of false exclusion---if a set L of properties of inclusion has even one that is applicable for the object being considered, then it is immediately included. So the final set as defined by inclusion with L is the really large number of objects that can trigger any property in L.
The more astute reader will realise that there is really a bit of trickery involved in these definitions. In both definitions, the set of properties L are applied in a disjunctive manner. If f(x) is a boolean function that returns true if some property p∈L is applicable to x, then the only time that f(x) is false is when there is no such p∈L where p is applicable to x. Thus on its own, we expect f(x) to return true for ``many members of x'', since of all the possible boolean outcomes of L with n=|L|, we expect only 1 out of 2n (i.e. the one case with all n elements being false) to not be a member.
The tricky part comes in the definition of the set whose membership we are determining. In the case of exclusion, it is the complement of the set. So what began as ``many members of x fulfilling L'' ends up becoming ``many members of x are part of the complementary of normal'', which ends up becoming ``few members of x are normal'' after pushing some of the negations in. Conversely, this does not happen in the case of the inclusion.
So clearly, the definition by exclusion is too strict, and cannot be used to define normality, because that would mean that most people are not normal, which contradicts the layperson's definition of normality (that it satisfies some very vague notion of being an ``expected'' behaviour, or ``standard'', or ``generally acceptable''). Conversely, the definition by inclusion is too lenient since almost everyone is normal, which sounds great in theory (it fits the layperson's definition of normality), but it does paradoxically provide an excuse to not look out for those who have issues (and are thus ``not normal'').
There are at least a couple of ways to rigorise this, but I am uncertain of their practical applicability---that last bit can be considered a good thing, because it can form an argument against automated rule enforcement over human society in general. One way might be to start with L the set of properties (we'll use the definition exclusion for simplicity's sake), and on it, define a new set S whose members σ∈S are defined as σ⊆L, which is fancy notation for saying that each member of S is some sub-set of properties of L. Then we define f(x) returning true when all properties of a set σ∈S are met. This relaxes the strictness of the exclusion definition, since it only excludes when all of a particular subset of properties from L is met, as opposed to any one of the properties in L. If L has a cardinality of n, then S potentially has 2n members, and we choose how many of those 2n members are to be excluded/included.
The catch of course is that that 2n is one very large number that shouldn't be laughed at---it doesn't matter if one wants to use the properties for a less rigid exclusion or a more discriminative inclusion, the same quagmire of defining these subsets cannot be run from. One can apply some simplifying assumptions by saying that up to r<n properties need to all apply before it happens, but this number is still asymptotically exponential the larger r is.
But then again, most people just ignore this rigorisation and stick to the shortcut of defining by [simple] exclusion or inclusion. The predominance of which definition choice is largely determined by a society's value system. Those that value more individual choice will tend to use definitions of inclusion, and those that prefer a more homogenous society will use definitions of exclusion.
Are either forms of definitions for ``normal'' considered good? No, neither are, and that is, like most cases, due to the extremism innately encoded. But a fairer means of defining normal is prohibitively complex, with the effort taken incommensurate with the outcome (which is to operate within society).
Why do something theoretically correct when the vast majority will do fine with the laziest application?
Wednesday, July 28, 2021
Meandering Updates
Ha! I wouldn't skip out on a proper entry for the day despite having already ``fulfilled'' the goal with an out-of-band ``stupid o'clock'' entry, even if I had almost nothing to write about.
Sadly, that's the case for today. I have almost nothing to write about.
It isn't because there isn't anything to grumble about. The ``old faithful'' of complaints is the consistent rise of COVID-19 cases with a fairly large (in proportion) number of unlinked cases in SIN city, but what's the fun in that? It's not novel; it's the same reason I cited before on not reporting on page counts and other tracking information for whatever I am currently reading.
I could talk a bit of the latest happenings in the Olympics, but I follow up on it even less than I am keeping up with the SIN city COVID-19 numbers, so talking about that is even more phoney.
I can complain about the weather, but at this point even I am sick of reporting that the weather is too damn bloody hot with inner ambient temperature heading northwards of 30°C (it was somewhere between 29°C at night to about 31°C in the day).
In short, the day has been pretty uneventful as far as my life is concerned. That's not to say that I did not observe anything hilarious/eventful---it's just that writing about that feels like someone trying to explain the latest joke in the most recent episode of a variety show. I sure as heck don't want to read that, so I don't think I'm going to subject someone else to that through writing about it just to pad up the day's words.
After all, this isn't NaNoWriMo. And even then, it is a strictly-in-November kind of deal for me.
I could write about my thoughts on Romans 13, but considering that I'm not baptised, nor am I seasoned in the study of the Word of God, it feels pretentious. Sort of like how I ended up not writing anything on my thoughts on martial arts in general, despite picking up quite a few interesting perspectives along the way that I would like to share.
However, I don't feel pretentious at all writing about dizi stuff on my personal blog, since I have played the instrument for a very long time at a decent enough level. Still needs some diagrams drawn though, and I am still lazy. Maybe I should really just finish that part---the writing is more or less in its final form anyway, with all the things that I want to say having said.
Perhaps I should write a bit about what I am expecting for next week. My second dose of the Comirnaty vaccine is coming up. Considering that I did feel a little off after the first dose some time back, I'm totally expecting getting slugged deep in the head with this upcoming one. I just hope that it doesn't affect me bad enough to miss out on celebrating the full release of Jupiter Hell. The trailer made by HyperStrange for ChaosForge can be seen here:
I've talked with KK about it, and he's basically reassured me that just because it was the full release didn't mean that the dev-team wouldn't honour all that was promised in the Kickstarter campaign. It was important to get a working game out of the door first before filling in the enhancement blanks.
Speaking of Kickstarter campaigns, I'm excited for Mini Rogue---it should be shipping soon. Awesome!
Alright, that's about it. I'm gonna watch another Hololive collaboration video while grinding a little bit of Grim Dawn. Till the next update.
Sadly, that's the case for today. I have almost nothing to write about.
It isn't because there isn't anything to grumble about. The ``old faithful'' of complaints is the consistent rise of COVID-19 cases with a fairly large (in proportion) number of unlinked cases in SIN city, but what's the fun in that? It's not novel; it's the same reason I cited before on not reporting on page counts and other tracking information for whatever I am currently reading.
I could talk a bit of the latest happenings in the Olympics, but I follow up on it even less than I am keeping up with the SIN city COVID-19 numbers, so talking about that is even more phoney.
I can complain about the weather, but at this point even I am sick of reporting that the weather is too damn bloody hot with inner ambient temperature heading northwards of 30°C (it was somewhere between 29°C at night to about 31°C in the day).
In short, the day has been pretty uneventful as far as my life is concerned. That's not to say that I did not observe anything hilarious/eventful---it's just that writing about that feels like someone trying to explain the latest joke in the most recent episode of a variety show. I sure as heck don't want to read that, so I don't think I'm going to subject someone else to that through writing about it just to pad up the day's words.
After all, this isn't NaNoWriMo. And even then, it is a strictly-in-November kind of deal for me.
I could write about my thoughts on Romans 13, but considering that I'm not baptised, nor am I seasoned in the study of the Word of God, it feels pretentious. Sort of like how I ended up not writing anything on my thoughts on martial arts in general, despite picking up quite a few interesting perspectives along the way that I would like to share.
However, I don't feel pretentious at all writing about dizi stuff on my personal blog, since I have played the instrument for a very long time at a decent enough level. Still needs some diagrams drawn though, and I am still lazy. Maybe I should really just finish that part---the writing is more or less in its final form anyway, with all the things that I want to say having said.
Perhaps I should write a bit about what I am expecting for next week. My second dose of the Comirnaty vaccine is coming up. Considering that I did feel a little off after the first dose some time back, I'm totally expecting getting slugged deep in the head with this upcoming one. I just hope that it doesn't affect me bad enough to miss out on celebrating the full release of Jupiter Hell. The trailer made by HyperStrange for ChaosForge can be seen here:
I've talked with KK about it, and he's basically reassured me that just because it was the full release didn't mean that the dev-team wouldn't honour all that was promised in the Kickstarter campaign. It was important to get a working game out of the door first before filling in the enhancement blanks.
Speaking of Kickstarter campaigns, I'm excited for Mini Rogue---it should be shipping soon. Awesome!
Alright, that's about it. I'm gonna watch another Hololive collaboration video while grinding a little bit of Grim Dawn. Till the next update.
Stuuuuuuuupid O'Clock Again?!
Ah, the true stupid o'clock timing. I can't say that I miss it.
I'm getting old. I don't miss staying up late doing whatever.
I was listening to various covers and originals from the Hololive crew as I was trying to level a mountain in a new Minecraft 1.17.1 world that I spun up.
``But MT, Minecraft is more fun to play with others! And also, why the heck are you levelling a mountain? Isn't it stupid?''
Okay, you got me there. Minecraft is more fun to play with others, but there's a catch---to start playing with others on a server is to continue playing on the same server relatively consistently, otherwise two things will happen.
Or as I would call it, a full-time job.
Okay, that explains the single player part, sort of. I mean, I play single player so that I can play at my own pace, and do what I want, when I want, without being beholden to any community.
As for the levelling of a mountain, it was because I wanted to keep my cobblestone shack on the higher (and a little levelled) part of my mountain along the range free from spawns from the other less lit part of the mountain [that I am levelling].
Besides, it's cathartic to dig imaginary cobblestone/dirt while listening to awesome music, after having binged quite a bit on SCP Foundation Tome 5: SCP2000--2499 today. I'd like to complete Tome 5 before I go on to read other things for no other reason other than to just... complete it.
Heh. Stupid o'clock is finally living up to its name. Anyway, this was one of the pieces that I was listening to, a cover of 乙女解剖 by Nekomata Okayu (猫又おかゆ):
The original was by DECO*27 and here it is:
Between the two, I prefer Okayu's version by a whole lot more---that silky low voice really sounds much better than the higher Hatsune Miku vocaloid voice.
Incidentally, I ran into this very macabre relyric version in Cantonese:
The relyric changed the tone from a girl who was playing games with other people's hearts suddenly getting hit with a dose of reality to one that was messed with and had some rather gory thoughts.
Still prefer Okayu's version though. Something about high pitch not working as well for this piece. Or maybe I have been influenced over time to enjoy the smooth feel of a mellow voice. I still like my sopranos (I still have to mentally project like one to play 笛子/flute/piccolo well), but maybe for something that is more high-energy? This piece feels more ``cool'' than ``high energy''.
Ah... what's missing from this stupid o'clock entry is being buzzed from booze, either whiskey or whisky. Officially, I'm out of those and haven't replenished stock, for the simple reason that I don't seem to have enough good reasons to keep them in stock any more. I still like me some strong spirits on occasion, but those occasions are getting lesser and lesser over [recent] time. Practically though, I still have a couple of tasters and smaller flash-sized whiskeys lying about that I could sip if I wanted to.
But the urge to drink whiskey hasn't been strong. I have been drinking some lager recently, and that's only because the weather is bloody hot, and I wanted to cool off with something that isn't soda. Thanks to the P2HAHAHA... no wait, P2HA ``Phase 2 (Heightened Alert)'', I can't even head to my favourite bar to just drink stout and read for a whole afternoon; buying the equivalent to sit at home to read/drink just feels different and really not worth it, even though it is cheaper.
In truth, what I really wanted was a change of environment. The drinking was incidental.
Anyway, since the quick summary of the experiment in the last post, I've been tracking for about 17.5 hours at −78.1 mV across the board with the new Intel graphics drivers, and things seem stable. No strange video playback issues from YouTube, average temperatures were comfortable enough (sub-80°C), and the lowest recorded Core VID was 0.485 V. One thing I forgot to add to the summary was the setting of the FPS limit in the Nvidia control panel to about 142 FPS, 3 shy of the main monitor's refresh rate of 144 Hz. It has led to much lower peak GPU temperatures of roughly 70.3°C for the hot spot sensor, as compared to the previous 88.6°C earlier when I kept the FPS limit to 288 FPS instead.
Anyway, I'll continue to run the experiment, and we'll see if it survives the ``idle'' mode.
That's all for stupid o'clock. Thank you for joining in.
I'm getting old. I don't miss staying up late doing whatever.
I was listening to various covers and originals from the Hololive crew as I was trying to level a mountain in a new Minecraft 1.17.1 world that I spun up.
``But MT, Minecraft is more fun to play with others! And also, why the heck are you levelling a mountain? Isn't it stupid?''
Okay, you got me there. Minecraft is more fun to play with others, but there's a catch---to start playing with others on a server is to continue playing on the same server relatively consistently, otherwise two things will happen.
- Folks on the server might think you as some kind of weird-ass free-loader not contributing to the barter economy; and
- Your gear and access to materials will be supremely outclassed by those who put in more consistent time in the game.
Or as I would call it, a full-time job.
Okay, that explains the single player part, sort of. I mean, I play single player so that I can play at my own pace, and do what I want, when I want, without being beholden to any community.
As for the levelling of a mountain, it was because I wanted to keep my cobblestone shack on the higher (and a little levelled) part of my mountain along the range free from spawns from the other less lit part of the mountain [that I am levelling].
Besides, it's cathartic to dig imaginary cobblestone/dirt while listening to awesome music, after having binged quite a bit on SCP Foundation Tome 5: SCP2000--2499 today. I'd like to complete Tome 5 before I go on to read other things for no other reason other than to just... complete it.
Heh. Stupid o'clock is finally living up to its name. Anyway, this was one of the pieces that I was listening to, a cover of 乙女解剖 by Nekomata Okayu (猫又おかゆ):
The original was by DECO*27 and here it is:
Between the two, I prefer Okayu's version by a whole lot more---that silky low voice really sounds much better than the higher Hatsune Miku vocaloid voice.
Incidentally, I ran into this very macabre relyric version in Cantonese:
The relyric changed the tone from a girl who was playing games with other people's hearts suddenly getting hit with a dose of reality to one that was messed with and had some rather gory thoughts.
Still prefer Okayu's version though. Something about high pitch not working as well for this piece. Or maybe I have been influenced over time to enjoy the smooth feel of a mellow voice. I still like my sopranos (I still have to mentally project like one to play 笛子/flute/piccolo well), but maybe for something that is more high-energy? This piece feels more ``cool'' than ``high energy''.
Ah... what's missing from this stupid o'clock entry is being buzzed from booze, either whiskey or whisky. Officially, I'm out of those and haven't replenished stock, for the simple reason that I don't seem to have enough good reasons to keep them in stock any more. I still like me some strong spirits on occasion, but those occasions are getting lesser and lesser over [recent] time. Practically though, I still have a couple of tasters and smaller flash-sized whiskeys lying about that I could sip if I wanted to.
But the urge to drink whiskey hasn't been strong. I have been drinking some lager recently, and that's only because the weather is bloody hot, and I wanted to cool off with something that isn't soda. Thanks to the P2HAHAHA... no wait, P2HA ``Phase 2 (Heightened Alert)'', I can't even head to my favourite bar to just drink stout and read for a whole afternoon; buying the equivalent to sit at home to read/drink just feels different and really not worth it, even though it is cheaper.
In truth, what I really wanted was a change of environment. The drinking was incidental.
Anyway, since the quick summary of the experiment in the last post, I've been tracking for about 17.5 hours at −78.1 mV across the board with the new Intel graphics drivers, and things seem stable. No strange video playback issues from YouTube, average temperatures were comfortable enough (sub-80°C), and the lowest recorded Core VID was 0.485 V. One thing I forgot to add to the summary was the setting of the FPS limit in the Nvidia control panel to about 142 FPS, 3 shy of the main monitor's refresh rate of 144 Hz. It has led to much lower peak GPU temperatures of roughly 70.3°C for the hot spot sensor, as compared to the previous 88.6°C earlier when I kept the FPS limit to 288 FPS instead.
Anyway, I'll continue to run the experiment, and we'll see if it survives the ``idle'' mode.
That's all for stupid o'clock. Thank you for joining in.
Tuesday, July 27, 2021
Yet Another Morning Entry
*sips some instant coffee from cup*
Well, here we go again, a morning blog entry. I'm not sure when I started to make morning entries a ``thing'', considering that for the most part, I do prefer to write in the evening when the day has ended---there's at least some thing that I can write about from the whole twelve hours or so that I had been awake then.
Writing morning entries have a way of requiring some kind of spark of inspiration, or some kind of [strong] stimulus, or even basic laziness in the sense of trying to get things done so that it can be checked off the check list and there will be no need to worry about it later on. That last habit is something that I use almost everywhere, and it has served me well for the most part; I see no point in delaying the starting/completion of a task just because the deadline isn't anywhere near it just yet, especially if the effort needed to complete it is minor. As an engineer in practice, Murphy's Law holds really strongly, and starting on things early when able is a great way to allow the things to go wrong to go wrong and still have time to rectify things. This is particularly true when working with other people; the inter-dependency of tasks means that the requirements can be sketchy even in the best of times, and the best way to get those correctly committed to is to start as early as possible on the task according to the requirements to surface issues early enough for rectification.
I mean, all time estimates are extrapolative in nature, and my personal take on extrapolation (or determining future behaviour from past behaviour) is that the longer the time horizon, the higher the divergence. So starting early gives a longer time horizon to correct for the divergence, either through re-planning of the timeline/milestones, or adjusting the requirements to fit into the feasibility region of the solution space, or to commit more manpower/resources if that is the true bottleneck. Time is the most valuable resource in all the world, even as compared to gold and other precious materials, and in another blog post, I talked about its value too. The most important part of any project (defined as a set of related tasks to achieve some defined goal) is timeliness, hence the great focus on the ``fast'' attribute out of the engineering motto of ``cheap, fast, good---pick two out of three''.
But the second attribute to choose depends on the risk appetite of whoever is choosing to do so. The risk takers would rather go for ``good'', since ``goodness'' means that it may command a higher value than ``cheap''. More conservative types would rather go for ``cheap'', since it means that they can get returns on investment earlier, which expands the amount of resources that they have at their dispoal earlier, which in turn increases the number of options that they can go for.
Argh. I digressed again. Thing is, start stuff as early as they can be started, so that problems that may arise can have a chance to do so while there is less time constraint, which improves the chances of having them nullified and thus not impacting delivery. It also helps the personal psyche since it is one of those many small ``wins'' that one can clock in to keep up the positivity and associated motivation.
The only times where it did backfire on me was when I started on something earlier than I could understand it. That ended up with extra effort required to rectify, but the benefits of it was that I ended up learning more, which made subsequent forms of the task more manageable in the future.
Well, that's about it for now. I originally wanted to write a bit more about more adventures in cooling following the latest one, but I'm still running experiments. A quick summary of what has happened: −80.1 mV was tried across the board, lowest Core VID measured was 0.486 V, Intel graphics driver was unstable when YouTube videos of multiple hours was watched causing an eventual BSOD crash; one reboot with new drivers later, things seemed working, but a new WHEA error of ``CPU Cache L0 Error'' was raised over the 10+ hours of non-active (i.e. I was asleep and not using Eileen-II) run-time later; −78.1 mV is tried now, with observation of the experiment taking place.
I'll talk a bit more about that last bit of technical experimentation on success or something. The new aggression is necessary because I decided to try using the full potential of Eileen-II's CPU through thermal velocity boost to get better average behaviour while keeping temperatures less annoying for native keyboard use.
Alright, this is the true end of this blog post now. Till the next update.
Well, here we go again, a morning blog entry. I'm not sure when I started to make morning entries a ``thing'', considering that for the most part, I do prefer to write in the evening when the day has ended---there's at least some thing that I can write about from the whole twelve hours or so that I had been awake then.
Writing morning entries have a way of requiring some kind of spark of inspiration, or some kind of [strong] stimulus, or even basic laziness in the sense of trying to get things done so that it can be checked off the check list and there will be no need to worry about it later on. That last habit is something that I use almost everywhere, and it has served me well for the most part; I see no point in delaying the starting/completion of a task just because the deadline isn't anywhere near it just yet, especially if the effort needed to complete it is minor. As an engineer in practice, Murphy's Law holds really strongly, and starting on things early when able is a great way to allow the things to go wrong to go wrong and still have time to rectify things. This is particularly true when working with other people; the inter-dependency of tasks means that the requirements can be sketchy even in the best of times, and the best way to get those correctly committed to is to start as early as possible on the task according to the requirements to surface issues early enough for rectification.
I mean, all time estimates are extrapolative in nature, and my personal take on extrapolation (or determining future behaviour from past behaviour) is that the longer the time horizon, the higher the divergence. So starting early gives a longer time horizon to correct for the divergence, either through re-planning of the timeline/milestones, or adjusting the requirements to fit into the feasibility region of the solution space, or to commit more manpower/resources if that is the true bottleneck. Time is the most valuable resource in all the world, even as compared to gold and other precious materials, and in another blog post, I talked about its value too. The most important part of any project (defined as a set of related tasks to achieve some defined goal) is timeliness, hence the great focus on the ``fast'' attribute out of the engineering motto of ``cheap, fast, good---pick two out of three''.
But the second attribute to choose depends on the risk appetite of whoever is choosing to do so. The risk takers would rather go for ``good'', since ``goodness'' means that it may command a higher value than ``cheap''. More conservative types would rather go for ``cheap'', since it means that they can get returns on investment earlier, which expands the amount of resources that they have at their dispoal earlier, which in turn increases the number of options that they can go for.
Argh. I digressed again. Thing is, start stuff as early as they can be started, so that problems that may arise can have a chance to do so while there is less time constraint, which improves the chances of having them nullified and thus not impacting delivery. It also helps the personal psyche since it is one of those many small ``wins'' that one can clock in to keep up the positivity and associated motivation.
The only times where it did backfire on me was when I started on something earlier than I could understand it. That ended up with extra effort required to rectify, but the benefits of it was that I ended up learning more, which made subsequent forms of the task more manageable in the future.
Well, that's about it for now. I originally wanted to write a bit more about more adventures in cooling following the latest one, but I'm still running experiments. A quick summary of what has happened: −80.1 mV was tried across the board, lowest Core VID measured was 0.486 V, Intel graphics driver was unstable when YouTube videos of multiple hours was watched causing an eventual BSOD crash; one reboot with new drivers later, things seemed working, but a new WHEA error of ``CPU Cache L0 Error'' was raised over the 10+ hours of non-active (i.e. I was asleep and not using Eileen-II) run-time later; −78.1 mV is tried now, with observation of the experiment taking place.
I'll talk a bit more about that last bit of technical experimentation on success or something. The new aggression is necessary because I decided to try using the full potential of Eileen-II's CPU through thermal velocity boost to get better average behaviour while keeping temperatures less annoying for native keyboard use.
Alright, this is the true end of this blog post now. Till the next update.
Monday, July 26, 2021
Mental Health Care
Mental health care [at the school level] became a hot topic recently in SIN city, no thanks to the recent homicide and potential suicide attempt. People are, as expected, saying the same platitudes over and over as though constant repetition will somehow make it true.
``Oh, if only he were to speak up...''
``Oh, the school should provide more counselling to students...''
``Peers should be taught how to help others with mental health issues...''
``The authorities should have stronger surveillance to identify such cases before they escalate...''
Notice that in all these statements, the big elephant in the room still hasn't been addressed---it is that caring for mental health in SIN city in general is taken to be even more bullshit than traditional Chinese medicine practices. We have an excellent medical system for handling physical health, a somewhat comprehensive traditional Chinese medicine system (for some reason), and a terribly overloaded system for actually diagnosing and treating mental health issues.
The problem here isn't that there isn't a good infrastructure for supporting treatment of mental health issues---that's merely a symptom. Rather, the true problem here is that ``mental health issues'' suffer from a stigma that is largely socially driven.
I'll give some examples. When someone has a cold, or runs a fever, we tell the person to go see a doctor, or rest at home and drink more water. When someone is getting a panic attack, what do we say?
We actually say nothing at all at best, ``oh hohoho, that's one crazy fella for ya!'' if we want to validate ourselves to someone nearby for whatever selfish reason, and verbally/physically abusing the person in the middle of a panic attack at worst. This type of behaviour is why anyone who is actually having a mental health issue will find it hard to find actual help---society has decided that mental health is inferior to that of physical health, especially since much of the issues are chronic in nature, and that any treatment progress is invisible anyway, unlike the removal of a tumour, or the stitching of a wound, or the stopping of a fever/cough/sneeze.
Does that dysfunctional behaviour sound familiar?
It is the same type of nonsense that one gets when we start talking about building information systems---the innate intuition that is displayed is mostly wrong about what reality is. This is also the same kind of nonsense with respect to innovation as well---if a result isn't immediately tangible, then it is deemed useless, with funding and other support cut. The relevant workers themselves suffer headache/heartache one after another---it's not a good time.
At least for work-related issues, one can usually walk away and do something else---society is big enough to allow different life paths. But in the case of mental health, not having the same level of care/professional help made available the way doctors are ubiquitous is not something that one can simply ``walk away'' from.
One of the old tenets of SIN city's relevance to the world is the availability of humans as a resource. Now, no one said that it will be all Singaporeans, a different rant for a different day, but that was the draw. In the old days where manufacturing was king, the warm bodies available just needed to be physically fit and somewhat mentally present---the thorough tip-top condition of the mind was not expected and can be argued to be somewhat dis-incentivised since it was the manual dexterity and skill associated with that level of dexterity that is the overriding principle of such factories' operation.
In the recent days, we are re-making ourselves as some kind of ``knowledge worker'', the kind that helps provide services of some sort as opposed to manufacturing products [for cheap], the so-called tertiary sector of the economy as opposed to the secondary sector. In such cases, it is what the worker knows and how he/she uses it that assists in increasing productivity. Such work isn't as easily automated as the way manufacturing is; services are always bespoke to fit particular requirements, and even when standardised, there are often enough edge cases that it is still more cost effective to train people and have an associated reporting chain for escalation than actually programming an automated assistant to handle it all.
In other words, the mental state of the person and more specifically, the mental health of that person is a determining factor of success. In that case, why then are we still pussy-footing about on improving the infrastructure to promote better healthcare, and to support mental healthcare providers the way we do for those of the physical healthcare sector?
It also does not help that SIN city is a city of stressors---we are among the most densely packed urban cities in the world, we work fucking-stupid long hours for god-knows what reason (another rant for another day), we have little to no open spaces to help relax the mind, and at the same time, are expected to out-perform everyone else in the region in industries where ``cheap and fast'' beats any pair-wise combination with ``good''. That we don't have too many death-causing violent cases from too much stress is a testament to the strength of the police state than a supportive mental healthcare system, though I really ought to do a little research on that last point on case numbers for correctness.
Lip service. That's what we are good at doing, and in some sad ironic way, I am no exception here writing out this rant in my blog.
That said though, there are other things that we can do at our so-called grassroots level while we browbeat the government to building stronger mental healthcare infrastructure, and they are surprisingly simple.
Empathy. Empathise with people a bit more, don't hide in our damn cocoons and be so bloody self-centred that we ignore everyone else that we meet on the street. Empathetic behaviours remind everyone that they are still part of a human society, and that their existence is acknowledged. It isn't much, but it is a very important link. It doesn't solve the underlying mental health issue since that requires professional work, but it does help build up a type of informal support network reminding everyone that this SIN city, despite its profit-seeking mechanistic machine behaviour, is still made up of denizens who remember what it means to be human.
Oh, and continue to browbeat the authorities until a good enough mental healthcare infrastructure is available, reframing it into their favourite economic question in order to get their undivided attention.
Till the next update.
``Oh, if only he were to speak up...''
``Oh, the school should provide more counselling to students...''
``Peers should be taught how to help others with mental health issues...''
``The authorities should have stronger surveillance to identify such cases before they escalate...''
Notice that in all these statements, the big elephant in the room still hasn't been addressed---it is that caring for mental health in SIN city in general is taken to be even more bullshit than traditional Chinese medicine practices. We have an excellent medical system for handling physical health, a somewhat comprehensive traditional Chinese medicine system (for some reason), and a terribly overloaded system for actually diagnosing and treating mental health issues.
The problem here isn't that there isn't a good infrastructure for supporting treatment of mental health issues---that's merely a symptom. Rather, the true problem here is that ``mental health issues'' suffer from a stigma that is largely socially driven.
I'll give some examples. When someone has a cold, or runs a fever, we tell the person to go see a doctor, or rest at home and drink more water. When someone is getting a panic attack, what do we say?
We actually say nothing at all at best, ``oh hohoho, that's one crazy fella for ya!'' if we want to validate ourselves to someone nearby for whatever selfish reason, and verbally/physically abusing the person in the middle of a panic attack at worst. This type of behaviour is why anyone who is actually having a mental health issue will find it hard to find actual help---society has decided that mental health is inferior to that of physical health, especially since much of the issues are chronic in nature, and that any treatment progress is invisible anyway, unlike the removal of a tumour, or the stitching of a wound, or the stopping of a fever/cough/sneeze.
Does that dysfunctional behaviour sound familiar?
It is the same type of nonsense that one gets when we start talking about building information systems---the innate intuition that is displayed is mostly wrong about what reality is. This is also the same kind of nonsense with respect to innovation as well---if a result isn't immediately tangible, then it is deemed useless, with funding and other support cut. The relevant workers themselves suffer headache/heartache one after another---it's not a good time.
At least for work-related issues, one can usually walk away and do something else---society is big enough to allow different life paths. But in the case of mental health, not having the same level of care/professional help made available the way doctors are ubiquitous is not something that one can simply ``walk away'' from.
One of the old tenets of SIN city's relevance to the world is the availability of humans as a resource. Now, no one said that it will be all Singaporeans, a different rant for a different day, but that was the draw. In the old days where manufacturing was king, the warm bodies available just needed to be physically fit and somewhat mentally present---the thorough tip-top condition of the mind was not expected and can be argued to be somewhat dis-incentivised since it was the manual dexterity and skill associated with that level of dexterity that is the overriding principle of such factories' operation.
In the recent days, we are re-making ourselves as some kind of ``knowledge worker'', the kind that helps provide services of some sort as opposed to manufacturing products [for cheap], the so-called tertiary sector of the economy as opposed to the secondary sector. In such cases, it is what the worker knows and how he/she uses it that assists in increasing productivity. Such work isn't as easily automated as the way manufacturing is; services are always bespoke to fit particular requirements, and even when standardised, there are often enough edge cases that it is still more cost effective to train people and have an associated reporting chain for escalation than actually programming an automated assistant to handle it all.
In other words, the mental state of the person and more specifically, the mental health of that person is a determining factor of success. In that case, why then are we still pussy-footing about on improving the infrastructure to promote better healthcare, and to support mental healthcare providers the way we do for those of the physical healthcare sector?
It also does not help that SIN city is a city of stressors---we are among the most densely packed urban cities in the world, we work fucking-stupid long hours for god-knows what reason (another rant for another day), we have little to no open spaces to help relax the mind, and at the same time, are expected to out-perform everyone else in the region in industries where ``cheap and fast'' beats any pair-wise combination with ``good''. That we don't have too many death-causing violent cases from too much stress is a testament to the strength of the police state than a supportive mental healthcare system, though I really ought to do a little research on that last point on case numbers for correctness.
Lip service. That's what we are good at doing, and in some sad ironic way, I am no exception here writing out this rant in my blog.
That said though, there are other things that we can do at our so-called grassroots level while we browbeat the government to building stronger mental healthcare infrastructure, and they are surprisingly simple.
Empathy. Empathise with people a bit more, don't hide in our damn cocoons and be so bloody self-centred that we ignore everyone else that we meet on the street. Empathetic behaviours remind everyone that they are still part of a human society, and that their existence is acknowledged. It isn't much, but it is a very important link. It doesn't solve the underlying mental health issue since that requires professional work, but it does help build up a type of informal support network reminding everyone that this SIN city, despite its profit-seeking mechanistic machine behaviour, is still made up of denizens who remember what it means to be human.
Oh, and continue to browbeat the authorities until a good enough mental healthcare infrastructure is available, reframing it into their favourite economic question in order to get their undivided attention.
Till the next update.
Sunday, July 25, 2021
Hot Day... Brain Melt-y (Not Necessarily Related)
Sunday. Another hot, blustering day. At the time of writing, a day that is almost done, with roughly six more hours before I turn in for the day for the daily dose of being in comatose as demanded by my physiology.
I spent much of the day [so far] reading some report written in the 1980s by the Department of Army (US Army Operational Group) that attempts to provide some kind of scientific grounding for the appearance and use of induced altered states of consciousness. I'm not going to mince my words here---the report was hard to digest because of the multi-speak that was involved in attempting to marry physics of the very small (i.e. quantum mechanics) with spiritual concepts that barely had a consensus in terms of formalised language (i.e. metaphysics), with an overall effect of someone just trying their best to provide a report because it was requested, not because there was something actually worth saying. The models that are posited had some grounding in neuroscience, but then it got waaaaaaaaay out into drugged hippie land pretty quick.
Maybe it's because it's a tad too far off my domain of expertise that I am interpreting things the way they are. Or maybe it is truly hocus-pocus, Department of Army (US Army Operational Group) provenance notwithstanding. Unless I dig very deep and attempt to understand what the hippies and the scientists are trying to talk to/past each other, I suspect that I am not going to get any headway into understanding this ever. In fact, I think I have better luck making sense out of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (20th Edition) than that---one reason could be that Harrison's was actually written to be a textbook that explains internal medicine, whereas the report was written to satisfy some superior officer's request, as indicated in the attached cover letter.
I'm not saying that human consciousness is unexplainable and completely mystical---I'm just saying that I cannot explain it, nor can I understand other people's attempts to do so. Maybe some of us are closer to the truth on the operation of the consciousness than others, but none of us really knows who is close to it, and more importantly, what to make of it. We say that God knows, and that's because He is Creator outside of time and space---supposing that God's powers are as limited as us, the mere fact that he exists outside time and space means that He can take an absurdly long time in His subjective time to figure it all out and still appear to know all about it ``as instantly as He may be questioned'' in our subjective time without us knowing whether He truly knew to begin with or if He took the time to ``figure it out''. Some questions are meaningless in the sense that there is no way of proving [to others] or knowing [for the self] if the answer(s) are valid---the will of God and the extent of His powers/knowledge is one such question.
Urgh... diversion again. I think my ability to control and guide my direction in writing is slowly going to the dogs over time, as I attempt to write something every day in this blog despite each day being more similar too the previous one as external stimuli from emergence through interaction slowly fades away.
I'll probably end the day with more Grim Dawn runs with some of the Hololive videos in the background. Till the next update.
I spent much of the day [so far] reading some report written in the 1980s by the Department of Army (US Army Operational Group) that attempts to provide some kind of scientific grounding for the appearance and use of induced altered states of consciousness. I'm not going to mince my words here---the report was hard to digest because of the multi-speak that was involved in attempting to marry physics of the very small (i.e. quantum mechanics) with spiritual concepts that barely had a consensus in terms of formalised language (i.e. metaphysics), with an overall effect of someone just trying their best to provide a report because it was requested, not because there was something actually worth saying. The models that are posited had some grounding in neuroscience, but then it got waaaaaaaaay out into drugged hippie land pretty quick.
Maybe it's because it's a tad too far off my domain of expertise that I am interpreting things the way they are. Or maybe it is truly hocus-pocus, Department of Army (US Army Operational Group) provenance notwithstanding. Unless I dig very deep and attempt to understand what the hippies and the scientists are trying to talk to/past each other, I suspect that I am not going to get any headway into understanding this ever. In fact, I think I have better luck making sense out of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (20th Edition) than that---one reason could be that Harrison's was actually written to be a textbook that explains internal medicine, whereas the report was written to satisfy some superior officer's request, as indicated in the attached cover letter.
I'm not saying that human consciousness is unexplainable and completely mystical---I'm just saying that I cannot explain it, nor can I understand other people's attempts to do so. Maybe some of us are closer to the truth on the operation of the consciousness than others, but none of us really knows who is close to it, and more importantly, what to make of it. We say that God knows, and that's because He is Creator outside of time and space---supposing that God's powers are as limited as us, the mere fact that he exists outside time and space means that He can take an absurdly long time in His subjective time to figure it all out and still appear to know all about it ``as instantly as He may be questioned'' in our subjective time without us knowing whether He truly knew to begin with or if He took the time to ``figure it out''. Some questions are meaningless in the sense that there is no way of proving [to others] or knowing [for the self] if the answer(s) are valid---the will of God and the extent of His powers/knowledge is one such question.
Urgh... diversion again. I think my ability to control and guide my direction in writing is slowly going to the dogs over time, as I attempt to write something every day in this blog despite each day being more similar too the previous one as external stimuli from emergence through interaction slowly fades away.
I'll probably end the day with more Grim Dawn runs with some of the Hololive videos in the background. Till the next update.
Mood at Stupid O'Clock
Mmm. In a mood, a mood for another stupid o'clock entry.
Reading White Fang over the Kindle PC program while listening to Lofi & chill mixes of Hololive original music does set up the right mood for stupid o'clock writing, though as far as stupid o'clock goes, this really isn't that late.
The past month has been a foggy mess, mentally speaking. It's less about me losing focus of what I am doing, but more on how the days sort of blended into each other even more easily than before. There were some moments of euphoric hope that we would be on our way out of this COVID-19 mess in SIN city, what with the successful release of my age demographic for vaccination, which was then followed by a larger influx of doses from the new batches that came in. National Day was coming around the corner, and there was a lot of positivity about how we as a country would be majority full-vaccinated in time for the greatest celebration of our nationhood.
Then a hitherto unknown cluster of cases exploded, which made the associated task force decide (hastily or otherwise---I don't really know) to slam the door back on everyone after having lightly released the restrictions. To make matters worse, just about the next day from that announcement, a high-profile homicide case involving teenagers (from my alma mater) was reported, all before the public holiday that was to happen. And with all that, the national sentiment has reached new levels of depression, with the affected business people from this new totally-not-a-lockdown ``lockdown'' actually being more vocal about how things are utter shite for them even as the usual platitudes about how help was ``always available'' to those who needed them in the situation of the homicide, among other things.
Okay, a diversion---these were things that just happened within the past week, and more importantly, speak nothing of what I meant by being mentally in a foggy mess. What I mean is, my internal clock is slowly running long, losing its calibration against what the mainstream terms as being ``normal''. I feel like the poorest of Copies from Greg Egan's Permutation City, being slowly deracinated through running at a much slower rate than the world is running. Some call this being ``blessed'', I personally am unsure if this categorisation ought to be done in the first place. I think that I am starting to reach the point where I am well-rested, and I suspect that within a month or two I would start to ramp up my thought processes towards re-integration into society once more, hopefully being in a line of work that is less ethically fraught than the one that I left.
I had been talking with people here and there, mostly folks whom I am comfortable with talking about things that straddle on that fine edge between insanity and reality. It does seem that the powers that be are still firmly entrenched, and even with the nonsense that is the pandemic, they are unlikely to change their ways. So perhaps the way out might be one where I strike it out on my own.
The true question then becomes, what can I do that people are willing to pay me for so that I can pay the bills?
That is a tough thing to think about, considering that anything that can be done by one person successfully is likely to be doable by a larger company with their army of cheap labour---experience has shown that in this part of the world, quality is of the least concern when it comes to most forms of engineering; it is always about being cheaper than the competition, and faster than the competition. ``Quality'' falls into the category of intangible non-quantifiable properties, the only one of the engineers' mantra ``cheap, fast, good---pick two out of three'' that is often alluded to in passing, but whose choice among the three was never the main point.
Everyone wants it cheap and fast, and by everyone, I do mean everyone from the smallest company to the largest public sector organisation. Quality is bullshit as far as the decision makers go, for the simple reason that it is not quantifiable, and therefore cannot be measured and compared directly in terms of cheapness (price per unit something) or fastness (time taken). It's bullshit because to these decision makers, quality is something that is so subjective that it will be indefensible against the other two when called up from a ``routine'' audit of the monies that have been spent.
It's like, why bother building an information system properly over two years when the user-interface will be obsolete in less than five, and besides, software simply cannot be that expensive right, since it is ``just lines of code'' compared to real engineering involving big iron parts and lots of electricity, right? Besides, if there's a bug, we can just patch it in production. Also, nowadays there're frameworks for everything---how hard is it to quickly put together an app (not program, not application, but this stupid word called ``app'')? I mean, my nine-year-old kid can do some thing in Roblox over an afternoon, so I am totally qualified to question you, a professional engineer's effort estimate.
😡
Man, I wrote myself angry---it was supposed to be a sort of mood, a relaxed and contemplative one, not an angry one.
Weather hasn't helped much though, with its tantrumous vacillations between hot & humid and sunny & rain (yes, I did not say that wrongly---sunny & rain). Those conditions do help in generating brain fog as the mind cannot decide how it wants to deal with things since it is so confusingly hot.
Well, by now I've run out of steam, so I will just end this entry here. If you can figure out what I am writing in this entry, that's great---because I'm pretty sure that I personally do not know what point I was trying to make throughout these thousand or so words.
Till the next update, hopefully not at stupid o'clock.
Reading White Fang over the Kindle PC program while listening to Lofi & chill mixes of Hololive original music does set up the right mood for stupid o'clock writing, though as far as stupid o'clock goes, this really isn't that late.
The past month has been a foggy mess, mentally speaking. It's less about me losing focus of what I am doing, but more on how the days sort of blended into each other even more easily than before. There were some moments of euphoric hope that we would be on our way out of this COVID-19 mess in SIN city, what with the successful release of my age demographic for vaccination, which was then followed by a larger influx of doses from the new batches that came in. National Day was coming around the corner, and there was a lot of positivity about how we as a country would be majority full-vaccinated in time for the greatest celebration of our nationhood.
Then a hitherto unknown cluster of cases exploded, which made the associated task force decide (hastily or otherwise---I don't really know) to slam the door back on everyone after having lightly released the restrictions. To make matters worse, just about the next day from that announcement, a high-profile homicide case involving teenagers (from my alma mater) was reported, all before the public holiday that was to happen. And with all that, the national sentiment has reached new levels of depression, with the affected business people from this new totally-not-a-lockdown ``lockdown'' actually being more vocal about how things are utter shite for them even as the usual platitudes about how help was ``always available'' to those who needed them in the situation of the homicide, among other things.
Okay, a diversion---these were things that just happened within the past week, and more importantly, speak nothing of what I meant by being mentally in a foggy mess. What I mean is, my internal clock is slowly running long, losing its calibration against what the mainstream terms as being ``normal''. I feel like the poorest of Copies from Greg Egan's Permutation City, being slowly deracinated through running at a much slower rate than the world is running. Some call this being ``blessed'', I personally am unsure if this categorisation ought to be done in the first place. I think that I am starting to reach the point where I am well-rested, and I suspect that within a month or two I would start to ramp up my thought processes towards re-integration into society once more, hopefully being in a line of work that is less ethically fraught than the one that I left.
I had been talking with people here and there, mostly folks whom I am comfortable with talking about things that straddle on that fine edge between insanity and reality. It does seem that the powers that be are still firmly entrenched, and even with the nonsense that is the pandemic, they are unlikely to change their ways. So perhaps the way out might be one where I strike it out on my own.
The true question then becomes, what can I do that people are willing to pay me for so that I can pay the bills?
That is a tough thing to think about, considering that anything that can be done by one person successfully is likely to be doable by a larger company with their army of cheap labour---experience has shown that in this part of the world, quality is of the least concern when it comes to most forms of engineering; it is always about being cheaper than the competition, and faster than the competition. ``Quality'' falls into the category of intangible non-quantifiable properties, the only one of the engineers' mantra ``cheap, fast, good---pick two out of three'' that is often alluded to in passing, but whose choice among the three was never the main point.
Everyone wants it cheap and fast, and by everyone, I do mean everyone from the smallest company to the largest public sector organisation. Quality is bullshit as far as the decision makers go, for the simple reason that it is not quantifiable, and therefore cannot be measured and compared directly in terms of cheapness (price per unit something) or fastness (time taken). It's bullshit because to these decision makers, quality is something that is so subjective that it will be indefensible against the other two when called up from a ``routine'' audit of the monies that have been spent.
It's like, why bother building an information system properly over two years when the user-interface will be obsolete in less than five, and besides, software simply cannot be that expensive right, since it is ``just lines of code'' compared to real engineering involving big iron parts and lots of electricity, right? Besides, if there's a bug, we can just patch it in production. Also, nowadays there're frameworks for everything---how hard is it to quickly put together an app (not program, not application, but this stupid word called ``app'')? I mean, my nine-year-old kid can do some thing in Roblox over an afternoon, so I am totally qualified to question you, a professional engineer's effort estimate.
😡
Man, I wrote myself angry---it was supposed to be a sort of mood, a relaxed and contemplative one, not an angry one.
Weather hasn't helped much though, with its tantrumous vacillations between hot & humid and sunny & rain (yes, I did not say that wrongly---sunny & rain). Those conditions do help in generating brain fog as the mind cannot decide how it wants to deal with things since it is so confusingly hot.
Well, by now I've run out of steam, so I will just end this entry here. If you can figure out what I am writing in this entry, that's great---because I'm pretty sure that I personally do not know what point I was trying to make throughout these thousand or so words.
Till the next update, hopefully not at stupid o'clock.
Saturday, July 24, 2021
Range?
Range is a thing, but range isn't everything. I speak, of course, about the range (or ambitus) of a musical instrument.
I play the dizi, and it has roughly 2.4 octaves of range (including the high instrument G). I also play the concert flute, and that one has about 3 octaves of range. The xun has roughly 1.4 octaves of range, and the bawu has about 2 octaves of range.
Despite all these differing ranges, there are several properties that are unobvious about them.
Near the beginning, music was largely modal in nature. This meant that after knowing what the series of notes in a scale are to be used, the piece of music (defined as a sequence of these notes with associated relative durations) can be written choosing any of the notes in the scale as the tonal centre, i.e. the pitch that the sequence of notes in the music that tends to ``return to'' each time. For the wind instrument family, this is where all the simple systems occur---they tend to have anything between 6 to 8 holes, with each successive uncovering of the lowest hole [in the lowest register] raising the pitch exactly to the next note in the series of the scale.
Eventually modal music evolved into modulated music, where instead of using the same notes in the scale but changing the tonal centre, they kept the same interval relationships of the frequencies of the notes used in the scale, but shifted the entire scale up/down by various ratios. Suddenly the same wind instrument may need to play a note that was not a part of the original design as part of the modulated scale---this brings in the concept of ``colouring'' the existing tuned holes to form the so-called chromatic notes (or accidentals). Given the same tuned range of the wind instrument, this meant that each note as played in the 12-TET (or any 12-tone system for that matter) outside of the tuned holes had its own ``character''; additionally, the modulation can hit various limits on the upper end of the range or the lower end, the former problem leading towards a solution of attempting to extend the range of the instrument, and the latter problem leading towards the creation of the instrument's larger cousins.
Notes with their own colour was not a problem for the most part, since the order of the day was usually that of a small chamber group playing. However, as the pieces started to get more complex and large, with the formalisation of what constitutes an orchestra coming into place, the interplay of all these instruments demanded that some level of uniformity of all chromatic notes (at least within the octave, and at best throughout the entire ambitus of the instrument) was to be present. In the brass instrument land, they started adding valves to extend any particular blown harmonic by one, two, or three semi-tones, and sometimes adding an extra horn; wind instruments started having keywork added together with extra holes to vent for the chromatic keys, as well as additional ``register'' holes/keys to force anti-nodes within the air column to coerce the standing waves to jump to the higher harmonic necessary for the extended range.
The existence of keywork discretises the air column within the wind instrument, which vastly reduces its expressivity. This is particularly true for the concert flute, one of the most dramatically different instrument as compared to its predecessor in terms of functional acoustics. While it can definitely play the 12-tones precisely, it lost a lot of techniques that involve playing with the amount of venting of the holes themselves, the way that dizi, xun or even the recorder/traverso can. It also has a built-in compromise in its acoustics, sacrificing a little bit of pitch accuracy in the lowest register to assure working upper register to fit the playing ambitus expected of it in an orchestral setting.
Expressivity is about the number of control surfaces available, and not the ambitus of the instrument. For a harmony instrument, expressivity isn't that important---range is, since there is a need to play the correctly pitched note in its right octave to achieve the ``columnar'' stack of sound expected in its harmony role. That required accuracy is also one of the spurring points of extending the range of the instruments and giving it less guess-work in terms of what note it is playing. For a solo instrument though, being expressive is its main purpose, and so have a larger number of control surfaces is preferable. That is also why we don't see the use of the xun or bawu as being a part of the harmony---it is a horrible joke at best, and masochism at worst.
Range is still a thing though, since it allows itself to be sliced up into different segments to constrain a melody, thus allowing an in-scale kind of modulation that is not available to small-ranged instruments, solo-class or not. It does make a piece of music more exciting, but at the end of the day, the instrument is as it is rightly named: merely a tool for the musician to express whatever he/she wants to do so. Personally, I'm used to the 2+ octave range as a default, since it does allow quite a fair bit of modulation, with the caveat that one may not get ``nice'' concert keys from the ``nice'' instrument-keys (like F-major, G-major, C-major, D-major) to play.
That challenge is why I simply adore playing wind instruments over others, and I don't think anything will change that.
I play the dizi, and it has roughly 2.4 octaves of range (including the high instrument G). I also play the concert flute, and that one has about 3 octaves of range. The xun has roughly 1.4 octaves of range, and the bawu has about 2 octaves of range.
Despite all these differing ranges, there are several properties that are unobvious about them.
- Range must also be specified with key for completeness: the xun for example can only maintain its 1.4 octaves within 2 keys;
- Range says nothing about innate expressivity even with the key provided: while the concert flute can play ``every'' note in its range (assuming 12-TET), it is significantly less expressive compared to the xun;
- Timbre across the different registers (or harmonic mode of the vibrating air column of the pipe we are deriving pitches of) imply that the same instrument can sound very differently across its range: the concert flute is brilliant and metallic in its highest registers, and can sound more sombre and mellow in the lowest;
- Relatedly, dynamics can also be affected by the register, which in turn determines the range.
Near the beginning, music was largely modal in nature. This meant that after knowing what the series of notes in a scale are to be used, the piece of music (defined as a sequence of these notes with associated relative durations) can be written choosing any of the notes in the scale as the tonal centre, i.e. the pitch that the sequence of notes in the music that tends to ``return to'' each time. For the wind instrument family, this is where all the simple systems occur---they tend to have anything between 6 to 8 holes, with each successive uncovering of the lowest hole [in the lowest register] raising the pitch exactly to the next note in the series of the scale.
Eventually modal music evolved into modulated music, where instead of using the same notes in the scale but changing the tonal centre, they kept the same interval relationships of the frequencies of the notes used in the scale, but shifted the entire scale up/down by various ratios. Suddenly the same wind instrument may need to play a note that was not a part of the original design as part of the modulated scale---this brings in the concept of ``colouring'' the existing tuned holes to form the so-called chromatic notes (or accidentals). Given the same tuned range of the wind instrument, this meant that each note as played in the 12-TET (or any 12-tone system for that matter) outside of the tuned holes had its own ``character''; additionally, the modulation can hit various limits on the upper end of the range or the lower end, the former problem leading towards a solution of attempting to extend the range of the instrument, and the latter problem leading towards the creation of the instrument's larger cousins.
Notes with their own colour was not a problem for the most part, since the order of the day was usually that of a small chamber group playing. However, as the pieces started to get more complex and large, with the formalisation of what constitutes an orchestra coming into place, the interplay of all these instruments demanded that some level of uniformity of all chromatic notes (at least within the octave, and at best throughout the entire ambitus of the instrument) was to be present. In the brass instrument land, they started adding valves to extend any particular blown harmonic by one, two, or three semi-tones, and sometimes adding an extra horn; wind instruments started having keywork added together with extra holes to vent for the chromatic keys, as well as additional ``register'' holes/keys to force anti-nodes within the air column to coerce the standing waves to jump to the higher harmonic necessary for the extended range.
The existence of keywork discretises the air column within the wind instrument, which vastly reduces its expressivity. This is particularly true for the concert flute, one of the most dramatically different instrument as compared to its predecessor in terms of functional acoustics. While it can definitely play the 12-tones precisely, it lost a lot of techniques that involve playing with the amount of venting of the holes themselves, the way that dizi, xun or even the recorder/traverso can. It also has a built-in compromise in its acoustics, sacrificing a little bit of pitch accuracy in the lowest register to assure working upper register to fit the playing ambitus expected of it in an orchestral setting.
Expressivity is about the number of control surfaces available, and not the ambitus of the instrument. For a harmony instrument, expressivity isn't that important---range is, since there is a need to play the correctly pitched note in its right octave to achieve the ``columnar'' stack of sound expected in its harmony role. That required accuracy is also one of the spurring points of extending the range of the instruments and giving it less guess-work in terms of what note it is playing. For a solo instrument though, being expressive is its main purpose, and so have a larger number of control surfaces is preferable. That is also why we don't see the use of the xun or bawu as being a part of the harmony---it is a horrible joke at best, and masochism at worst.
Range is still a thing though, since it allows itself to be sliced up into different segments to constrain a melody, thus allowing an in-scale kind of modulation that is not available to small-ranged instruments, solo-class or not. It does make a piece of music more exciting, but at the end of the day, the instrument is as it is rightly named: merely a tool for the musician to express whatever he/she wants to do so. Personally, I'm used to the 2+ octave range as a default, since it does allow quite a fair bit of modulation, with the caveat that one may not get ``nice'' concert keys from the ``nice'' instrument-keys (like F-major, G-major, C-major, D-major) to play.
That challenge is why I simply adore playing wind instruments over others, and I don't think anything will change that.
Friday, July 23, 2021
Not-so-good Day Ahead
Oof. I can feel that today is going to be one of those not-so-good days.
Is it because of the re-instatement of restrictions? Is it because of the superfluous heat & humidity? Is it because of the emergence of some really strong existential dread as the metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel seems ever more farther away than initially noticed, which was already a pin-prick to begin with?
Is it... a true surfacing of a depressive episode?
Well, that last one is hard to know since I haven't thought of spending at least a thousand bucks to get looked at by a therapist to talk through whatever is going on in my head. It's not that my mental health isn't worth at least a thousand bucks (it's really worth much more, considering the amount of income I am forgoing while I am on this sabbatical), but that I do not believe that whatever is going on in my head is providing me with a negative quality of life; in some ways, it isn't really degrading my quality of life at all, let alone bringing it down to the negatives. I still socialise the way I do, given the bloody circumstances that we have now, and I am still taking relatively good care of myself (regular showers, not much change in appetite). I'm not completely anhedonic, though what counts as pleasure has always been a weird thing for me.
That said though, I think that I do run a little hot in that direction. And if things truly go sideways, I would go seek treatment. It's kinda like how when one runs a low-grade fever, the first thing that one does isn't to run off to find the doctor---it is literally to wait and see for a moment. Sometimes that low-grade fever is all there is, a transient moment of temporary atypicality to assist in the recovery/healing process. So, feeling down sometimes isn't that big a deal, if it isn't something that matches the DSM-V diagnostic criteria for an actual issue, and if it doesn't really screw up the quality of life.
I mean, [human] life isn't [human] life unless there are actual changes in emotional states. To live a life without experiencing its highs and lows is a life that is wasted, since what we truly carry with us throughout the entirety of our mortal lifespan is what we bring along in our heads. And despite all the rhetoric about how humans are amazing because we are rational (as compared to the other creatures), the real motivator isn't about rationality but about how we feel. I would even posit that we are rational because we see a need to share how we feel about things with other people in order to seek validation. Since decisions made of emotions cannot find an easy common ground at the emotional level, we back-think some ``hard facts'' that others can objectively observe/measure, and use deductive mechanics like modus ponens or modus tollens with consensually accepted implication statements to convey what we want to convey to others.
That's not a new sentiment from me though---this concept has existed philosophically for a while now. It's just that we are so enamoured with seeking happiness that we forget that happiness is in contrast with sadness, just as contentment (another lofty ``neutral'' goal of life that many seek) is contrasted against insufficiency.
I think that's enough out of this windbag for now. It's another short post, because I have set Eileen-II up for typing mode instead of gaming mode for updating my read-list, and didn't want to ``waste'' the effort to do so. ``Typing mode'' simply means having Eileen-II sitting flat on the table, while ``gaming mode'' refers to the lifting up of Eileen-II on four plastic legs to improve the air-flow from the in-take fans to cool her down as I use WASD to manoeuvre about in the specific game world. I don't like typing in ``gaming mode'' because that raised keyboard feels quite nasty on my wrists to type for long periods on. I've also decided to set all the offsets to −40.0 mV instead of just the CPU Core and Cache.
I justify this by observing that all these heat-generating parts of the CPU package share the same cooling system, and even though some of them may have ``negligible'' effect on the heating, considering the fact that the ambient condition is at multiple levels of suck, all these ``negligible effects'' do add up to something. So far, things seem stable, and I'm probably going to keep it as so.
And now, I am truly done for this post. Till the next one then.
Is it because of the re-instatement of restrictions? Is it because of the superfluous heat & humidity? Is it because of the emergence of some really strong existential dread as the metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel seems ever more farther away than initially noticed, which was already a pin-prick to begin with?
Is it... a true surfacing of a depressive episode?
Well, that last one is hard to know since I haven't thought of spending at least a thousand bucks to get looked at by a therapist to talk through whatever is going on in my head. It's not that my mental health isn't worth at least a thousand bucks (it's really worth much more, considering the amount of income I am forgoing while I am on this sabbatical), but that I do not believe that whatever is going on in my head is providing me with a negative quality of life; in some ways, it isn't really degrading my quality of life at all, let alone bringing it down to the negatives. I still socialise the way I do, given the bloody circumstances that we have now, and I am still taking relatively good care of myself (regular showers, not much change in appetite). I'm not completely anhedonic, though what counts as pleasure has always been a weird thing for me.
That said though, I think that I do run a little hot in that direction. And if things truly go sideways, I would go seek treatment. It's kinda like how when one runs a low-grade fever, the first thing that one does isn't to run off to find the doctor---it is literally to wait and see for a moment. Sometimes that low-grade fever is all there is, a transient moment of temporary atypicality to assist in the recovery/healing process. So, feeling down sometimes isn't that big a deal, if it isn't something that matches the DSM-V diagnostic criteria for an actual issue, and if it doesn't really screw up the quality of life.
I mean, [human] life isn't [human] life unless there are actual changes in emotional states. To live a life without experiencing its highs and lows is a life that is wasted, since what we truly carry with us throughout the entirety of our mortal lifespan is what we bring along in our heads. And despite all the rhetoric about how humans are amazing because we are rational (as compared to the other creatures), the real motivator isn't about rationality but about how we feel. I would even posit that we are rational because we see a need to share how we feel about things with other people in order to seek validation. Since decisions made of emotions cannot find an easy common ground at the emotional level, we back-think some ``hard facts'' that others can objectively observe/measure, and use deductive mechanics like modus ponens or modus tollens with consensually accepted implication statements to convey what we want to convey to others.
That's not a new sentiment from me though---this concept has existed philosophically for a while now. It's just that we are so enamoured with seeking happiness that we forget that happiness is in contrast with sadness, just as contentment (another lofty ``neutral'' goal of life that many seek) is contrasted against insufficiency.
I think that's enough out of this windbag for now. It's another short post, because I have set Eileen-II up for typing mode instead of gaming mode for updating my read-list, and didn't want to ``waste'' the effort to do so. ``Typing mode'' simply means having Eileen-II sitting flat on the table, while ``gaming mode'' refers to the lifting up of Eileen-II on four plastic legs to improve the air-flow from the in-take fans to cool her down as I use WASD to manoeuvre about in the specific game world. I don't like typing in ``gaming mode'' because that raised keyboard feels quite nasty on my wrists to type for long periods on. I've also decided to set all the offsets to −40.0 mV instead of just the CPU Core and Cache.
And now, I am truly done for this post. Till the next one then.
Thursday, July 22, 2021
The Numbers No Longer Mean Much
Well, here we are again in the throes of ``Phase 2 (Heightened Alert)''. It has happened, with a provided last date of Aug 18. The case numbers have always been meaningless for the man-on-the-street for the simple reason that it does not take into account the context in which any single individual may be in, i.e. just because there are 160+ reported cases does not mean that the risk of any single person contracting COVID-19 is raised proportionately. The numbers are reported mostly because they are easy to derive (a very important property of any sort of chosen statistic), and that there is inertia to maintain a similar statistic so as to make use of past data.
I don't necessarily agree with the last part, but it is one of those compromises that needs to be taken to ensure some level of transparency in public policy making. Personally, I think that using the wrong statistic for making decisions is probably worse than apparently using none (this is how using some other kind of undisclosed statistic look like to outsiders), but I can understand the pressure that the policy makers for this crisis are facing from the public eye. Empathy aside though, I still maintain that if they want to project data-driven superiority as their technocratic credentials, then they ought to do as they preach and use the right statistic for what they are claiming will be the indicator variable for treating COVID-19 as an ``endemic disease''.
Well, today's a short entry. I could have written a rant about equal opportunity against equal outcome in the context of the anger that non-typical musicians have when concert flute makers don't seem to give a damn about their existence, but the heart really isn't in it---it's been one helluva hot-ass day. I spent more time with my Blademaster in Grim Dawn, and will probably get back to reading tomorrow, starting on White Fang by Jack London.
That's it for now. Till the next update.
I don't necessarily agree with the last part, but it is one of those compromises that needs to be taken to ensure some level of transparency in public policy making. Personally, I think that using the wrong statistic for making decisions is probably worse than apparently using none (this is how using some other kind of undisclosed statistic look like to outsiders), but I can understand the pressure that the policy makers for this crisis are facing from the public eye. Empathy aside though, I still maintain that if they want to project data-driven superiority as their technocratic credentials, then they ought to do as they preach and use the right statistic for what they are claiming will be the indicator variable for treating COVID-19 as an ``endemic disease''.
Well, today's a short entry. I could have written a rant about equal opportunity against equal outcome in the context of the anger that non-typical musicians have when concert flute makers don't seem to give a damn about their existence, but the heart really isn't in it---it's been one helluva hot-ass day. I spent more time with my Blademaster in Grim Dawn, and will probably get back to reading tomorrow, starting on White Fang by Jack London.
That's it for now. Till the next update.
Wednesday, July 21, 2021
Sleaze?
I am not a fan of sleaze or anything that isn't in the spirit of fair play. To me, anyone resorting to sleaze or some manner of cheating in things that involve/affect other people isn't exactly considered a good person, let alone a righteous one.
With that said, I can understand why people would want to resort to sleaze and/or cheating, and more importantly, why rule enforcers have a tendency to often times look away from the sleaze/cheating aspects. Now, a reminder: just because I can understand why someone does something doesn't imply that I personally condone it. Anyone who cannot see the difference between understanding a different perspective and agreeing with the perspective have some innate extremism that needs to be addressed.
Society as a whole is a complex web of relationships among people with some modicum of trust being tossed into the mix so that we don't inadvertently kill ourselves off. Formal rules in the form of laws or etiquette exist to ensure that as the complexity of the web of relationships increases, people will ``know'' what is considered normal behaviour so as to extend that sense of trust, all in the bid to reduce unnecessary inter-personal friction that can/will cause mayhem. I mentioned this idea of social lubrication before, but it was largely in the context of formal organisations in the form of corporations. Regular society has similar needs, with the sole difference that their hierarchy is defined organically as opposed to by fiat through a corporation's constitution.
The relationship between law and society is thus this: first there is society, then there is law, ergo society (in the sense of a group of people coming together either voluntarily or by happenstance) comes up first before formal rules of acceptable behaviour are codified in the form of law for other newcomers to learn quickly before they commit faux pas that may cost them their very lives. Natural law in the form of God's word ought to be considered as the universal principles that most if not all [human] laws will need to encompass at some point---deviations from it are generally not permissible for believers, and as for non-believers, they will have their reckoning at the end of the day. But putting that aside for the moment and just considering the non-supernatural aspects of things, the laws that are written by humankind need to be understood as formalised control mechanisms, a means of making explicitly what a particular society (and its embedded culture(s)) believe as acceptable behaviour, and the extent in which less-than-acceptable behaviour is allowed, and to what degree will they be policed/forced to comply.
The thing is, policing and/or enforcement of rules/regulations/laws is, at the end of the day, a trade-off equation. Total and absolute enforcement of all rules/regulations/laws is always prohibitively costly, and socially detrimental since there is no slack allowed for people to feel that they still have personal agency and/or free will. The other part of total and absolute enforcement that remains unsaid is that there is a critical mass beyond which the effects of total and absolute enforcement run counter to its intention, because of the simple trade-off calculus that if everything is important/controlled, then nothing truly is, since there is always a finite supply of effort that can be provided, while there are always new ways of circumventing what is essentially a finite list of dos and don'ts.
Going back to sleaze/cheating. Sleaze can be considered as the pathos way of convincing others to go along with something---while there is often some form of logic being applied when providing justification of their chosen course of action, these logic can usually be refuted quite easily upon closer scrutiny. The veneer of rationality is what I would describe sleaze as---it appeals to a much baser human emotion through the cover of a more dignified position. Examples of these include the mobsters who go around talking and acting as though they are some kind of pillar of society providing services that the actual authorities haven't been doing, or the more recent cases of ``KTV lounges'' being weakly ``re-pivotted'' into F&B joints.
The thing is, there will always be people who prefer satisfying/listening to their baser instincts. A truly pragmatic and technocratic governing system will acknowledge this, and provide rules/laws that regulate the behaviour to at least make all participants play safer within it; however, the price to pay for this is the loss of legitimacy among those who claim that the governing body has a moral role to play in addition to merely preventing the outbreak of chaos.
What then has the governing body got to do under such circumstances?
Like many things in life, if there isn't anything that can be done to improve matters, sometimes the best action to take is just to take no action, and instead perform more observation to look out for when taking some action is unequivocally more beneficial than taking no action. My take on this is that as long as the activity harms no one else, it ought to be allowed under the principle of self-agency and free will. If it will harm someone else, then it ought to be regulated to the extent that society is willing to pay for the price of regulation. All these should be applied equally regardless of the moral content of the activity involved---morality is based on one's belief system and has no place within general rule set of a pluralistic society. The only catch here is if the particular pluralistic society has decided as a whole that they would want to enforce a certain morality-based behavioural rule that it ought to be enacted---this must be through a referendum and not through fiat from the handful of representatives, mostly because the addition/removal of morals-based rules involve indicating the particular society's beliefs/principles (or even conscience), and is thus different from nailing down the finer details of the rules, which is what the representatives often do. So the correct chain of events is having a referendum from society to determine the principles first before having the legislators fill in the details of what will make up the body of law.
Everyone has their own sense of what a perfect society is, and I can't say that any one's version is superior over others. But I can say that if we choose to live in a pluralistic society, we ought to know that there are others who disagree with our beliefs, and that disagreement may only affect them and not us, in which case maybe they should be allowed to live the way they want. After all, they have to have their own reckoning with God at some point, as do we, and they have to justify themselves to Him, not us for them.
Till the next update.
With that said, I can understand why people would want to resort to sleaze and/or cheating, and more importantly, why rule enforcers have a tendency to often times look away from the sleaze/cheating aspects. Now, a reminder: just because I can understand why someone does something doesn't imply that I personally condone it. Anyone who cannot see the difference between understanding a different perspective and agreeing with the perspective have some innate extremism that needs to be addressed.
Society as a whole is a complex web of relationships among people with some modicum of trust being tossed into the mix so that we don't inadvertently kill ourselves off. Formal rules in the form of laws or etiquette exist to ensure that as the complexity of the web of relationships increases, people will ``know'' what is considered normal behaviour so as to extend that sense of trust, all in the bid to reduce unnecessary inter-personal friction that can/will cause mayhem. I mentioned this idea of social lubrication before, but it was largely in the context of formal organisations in the form of corporations. Regular society has similar needs, with the sole difference that their hierarchy is defined organically as opposed to by fiat through a corporation's constitution.
The relationship between law and society is thus this: first there is society, then there is law, ergo society (in the sense of a group of people coming together either voluntarily or by happenstance) comes up first before formal rules of acceptable behaviour are codified in the form of law for other newcomers to learn quickly before they commit faux pas that may cost them their very lives. Natural law in the form of God's word ought to be considered as the universal principles that most if not all [human] laws will need to encompass at some point---deviations from it are generally not permissible for believers, and as for non-believers, they will have their reckoning at the end of the day. But putting that aside for the moment and just considering the non-supernatural aspects of things, the laws that are written by humankind need to be understood as formalised control mechanisms, a means of making explicitly what a particular society (and its embedded culture(s)) believe as acceptable behaviour, and the extent in which less-than-acceptable behaviour is allowed, and to what degree will they be policed/forced to comply.
The thing is, policing and/or enforcement of rules/regulations/laws is, at the end of the day, a trade-off equation. Total and absolute enforcement of all rules/regulations/laws is always prohibitively costly, and socially detrimental since there is no slack allowed for people to feel that they still have personal agency and/or free will. The other part of total and absolute enforcement that remains unsaid is that there is a critical mass beyond which the effects of total and absolute enforcement run counter to its intention, because of the simple trade-off calculus that if everything is important/controlled, then nothing truly is, since there is always a finite supply of effort that can be provided, while there are always new ways of circumventing what is essentially a finite list of dos and don'ts.
Going back to sleaze/cheating. Sleaze can be considered as the pathos way of convincing others to go along with something---while there is often some form of logic being applied when providing justification of their chosen course of action, these logic can usually be refuted quite easily upon closer scrutiny. The veneer of rationality is what I would describe sleaze as---it appeals to a much baser human emotion through the cover of a more dignified position. Examples of these include the mobsters who go around talking and acting as though they are some kind of pillar of society providing services that the actual authorities haven't been doing, or the more recent cases of ``KTV lounges'' being weakly ``re-pivotted'' into F&B joints.
The thing is, there will always be people who prefer satisfying/listening to their baser instincts. A truly pragmatic and technocratic governing system will acknowledge this, and provide rules/laws that regulate the behaviour to at least make all participants play safer within it; however, the price to pay for this is the loss of legitimacy among those who claim that the governing body has a moral role to play in addition to merely preventing the outbreak of chaos.
What then has the governing body got to do under such circumstances?
Like many things in life, if there isn't anything that can be done to improve matters, sometimes the best action to take is just to take no action, and instead perform more observation to look out for when taking some action is unequivocally more beneficial than taking no action. My take on this is that as long as the activity harms no one else, it ought to be allowed under the principle of self-agency and free will. If it will harm someone else, then it ought to be regulated to the extent that society is willing to pay for the price of regulation. All these should be applied equally regardless of the moral content of the activity involved---morality is based on one's belief system and has no place within general rule set of a pluralistic society. The only catch here is if the particular pluralistic society has decided as a whole that they would want to enforce a certain morality-based behavioural rule that it ought to be enacted---this must be through a referendum and not through fiat from the handful of representatives, mostly because the addition/removal of morals-based rules involve indicating the particular society's beliefs/principles (or even conscience), and is thus different from nailing down the finer details of the rules, which is what the representatives often do. So the correct chain of events is having a referendum from society to determine the principles first before having the legislators fill in the details of what will make up the body of law.
Everyone has their own sense of what a perfect society is, and I can't say that any one's version is superior over others. But I can say that if we choose to live in a pluralistic society, we ought to know that there are others who disagree with our beliefs, and that disagreement may only affect them and not us, in which case maybe they should be allowed to live the way they want. After all, they have to have their own reckoning with God at some point, as do we, and they have to justify themselves to Him, not us for them.
Till the next update.
Whelp, Back to the Cave I Go Again
So much for the endorphin high.
Anyway, I'm pushing this out using a scheduler. Because I really don't want to mar the nice endorphin-filled day. It should appear at 2400hrs of Jul 20, even though I wrote this on Jul 20 at 1645hrs.
Basically, we are back to being in a quasi-lockdown, starting from Jul 22 and ending after Aug 18.
Weird duration start/end dates? Yes.
Necessary? Who knows.
Pissed off? Nah, just disappointed.
That is all.
Anyway, I'm pushing this out using a scheduler. Because I really don't want to mar the nice endorphin-filled day. It should appear at 2400hrs of Jul 20, even though I wrote this on Jul 20 at 1645hrs.
Basically, we are back to being in a quasi-lockdown, starting from Jul 22 and ending after Aug 18.
Weird duration start/end dates? Yes.
Necessary? Who knows.
Pissed off? Nah, just disappointed.
That is all.
Tuesday, July 20, 2021
SBG Walk
Man, that was a wonderful walk. 8.80 mi clocked in 2 h 57 min at the Singapore Botanical Gardens (SBG) with Harish on this public holiday---tired but satisfyingly so. The last time I went on such a walk/hike with him was way back in January, and the last time I actually walked in SBG was to watch a concert held by Audio Image Wind Ensemble at the Shaw Foundation Symphony Stage out in the middle of Symphony Lake.
I have never really walked about in SBG as a choice of leisure. It's one of those mystical places that one knows the existence of, but have no sense of what it is. I think I have better recollection of the Central Catchment Nature Reserve than that of SBG, and even that is from memories nearly a decade ago when I was much more active in the geocaching scene.
Ah SBG. There was definitely the start of a morning crowd of people when Harish and I met (we were supposed to meet at 0900hrs, but ended up meeting at 0845hrs instead), but it was the type of crowd that would eventually disperse itself outwards after the initial choke-point that was the pathway from the gate. Masking up was expected, but given the way Harish and I walked (we brisk-walked while discussing sociology, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics), coupled with my generally crappy fitness, I deemed it strenuous enough that I refused to mask up, as it was allowed to do. It is one of those rare occasions that I would wear my Garmin Forerunner 35 for walking---I wanted to ensure that if I was ever confronted by a zealous enforcer, I would have the means of providing evidence to support my claim. That heart rate monitor was sufficient to demonstrate objectively that I was undergoing something strenuous with little to no contention. It is sad that I even had to think of such measures to counteract these kinds of potential zealotry---I like that we are enforcing the law, but when the law itself has provisions pointing out its applicability, it is important that they are well-understood as well; if the provision itself requires a judgement call of the subject, then perhaps some level of trust ought to be allowed on the subject instead of doing any of those stupid ``zero tolerance'' response.
The walk itself had no specifically planned itinerary---the sole intention was just to get some walking going among the wonderful greenery that SBG has to offer. We began with something that looked like we were going in small loops near the Bukit Timah Gate, before heading southwards and getting trapped in a small loop there, before finally heading north-west into the new Gallop Extension across the road.
Lunch was at the Guzman y Gomez at Serene Centre---it's always a treat to have some nice burritos with chips and guac at the end of a long walk.
I don't have anything else to write about---I want to end this blog entry on the endorphin high from all that walking. And so, till the next update.
I have never really walked about in SBG as a choice of leisure. It's one of those mystical places that one knows the existence of, but have no sense of what it is. I think I have better recollection of the Central Catchment Nature Reserve than that of SBG, and even that is from memories nearly a decade ago when I was much more active in the geocaching scene.
Ah SBG. There was definitely the start of a morning crowd of people when Harish and I met (we were supposed to meet at 0900hrs, but ended up meeting at 0845hrs instead), but it was the type of crowd that would eventually disperse itself outwards after the initial choke-point that was the pathway from the gate. Masking up was expected, but given the way Harish and I walked (we brisk-walked while discussing sociology, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics), coupled with my generally crappy fitness, I deemed it strenuous enough that I refused to mask up, as it was allowed to do. It is one of those rare occasions that I would wear my Garmin Forerunner 35 for walking---I wanted to ensure that if I was ever confronted by a zealous enforcer, I would have the means of providing evidence to support my claim. That heart rate monitor was sufficient to demonstrate objectively that I was undergoing something strenuous with little to no contention. It is sad that I even had to think of such measures to counteract these kinds of potential zealotry---I like that we are enforcing the law, but when the law itself has provisions pointing out its applicability, it is important that they are well-understood as well; if the provision itself requires a judgement call of the subject, then perhaps some level of trust ought to be allowed on the subject instead of doing any of those stupid ``zero tolerance'' response.
The walk itself had no specifically planned itinerary---the sole intention was just to get some walking going among the wonderful greenery that SBG has to offer. We began with something that looked like we were going in small loops near the Bukit Timah Gate, before heading southwards and getting trapped in a small loop there, before finally heading north-west into the new Gallop Extension across the road.
Lunch was at the Guzman y Gomez at Serene Centre---it's always a treat to have some nice burritos with chips and guac at the end of a long walk.
I don't have anything else to write about---I want to end this blog entry on the endorphin high from all that walking. And so, till the next update.
Monday, July 19, 2021
88 Ain't Big Enough---It's 163 Apparently
I didn't want to write any more, but this is getting ridiculous. We are now looking at 163 cases today for COVID-19 as well. It's almost as though SIN city were playing mahjong with the pandemic, and we just lost the hand, and we have to pay up because the pandemic has a 花 tile.
What makes things worse is that the ``new'' fishery port cluster is actually related to the KTV lounge cluster. Considering the high mobility of the persons that visit the fishery ports (generally controlled places specific only for merchants as far as I know), this is bad news indeed.
Would tomorrow's numbers jump even higher? Will there be a new and tough lockdown coming on tomorrow?
I don't know. I'm borderline past caring about how things are going already. The root cause is what it has always been---people not following the control measures properly. That's it. It doesn't matter if people are vaccinated or not---even when vaccination wasn't part of the big picture in SIN city, we could sort of tame things down with careful social distancing, masking up, and not taking unnecessary risks.
Year's fucked up. 'nuff said.
What makes things worse is that the ``new'' fishery port cluster is actually related to the KTV lounge cluster. Considering the high mobility of the persons that visit the fishery ports (generally controlled places specific only for merchants as far as I know), this is bad news indeed.
Would tomorrow's numbers jump even higher? Will there be a new and tough lockdown coming on tomorrow?
I don't know. I'm borderline past caring about how things are going already. The root cause is what it has always been---people not following the control measures properly. That's it. It doesn't matter if people are vaccinated or not---even when vaccination wasn't part of the big picture in SIN city, we could sort of tame things down with careful social distancing, masking up, and not taking unnecessary risks.
Year's fucked up. 'nuff said.
Murder One
Because it isn't enough to have a spike in COVID-19 cases, we now have murder in a local secondary school.
Yes, it's a little Johnny-come-lately of me to talk about this. No, it's not to capitalise on a tragedy. I am an alumnus from there, and the news simultaneously shocked and not shocked me; it shocked me in the sense that someone actually managed to pull off a killing (granted it was stupid because the person still got arrested), and it did not shock me in the sense that it really was going to be a matter of time when something like that happened, if the culture that I was exposed to some twenty odd years back still holds.
I am not going to lie. I did not have many fond memories of my secondary school. Much of it was spent being a social outcast for the most part, partly because I didn't come from some prestigious primary school, partly because I didn't like speaking Mandarin as my default language, and partly because I lived way out in the north-east as compared to the westies that dominated the school. Mind you, this was back when the school itself was nearer the west-south-west side of West Coast Road, before it moved off into the deep west that is Boon Lay. Despite the many averse memories of the place, I would say that studying there during my teenage years have shaped me into the crazed bastard that I am today---the impact of that place on my psyche is definitely undeniable. Almost anything that counts as a success/failure that I have today can be traced back to something that happened from that era.
But I digress heavily, even though the intent was to establish relevance.
I said that it did not shock me because that place had pretty strict rules on what is permissible, and what isn't---this went beyond that of the usual school rules and veered into the social rules. Cliques were the norm, and unlike regular cliques, these were elitist in nature. The elitism is not at the level of snobbery where there was no way out---they were lily-livered enough that if one had a strong enough personality, they would rather stay the hell away instead of attempting vengeance for conformance. Grades were important, but that was a given from the get-go due to the special status of this class of secondary schools---they were a part of the SAP schools, the second most elitist schools after the so-called Independent schools. The history of these classifications are better explained through the monster article on Education in SIN city on Wikipedia instead of an out-of-school middle-ager like me.
So much back-story for digression. The point is, I would not be surprised if the oppressive environment played some part in causing the outburst. This is strictly armchair theorising---I was never there, do not know the people involved, and am only writing down what I feel/think about the situation here because it involved a school that I was once a part of. Anyone who dares to claim otherwise about me is lying through their teeth.
------
The day's been a tad weird. I started off trying to advance the main quest in Grim Dawn, but quit [totally without raging] when my Blademaster got pulped one too many times due to limited fighting space by enemies that are a tad too high-level for me. Enemy levels are weird in Grim Dawn---generally speaking, one is incentivised to play longer if one wants an easier game in general, since the scaling of the enemy levels in the session are tied to whatever the level of the character is at the start of the session.
Subsequently, I carried on reading some more A Thousand Sanities by Adam Gopnik. Then the news of the murder came up, and a couple of hours later, I decided to react to it here.
And so, that's what it is. I'm heading out for a long walk tomorrow, my first in a long time. Let's hope that all the weird tiredness that I have been feeling isn't going to get in the way tomorrow.
That's all I have for now. Till the next update.
Yes, it's a little Johnny-come-lately of me to talk about this. No, it's not to capitalise on a tragedy. I am an alumnus from there, and the news simultaneously shocked and not shocked me; it shocked me in the sense that someone actually managed to pull off a killing (granted it was stupid because the person still got arrested), and it did not shock me in the sense that it really was going to be a matter of time when something like that happened, if the culture that I was exposed to some twenty odd years back still holds.
I am not going to lie. I did not have many fond memories of my secondary school. Much of it was spent being a social outcast for the most part, partly because I didn't come from some prestigious primary school, partly because I didn't like speaking Mandarin as my default language, and partly because I lived way out in the north-east as compared to the westies that dominated the school. Mind you, this was back when the school itself was nearer the west-south-west side of West Coast Road, before it moved off into the deep west that is Boon Lay. Despite the many averse memories of the place, I would say that studying there during my teenage years have shaped me into the crazed bastard that I am today---the impact of that place on my psyche is definitely undeniable. Almost anything that counts as a success/failure that I have today can be traced back to something that happened from that era.
But I digress heavily, even though the intent was to establish relevance.
I said that it did not shock me because that place had pretty strict rules on what is permissible, and what isn't---this went beyond that of the usual school rules and veered into the social rules. Cliques were the norm, and unlike regular cliques, these were elitist in nature. The elitism is not at the level of snobbery where there was no way out---they were lily-livered enough that if one had a strong enough personality, they would rather stay the hell away instead of attempting vengeance for conformance. Grades were important, but that was a given from the get-go due to the special status of this class of secondary schools---they were a part of the SAP schools, the second most elitist schools after the so-called Independent schools. The history of these classifications are better explained through the monster article on Education in SIN city on Wikipedia instead of an out-of-school middle-ager like me.
So much back-story for digression. The point is, I would not be surprised if the oppressive environment played some part in causing the outburst. This is strictly armchair theorising---I was never there, do not know the people involved, and am only writing down what I feel/think about the situation here because it involved a school that I was once a part of. Anyone who dares to claim otherwise about me is lying through their teeth.
------
The day's been a tad weird. I started off trying to advance the main quest in Grim Dawn, but quit [totally without raging] when my Blademaster got pulped one too many times due to limited fighting space by enemies that are a tad too high-level for me. Enemy levels are weird in Grim Dawn---generally speaking, one is incentivised to play longer if one wants an easier game in general, since the scaling of the enemy levels in the session are tied to whatever the level of the character is at the start of the session.
Subsequently, I carried on reading some more A Thousand Sanities by Adam Gopnik. Then the news of the murder came up, and a couple of hours later, I decided to react to it here.
And so, that's what it is. I'm heading out for a long walk tomorrow, my first in a long time. Let's hope that all the weird tiredness that I have been feeling isn't going to get in the way tomorrow.
That's all I have for now. Till the next update.
Sunday, July 18, 2021
``88'' is a Great Number Except for This
Sunday, 1940hrs as at now. SIN city.
The sky is confusingly dark---it isn't clear if it is just the night, or rain is imminent. The weather is still muggy, possibly due to the stillness of the air, the interior temperature recorded as 31°C dry-bulb.
Ludicrousness has finally fallen in with one of the greatest daily spikes in cases throughout the saga that is COVID-19 in SIN city. It simultaneously affects and does not affect me---I am a hermit this year, and with it come the unnatural protection from consistent physical isolation. My mental state waxes and wanes depending on stimulus and the level of despair of the future that I feel on any particular time. The pressure isn't really on me, but I can still feel it.
The city itself can feel it. Each time an overly optimistic announcement about how COVID-19 is contained is made, the city reacts with an inflamed response in the form of a spike of cases that come from a previously unmanaged loophole. After more than a year of actively managing this fracas, it seems that while much has been learnt, much more about human nature hasn't been mastered, despite the demonstration of strongly authoritarian tendencies in many of the control measures.
Resentment against the proscribed social habits have manifested as covert rebellious behaviour---I cannot tell if it is a failure of civic-mindedness or that of the authority's control measures. For all that I know, the truth might be a mix of both, where the individual has been so repressed by the cabal of rules and regulations that instead of learning what is right, they learn how to circumvent and bend all that they disagree with, without ever engaging in the type of spirited debate that would lead everyone one step closer to a consensual truth and reality where everyone contributes to the outcome together.
As such, I throw the blame all around; the authority for failing to enforce the rules that they perceived to be necessary and failing to demonstrate the full power of what being authoritarian means; the rebellious, both covert and overt, for placing their short-term satisfaction over the long-term sustainable solution; and the silent majority, whose only role in this entire crisis is to complain about it online, and allow the selfish among their ranks to carry on their ways for fear of ostracisation from voicing out their concerns firmly and explicitly.
As one might say, we reap what we sow. We've sown apathy, and now we reap it. We've sown the spirit of following the letter of the law and not the spirit of it, and now we reap it.
We are all to blame for everything that happens. It is a lesson that will be learnt through blood, like all lessons that matter. And if we don't learn from it soon enough, more will die, and the lesson repeats itself until we finally learn from its history and not repeat it all again.
Such is the nature of things, pandemic or otherwise. The only difference is that any mistakes and failures are more publicly pronounced in the case of the pandemic than in regular times---think of it as a much harsher rebuke where the stakes are much higher.
I don't have much else to say about all these except one word.
Disappointment.
Not anger, but disappointment.
The sky is confusingly dark---it isn't clear if it is just the night, or rain is imminent. The weather is still muggy, possibly due to the stillness of the air, the interior temperature recorded as 31°C dry-bulb.
Ludicrousness has finally fallen in with one of the greatest daily spikes in cases throughout the saga that is COVID-19 in SIN city. It simultaneously affects and does not affect me---I am a hermit this year, and with it come the unnatural protection from consistent physical isolation. My mental state waxes and wanes depending on stimulus and the level of despair of the future that I feel on any particular time. The pressure isn't really on me, but I can still feel it.
The city itself can feel it. Each time an overly optimistic announcement about how COVID-19 is contained is made, the city reacts with an inflamed response in the form of a spike of cases that come from a previously unmanaged loophole. After more than a year of actively managing this fracas, it seems that while much has been learnt, much more about human nature hasn't been mastered, despite the demonstration of strongly authoritarian tendencies in many of the control measures.
Resentment against the proscribed social habits have manifested as covert rebellious behaviour---I cannot tell if it is a failure of civic-mindedness or that of the authority's control measures. For all that I know, the truth might be a mix of both, where the individual has been so repressed by the cabal of rules and regulations that instead of learning what is right, they learn how to circumvent and bend all that they disagree with, without ever engaging in the type of spirited debate that would lead everyone one step closer to a consensual truth and reality where everyone contributes to the outcome together.
As such, I throw the blame all around; the authority for failing to enforce the rules that they perceived to be necessary and failing to demonstrate the full power of what being authoritarian means; the rebellious, both covert and overt, for placing their short-term satisfaction over the long-term sustainable solution; and the silent majority, whose only role in this entire crisis is to complain about it online, and allow the selfish among their ranks to carry on their ways for fear of ostracisation from voicing out their concerns firmly and explicitly.
As one might say, we reap what we sow. We've sown apathy, and now we reap it. We've sown the spirit of following the letter of the law and not the spirit of it, and now we reap it.
We are all to blame for everything that happens. It is a lesson that will be learnt through blood, like all lessons that matter. And if we don't learn from it soon enough, more will die, and the lesson repeats itself until we finally learn from its history and not repeat it all again.
Such is the nature of things, pandemic or otherwise. The only difference is that any mistakes and failures are more publicly pronounced in the case of the pandemic than in regular times---think of it as a much harsher rebuke where the stakes are much higher.
I don't have much else to say about all these except one word.
Disappointment.
Not anger, but disappointment.
Saturday, July 17, 2021
Guilty Pleasures
Ah, guilty pleasures. First up, a new Jupiter Hell (JH) trailer for the version 1.0 release slated for Aug 05, 2021. I've supported JH from the very get go, contributing a fair bit to it as part of the Kickstarter back in the end of 2016. See that ``1 backer'' statement under the ``Chaos Count'' level? Yep, that's me. I like the game that has shaped out, though I would really prefer it if there were a ``proper'' ASCII mode.
That said, version 0.9.11a was out, and I was grinding runs to level up to 1st Lieutenant---I needed one more Gold Badge to do so, and I felt the going for a Gun Kata-based run for Angel of Marksmanship (Hard) was the way to go. I was too impatient, and died a couple of times. It was still fun though, redeveloping that intuition about the mob AI to better take care of them while minimising damage. JH differs from DoomRL in that the mobs do not pick stuff up, so their movement are independent of whatever gear/items are dropped on the ground. The lack of diagonal movement means that what used to require only one movement to get out of the way in DoomRL is now a 2-movement exercise. Cover is super important in JH, and running away for better cover usually beats standing one's ground to shoot back. There are some improvements in the UX in that the amount of damage done/taken is controlled by a straightforward linear decay formula as opposed to something more RNG-heavy like the old ``dice-based'' system that is DoomRL---the amount of damage that can be taken off is estimated in the targeting module.
However, punishment does come harshly if one is impatient, which is usually how most playable characters (PCs) die in rogue-likes.
Second, after getting a little worn from grinding JH (I still haven't gotten my Gold Badge), I decided to switch over to Grim Dawn for a spell. Grim Dawn is an isometric-ish Diablo-like that is more developed than the games it succeeded, and this includes my beloved Torchlight II. The big thing about Grim Dawn as compared to old school Diablo 2 or even Torchlight II is the massive class system. There are 9 masteries, and one can pair them up in-game. This means that there are 36 unique classes that are made up of these dual-masteries. Add that to the 9 deliberate single mastery pseudo-classes, that means there are 45 different classes from which builds can be created from. Combine that with the three difficulty levels, each difficulty level toggling between regular and veteran, we're looking at at least 270 different playthroughs of the main storyline (including of the DLC). The true number is much larger because in each of the 45 different classes, there are myriads of different builds that can be constructed, each with a different play-style.
That is a stupid number of full playthroughs to consider. The maps themselves feel much larger than that of Diablo 2, and are more gritty than the 4-class Torchlight II. In short, there's likely to be no way for me to ever ``complete'' the game's entirety the way I did for the four different classes in Torchlight II (I simply can't play through the 45 of them necessary for just clearing the Normal difficulty). Nevertheless, Grim Dawn's sheer variety makes it as replayable as it gets, and a definite guilty pleasure.
And for what it's worth, I don't do min-maxing on my PCs for such games, since I'm too lazy to spend too much effort in the theory crafting as well as putting in the logistical efforts of farming/managing required in twinking. I mean, just look at this graphic from Crate Entertainment about statistics about Grim Dawn replicated here for reference:
That are more than 1000 unique items alone---there is simply not enough storage in-game to store all that. It's a full-time database warehousing/PC save file hacking job. No way I want to spend that amount of effort for a game that I play for fun. I mean, there are tools like the Grim Dawn Item Database, but ultimately, it has to manifest in-game for it to count/be usable.
Anyway, my most successful character is a level-100 Sorcerer (Arcanist-Demolitionist) that relies on Albrecht's pew-pew (official name: Albrecht's Aether Ray). It's basically a high-mana drain high DPS ``laser'' beam. The catch behind its power is that one has to stand still when using it---this makes kiting stupidly hard to pull off. The poor PC is doomed to never completing Ultimate difficulty due to this. I tried mitigating the problem of immobility by cranking as much DPS as possible through the over-levelling into the ``ultimate level'' process---but that runs into a limit because ultimate levels do not scale on forever while the enemy levels (and thus their HP and damage) do in Ultimate difficulty. I also tried cranking up the casting speed, but there is an actual limit of 200% on it (as is the attack speed). I cranked up the Aether damage as well, but eventually I will run into the situation where I needed to farm really hard for really rare attributes. All in all, it just means that my level-100 Sorcerer has had a good run.
The character I played today though is a Blademaster (Nightblade-Soldier). The build concept is to go all out dual-wielding melee weapons and thwacking things left, right, and centre. Watching things blow up with nice numbers is always fun. I've not had much luck with melee characters in Grim Dawn thanks to the ludicrous amounts of damage that come in from the later levels/difficulties, but I think I would be quite happy if I can complete both Normal and Elite difficulties. It's meant to be fun, a guilty pleasure, not some kind of work.
And each time I play Grim Dawn, time just slips on by quickly and quietly.
I must say though, running Grim Dawn on Eileen-II meant that I could crank up all the video settings to stupid-high, and things worked well above the playable 60 fps while simultaneously playing YouTube videos on the next screen. Thanks to setting up alarm-profiles in Throttlestop, I managed to keep the run-time average temperature to something like 93°C with a PL1 of 27 W and an indoor ambient temperature of 31°C. The keyboard does feel a little bit hot, so I'm going to bring down the PL1 value back to 25 W and continue using the alarm-profile feature have a slightly more responsive and aggressive thermal throttle.
Alright, that's enough nerding out for a guilty pleasure. Till the next update.
That said, version 0.9.11a was out, and I was grinding runs to level up to 1st Lieutenant---I needed one more Gold Badge to do so, and I felt the going for a Gun Kata-based run for Angel of Marksmanship (Hard) was the way to go. I was too impatient, and died a couple of times. It was still fun though, redeveloping that intuition about the mob AI to better take care of them while minimising damage. JH differs from DoomRL in that the mobs do not pick stuff up, so their movement are independent of whatever gear/items are dropped on the ground. The lack of diagonal movement means that what used to require only one movement to get out of the way in DoomRL is now a 2-movement exercise. Cover is super important in JH, and running away for better cover usually beats standing one's ground to shoot back. There are some improvements in the UX in that the amount of damage done/taken is controlled by a straightforward linear decay formula as opposed to something more RNG-heavy like the old ``dice-based'' system that is DoomRL---the amount of damage that can be taken off is estimated in the targeting module.
However, punishment does come harshly if one is impatient, which is usually how most playable characters (PCs) die in rogue-likes.
Second, after getting a little worn from grinding JH (I still haven't gotten my Gold Badge), I decided to switch over to Grim Dawn for a spell. Grim Dawn is an isometric-ish Diablo-like that is more developed than the games it succeeded, and this includes my beloved Torchlight II. The big thing about Grim Dawn as compared to old school Diablo 2 or even Torchlight II is the massive class system. There are 9 masteries, and one can pair them up in-game. This means that there are 36 unique classes that are made up of these dual-masteries. Add that to the 9 deliberate single mastery pseudo-classes, that means there are 45 different classes from which builds can be created from. Combine that with the three difficulty levels, each difficulty level toggling between regular and veteran, we're looking at at least 270 different playthroughs of the main storyline (including of the DLC). The true number is much larger because in each of the 45 different classes, there are myriads of different builds that can be constructed, each with a different play-style.
That is a stupid number of full playthroughs to consider. The maps themselves feel much larger than that of Diablo 2, and are more gritty than the 4-class Torchlight II. In short, there's likely to be no way for me to ever ``complete'' the game's entirety the way I did for the four different classes in Torchlight II (I simply can't play through the 45 of them necessary for just clearing the Normal difficulty). Nevertheless, Grim Dawn's sheer variety makes it as replayable as it gets, and a definite guilty pleasure.
And for what it's worth, I don't do min-maxing on my PCs for such games, since I'm too lazy to spend too much effort in the theory crafting as well as putting in the logistical efforts of farming/managing required in twinking. I mean, just look at this graphic from Crate Entertainment about statistics about Grim Dawn replicated here for reference:
Anyway, my most successful character is a level-100 Sorcerer (Arcanist-Demolitionist) that relies on Albrecht's pew-pew (official name: Albrecht's Aether Ray). It's basically a high-mana drain high DPS ``laser'' beam. The catch behind its power is that one has to stand still when using it---this makes kiting stupidly hard to pull off. The poor PC is doomed to never completing Ultimate difficulty due to this. I tried mitigating the problem of immobility by cranking as much DPS as possible through the over-levelling into the ``ultimate level'' process---but that runs into a limit because ultimate levels do not scale on forever while the enemy levels (and thus their HP and damage) do in Ultimate difficulty. I also tried cranking up the casting speed, but there is an actual limit of 200% on it (as is the attack speed). I cranked up the Aether damage as well, but eventually I will run into the situation where I needed to farm really hard for really rare attributes. All in all, it just means that my level-100 Sorcerer has had a good run.
The character I played today though is a Blademaster (Nightblade-Soldier). The build concept is to go all out dual-wielding melee weapons and thwacking things left, right, and centre. Watching things blow up with nice numbers is always fun. I've not had much luck with melee characters in Grim Dawn thanks to the ludicrous amounts of damage that come in from the later levels/difficulties, but I think I would be quite happy if I can complete both Normal and Elite difficulties. It's meant to be fun, a guilty pleasure, not some kind of work.
And each time I play Grim Dawn, time just slips on by quickly and quietly.
I must say though, running Grim Dawn on Eileen-II meant that I could crank up all the video settings to stupid-high, and things worked well above the playable 60 fps while simultaneously playing YouTube videos on the next screen. Thanks to setting up alarm-profiles in Throttlestop, I managed to keep the run-time average temperature to something like 93°C with a PL1 of 27 W and an indoor ambient temperature of 31°C. The keyboard does feel a little bit hot, so I'm going to bring down the PL1 value back to 25 W and continue using the alarm-profile feature have a slightly more responsive and aggressive thermal throttle.
Alright, that's enough nerding out for a guilty pleasure. Till the next update.
Friday, July 16, 2021
Hubris Led Us Down the Steps to Hell Once More
Well well well... here we go again with the hubris being punished. First, the reference: heading back to max of 2 dine-ins, with potential of 5 only for ``fully vaccinated'' (defined as surviving fourteen days after the second mRNA vaccine dose) individuals in entire party. Next, the context of why this happened: spike from the ``KTV cluster''.
And now, my thoughts on the matter.
Well... it's a shame that we have a spike like this just when we are about to head to the start of the end-game play for SIN city's COVID-19 situation. Could it be avoided? Of course, since the location of the cluster wasn't even in some kind of ``essential'' category for basic survival---it was purely for entertainment. And in times of crisis, I think that it is acceptable to give up entertainment for a while until the crisis has been averted. That the people involved knowingly decide to circumvent the measures put in place to help bring about the start of the end-game is pure hubris and nothing more.
Am I angry with them? No, just disappointed---I've resolved to not get angry at people over things that should rightfully be considered disappointments instead.
It still doesn't affect me too negatively since I am on sabbatical. Call it a premonition or something, but I did recently turn down a meet-up request from some of the CO fogeys---to be fair, the reasons are more prosaic than prophecy; I felt like I needed a little bit more space away from scrutiny since I don't really have anything else going on that was worth talking about. Much of what is going on is in my head (and dumped out here where applicable); not being at work means a lack of human interaction from that front (which reduces the amount of friction that needs to be dealt with and thus vent about); not having any rehearsals mean that there was little to nothing to talk about with respect to music---all these are in comparison to their budding couple's life, dealing with work-place metamorphosis due to the extended COVID-19 changes, among other things.
An outsider like me with only loose ties with people will eventually become an even bigger outsider when these loose ties get ever more loose thanks to the social isolation that SIN city's COVID-19 measures strongly imply/enforce.
That feeling is showing up even among the care group, though I'm not sure if it is just me being sensitive (an irony for sure), or is actual/factual.
Sometimes I fear that at the end of 2021, I would be an even bigger outcast/hermit than I was before. But only sometimes though.
------
In other news, I bitched nearly a month ago about how the construction process was so drawn out. Well, I have some updates.
The good news is that the covered walkway linking my cluster of apartment blocks to Hougang Village across Hougang St 61 is completed---it even has accessibility features like a suitable ramp on the far side to allow the wheelchair to go up smoothly.
The bad news are:
What the heck man. I sure hope that they are going to rectify these issues, otherwise I'd be wondering just what the heck are they doing.
Anyway, they have been doing more welding in the past few days, which meant lots of funny bright light at the corner of my eyes, and the associated vapours. I wouldn't be surprised if that shortened my life a little, but I'm frankly not that sure.
Well, that's about it for now. It's a Friday, but days don't really mean anything to me while I am on sabbatical---only the diurnal cycle is meaningful enough for me to keep track of. Till the next update then.
And now, my thoughts on the matter.
Well... it's a shame that we have a spike like this just when we are about to head to the start of the end-game play for SIN city's COVID-19 situation. Could it be avoided? Of course, since the location of the cluster wasn't even in some kind of ``essential'' category for basic survival---it was purely for entertainment. And in times of crisis, I think that it is acceptable to give up entertainment for a while until the crisis has been averted. That the people involved knowingly decide to circumvent the measures put in place to help bring about the start of the end-game is pure hubris and nothing more.
Am I angry with them? No, just disappointed---I've resolved to not get angry at people over things that should rightfully be considered disappointments instead.
It still doesn't affect me too negatively since I am on sabbatical. Call it a premonition or something, but I did recently turn down a meet-up request from some of the CO fogeys---to be fair, the reasons are more prosaic than prophecy; I felt like I needed a little bit more space away from scrutiny since I don't really have anything else going on that was worth talking about. Much of what is going on is in my head (and dumped out here where applicable); not being at work means a lack of human interaction from that front (which reduces the amount of friction that needs to be dealt with and thus vent about); not having any rehearsals mean that there was little to nothing to talk about with respect to music---all these are in comparison to their budding couple's life, dealing with work-place metamorphosis due to the extended COVID-19 changes, among other things.
An outsider like me with only loose ties with people will eventually become an even bigger outsider when these loose ties get ever more loose thanks to the social isolation that SIN city's COVID-19 measures strongly imply/enforce.
That feeling is showing up even among the care group, though I'm not sure if it is just me being sensitive (an irony for sure), or is actual/factual.
Sometimes I fear that at the end of 2021, I would be an even bigger outcast/hermit than I was before. But only sometimes though.
------
In other news, I bitched nearly a month ago about how the construction process was so drawn out. Well, I have some updates.
The good news is that the covered walkway linking my cluster of apartment blocks to Hougang Village across Hougang St 61 is completed---it even has accessibility features like a suitable ramp on the far side to allow the wheelchair to go up smoothly.
The bad news are:
- Design flaw in connecting the end of the covered walkway to the extended roofing---the covered walkway goes above the extended roofing, so when it rains, the rainwater will flow along the roof and drench whoever is trying to transition from the walkway into the Hougang Village area;
- The central concrete island divider has been hacked flat with the covered linkway overhead to provide acessibility, but the exit points of either side have not undergone that treatment---the nearest one is from that legalised ``illegal'' accessibility crossing made some 5 m away, which is uncovered;
- The `p' and `q' metal barriers that were supposed to limit cyclists' speed can be easily circumvented by just going around them, since the newly constructed covered walkway extends the width by another 1 m or so.
What the heck man. I sure hope that they are going to rectify these issues, otherwise I'd be wondering just what the heck are they doing.
Anyway, they have been doing more welding in the past few days, which meant lots of funny bright light at the corner of my eyes, and the associated vapours. I wouldn't be surprised if that shortened my life a little, but I'm frankly not that sure.
Well, that's about it for now. It's a Friday, but days don't really mean anything to me while I am on sabbatical---only the diurnal cycle is meaningful enough for me to keep track of. Till the next update then.
Thursday, July 15, 2021
Binge Watch
Earlier today, I asked out loud what I wanted to do. Well, I answered it, as well as that last self-thought back in May---I binged-watch the Hellsing OVA.
It's not the first time that I have watched it, but I am a little surprised that I had not talked about it at all in this blog. Fascinating.
Anyway, Hellsing's anime adaptation comes in two flavours, the first TV series, and the OVA. They are both based on the Hellsing Manga, of which I have all ten tankōbon volumes translated into English by Chuang Yi Publishing. Where they differ is when they were produced---the OVA was done after the whole story of Hellsing was completed and was thus most faithful in the adaptation, while the first TV series diverged from the end of the Valentine brothers story arc. The entire background theme of Millenium (and holdover Nazis) was omitted in the first TV series since the details of that only came on much later in the manga---at the time of anime (2001--2002), those details had not emerged yet. That entire explanation arc was replaced with an alternative explanation that tied the available plot in the TV series together.
Between the two, I think the manga's grandiose version as adapted into the OVA suits the theme better as compared to the TV series. In fairness though, all these are in retrospect---there was always a danger of diverging too much from the source material to the point that it breaks what the original stood for. No one could predict that Kouta Hirano would go that far as to include hold-over Nazis into his storyline, and how that whole spiel of an eternal war was really the ultimate demonstration of how Alucard may be defeated ``once and for all''. The TV series did a good job with what they had---in addition, I think their soundtrack had better groove than the one that was present in the OVA. Back when I could use a CD player in the car, the Hellsing TV series soundtrack was what I would play to ensure minimal distracted driving and maximal alertness due to the strong beats.
It's definitely a nostalgia trip, and there are a few more such anime series on my list that fall in that category. Let's see how many of them I can get through in between all the reading, gaming, and catching up on more recent productions from various YouTubers and VTubers.
That's all for now. Till the next update.
It's not the first time that I have watched it, but I am a little surprised that I had not talked about it at all in this blog. Fascinating.
Anyway, Hellsing's anime adaptation comes in two flavours, the first TV series, and the OVA. They are both based on the Hellsing Manga, of which I have all ten tankōbon volumes translated into English by Chuang Yi Publishing. Where they differ is when they were produced---the OVA was done after the whole story of Hellsing was completed and was thus most faithful in the adaptation, while the first TV series diverged from the end of the Valentine brothers story arc. The entire background theme of Millenium (and holdover Nazis) was omitted in the first TV series since the details of that only came on much later in the manga---at the time of anime (2001--2002), those details had not emerged yet. That entire explanation arc was replaced with an alternative explanation that tied the available plot in the TV series together.
Between the two, I think the manga's grandiose version as adapted into the OVA suits the theme better as compared to the TV series. In fairness though, all these are in retrospect---there was always a danger of diverging too much from the source material to the point that it breaks what the original stood for. No one could predict that Kouta Hirano would go that far as to include hold-over Nazis into his storyline, and how that whole spiel of an eternal war was really the ultimate demonstration of how Alucard may be defeated ``once and for all''. The TV series did a good job with what they had---in addition, I think their soundtrack had better groove than the one that was present in the OVA. Back when I could use a CD player in the car, the Hellsing TV series soundtrack was what I would play to ensure minimal distracted driving and maximal alertness due to the strong beats.
It's definitely a nostalgia trip, and there are a few more such anime series on my list that fall in that category. Let's see how many of them I can get through in between all the reading, gaming, and catching up on more recent productions from various YouTubers and VTubers.
That's all for now. Till the next update.
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