Remembering to Keep Things Fun, and Them EPP Values

The numbers game is always so seductive to play. Once a quantifiable measure is defined, it eventually becomes easier over time to attempt to improve upon the numbers that make up that measure, a phenomenon that is generalised by Marilyn Strathern from Charles Goodhart's original observation as:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

It's not a new concept, the original observation as stated by Goodhart was from 1975 (generalisation was in 2007).

Don't get me wrong---determining the quantifiability of some variable is often a very good first step towards understanding, since the use of numbers allows one to define these things all at once (through mapping properties to that of numbers):

1. ``Ordering'', a means of putting state space into some kind of sequence for purposes of comparison;
2. ``Boundedness'', a determination if a maximum/minimum may be found, or if suprema/infima are applicable instead; and
3. ``Resolution'', the determination of the smallest amount of change in the phenomenon that can be measured.

The study of numbers is the most rigorised among the many different branches of knowledge that are available, and thus finding some kind of isomorphism with them is an effective way of leap-frogging knowledge in a different domain using the theories that have already been proven/established within that of numbers.

However, the quantified measures never explain the whole story except in the most restrictive of conditions---even physics, a large source of quantified measures of reality, has to define several strong assumptions and conditions before the specific equations can be used, which is often summarised as being the cosmological principle. It's a ``principle'' in the sense that it is an axiomatic assumption---its provability is nuance-filled and sketchy at best.

Heading back to the topic at hand, I am not-so-obviously not intending to talk about cosmology here, but my own ``numbers game'' associated with my reading list. I have this compulsion to want to beat my old records of reading [at an annual basis], and it is starting to pervert the way I choose books to read. It has also changed the way that I have been deciding to spend my time, feeling guilty at times when I am doing something else other than reading some long work that can yield more than one ``named item'' as defined in my read list.

Essentially, I've made reading go from something I do for fun into something that I am doing for not-fun. I can't call it ``work'', because it isn't, but it sure is turning into some kind of a chore.

I'm on a sabbatical, I'm supposed to be recharging and recentring myself. I should be exploring, thinking, planning, improving, and not getting all hung up on things that I was previously doing at work that was driving me insane.

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In other news, I figured out my problems with the stuttering frame rate for Grim Dawn. Turns out that I screwed up the Speed Shift EPP values---by keeping it at 255, I sort of improved on thermals through overly preferring a lower clock-rate, but it meant that under sufficient load, even the 26× multiplier inevitably gets dropped to 8× ever so often, which causes a lag spike from the loss of a whole lot of clock cycles. I adjusted it to 32 for both the bursty and continuous performance, and the micro-stuttering went away, while the thermals (at −80.1 mV offset voltage across the board) were very tolerable.

Grim Dawn is quite CPU intensive, and that's why that little blip was enough to stutter. I think that Minecraft would benefit from this too... I'm going to get into my single-player 1.17.1 world and build an iron farm to try it out.

So dumb. All this episode does is to remind me to think carefully about the whole system and do enough tests to find out the bottlenecks and fix them accordingly. Maybe I'm getting a little softer around the edges now that I am on sabbatical... who knows.

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