Malcontentment

I will say something controversial.

It has gone on long enough. It is time to bring back sanity to the rules and regulations surrounding the entire pantomime that is the COVID-19 management in SIN city. The political capital that had been previously amassed has already been spent, and it is all going downhill there---there will be other ways of regaining the lost political capital some time in the future, way before the next election, I'm sure; they will always find a way to do so.

So there is no excuse to not bite the bullet and do the right thing now.

What is the right thing then? Instead of throwing money towards various ``support schemes'' to keep entire industry sectors in the thrall of the government (and thus justifying the need to increase taxes in the near future to make up for the shortfall from ``emergency spending''), work towards reducing the many rules that restrict movement so that people can start to organically support the various businesses that are on these ``support schemes''---this means actually planning for an exit rather than just taking knee-jerk reactions. I know that there is a crisis to manage, but I would be disappointed if the powers that be had not set aside a skeleton crew (or even planned time among the existing task force) to actually think about how our exit might look like, to define the end conditions of what constitutes a ``successful management of the COVID-19 crisis in SIN city'', and to communicate it to the general public. Without a defined end-state that everyone is made aware of, there is simply no way to proceed, and the task force might as well be formalised as yet another ministry instead since it will essentially exist ``forever'' as its mission is never complete.

Instead of focusing on trying to regain global reputation through being overtly friendly to those outside of SIN city at the expense of neglecting the residents of SIN city, focus on rebuilding the local community towards actually being self-responsible and making their own risk assessments. The vaccination rate of SIN city residents are already exceedingly high, and after two long years, COVID-19 isn't going anywhere, ever. Standardise the restrictions to ensure consistency between what is allowed locally, and what is allowed under the MICE events. Foreign capital will always appear sweet, but without the backing of the residents who are the value adders of these capital, what's the point of having so much capital? It will simply come, realise that it is all a sham, and then leave as quickly. The rise and fall of various national-level initiatives that involve foreign investment are but a demonstration of this ``easy come, easy go'' nature---businesses have no morality nor responsibility to anyone and anywhere they go, save for their profits. I know that SIN city has mostly been an entrpôt for most of its history, but come on, residents (permanent, or even citizens) actually exist and they are backbone of the economy. The whole incapability of the healthcare sector to weather all cases is a long term problem that has been overlooked for too long---take that as an existing limitation, formulate a better strategy to keep those who are not actually that ill to stay home, and remember to strengthen this sector in the future (it's a technical debt that needs to be paid for). On that note, the changes in regulation to allow those who are less ill to convalesce at home did arrive, but damn it came late.

COVID-19 was a shake-up that could allow a rewriting of our social norms to make it more resilient, to bring back more of that gotong royong that was alluded to as being the key success factor of early post-war SIN city. Instead, we get a people who are afraid of their own shadow, seeing danger at every corner, misfed with misinformation, thrown into chaos from the myriads of rules that seem to be unprincipled, stressed out and tired with little to no end in sight, while developing stronger anti-social attitudes that can undermine everyone's safety and right to living all at once as it all comes together.

If the true purpose was to reshape a people to remove any last vestiges of discernment to make them more pliable and serf-like, then perhaps the powers that be have succeeded well. The only thing lacking is probably a social credit system, but with all the so-called ``digitalisation'' going on at the national level, it is a matter of time before some watershed event kicks in to give enough political momentum to bring it online---it takes a strong and principled government to not want to do that with all that tempting data that is already collected. I mean, we are already lugging around a tracking beacon under the TraceTogether programme, and it has suffered at least one mission creep from only just enabling contact tracing to a shibboleth for basic living activities under the SafeEntry programme due to its gate-keeping nature of demonstrating vaccination status, with no end in sight.

I will eat my words on the day when an official announcement of a specific deadline for the retiring of the TraceTogether programme; frankly, I'm not going to hold my breath on this one.

That's all for now. Also note that this is the last post for October---all the October posts have titles that begin with `M'. It was tricky to figure out what title to use each time, but it all turned out well. Consider it a type of warm up for the NaNoWriMo that kickstarts tomorrow.

Till the next update.

Meeting My Daily Writing Requirements

I filed a support request regarding the fan vibration. The sound was getting bad---it had scraping elements in it, and was triggering at random moments as well. Terrifying. It'll be a while before they will get back to me though, considering that it is a weekend after all.

I hope that they can replace fan assembly so that new bearings and other good stuff are in place.

An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land by William Stringfellow is starting to get more interesting. It covers largely Revelation from the Bible, and uses it as a way of talking about Christian ethics while still living in this fallen world [of Babylon]. This is in contrast with the more predictive nature of God's Prophetic Blueprint by Dr Bob Shelton. I don't think that either is ``a more correct interpretation'' than the other, mostly because Revelation itself has strong eschatological components to it that is less ``targetted'' like the epistles that make up most of the New Testament, but also because each uses slightly different approaches that come to conclusions that are broadly in agreement (as they should be since they are sourcing from the same Bible). But I will defer discussion till after I've finished An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land.

Tomorrow will be the last day before NaNoWriMo kicks in. I think I'll watch me some Jump King gameplay by Calliope Mori while going ham with Serious Sam 3: BFE and watching the temperature settings---I've had to lie Eileen-II flat on the desk without the support struts because I didn't want to risk more excessive vibrations. I had taken apart the back cover again this morning and added more vaseline as lube---it seemed to work well as an interim measure, as long as it doesn't dry up. I think the vibration problem came back since the last application because I was running the fans at full speed for most of yesterday, figuring out that I could probably try to get more cooling going just so that I can squeeze out more turbo boosted frequencies for longer.

Ah well. Stupid lousy hot and humid weather that is SIN city. Can't do much about that.

Till tomorrow's update then.

Micro-update

No words today to spare. Saving them up for when NaNoWriMo begins.

Only thing I would say is, the fan in Eileen-II was acting up again, and I re-applied as much Vaseline as I could squeeze with a toothpick. It seems to work well so far, even when running under the ``Full Power'' profile that basically pushed the fan speeds to 100%.

I'm going to take a shower and then turn in for the night. The day has been quite long. Till the next update then.

Mini Update

NaNoWriMo season is going to be upon us very soon. I can't wait to dump all the negativity that I have been accumulating throughout the whole year into this one novel as a type of mental purge.

It's sort of like what happened in 2013, where I completed the entry, but I did not put it up for download. I am tempted to do the same for this year's entry. I mean, with a title like 50 Ways to Die, what would you be expecting me to write?

I cropped my hair down again today. It was starting to get long enough that under the heat, the perspiration was getting very discomforting.

And that's about it. I've been playing a bit more of Serious Sam: Before the First Encounter. I find that as I get older, I can't play first person shooter games in long stretches any more. Not sure why, it's just a thing. I remembered that I could easily play 8--9 hours of Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, or even Shadow Warrior. Now... I'd be lucky if I can even get one hour non-stop.

No working on LED2-20 yet... it's getting to the part that requires quite a bit of concentration and more assets to set things up for testing.

Till the next update then.

Mumbles About Fear

Fear. Everyone has it in one form or another, whether or not one is aware of it or not. Fear is something that is deep within, and is a manifestation of either weakness or uncertainty. Those who claim to be fearless are either naive (by choice or otherwise), or extremely certain of the outcome.

Generally speaking, there are few outcomes that are certain. Physical death, for example, is usually quite certain---there's no coming back from that for the most part. That's why those who have terminal illnesses (physical or otherwise) for example, after a period of grief and denial, eventually become fearless upon acceptance.

But I'm in no position to talk about fearlessness. Today I want to talk about fear itself.

Most fear uncertainty for the simple observation that uncertainty has a tendency to be unbounded unless extra thought is applied to apply mitigating factors that can reduce the range of uncertainty. This is what preparation usually entails---taking control over what we can control and doing the best we can in preparing for the eventualities that we can reasonably figure out. Whatever is left will still be uncertain, but at the very least that level of uncertainty is bounded. For those who want to further reduce their fear of the uncertain, they can pray and trust in God to take care of whatever else that they cannot take care, particularly so if they are believers. While there is never a firm guarantee that the outcome will be well for the person himself/herself (if the outcome can be guaranteed, it is no longer uncertain by definition), at least the believer can have faith in the actions of their righteous God who can do no wrong by definition.

As for fear stemming from weakness... I think that it is a reaction that comes from those who did not proverbially ``do their work to earn their bones''. If one had undergone the necessary steps rigorously to learn a skill or to come to power, without relying on shortcuts but instead go through a trial by fire to earn their skill or have their power invested into them by others, then one is less likely to feel that one is weak, imposter syndrome notwithstanding. Part of that reaction is based on the seeming interpretation of what others think about one, whether it is peers, or a more senior person, or even other governments.

Newsflash: no one on this wide Earth knows what they are doing, and everyone is making things up as they go along. The harshest critics of ourselves are ourselves, because we see ourselves every day, and we remember all the seemingly weak things that we have done compared to any other person. Only God knows what is going on at all times, and the rest of us just do what we can. Now while I said what I said, I want to point out that this doesn't mean that there are no degrees to the ``correctness'' of the things that people are making up as they go along---that's what the ``exercising of one's judgement'' means. The ``judgement'' here is more ``discernment'' than ``pronouncement of whether a person is righteous or not'', and it should be applied to the courses of actions that one can take as opposed to applying it to others.

I raise this issue on fear here because I had been thinking about the whole competitive nature of things, as well as how some governments get so thin-skinned over criticism on the ways that they do things. A government that gets its mandate of governance through the direct support of the people as opposed to being parachuted into their position tends to be one that has higher levels of trust from the people, and thus have a tendency to be less likely to be fearful of any critics---they know that they have the unpressured support of the people, and are thus freed up to concentrate on doing the right thing instead of just appearing to do so. Unfortunately, in many systems of government, the process in which the mandate of governance is obtained has been corrupted into a byzantine one that naturally favours the incumbent instead of the one that is actually good for the people. And when the results are not sufficiently favourable to the incumbent (despite winning), the process gets further mangled to bias more towards the incumbent in the next round.

Fear does power a lot of vicious cycles. Arms races are the most obvious ones, and so is the more recent ``race to zero'' economic races in some sectors of industry. A key leveller that the people of old didn't have then that we do now is fast global communications. Information can flow from one part of the planet to the other some how, and with it comes the ability for those who are oppressed under the fear to band together in solidarity and create their own bloc to push back. How they push back though will determine if they end up assauging the fear that the oppressors feel, or exacerbating it causing an even larger backlash.

Humanity's greatest strength [of banding together] is also its greatest weakness, because those of the like amplify their own perceptive reality. Truly homogeneous societies amplify their perceptive realities much faster and stronger, but not necessarily for the better. A better understanding might lead to the reduction of uncertainty, and allowing systems that promote capability independent of socio-politico-economic ability can produce people more certain of their strength and less worried about weaknesses imaginary or otherwise. But these are the ideal---I doubt that we can achieve this in real life.

And so fear will still rule this world and drive much of the associated suffering from the many vicious cycles.

Making Sense of the Rules of the Internet

To make up for the low-effort posts of the past few days, let me do a commentary on The Rules of the Internet that I had alluded to way back in August.

Here we go:

0. Don't f**k with cats.  If there's one thing that the majority of the Internet agrees with, it's that cats are cool, and by extension, other [cute] animals are cool too. So don't be a dick and harm them.
1. You don't talk about /b/.  We don't talk about /b/. By extension, we don't talk about the online groups that we may/may not associate ourselves with in meat-space.
2. You DON'T talk about /b/.  We DON'T talk about /b/. This is important enough that it bears repetition.
3. We are Anonymous.  The fundamental rule of the Internet is that there are personalities, but there is never a clear mapping between personalities on the Internet and real-world people. Anonymity is a built-in nature of the Internet, so don't let the big corporations fool you into thinking that somehow it is necessary to identify one's real-world persona with any personality. In fact, it can get dangerous to do so if we look at the later rules.
4. We are legion.  For every personality we see on the Internet, there are many more lurking in the background---there is no way to tell just how many are there. Never assume that the single handle that one sees is associated with only one person---it could be more, or it could even be none (automated shill).
5. We do not forgive, we do not forget.  Since personalities on the Internet are anonymous and legion, there will always be at least one person who remembers, and there is always at least one person who will hold a grudge---it is wise to remember these even as one tries to participate.
6. /b/ is not your personal army.  A ``personal army'' is like an activist group of sorts that can advance one's agenda. It comes directly from rules 3, 4, and 5, really. In short, don't treat any [loose] association group on the Internet as a potential ally to advance one's personal causes. So all those ``woke'' groups (and ultra-conservative ``no-chill'' groups too) are making the mistake of thinking that those Internet groups they created are their ``personal army''. Spoilers: It will backfire.
7. No matter how much you love debating, keep in mind that no one on the Internet debates. Instead they mock your intelligence as well as your parents.  Ho ho ho... this one's a stinger. It's easy to forget this rule in the Social Media Age, because we get this false equivalence of a person and an online personality due to the hasty conclusion that since a [profile] picture and a ``real'' name can be associated with the online personality, they are therefore ``real'' people who are willing to listen and act like how ``real'' people would do in meat-space. This rule completely disabuses that notion. Debates occur on the Internet under two specific conditions: it's a tight group where every personality present has an associated reputation that everyone in the group knows, and the point under discussion is on a very narrowly defined topic that is of interest of the tight group. And even then, the debate that occurs is like how one would normally view a ``real-world'' debate: an exercise in rhetoric a la competitive debating rather than a true attempt at decision-making. In general though, it is good advice to remember that debates never really changed anyone's minds---most people go into them with a specific mindset already, and are usually there aching for a verbal fight, not to have their minds changed.
8. Anonymous can be a horrible, senseless, uncaring monster.  Well, it comes from being unidentified with a real-world person---the repercussions of any action that Anonymous takes is limited to whatever handle it was that made the said action. Even the personality associated with that handle leaves unscathed no matter the outcome.
9. Anonymous is still able to deliver.  Comes from rule 4---with a legion, it is hard for Anonymous to not deliver. Unless there are some really strong forces keeping them at bay (like a well-funded intelligence agency), and even then, some of Anonymous might just make it through regardless, just to show that they can (and fulfill rule 9).
10. There are no real rules about posting.  Apart from the protocols that are used to send the bits all over the Internet, all other interaction rules are organically driven anyway. This is, sadly enough, true about meatspace.
11. There are no real rules about moderation either---enjoy your ban.  Same concept as in rule 10, except this is about personalities with power. In meatspace, we have laws (and their associated enforcement) to restrict those whom we invest power in to ensure that the power that is allowed isn't misused (even though it does get misused anyway, but if it is legal at that point of time, it's still legit). On the Internet, there is no such thing---Might Is Right holds. In many ways, this is really a natural law in action. In the Social Media Age, the false equivalence of online personality and meatspace person has lulled participants into believing that meatspace rules apply, and so they get all angry when they seemingly get banned for ``no reason'', and then they make a stink of how it is going against their constitutional rights and what-not. I can understand their frustration---it literally comes about because of the false equivalence. The solution then is just to play nice... it is someone else's walled garden one's playing in after all.
12. Anything you say can and will be used against you.  Moreso on the Internet because that is usually all anyone sees. Sure, you can be dumb enough to upload a video of yourself defending your words and what-not thinking that it would do any good, but all that you've done is just to give Anonymous more things to use against you, specifically ad hominem ones on your appearance.
13. Anything you say can and will be turned into something else.  This used to be bad in the old days, but now, thanks to the proliferation of videos (which provide nice appearance and sound samples), this is more insidious. Have fun getting your meatspace reputation smeared in mud for that one-time indiscretion.
14. Do not argue with trolls---it means they win.  Most folks on the Internet aren't there to cause trouble---they just want to seek new information/perspectives. But there are a select few who get all excited to piss people off---they are the notorious trolls. Trolls are everywhere really---in meatspace we tend to call them ``assholes'' or ``dickheads'' or ``CB-kia''. They have no shame, and they don't care about reasoning. They are there for the fight, real or otherwise. ``Karen''-type behaviour can be seen as a contemporary meatspace equivalent of a troll. Any form of engagement immediately leads to a losing position---it then just becomes a question of how much one loses. Take rule 14's advice: do not argue with trolls.
15. The harder you try, the harder you will fail.  Oof. This one hits hard in the Social Media Age. All that stupid trendy bullshit copycat TikTok videos nonsense? Yeah... we saw all that in text form aeons ago on the Internet. At least failing back then could be insulated through the use of disposable personalities. Now, with one's bloody face associated with it, and the false equivalence of personality and person kicking in, combined with The Algorithm of the corporations running the social media, good luck in redeeming from your failure. My advice? If you're gonna do things on the Internet, at least do something that you are interested in, and not because you want to follow a trend. The more you want to follow a trend, the harder you are trying, and then rule 15 kicks in. Oh I nearly forgot... the trendy word for rule 15 today is ``cringe''.
16. If you fail in epic proportions, it may just become a winning failure.  Ever saw a movie so bad that it was good? Rule 16 encapsulates this point. And I suppose it is an inspiration of sorts for the try-hard behaviour that rule 15 captures. ``Failing in epic proportions'' isn't a high-probability thing---you are more likely to just fail normally instead. It reminds me of an apocryphal story about how a professor was giving a true/false-type examination, stating that if anyone could get all the questions wrong (i.e. an epic failure), they would get full-marks for that exam (i.e. a winning failure). The catch though was that if one did not get all the questions wrong, then the number that was correct would be the final score instead. Cast in those terms, it becomes more obvious that one should probably not try one's luck to get rule 16.
17. Every win fails eventually.  Trends come, trends go. Anyone still remember grumpy cat? Or numa numa? Or even ``coffin dance''? Yeah, me neither.
18. Everything that can be labelled can be hated.  Oh this one is a fun one. We say that humans beat other animals because we developed writing that allows us to learn stuff outside of personally experiencing it. That's only half-true: writing as an ability is useless if there isn't some kind of information compression that allows us to quickly and effortlessly refer to an entire body of knowledge with a simpler symbol to build up the necessary amount of detail. That is what we mean by ``label''. This is the strategy that ``woke'' culture uses mercilessly---they figured out how to label different groups of people whose behaviour is mainstream that they don't like, and from there, they make it super easy to identify and then lambast them. I mean, meatspace has tons of such examples too: ``radical left'', ``communists'', ``capitalist pigs'', and so on are such examples. They all come from a practical implementation of othering. We can't easily define the in-group through positive identifiers, so maybe we can define the in-group by defining the out-group of those we don't like, and then apply the ``if you have any characteristics of the out-group, you are not part of the in-group''. And from there, hate can flow.
19. The more you hate it, the stronger it gets.  Oof... another psycho-social realism. When the out-group gets increasing amounts of hate for being in the out-group, they can start embracing their out-group label and then become their own band and rallying call before pushing back, hard. Contemporously, just look at the whole anti-vaxxer movement, the awkwardness that is the US Republican Party, or even the libertarian tendencies of some US Democratic Party folks. It's all about pushing back against what was pushed to them. Rule 19 provides a solution in some sense in dealing with groups that one doesn't like [on the Internet]---don't go round provoking them.
20. Nothing is to be taken seriously.  Remember rules 3, 4, and 7? When personalities with no meatspace stake interact, the interaction shouldn't carry the kind of weight of seriousness that one would expect. Take it easy man... just because hunter2_69420 called you a bad name doesn't mean that you are so and should take it seriously---you don't even know if hunter2_69420 is human or not. This is true even under the false equivalence of personality and person that is in social media. ``Dems fighting words'' only works when you and that person is in meatspace, and under those conditions, there are enough social cues to show just how serious things are. On the Internet, what social cues?
21. Pictures or it didn't happen.  Everyone can say what they want, but they've got to back it up with their own evidence to show that it is true. So, if someone claims that the Earth is flat, that person needs to supply the evidence showing that the Earth is indeed flat, and it is not up to someone else to show that the Earth is not flat. The burden of proof should always be on the proclaimer, but always remember rule 7.
22. Original content is original only for a few seconds before it's no longer original. Every post is always a repost of a repost.  Ah the old classic. Nothing remains original for long on the Internet in the same way nothing remains original for long in meatspace. The only difference between the two is that duration aspect: meatspace duplication of ideas might take longer due to the need to actually replicate things that need time to happen (think chemical processes, mechanical processes and what-not), whereas replication on the Internet is just a simple duplication of bits. If one sees something, there is a very high chance that it was a reposted item. This is especially true when considering memetic material from ``groups'' in the curated social media. These ``groups'' exist for the purpose of gaming some metrics of engagement, and their way of doing it is to aggregate popular material. Except rule 15 precludes them from creating their own popular material, and so they just rely on low-effort reposting of reposts, often times with just enough effort to further obfuscate the origins of the item. And this is why, my friends, if you want to do something original and publish it [on the Internet], don't go in with the mentality of wanting to retain ownership, it won't work that way... see also rule 62. You are better off either going with creative commons or some other open-source type license. If retaining ownership is that important, consider doing something that is more physical in nature, something that is a little bit harder to replicate, and more importantly, where you can apply meatspace law to enforce that ownership. Even then, rule 62 guarantees that with all the effort thrown in, all you are doing is just buying some short time between when you are holding ownership and when it goes into the Internet as a ``free'' thing.
29. On the Internet men are men, women are also men, and kids are undercover FBI agents.  Oh, this might be controversial to the PC crowd. Yes, it's misogynistic, but hey, it's the first mover advantage. If anything, this rule tells us to not bring in gender and age into any Internet discussion, because remember rule 18. If one comes in and begins with ``as a 32-year-old ciswoman...'', you are not empowering yourself in any way, you are just making it easier for people to commence ad hominem, not to mention the effects of rule 7, 12, 13, and 14. Go in as a faceless personality and ``enjoy'' what the Internet has to offer instead of trying to force your agenda. Changing the world involves fixing it from the meatspace, not in a place where nothing is taken seriously (rule 20). Does that require more effort than angry-posting in whatever part of the Internet one lurks? Absolutely, but usually the things that matter will require more effort to get them anyway---get used to it. Use the Internet to organise by any means, but don't think that the Internet alone is sufficient to get real change done.
30. Girls do not exist on the Internet.  See my comment rule 29, and rules 12 and 13.
32. You must have pictures to prove your statements; anything can be explained with a picture.  See my comment on rule 21.
33. Lurk more---it's never enough.  Ooo... this one is spicy. In the Social Media Age where ``engagement'' is highly valued, there has been a lot of effort in making sure that people interact as soon as possible instead of allowing them to lurk. This naturally increases the friction among them because the existing interaction dynamic (I'll call it ``culture'') gets challenged by the newcomers. The existing population is angered at the threatened peace from the upstarts, and the newcomers are angered at how the existing population are not seeing the ``right way'' of doing things. The key issue here is that unlike meatspace, social cues hardly exist on the Internet. The closest to social cues is through the culture inferred from the words that are exchanged within the group. Those who are already in the group are a part of the culture, while those who are new are not---it then behooves the newcomer to learn the culture proper before participating actively. In meatspace, we often put newcomers in their place very quickly due to the myriad of social cues that trigger strong visceral reactions (if one is really out of line, the ``air'' can be sensed to have ``gone bad'' very quickly). No such thing exists on the Internet, whether the false equivalence of personality and person exists or not. In fact, I would say that the false equivalence of personality and person is one of the contributing factors to the lack of lurking---that false equivalence falsely empowers the person when they enter a new online group as they believe that their personality carries forward into all the groups they are in. It's like that stereotypical shouting person at the counter going ``do you know who I am?!'' at the poor customer service representative. Well, this is a new/different social group, we don't know who you are; conversely, we do know our group, and we also know that you are out of line. Since social cues don't exist on the Internet, what usually happens is a backlashed smackdown that just escalates. See also rule 10, 11, 12, and maybe 18.
34. If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.  Yeah. People are weird with what gets them off (see rule 36). The only difference is that with the Internet, physically impossible fantasies are not completely impossible.
35. If there is no porn of it, porn will be made of it.  Yeahh... see rule 34.
36. No matter what it is, it is somebody's fetish.  Just remember what fetish means.
37. No matter how fucked up it is, there is always worse than what you just saw.  ``Fucked up'' can mean many things, but just remember that the depths of human depravity can go really deep. Just remember that the largest advances in technology usually come from people thinking about how to hurt/maim/kill others more efficiently/effectively.
38. No real limits of any kind apply here---not even the sky.  See also rule 10, 11, and 20.
39. CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL  IT'S REALLY SHOUTING, BUT SHOUTING IS COOL EVEN IN MEATSPACE.
40. EVEN WITH CRUISE CONTROL YOU STILL HAVE TO STEER  MAKE SURE THAT WHILE YOU ARE SHOUTING, YOU ARE NOT SHOUTING COMPLETE GIBBERISH!
41. Desu isn't funny. Seriously guys. It's worse than Chuck Norris jokes.  This rule is quite dated these days. I don't think anyone remembers ``desu''. Think of it as a specific interpretation of rule 17.
42. Nothing is Sacred.  A different emphasis of rule 37, 38, and maybe even rule 8.
43. The more beautiful and pure a thing is---the more satisfying it is to corrupt it.  It's like cultivating bonsai... it takes time and effort. And naturally, the greater the effect, the more satisfying it gets. Thanks to rule 37, 38, and 42, the Internet is more of a corrupting influence than a wholesome one anyway---why do you think God is pissed at human sin?
44. If it exists, there is a version of it for your fandom... and it has a wiki and possibly a tabletop version with a theme song performed by a Vocaloid.  Okay, let's break this down. A fandom is a community of fans of something (let's call it by the metavariable ``Abraxis'' for ease of reference). These fans usually like to mashup Abraxis with other currently popular thing to derive fun/pleasure (potential application of rule 36, or 43 depending on context). Thanks to the existence of Fandom/Wikia, hosting a knowledge-base of any sort is easy (think Wiki). The tabletop version, theme song performed by a vocaloid parts are all part of the mash-up that I referred to. Note also that rule 44 isn't just applying to Abraxis... it is referring to derived works of Abraxis as well. So if Abraxis was originally a novel, there might be a game derived from it, and that game will have its own Wiki, tabletop version, theme song sung by a Vocaloid and what-not.
45. If there is not, there will be.  It's the induction rule as applied to rule 44.
46. The Internet is SERIOUS FUCKING BUSINESS.  This sounds antithetical to rule 20, but it is more of an ironic statement. I mean, consider rule 20, and then contemplate on the fact that there even exists this list of rules of the Internet. Head broken yet? So yes, there are people who take the Internet too seriously to the point that it has spillover effects into meatspace (or otherwise really), but it is important to remember that the Internet is only important in itself, and is important as a potential communications channel for meatspace things. It should not be seen as a replacement of meatspace nor can it be manhandled like in meatspace.
47. The only good hentai is Yuri, that's how the Internet works. Only exception may be Vanilla.  Um, anime girls/women are usually drawn much better than anime boys/men. Also the predominance of ``men'' on the Internet (see rule 29, and 30).
48. The pool is always closed.  An old, old meme of a coordinated denial of service from yesteryear forever remembered as this rule. Still, remember rule 6.
49. You cannot divide by zero (just because the calculator says so).  Another old meme.
50. A Crossover, no matter how improbable, will eventually happen in Fan Art, Fan Fiction, or official release material, often through fanfiction of it.  In many ways, fan fiction/art are just one of the many ways fans of Abraxis (see rule 44) choose to be active participants in the appreciation of Abraxis itself. And when someone is a fan of multiple Abraxis? It will be inevitable that they will play the ``what-if'' scenarios when their favourite character of Abraxis 1 meets their favourite character of Abraxis 2. The more talented will then make the art, or fiction, or whatever, and thus rule 50 will be validated.
61. Chuck Norris is the exception, no exceptions.  Self-referential ironic statements are a fact of life on the Internet. Don't worry too much about it.
62. It has been cracked and pirated. You can find anything if you look long enough.  Sadly, this is true. If your main skill is in things that can easily be cracked/pirated, perhaps consider how to incorporate aspects that can make you some money while being resistant to being cracked/pirated. Physical merchandise is a thing for creative works, while blocking functionality behind the Software as a Service is another. Having a donation account for direct monetary contribution is also a good way to getting support/remuneration without necessarily having to resort to ``evil'' ways too. Just remember that unlike what corporations like to say, a pirated/cracked copy isn't usually a ``lost sale''---it was never really a sale to begin with. Tolerating some amount of piracy can actually turn out well, because it can create a de facto standard instead (remember the days of Photoshop before it got all to the cloud?).
63. For every given male character, there is a female version of that character (and vice-versa). And there is always porn of that character.  A specific instance of rules 34, 35, 44, 50, and maybe even 43).
64. If it exists, there's an AU of it.  Yeah, it's like rule 50, except the crossover is with itself. Sometimes Abraxis develops a certain [unnatural] way because of external constraints like time/money, and if the fandom is unusually vocal, they might just come up with their own interpretations of things.
65. If there isn't, there will be.  See my comments in rule 64.
66. Everything has a fandom, everything.  Related to rules 36, 44, maybe 46, 50).
67. 90% of fanfiction is the stuff of nightmares.  A specific implementation of rules 36, 37, 42, and maybe 43. There could be more, but damn this post is bloody long.
72. If a song exists, there's a Megalovania version of it.  As noted before, this is too new for me to comment on.
77. The Internet makes you stupid.  Yes it does. I just spent a couple of hours commenting on the rules of the Internet, didn't I? And didn't you just spend some time reading/skimming through this too, yes? Not to mention the more serious problem of misinformation because people spend so much time on the Internet and falsely equating the correctness of a statement with whether one personally trusts the person who forwarded that statement to them, as opposed to evaluating the statement's truth via the veracity of the supporting evidence and relevant expertise of the person making the statement.

And there you have it, my commentary on the rules of the Internet. It's a really long post, and so I'm going to stop here. I hope this does make up for the many recent short posts.

Till the next update.

Math?

Man, is it truly Monday? It's starting to get increasingly harder to tell which day of the week it is these days.

I worked on a little bit of math to figure out how to define ellipses for use with the CIRCLE statement to show the ``shield'' for LED2-20. It was not particularly hard, but it did trigger me towards thinking about how I can pre-compute the parameterisation at hybrid-bitmap generation time so that I can just load it all into memory and use it accordingly. I also started to work on some line segment-ellipse intersection math, but it was hairy algebraically and I didn't get too far. That last part was to be used for collision detection also, and it made me think about the best way to structure my data to ensure that the collision detection process isn't too bad.

I was also thinking about numerical scaling needed for the various features of the player character and how best to represent them in the gauge form. Right now I am veering towards a gauge that is linear when short, and logarithmic beyond a certain point to handle the potentially large dynamic range (I'm thinking of an order of magnitude difference of about 6 or more from end to end).

In short, lots of thinking about implementation details of LED2-20.

Incidentally, I've also discovered DOSBox-X, a fork of DOSBox that aims to be a more complete emulator for PC hardware earlier than the Pentium II era. It claims more features than the old DOSBox, but the one feature that I found most useful was the ability to send Ctrl-Brk to the underlying program---this is the main way of telling QuickBASIC to pause execution and go back to the IDE. DOSBox cannot do that for a whole bunch of reasons, and it is unlikely that it will be fixed at this stage to do so since this key-command is more likely to show up in doing development work in DOS than in playing a game. The alternative is to use Ctrl-Scroll Lock, but funny enough, Eileen-II does not have a Scroll Lock key(!).

Apart from that singular feature though, everything else that DOSBox-X offers is not as interesting nor needed, and so I'm just going to use regular DOSBox as originally planned. Actually, there is one issue in DOSBox-X that actively discourages me from using it---when changing video modes, it has a rather unhealthy amount of delay, even on maximised emulation speed settings. I don't remember old hardware ever demonstrated that problem... except maybe for some Matrox displays from back in the day. Not sure why, not bothered enough to figure out when I have a working alternative.

I also played a few rounds of Jupiter Hell, trying to get a 100% kill on Angel of Carnage on Ultra-Violence. Man, those Medusas hit real hard. I was doing well till I faced them. To be fair, that was also the first time I faced those enemies, and at that point, I was doing heavy damage with my modded rocket launcher. It seems to me that my play-style for Jupiter Hell has been very weapon-restricted in general, favouring pistols/shotguns, or just the rocket launcher in this challenge mode. Maybe I should do a ``sight-seeing'' tour with a more conventional automatic weapon-type build instead just for fun.

That's about all I want to write about today. Till the next update then.

My Cracked Finger-tip Skin Hurts

Today's a day that was spent in reading. I finished The Abyss by Orson Scott Card. The Abyss is the novel version of movie of the same name written by the author of the Ender series. It's worth a read---the characters are well fleshed out, and the scenes were as well fleshed out as they were in the movie itself.

Apart from the reading, I didn't do much though. Hmm... I mean, failed runs of Jupiter Hell notwithstanding. I was trying to get a Gold Badge challenge of completing Angel of Shotgunnery on Hard difficulty for quite a while, but I just didn't quite get the right tempo. So I've been switching over to Angel of Carnage on Ultra-Violence instead. I made slightly deeper progress on the latter than on the former.

I suppose part of the reason why I didn't seem to have done anything active on the PC or otherwise was the cracks in the finger tip skin for both of my middle fingers. I don't know how nor why they decided to occur---but I do know that they they hurt like hell when using them in typing, since I my fingers actually press the keys straight down via the finger tips, as opposed to being flat. And I can tell you, those cracks in the skin... they are nasty. Mere contact with the key surface is enough to increase the level of irritation through pain, then when the typing goes on, it just breaks any tempo that is available. And need I mention that they keys that they are used on (``edcik,'') are some of the most used keys that one can have? And when they start bleeding... my keyboard starts becoming really unsightly and horrible to use.

Needless to say, I can't play any woodwind instruments either since they need the finger tips to work well.

Anyway, that's all I can write for now. Till the next update.

Multipolarities

It's been a slow day today. I spent some time reading the ESV Study Bible for Luke and Genesis, a chapter of An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land by William Stringfellow, and started in The Abyss by Orson Scott Card. I also watched a couple of Hololive Production videos, played quite a few failed runs in Jupiter Hell, and started on game object structure definitions in LED2-20 in preparation for adding in the game sprite renderer.

I also went to church.

That's about it. Till the next update.

Manipulating Draw Order for Better Performance Through Amortisation

I'll give a quick update and call today's entry a day because frankly, I'm not feeling too good in the head. Too many dark thoughts recently.

Anyway, I talked about getting parallax background movement to work yesterday and said that the speed was acceptable.

Well, it was acceptable in the stochastic sense. In reality, there were big dips in the processing rate ever so often even while using the PCOPY caching technique that came from the increase in workload needed to dump a whole bunch of large (relative to the screen) bitmaps at once whenever the background had to be shifted by a pixel due to the parallaxed movement. This was unacceptable for the simple reason that it was affecting the output animation in a very obvious way.

20 years ago me would have raised my hands and go ``well I don't know how to solve it''. The me of today just shrugged at 1am and said ``meh, let's use another screen page (we have 6 spare not counting the two that we are using for the page-flipping animation technique) to incrementally dump the 21 vertical slices of the background for the next pixel shift, and then just copy it over to the original page for the full background, filling in the missing slices that we didn't manage to do before''. And that was what I did.

It wasn't too hard to implement it---I just added a new variable amortisedXtile that kept track of which of the 21 slices I have drawn so far. Then, I shoved some variant of a conditional on amortisedXtile that would do the relevant PUT as needed. So, instead of paying 21×C all at once to draw the entire background, I just pay C slowly over 21 different rendering cycles to spread the cost around. It worked superlatively well in reducing those dips in processing rate.

One last thing I did to further amortise the cost of the parallax background update was to apply the same set up towards the shifting of the vertical slices by one tile when the left-most had fallen out of the screen. In a modern set-up, this would be trivial---I just needed to maintain [say] a singly-linked list of pointers to the bitmaps in memory, and just append a new one to the end while dropping off the first. Except in QuickBASIC, there isn't such a thing as ``pointers''. No, I can't even make use of the 20-bit physical address thing I mentioned before because I was using the built-in GET/PUT statements for these. Those are faster than whatever equivalent that I did in QuickBASIC, unless I decided to go down the Dark Arts Path of using pure assembly (recall that I've disallowed myself the use of that). If I wanted the array representing slice 1 to now represent slice 2, I would have to copy the contents of slice 2 back into slice 1. Sadly, the GET graphics statement works an order of magnitude faster than a FOR-loop that I could code in QuickBASIC.

So with all that amortised things added in, the parallax background renderer is much more efficient than before. All these are predicated on having more than 21 frames of activity before the time for pixel shift though, which is something I can control somewhat through my choice of the overall width of the background ``skybox'' image and the overall width of the entire level.

I also got the explosion rendering pipeline to work correctly, and wrote a basic pixel-collision function between the masks of two sprites. That is not sufficient for true pixel-perfect collision detection though---we need to take into account the intermediate motion between the start and end of the trajectory of the two sprites as well. Otherwise we will have the age-old problem where a sprite moves so fast that it completely bypasses collision altogether. That's a different math problem for a different day, but it will get done.

The final thing that I did was to add a basic gauge-bar renderer. The gauge-bar renderer is similar to say the life bar of some modern games, where if the number reduces, the difference between the original number and the current number is shown fleetingly with a mini-bar of a different colour. The renderer can do that now, but it cannot do it in a ``smoothly animating manner'' just yet. I'm not even sure if I want to do it, since it will require more sprite elements to keep track of, but we'll see.

I'm also thinking about incorporating hit-boxes in lieu of just using the mask to define collision. This would allow ``boss'' sprites to be more challenging to tackle. But we'll see.

Head isn't doing too well after being rudely woken up this morning by some incessant banging. Till the next update.

Minor Update

Here's a short one. I've gotten the parallax background working in LED2-20. I had to ditch the vertical parallax due to what seems to be a general slow down due to too many FUNCTION/SUB calls. I kept the vertical slices idea, but used a code generator in Python3 that would only call the fancier GaPutBitmap() SUB on the leftmost and rightmost slices, relying on the direct call to the faster PUT statement to draw them. In addition, I ended up using an additional screen page to cache the background to PCOPY over to the page under active rendering to further reduce overhead from drawing each slice.

It does make me worried about how terrain tiles would work though, but we'll deal with it later.

Scrolling the background using on-the-fly loading from the FILEPAK for the needed slice works well now, and the speed is acceptable.

Now I'm working on the explosions part. We'll see how it goes.

Till the next update.

Minute Control Over Dynamics

My new alto recorder came in today. As stated in yesterday's entry, it is the Yamaha YRA-302BIII.

As expected, it definitely gave me much finer control over the tone, with soft dynamics working much better than my previous Yamaha YRA-28BIII. I also did my usual thing of weighing it, and it weighed in at 196.0±0.1 g, compared to the 211.1±0.1 g that is the YRA-28BIII. So, despite it having less mass, it plays much better, which suggests that for woodwind instruments, geometry plays the larger role of determining the quality of the tone that comes out of it.

That said though, I really cannot bring myself to getting a wood version of the recorder, or of any instrument that I don't play as often as my dizi. While wood and its allies are traditional woodwind instrument materials, their dimensional stability has always been something to worry greatly overr. Unlike sufficiently dense plastic and metal, wood will change its shape due to the combined effects of both heat and humidity. The geometry of woodwind instruments' air column bore is extremely sensitive to these minute changes, so they really require more care to ensure that their timbre does not get overly affected by it.

``But MT, you play the dizi---it's wood-like. Isn't that contradictory?''

Ah, but I play the dizi more often than I play some of my other alternate instruments, and so I am more aware of the changes when they occur. Also, unlike the western instruments, the dizi does not have as much ``work'' done on them that can exacerbate any of these ambient environment issues. What I mean is, dizi do not have screw holes to mount posts on (compare with piccolo, and clarinet), nor do they have mixed woods of different behaviour under the same ambient conditions (compare with the recorder where the block is often made of a different wood compared to the rest of the instrument). They do have a stopper that used to be cork and thus potentially problematic, but most modern-made dizi use a synthetic plastic-rubber one instead. The joint separating the head joint from the body is another potential source of issues, but it tends to be problematic only if is sufficiently cold and dry.

So, for instruments that I don't play as often, I'm more likely to look for something that is more consistent in its dimensions. And high density plastics tend to fit this role very well. Sure, it might lose out a little on the visual aesthetics, but come on, it's a musical instrument---how it sounds is more important than how it looks. And since these instruments aren't played as often as my dizi, cost can become a factor to consider too. The cost we are talking about is more than just the initial sunk cost of purchase---it also includes the upkeep cost as well. A hard-wearing high density plastic music instrument built with the right geometry can go pretty far without much upkeep beyond the basics, and that is usually good enough.

I'm up to p500/803 of Mathematics for Engineers (2nd Edition), and despite the author's name of Dull, is anything but. I might want to take a break from reading tomorrow and just play something, either a first person shooter like Serious Sam 3: BFE, or restarting Cthulhu Saves the World; I don't think that I have actually completed that game. I do remember that I liked the humour in it though.

Maybe I'll work a little on LED2-20 on getting that parallax background working. I am starting to think that splitting into vertical strips isn't sufficient... parallax scrolling should also include some minor up/down movements as well, which means that the far background should have dimensions that are both wider and higher than the width and height of the screen respectively. My current partial bitmap code limits the bitmaps in place to being no more than 320×200, which was why I decided to decompose the background image into vertical strips. But needing this vertical parallax as well makes me think that maybe I need to further sub-divide each vertical strip into two to ensure that I don't break anything.

Eh, we'll see.

That's all I want to write for now. Till the next update then.

Manual for Recorder Fingering Patterns

I find myself getting more interested in recorders. They are actually more interesting than what our school day mandatory lessons might suggest because they actually have a pretty wide range nearly 3 octaves (kinda like a concert flute), though the more standard range is closer to being 2+ octaves (2 octaves and a minor second). This is very close to that of the dizi actually---dizi has a standard range of 2 octaves and a second, with an option to go up to 2 octaves and a fourth. There are some subtle differences still of course, since in terms of correspondence of fingering patterns, the recorder's bell tone starts one major second lower than the dizi, and while the recorder does overblow in octaves, the addition of the thumb hole on the recorder means that the lower half of the second instrument octave has some funky fingering patterns to begin with.

Getting to the upper half of the second instrument octave on the recorder is super funky. They use a lot of variations from the ``standard'' simple flute fingering pattern of XXO-XXO to choose the higher harmonics accordingly to get the right pitch (see this old post for examples of the fingering). It is hard to do that on a 6-hole dizi for two reasons: the lack of a thumb hole makes selecting that higher harmonic through forcing an anti-node from pure embouchure control harder, and the holes on the dizi are much larger than that of the recorder while having a larger inner bore diameter, characteristics that make it less sensitive than the recorder in using right-hand hole covering to force different standing wave modes. But having direct embouchure control on the dizi does make up for the differences---the recorder cannot be coaxed to overblow very high harmonics due to the fixed angle set by the windway and labium.

The recorder does have a more dainty feel to it compared to the one-key flute (and it definitely is much more dainty than the dizi, though it is possible to play the dizi that way with enough training).

I spent some time today putting together an easier table to reference the fingering patterns (regular and minor/major second trills) that the woodwind fingering guide has. There's nothing wrong with that website, it's just that it is not that easy to look at the fingering patterns at a glance. I have done the same for the concert flute as well; unfortunately I cannot post them out due to various limitations listed on the main page itself since I do use the images that the site uses itself. Compare this to the one-key flute fingering chart, and the generic saxophone fingering chart.

Anyway, I raised this point because I'm expecting a delivery tomorrow for an updated alto recorder. Specifically, the YRA-302BIII. I already have the YRA-28BIII from 9 years ago, and it had been one of the old ``work horse'' recorders that I enjoy playing. Now though, amidst all the other recorders that I have, the YRA-28BIII felt a little lacklustre as compared to all the other 300-series recorders from Yamaha. It's about that windway---the other recorders that I have use a slightly curved one, and it has an appreciable effect on the amount of control that I can apply on the instrument. The YRA-28BIII just felt very flat in tone; it didn't seem to want to respond to nuances. At some point, when I was trying to play softer, the sound outright died instead of maintaining itself at the lower dynamics. I'm expecting that the YRA-302BIII will perform much better on that.

It's also a way of testing the Yamaha e-shop. Unfortunately, there really is nothing else from Yamaha that I would like to get, save for their pianica. But that involves a keyboard... and I'm a little less inclined to do so. The rest of the [woodwind] stuff, I can get them from MusicGear Singapore, and with good service as well.

------

In retro-programming land, I figured out the format that QuickBASIC stores its bitmaps in 16-colour land. The basic layout is quite messy---see this schematic to understand the actual memory-mapping used for the hardware. The abstraction here is that the 16-colour is broken down into its 4 bits, with each bit occupying one ``bit plane''. QuickBASIC stores the bitmap in row-major order, with each row comprising a byte-aligned bitmap for each plane. The bytes little-endian order, while the bits are big-endian order (as explained in the schematic). So, to write one pixel colour into the bitmap, I would have to access four different bytes and use bit-operations to set the correct bit. It's horrible, and it sucks, but it was needed because it was designed to conform to what the hardware was capable of. Figuring out the format is important because I needed some way to do pixel perfect collision---dumping it to screen and iterating through what was on-screen felt very wasteful to me. Having in-memory bitmaps that I can operate on also expands options for when I need them, like extracting sub-bitmaps from existing bitmaps/hybrid bitmaps. I think of it as a way to support things like masked bitmapped versions of fonts to allow the background to show through without having to manually create and maintain 256 separate hybrid bitmap arrays (urgh). Potentially, it can be used to handle frame-animations for individual sprites, but that will not be a high priority for now because I don't know how much memory I will end up with.

I also revamped the memory-related parts that I was using for LED2-20. The old method that I was using had an error in it---I was advancing the offsets by one [byte] each time, and when it hit 65536, I rolled it over back to 0 and incremented the segment. It was wrong because of the translation from the segment:offset to the 20-bit physical address was based on segment×16+offset. This meant that if I did what I did, I would end up going back to some previously seen memory location to recopy, which was wrong.

The correct way was to advance along the actual 20-bit physical address to make the copy. However, there was no way within QuickBASIC to walk through the memory that way---it had to be reduced back to some segment to be set by DEF SEG before the relevant PEEK/POKE can be done. And so there had to be some translation in between these two. I haven't benchmarked if this method was fast enough, but at least it would not be the part that breaks if/when I decide to use the ``huge array'' option in QuickBASIC which allowed arrays to break the 64KiB size barrier.

I also have enough machinery to start generating the background images needed for that parallax effect. For efficiency reasons, I'll probably end up storing them as vertical strips. But before I could do it though, I had to think about how the UI should be like; in LED2, the play area was about 320×176, with two lines at the top and one at the bottom used to convey game information. I was thinking that I would use the full screen, with UI elements ``floating'' on top with the background showing through. I haven't done up thumbnail sketches yet, but I do have a vague idea of what I want. Think of how (say) Bayonetta, Dark Souls and other modern action RPG's UI elements---I think I'd like to re-create that, but in QuickBASIC.

Anyway, that's about all I want to talk about for now. Till the next update, I suppose.

Machines as Masters?

Let's talk a bit about the ``recent'' craze over artificial intelligence techniques that revolve around the use of neural networks. Neural networks isn't exactly a new thing, in fact, it was one of the core ideas of artificial intelligence that were explored from the 1940s onwards. The Wikipedia article that I linked to probably can give a better summary than what I care to do here, so I'm not even going to attempt to do so. What I want to do is to disabuse the hyper-optimism that artificial intelligence based on neural networks (or other data-trained programs really) is the Final Solution of all things involving humans. This line of thought came about during one of the debates that I was having before with someone who told me in my face that I was too much of a theoretician in nature to not see the usefulness of what neural networks can bring, while I was pointing out the sheer recklessness that we are using these tools without proper understanding of its limitations in the name of Capitalism.

The idea of creating a device that can automate decision making is a consequence of our highly successful automation of physical processes as seen in the many electro-mechanical machines. In many ways, boolean logic is applied to measurement based ``features'' (to borrow from machine learning jargon) which results in particular actions stemming from fulfilling certain conditions. A crude example of such automated decision systems as used in the automation of our physical processes can be seen from ladder logic and its cousins in the form of micro-controller logic. In many ways, much of the menial decision-making has been automated already in the form of programs---the world of artificial intelligence is already here even without the use of technology like neural networks.

The key benefit of such program-based artificial intelligence is that almost all outcomes that arise from the execution of the program can eventually be back-traced as a reasoning path through the program itself, with the source code of the program acting as its own documentation of the features that it was examining, and how it chose to combine the features to arrive at a decision. This ability to trace reasoning paths through a program from its outcome is part of what ``explainability'' means. In the sense of defending decisions (or rather, actions that result from a decision) in human societies, having such a laid out sequence of antecedents makes it easier to bring about debate on the correctness/validity, since all who are interested can examine the antecedents and state if they agree with the feature, the value of the feature at the time of the evaluation, or even the correctness of the combination of the features that spark off a branch in the execution path.

Assuming no exceptions or crashes of the program, all outcomes that it produces must come from at least one execution path through its program logic. This level of certainty combined with the direct correspondence nature of feature and outcome the execution path can inspire trust in the program's correctness, as well as allowing people to decide together how to fix it if the program outcome for a specific context is not acceptable. This is a good thing, because as human societies evolve over time, their needs and requirements change, and the associated programs may need to have their reasoning checked against the updated expectations, and if that is lacking, must be fixed accordingly to fulfil the correctness of the automated decision making. More importantly, the error of a single outcome can be used to correct the program.

Now let's go back to the neural network and be extension, other computer programs that require training in order to achieve their purpose. These techniques exist for the reason that the problem space that they are used in are either:

1. Not well understood due to too many inter-relating variables; or
2. May be understood somewhat in abstraction, but face a steep effort wall in converting that abstraction into the boolean logic form that digital micro-processors can handle.

As humans, we tend to use consensus as a means of determining correctness, and a consensus is often obtained through structured empiricism (scientific method). So a logical extension of that reasoning process when faced with problem spaces of such nature is to try and get as much data as it is possible and ``make sense'' out of it.

There are some catches though:

1. Data are not created equal: it's the amount of information relative to the outcome that it contains that is critical. If I want to know if tomorrow is likely to rain, knowing that there exists spotted dogs does not help me.
2. Representation is the cornerstone of all intelligence. As humans, we cheat a little since we already have some built-in representations that we axiomatically take for granted---machines are dumb enough that we need to explicitly define it for them. It's easy to go overboard too---see the curse of dimensionality. ``Dimensionality'' here refers to each feature that we introduce to our model/program.

Much of the work [in machine learning] has been to deal with these two catches---it is important work because helps to establish the baseline correctness of the approach. So all the different neural network architectures including the number of levels, types of units, units per level, connection schemata, regularisation, ensemble learning protocols and the like are to address these two major catches. Getting these right is more art than science for now, but who knows when that will be made rigorous enough that we can predict performance before doing any training/validation.

There is a related problem from trying to solve these two big catches: I call it the surjection problem. Put simply, it is usually the case that the number of unique input to the neural network far exceeds the number of unique outcomes that we want. By the pigeonhole principle, this means that there will exist some specific outcome that will have more than one unique input that can reach it. This is usually not a problem because we assume that the input to the neural network is sufficiently biased towards ``what is possible in the real world'' that the neural network will therefore ``only be used in possible real world situations''. We gain some confidence about this through the data collection protocol that is used to train the model/program.

So, where is the disabusement?

Disabusement #1: Neural networks are fallible, and therefore we need oversight when we choose to use them as a tool.  Neural networks are fallible for the reason of the ``surjection problem'' that I raised earlier. The attack idea is like this: let's say I want a specific outcome from a decision process that is made up of the neural network. All I need to do then is to find some input that I can shove into the neural network to get that outcome. This attack can work because neural networks are surjective in nature, and more importantly, are not designed to be collision resistant because they were designed to achieve the right outcome given ``possible [in the real world]'' input and not to exclude any outcome given ``impossible [in the real world]'' input (more specifically, the behaviour of the neural network when fed with ``impossible'' input is not explicitly tested). There is a practical reason for this: the number of unique ``possible'' input is generally tractable compared with the number of unique ``impossible'' input.

Sounds impossible? Think again. These attacks are going to be more sophisticated over time as more neural networks play larger roles in decision making processes that matter. It may not be against facial recognition next time; it could be using the small hijacking of communicated data to confuse the neural network controlling infrastructure, or something more coordinated and nefarious that attacks entire economies---the possibilities for mischief are endless. In fact, it can get much worse quickly because there is a high chance that these neural networks will converge to a few trained ``super'' neural networks that everyone uses [in a service model] because training neural networks requires stupid amounts of [relevant] data and computational power that only the a few big players have, making such attacks increasingly profitable from the return of investment of effort perspective. An example of such a ``super'' neural network that can be a basis for downstream use is GPT-3.

Not terrified enough? What if we tie the human institutions of punishment to the outcome of these neural networks? What if one is automatically charged of a crime because the neural network misidentified your profile picture from the CCTV? What if the justification for the use of these automated tools with no oversight prior to taking action on final outcome is the need to deal with the increased transaction/population density/costs of deploying people to look out? Will you want to live in such a world?

Disabusement #2: Even if we have oversight, correcting the neural network so that its outcome conforms with our [society's] understanding of correctness requires a Herculean effort akin to tearing down what was already built completely and rebuild it.  The strength of the neural network is also its chief downfall when it comes to correction: since the behaviour of the neural network is largely dependent on the quality of the information from the input data, any correction that is needed from the oversight requires providing additional data that has the information relevant to the correction needed to cause the neural network to change in behaviour. One might argue that there are still various hyperparameters that can be tweaked to tune the behaviour of the neural network, but the correlation between such tweaks as compared to the oversight-determined correction is sketchy at best.

Thus, training (and validating) with new data containing information relevant to the correction required is still the better approach. Now, whether it requires a complete tear down and re-training of the neural network depends on the chosen training protocol, but my gut says that the oversight is likely to be less convinced with a ``patching'' approach using the already trained neural network as compared to a re-train ``from scratch''. Part of the reason is that there is an ontological disconnect between how the neural network works and how it is trained---it is easier to gain a peace of mind to start ``with a clean slate'' on something that is not easy understand than to worry if the new data provided has indeed corrected the behaviour of the neural network truly, or if it was just part of an overfitting phase that would immediately fail when the next instance of the input of a ``problematic type'' arrives.

Sadly, I don't think that we have the right theory now to explain any of these things. A good theory on the characteristics of how much data is required to perform certain types of correction can go a long way towards making oversight and correction of neural networks as natural as fixing a broken regular program because of a wrong antecedent.

As an added bonus somewhat tangential to the gathering of data to train such neural networks, it is apparently possible to derive a [good enough] approximation of the individual data used to train the neural network (actual paper). Still think that you have ``nothing to hide'' and therefore that little bit of information you feed into the data-dredge is safe?

So where does this leave us? Should we abandon using neural networks in Real Life then? No, I didn't claim that---I claimed that we should not be hyper-optimistic that neural networks can completely replace humans in decision making and be the Final Solution. Even in electro-mechnical automation we still see operators being present to keep an eye out on things despite those systems having decades of good performance data, what more about neural networks?

Legislation must make an effort to keep up, and we must bend neural networks to conform to human ethics, and not bend human ethics to conform to neural networks. Even if this means reduction in the efficiency in the neural network (for whatever definition of efficiency), it must be done.

Neural networks (and their allies) are powerful tools, but they should be treated as powerful tools and not as masters over us. Even the most powerful tool can cause a serious amount of damage when misused, and allowing neural networks to operate completely autonomously for ``big decisions'' that intersect with rules/norms/laws of human society is just an invitation for trouble at all levels, no matter what socio-economic class one is from.

After all (from Bill Vaughan):

To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer.

Till the next update.

Mending Auto-sorter & Lenna

An early-ish update for today: I managed to figure out a fix for the item auto-sorter overflow handler in Minecraft. Consider the following schematics for the redstone filter circuit I am using (reproduced from here):

Main reason for using this is the compactness in the layout, and the relatively few items that need to be stored in the filter hopper (R1C4), but that aside, look at the hopper in R2C4. When that hopper gets completely full, it transmits a signal strength of 15 through the block at R2C3, which eventually messes up the comparator signal at R1C3, leading to a shut down. That's what it means by being ``not overflow protected'', a feature tha I didn't realise until I started to have to worry about this.

My solution is to put a solid block at R1C5 with a switch, which effectively blocks the filter from working through locking it with a redstone signal. This means that when the object of the same type passes from above (the hopper chain not pictured at R0C4), it will not be pulled by the filter hopper at R1C4, and will merrily continue on to get to the other auto-sorter which filters out excess things that I want to send to the incinerator. The item generation rate of my mob farm (and bamboo farm) isn't great enough that I don't have the time to manually set that switch, and so this solution is good enough. With that implemented, I promptly demolished that branching hopper train that I built for the bamboo farm.

The next highest rate of item generation is the sugar cane farm, and the problem with that was that it fed into its storage system directly as opposed to going through the main item bus. Space in the warehouse portion of the mob farm was really tight, and I ended up building a dual-switch version of the shunt I originally implemented for the bamboo farm. It works well too. Wonderful.

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I mentioned earlier about thinking about how to generate/handle the far parallax background, and talked about how I would use Pillow to generate it. Well, I put together a hastily written program in Python3 that generated something that could be plotted in QuickBASIC using the default colour palette. Here's a rendition of the infamous Lenna in SCREEN 7 with EGA 16 colours:

Overkill? Maybe. Remember, the idea here isn't to go full caveman mode, but to use the retro-technology to build the actual game that will be LED2-20 while applying the knowledge that I have gained over the past 20 or so years. If the assets can be generated using other more effective means, then it would be silly not to do so, since it does fall into the whole ``knowledge gained over the past 20 years'' category. I draw the line at [programming] language translation though, so I won't be doing things like writing LED2-20 in QB64 or FreeBASIC or even some flavour of C/C++ and back-translating it to QuickBASIC.

The game itself will be written in QuickBASIC, and potentially compiled to run in DOSBox as a 16-bit program. Now whether it will run well under 80286 is not part of the equation---I'm not willing to go that far, because it will mean bringing in more forbidden techniques of a bygone era (hello MASM my old friend) at which case I might as well just write it for a modern system in the first place. Any other tools that I use that fall outside of old school MS-DOS of the day are not part of the ``retro'' limitation that I am setting for myself.

That's about it for now. Till the next update.

Mindsad

Ever heard of bacon bak kwa? Well now you have---that was dinner. I bought 300 g of it some days back to share with my parents, and I just finished the last slice for dinner today.

Well, part of dinner. The other part is a nice Jack Daniel's on the rocks. I know that I said that I had drained off the hard liquor I have, but I still had a bunch of small bottles of heavy stuff lying around, and today felt like the day to break open one of them.

I felt rotten, that's why I was in a drinking sort of mood. The reason of the rottenness feeling is that gut-punch one feels when one realises that the future is really quite bleak if one wants to stand by one's principles. Nothing remains untainted by egoism and its associated consequences. If I really wanted to stick to my principles, I would probably not work ever again.

Hmmmmmmmm... tempting.

But anyway, since the last update, I fixed an issue that I had with the FilePak that I didn't talk about---the inability to store STRING variables. I hacked a string-to-integer-array subroutine to do the save, but it had two issues: it doubled the amount of memory needed, and it made all string data be even lengthed, whether or not they were to begin with.

The solution, as it turned out, was from reading the documentation. All STRING data is stored in the DGROUP segment of the MS-DOS segment convention. And there exists a function that I've never used before, SADD(), that returns the offset of the passed string in it. With that, it was easy enough to whip up a fix to handle STRING directly.

Relatedly, there exists another function, SSEG() in Microsoft BASIC Professional Development System (or what we would call QBX from the IDE or PDS 7.1) exists that returns the segment for a STRING. If, by any chance, I decided to use the PDS 7.1 compiler, I might want to take that into account. It's not likely though---PDS 7.1 does not offer enough useful features for LED2-20 to be worth considering. The ON LOCAL ERROR GOTO ... construct is quite tempting, but ultimately insufficient to justify changing the toolchain to something that heavy. The next thing on my list might be to think about how to handle the far parallax background, or more specifically, how to generate them. The idea here is to start with some wide background image, convert it to the 16-colour EGA palette, cut them up into individual vertical strips, and then use those strips to simulate the slow parallax movement of the background. That ``convert it to the 16-colour EGA palette'' also includes scaling it to 200 px height among other things, and it might require me to break out some other modern tool to get it done---I really don't see a need to write my own damn image parser in QuickBASIC when I can do it easily with Pillow.

I also re-ran the SPEEDTST.COM with no load using the ``long'' option, and came up with 3.7M parrots under maximum single-core speed (corresponding to 5.0 GHz clockspeed with no other load) against 26k parrots using the default 3000 cycles setting.

That's a theoretical multiplier of about 142×, about 20% to 48% faster than when I had VLC running at 2× replay speed and Minecraft running in the background. Nearly 38 years of improvement in single-core processor efficiency, and we're hitting 142× as compared to the 80286 then, or roughly 13% improvement year-on-year. Realistically though, we haven't had much single-core improvements in general since the current trend is to cater to multi-threaded/multi-process environments, i.e. putting more processing cores into the same die, sometimes with deliberate specialisation to also take care of the overall power consumption of the chip. So fun.

In other news, I had some issues with my over-flow auto-sorter in Minecraft. The problem here is that my 5--6 double-chest storage array was going to run out of space for some items (bamboo), and I wanted the excess to overflow over into auto-incineration. So I did the obvious thing of extending out from the original overflow chest into its own auto-sorter for items that I don't mind incinerating, before sending what is left back to the storage chest system for those items.

It didn't work. I don't know why. I'm currently dealing with it by using a manual red-stone switch shunt to bring the excess bamboo down a hopper chain into the incinerator directly. I'm going to debug that and see what's wrong after this post goes live.

Anyway, time to load up on more Jack Daniel's and figure out what's wrong with the over-flow auto-sorter. Till the next update.

Maps & Masks in One

Hmm. The weather forecast in the morning suggested rain at 0200hrs tomorrow, but a quick glance at it just now suggested rain between 0700hrs to 0800hrs instead.

Okay... meanwhile, it is still as hot as can be.

And that lubricant trick for the fan? Well... I don't think it worked. I probably need to really take it apart completely to get it right. Or wear enough parts down to trigger the service contract.

I'm carefully making my way through Mathematics for Engineers (2nd Edition) by Raymond W. Dull. The early fifth of the book is very algebraic in nature, reminding me of material from upper secondary/early junior college from Back In The Day. There's a sizeable chunk of information on how to use much fewer [significant] digits to get approximate calculations that fall within some specified tolerance; that's interesting when one realises that this book was written in a time where the most potent and ubiquitous calculatory tool is a slide rule.

In retro-programming news, I messed a bit more of my DOSBox installation. The main concern was the general slowness it felt. I know I said I'd like to do retro-programming, but 3000 cycles emulated just felt more sluggish than I remembered. I pulled up the associated Wiki, and according to this table, the approximate system emulated was closer to an 80286. Sadly, I cut my teeth in systems that were faster than that---it was at least an 80486. No wonder I found it super sluggish, and it also explained how the old LED(II) was acting slower than I remembered too.

I think I settled upon the following configuration for my own edification:

[cpu]
core=dynamic
cputype=auto
cycles=max
cycleup=10
cycledown=20

The setting of core=dynamic allows a ``dynamically recompiling core'', which aided in speed. Setting the cycles=max means that we run at whatever the maximum clock rate of a single core is. I also set output=ddraw under the [sdl] section, hopefully for more speed.

And oh boy. A jump to about 96× to 119× compared to before. And this was with VLC running at 2× replay speed and with Minecraft running in the background as I AFK-ed at my mob farm.

Configuration issues aside, I worked a little on LED2-20 today using the concept of ``hybrid bitmaps''. The problem that needed ``hybrid bitmaps'' was the management of arrays from within the QuickBASIC environment. For each bitmap with an associated mask, one would normally need to have two array names defined. Multiply this by the number of sprites and what-not, and the management of these array names are a downright pain in the ass.

Thankfully, the GET and PUT graphics statements allow the passing of an array name with an associated index to start the bitmap from. With that in mind, I decided to solve my ``too damn many arrays'' problem by combining bitmap and mask arrays into a single integer array using an offset to separate them. The first thing to note is that with a bitmap of 320×200 in this screen mode (screen 7's full screen), it requires 32004 bytes. Double that (one for bitmap, one for the mask) yields 64008 bytes. Using the 16-bit integer primitive data type for the array, the index goes up to 32004. Adding an additional 16-bit integer to record the offset yields an array with only 32005 entries. This is less than 65536 bytes (limit of a non-huge array), and more importantly, has an index range of less than 32767. These two limits are not busted by the largest image with mask that I can come up with (the whole screen), so it is not a problem for the much smaller sprites that I have in mind.

And thus, the ``hybrid bitmap'' is created. I updated the various sub-routines to handle this, and also tweaked the sample sprite-generator code to save the generated sprites according to the new ``hybrid bitmap''. The sub-routine updates were quite painless since QuickBASIC allows one to define array indexes using any range of signed 16-bit integers---all I did was to ensure my ``hybrid bitmap'' array was defined like DIM a(0 TO ...) AS INTEGER while the regular bitmaps were defined as DIM a(1 TO ...) AS INTEGER.

Now I'm wondering how best to do pixel-perfect collision checking. I envision basic bounding box collision checking before we apply the pixel-perfect collision.

That's about it for now. Till the next update.

Manipulating Pixels

Ah, Thursday.

The weather is still nut-so, but what can I do about it? Anyway, the weather has been bad enough that I had to bring out the four laptop ``leg'' stands. I had put those away for quite a while because the angle that I was using them that allowed a better channeling of wind (tilted away from me) was screwing my wrists. The ``as-designed'' angle was really to have the laptop tilting towards me, with the rear raised higher than the front, but the problem with that was that the fan on the right side of Eileen-II would randomly sound like it was rubbing on something bad, causing some scary sounding vibrations.

Previously when those vibrations came about, I would hastily suspend Eileen-II before opening up the back cover, and try to clean out the dust. Then it got a little bit more frequent than expected, but I realised that if I left it alone for a while, the fan would eventually slow down/stop, and the next time it restarted, the vibrations would be gone.

Well, today the vibrations happened again. I was annoyed enough that I took apart the back cover and stared at the fan again. Back in the day, I would take the fan out from the casing and lubricate the moving parts, but the way Eileen-II was set up, it was very risky to take the fan out completely. But I realised that there was just enough leeway to get some lubricant in, which I did, carefully. My lubricant of choice was, of course, Vaseline, mostly because it is non-conductive. I slipped some of it in, and after putting things back together and setting up the legs ``as-designed'', there hasn't been any major vibration incident.

A win, perhaps?

Anyway, it was comfortable enough to type on, and I worked a little on LED2-20. I got the right-rectangle (rectangle with edges parallel to the screen edges) intersection sub-routine working, and with that, managed to get the ``put sprite anywhere on screen'' sub-routine working. The problem that I had to solve was that the built-in PUT graphics statement automatically fails if any part of the bitmap image exceeds the boundaries of the screen. This means that, for example, if I have a 16×16 sprite, I cannot use PUT with the upper left corner being at (−10,−10). But in LED2-20 (and other games), we should expect ``partial'' sprites to appear on screen for that immersion. My solution to this was to grab the reduced sized bitmap (and mask) on the fly and use that with QuickBASIC's internal PUT statement.

It works well enough. I did switch up the way I separated out the cases though, relying on error-trapping to handle the cases where the more time-consuming bitmap handling was required while avoiding the cycles spent on validation checking before using the PUT graphics statement in the beginning. This can be quite a time saver in the long run when considering just how often we are drawing sprites on the screen.

So at this point, keyboard handling, and basic sprite/background renderer (the background renderer is similar to the sprite handler, but without the mask) are done. I'll probably need to worry about pixel-perfect collision testing next, or think about the game data structures that I need---either way is fine.

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In Minecraft, I dug out another row of rocks from my mine, and built a glass enclosure for my bees and flowers. I had to do that second bit because the damn bees kept on disappearing. They first disappeared because they kept on running into my lava wall (I removed that), and then they probably disappeared because they wandered too far off from my service platform and didn't return or something.

Anyway, that's about all I want to talk about for now. Till the next update.