Big Badda Bang of Words

Ah... end of the week. Final-fucking-ly. The week has been long, for a variety of reasons that I will not go into, because it is (1) boring for most people; and (2) involves too any ``other people'' that it really isn't about me any more.

Instead, let's talk about some accumulated things that I had done.

Not too long ago, I learnt about some new HTTP headers needed for security, along with an online tool to test them. The idea behind these ``security headers'' is to provide server-centric instructions to the client browser to ``know'' what kinds of content (static or executable) are to be considered legitimate from the perspective of the server that the client is connecting to. This is the missing information link that is needed to prevent the class of exploits that starts with a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, which includes drive-by malware downloads, page hijacking to siphon off user input (and therefore information). It is an explicit white-list to the client on what the server knows as resources/actions that it needs that the client should pay attention to, ignoring/stopping any that do not follow that whitelist.

Intrigued, I tried setting it up on my personal domain. The HTTP headers were created in a no-brainer way, but the behaviours that they created... broke lots of things.

For starters, there is now a strict segregation of the presentation layer (i.e. the HTML and CSS stuff) from the controller layer (i.e. any executable code, often in the form of JavaScript). One can no longer use the on* family of attributes within the HTML tags to create callbacks for specific actions (notably in my case, the onClick, onChange, and onLoad actions).

That broke enough stuff that I had to rewrite my website to do that, and boy did that take a while.

Also, even in the presentation layer, there was a strict enforcement of splitting out the semi-structured layer from the styling layer (i.e. HTML files cannot have embedded CSS styles, no matter how small, nor when they were inserted (like in original HTML file, or as part of some DOM-tree shenanigans)). It wasn't difficult; it was more annoying than anything else.

But after all that effort, my website works well now, and you can verify the Security Headers with the link.

The eagle-eyed will notice that the new pages no longer have referrals to the CSS/HTML validation links. That's because one of the security headers basically blocks the passing of the forwarding page's URL to the forwarded to URL, which made such validation links impossible to operate in the client browser.

My chief constraint is that I have very little control over how to configure the website server program, so I had to do what I had to do just to keep the 'net gatekeepers happy. Like how I ended up creating a damn sitemap, and having to do up an entire toolchain that minifies and GZips individual pages, all because the damn gatekeeprs of the 'net these days state that all websites are clearly meant for machine-to-machine communication, so the sources of the pages themselves should be mangled for efficient machine-to-machine communication, as opposed to something that is human readable (and therefore learnable from).

Man, the ways of the 'net have changed drastically over the past 25 years.

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I have the ESV Study Bible in hard copy for a few years now, and have wanted to grind through it slowly but surely as part of my own education on my faith. It's not my first time through the Bible (according to my own loose tracking, I've covered the Bible end-to-end two full times by now). But one of the biggest problems was that the book was an inch thick, and has terrible portability, despite it being the ``personal edition'' and having the general dimensions (not counting the thickness) of an A5 sheet of paper.

An e-book version would work wonders on the portability front.

Crossway has it. Unfortunately, it is terrible to use.

You see, unlike the deadtree version where the ESV text sits in the upper half of the page, and the extensive study notes sit as end notes in the bottom half, the official e-book version treats it like a hypertext document with oversized text, where the footnotes are replaced with links that jump to a completely different part of the binary file, and after a few such jumps, being lost becomes the regular state of things, made worse by being on an e-reader like the Kindle [Colorsoft].

In short, the official e-book sucks.

I had been patiently looking to see if there was a version of the ESV Study Bible that was just a straightforward digitisation of the printed version, with all the information where they are, without having to jump all over the place like a punch drunk monkey.

Let's just say my patience paid off and I got ahold of such a version. There was a problem with the images that made up each scanned page---there was a very strong unsaturated red tinge that made the text contrast terrible.

Ignoring lots of [necessary] intermediate steps, I managed to fix the contrast problem at the image level with the following ImageMagick miniscript/command:

find -type f -iname '*.jpg' \
  -exec magick {} -separate -contrast-stretch 0.5%x66% \
  -combine {}_out.jpg \;

So what this does is that it uses the find command to locate all the image files, and then apply the ``auto-leveller'' on each channel separately, allowing up to 0.5% of the pixels to go ``black'', and up to 66% of the pixels to go ``white''. The 66% is empirically determined through checking the output---the idea is that we want the ``background'' colour of the page to have its unsaturated red plus bleedthrough from the other side's text to ``go away'' (the actual paper is thin enough that there is some bleedthrough in real-life, which of course meant that the scan would yield the same problem, decreasing legibility).

I had tried ImageMagick's -auto-level option before, but it did nothing to the contrast. Using the alternative of

magick {} -colorspace Lab -channel 0 \
  -auto-level +channel -colorspace sRGB {}_out.jpg

brightened the contrast, but did not remove the unsaturated red tinge much. It was only after applying the final incantation I specified in the beginning that I saw results.

And the results were dramatic (I'm not showing them here for obvious reasons), and after running the images through an older version of KCC (I used 7.2.0 instead of whatever is there now because the 7.3.x series broke many things), I had something that worked wonderfully on Eirian-VI, my Kindle Colorsoft. In this case, I needed the colour ability of Eirian-VI since colour is used quite extensively as highlights, and for specific diagrams/illustrations within the ESV Study Bible to explain core concepts.

I said that I left out some necessary intermediate steps. They weren't the focus of this discovery, but were needed because magick could not work on the source file directly to generate the type of output needed. I used an updated version of pypdf that needed pillow, which demanded that one does not update one's Cygwin Python3 installation to 3.12, because it messes the hell out of the dependency availability from the mish-mash of libraries under the default 3.9 and newer 3.12.

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The stupid thing I bought finally showed up yesterday. It was, as they say in Chinese, 又贵又重. Shipping was a bitch, and product delivery took a while.

But it finally arrived.

First impressions: yep, it is as it says on the box---a fucking heavy cup. To ensure that it could have the 10 kg mass, the cup's diameter was large enough to quality as a mug, but its depth was shallow enough that the total volume was still cup-sized. In essence, it was like a bowl with a really extended and heavy-af bassbase. I currently cannot lift it one-handed, and am not expected to do this any time soon. I can also see a litany of overuse injuries in the near future as my deltoids and parts of my pectorals get continually hurt from moving this even as they are healing from their own weakness.

It was as stupid as it gets, and I love it.

I also got the 0.5 lb stainless steel shotglasses (are they still considered shotglasses despite being made of not-glass?), originally three (one for me, two for CP/Elain), but they upped it to four when my order was delayed enough that they graciously upgraded it to their 4-for-3 promotion.

That shotglass(?) felt nice to hold and drink from. There was no ``metallic'' flavour that one might think something like this would have, but then again, after having eaten out of stainless steel plates and cutlery, there was never a real ``metallic'' flavour to begin with.

For both, I would suggest scrubbing the interior a little more thoroughly before using them as a matter of course.

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I watch lots of VTubers, so many to the point that 8 regular hours a day cannot be enough. So I watch them at 2.5× speed, which is a speed that the observant will realise to be impossible from both the network bandwidth, and web-client viewer perspective.

The answer is yt-dlp. That's all I'll say about this part.

The other parts start with the statement that for the sake of my network, I don't usually need to watch things at 1080+p, for the reason that the video often runs on the vertically aligned screen.

This means that the maximum width of the video that I will be watching, tends to be limited by 1080 px horizontally.

Mathing it with the usual 16:9 ratio of today, this works out to something like 608 px vertically.

YouTube doesn't have anything at 608p, but they do have 480p, which is the resolution that I often watch my videos in. Automatically upscaling it in VLC media player has some blurriness, but throwing in small amount of sharpen filter, it works well enough.

That is, until the game that the VTuber is playing has lots of words (not a secret: am referring to Blue Prince). The encoding at 480p from YouTube tends not to do well with text, and it was getting a little... more frustrating to follow.

The magic is to recode it to 480p using better settings than whatever was used when YouTube was transcoding the source to the different bitrates.

The incantation used looks like:

ffmpeg -i inputfile \
  -vf "scale=-1:480" -c:v h264_nvenc -crf 23 \
  -c:a copy \
  outputfile_480p.mp4

The only reason why I thought this was viable was that the encoder could make use of the NVIDIA graphics card that Eileen-III had (RTX 4090). I didn't try to encode without the h264_nvenc option, seeing that using it meant that it still took time to re-encode the video part.

``Why not just use the source resolution/bit rate and downsample?''

Well... it's slow and doesn't do as good a job as re-encoding. There's also the side issue of avoiding the integrated graphics card [doing the decoding when I'm watching it] from grinding through too many pixels only to discard more than two thirds of them to fit into 1080×608, and end up with a blurry mess due to the lack of access to the kinds of advanced filters that re-encoding can provide.

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The last thing to bitchtalk about is the trend of ``oh if you see em-dashes in a text, it is 100% AI generated''. Related to that is ``if the AI detector detects that a paragraph of text is AI generated, it is 100% correct''.

On item 1, that's just a lazy way of looking at things. I mean, come on---if you look at this blog, almost all my posts have em-dashes rendered in. I use them extensively, though to be fair, I don't actually type the emdash as is---I type it out LaTeX style as ---, and rely on my pretty-printer to render it as an em-dash.

Which segues into item 2. It seems that ``AI detectors'' these days seem better at estimating the quality of a piece of writing with respect to grammar and diction than to truly ``detect'' the use of [generative] AI.

What I am trying to get at is, just because ``you'' suck at writing doesn't mean that any piece of writing that doesn't suck is ``generative AI'' just because ``you'' cannot write well enough. And if life in the modern world is anything to live by, is that anyone who points fingers and claims that someone else is displaying the qualities consistent with some thing of meta-variable-X, it is more likely than not a projection of the accuser who actually is the thing of meta-variable-X.

And that's about it for this update. Till the next one.

Eliana's First Proper Gig

That was... confusing.

So, despite having Eliana since 2021, I have never really taken her out on an ``official'' gig---I play on her a lot in between as part of the long-standing principle of ``cross-training'' that sifu has taught me nearly two decades ago. But for a proper gig, that has never happened.

The reason is much simpler: alto flutes need their score to be transposed a perfect fourth lower from concert pitch. The reason for this is practical---unlike the crazy recorder players (with all due respect of course), flute players tend to like playing using their ``instrument'' keys, mostly because the music for the flute tends to be very technical, and thus writing in the same ``fingering pattern'' (i.e. the instrument keys) makes it much easier for the regular concert flute (or C-flute) player to adapt accordingly.

But most music isn't transposed, so it becomes hard to just grab an alto flute out to play to scores originally written for concert flute. There's also the issue of ambitus, but that is usually more obvious---the highly technical stuff will span the full three octaves and thus cannot be easily transposed for playing, while most ``singable'' things stay within two octaves.

Which brings us to today.

Aurelia and Stella have traded places with Davie, and are now at MusicGearWindWorks undergoing their annual servicing (clean, oil, & adjust). I could bring out Azumi, and I was trying her out again last night as part of preparation for serving at the music ministry. But I sounded poor on her---and there was something clacky about her keys that made me draw pause. I dropped in some heavy key oil (probably too high a viscosity), and it helped a bit, but that was when I had a thought.

Why not bring out Eliana?

The pieces were in D-key, B♭-key, A♭-key, and C-key. The tempi weren't too drastic (they were hymns, and therefore needed to match up to what your regular church-goer can sing), and were therefore the best pieces to pick up transposing on-the-fly on Eliana.

It all worked fine, except when times I was confused with concert high-C, concert high-D♭ and concert high-E♭.

Oh, and a surprise hymn requested by senior pastor that was in G-key.

The trick, it seems, is to forget all the rubbish theory that people tell you ``oh, it's like reading the bass clef's top space onwards'' and just play the damn thing, remembering that the default scale runs with F♯ that needs to be taken care of. It's about reassociating where in the [treble clef] scale the fingering patterns are located, and just going without thinking too hard.

With enough repetition, it becomes easier. I dare not say that it becomes ``second nature'' until I can hot-swap between C-flutes and alto flute within the same gig without going nuts.

And that's all I wanted to talk about to day. Am still recovering from whatever the hell I had caught on Friday.

Till the next update.

SMS Musing #16

In between lucidity:

If I claim that I'm a musician foremost, then what is it that I stand for? Or rather, what have I done to further that direction that is my self assigned identity?

I have refused to get the necessary grading as a matter of principle, yet that is the bare minimum for entry to the music making fraternity. I don't cultivate a strong online presence that is effectively mandatory for the modern musician for self promotion. I'm not racing to the most prestigious competitions or performance venues to establish the kind of street cred that is expected. And I don't even do the most important thing that many musicians do---teach.

So what am I doing then?

Marching primarily to my own beat, playing music that is somewhat incomprehensible to many because it has "too many styles", like the kind of poly-linguistic potpourri that Finnegans Wake epitomises. I think I mentioned how my dizi dealer was telling me in an off-handed comment that I was playing to many different kinds of music to the point that I seem to have lost my roots (context is from the noodling that I was doing with the new pieces of dizi that I was picking up from him).

But do I really care? I somehow don't think so. As time goes by, I find myself being drawn towards using music to express myself, a short of sonic expression of the writing that I do ever do often. For the past few months, I find myself just noodling free style during the half hour before rehearsal time for Chinese Orchestra, as opposed to playing through the various solo pieces that were notated for the dizi. I still run through etudes every now and then, but the freestyling is more dominant.

It's so dominant to the point that I wonder if I'm missing something without realising. It's hard to say, really. In the old days, I can at least ask Chara, but now, who can I ask? Perhaps only others will know---I sure as hell don't.

Windsor Again!

Ah, here we are once again, nearing stupid o'clock, and itching to write something.

Recently, I went back to Windsor Nature Park, this time with friends from TGCO. I like walks, and this was no exception. Unlike a a similar trip nearly 4 years to the month, we didn't really circum-navigate all the trails that Windsor Nature Park had to offer, but sort of bee-lined towards the Tree Top Walk trail.

Oh, and our starting point wasn't at the main entrance at Venus Dr, but at Thomson Plaza itself.

The walk was fairly uneventful, except for more than my personally acceptable quantity of people due to it being a public holiday---I almost always prefer going for long walks (or cycles!) at ``odd hours'' where there were few people around. Part of the reason is to better enjoy the recreation area without having to deal with clueless ``casuals'' who are obviously transplanted so hard from their usual place that they act thoughtlessly and carelessly (for example, not keeping to the left of the fucking path), and part of the reason is that I just don't like being in places with too many people as a whole.

Seriously, the ``filthy casuals'' we passed by spanned from singing out loud to playing music on some bloody radio, all in a nature park, even when it is stated up front that these were not the right kinds of behaviours at the big-ass notice board at the entrance of the park proper.

But like everything in life, rules/regulations/laws that aren't enforced are basically worthless, and as long as there were no enforcement, bad behaviours like that are expected to continue, courtesy and public conscientiously be damned.

And people wonder why society is on the downhill...

And that's about what I wanted to write about. There's nothing else that is worth talking about for the moment. Just wanted to make a note that I had been to Windsor Nature Park again slightly four years since I was last there. Thomson Plaza itself is hella different, with many new shops, a new sense of vibrancy. I didn't actually walk through the place partly due to the company I was with, and partly because after merely walking for some 7+km, my legs were sore, and I just wanted to go home, which is damn funny considering that I can ``easily'' (for very loose definitions of ``easily'') cycle some 60+km before I feel like my legs are dead.

And I do prefer cycling more than walking, and only because it allows me to go farther, faster. The key drawback of cycling? I still need to move my damn bicycle with me at the end of the day, which is still a pain even if it is a foldable.

Till the next update then.

``MT, You've Got... Issues''

This week... was a different kind of hell. Thank God it wasn't work related, or I think I'd flip. I'll leave out the stuff involving other people, and just talk about myself.

I was in a sort of existential dread for much of the week. Couldn't tell what was wrong---just this weird sense of foreboding.

``But MT, you're always feeling like that. What's the difference this time?''

Prescient observation---at first, I had no idea. But as I took the long-ass way home today (i.e. by using the buses alone), I slowly realised what it was. So let me reconstruct it all.

It began with me thinking (on a Wednesday?) about how are we certain about who we are, considering that we don't really remember anything prior to three years old. And while we, in theory, have lived through the time from the past till now, there really isn't any other indicator that it was ``real'' and not some simulated [false] memory (a.k.a. last Thursdayism). Everything that we think we know is based on some interpretation from the electro-chemical patterns of the neurotransmitters---the classic mindfuck is the realisation that the fovea of the eye actually has the image upside-down, yet our brain manages to ``see'' it right-side up, and have all our actions coordinated somewhat correctly.

``But MT, you lived through it! Couldn't you trust the time that passed?''

See, normally I would say yes, but then I realised that the two times I underwent general anesthesia, I literally ``lost'' time, and yet there was still some sense of continuity of my brain state from before the GA, and after it. A more mundane version is sleeping and then waking up---did I truly exist when I was not really consciously aware of it?

I had wanted to write something about that here that day, but was just bloody tired due to... other reasons, and therefore didn't. Then I was reading Kimagure Orange Road, and suddenly found myself reacting very strongly to the manga. I didn't hate it, but I found myself having to put it down each time Kyōsuke mistook Madoka as being involved with someone else---it triggered a whole lot of really uncomfortable dread within me. Once that feeling passed, I could continue to read, but then at some point later, I just had to stop for a quite a bit more, because this time, I realise that I never really had the kind of childhood that allowed me the chance to explore such relationships (characters are in middle school, so about secondary school or between fifteen to seventeen years old).

That had a few reasons:

1. I had/have bad skin, and at my worst, look like a monster;
2. SIN city's culture is fucked up in that they actively discourage all school-going children (this includes university!) from dating, and then once they graduate, start demanding where the fuck is their grandchildren(?!); and
3. The secondary school I went to was repressive as fuck, while I was a meganerd while in junior college.

Looking back, the only non-trivial relationships that were deep enough to hurt me when they ended were those that I could have once my skin was less shitty.

As I sat in the bus and mulled over all these nonsense (and getting irritated by a BO-laden fat fuck who decided it was fun to try and squash me in---I exited the bus at the earliest opportunity that allowed me to switch over to another bus that could get me nearer my home than the bus interchange), I was getting restless. I wanted to cry badly for some damn reason, and did tear up here and there.

I won't say that I was distraught, but when I got home, I just dumped my work bag, closed the room door, and pulled out my dizi, and started playing solo pieces for a solid hour. These were not etudes---they were actual solo pieces that I love playing, and they had their own technical difficulties, and their associated voice. I played them as though it was part of a set---one run per piece, at the actual pace and expression needed.

That hour later, I felt so much better, and I remembered who I am.

I'm a musician whose first love is the dizi. I started on dizi before I even started on writing, and definitely before I started on computer programming/system design, or even cycling. After so many years, after so many divergences, I still come back to the dizi as my comfort zone.

The dizi is my voice, my anchor back into reality. And each time when I was feeling frustrated, annoyed, or restless, out came the dizi, and after it all, everything would be right again.

Yes, writing can be cathartic, but it doesn't have the kind of physicality the way playing hard pieces on dizi has. No, not even if I were to be writing things out in cursive---it's still different. When playing the dizi, I have to control my breathing, I have to control the movement of my fingers, and I have to pay attention to the score to see what notes and ornamentation I'm playing. I play the concert flute too, but it's a bit like speaking in a second language---the dizi is still my voice.

``MT, what about God?''

God's no slouch. Prayer's important and all, but I still need to take care of the meat bag that is run by the soul. I'm not that saintly enough that prayer alone is sufficient to lift my soul, my mind, and my body all at once.

I think I still have some remnant... issues (I don't dare to use the technical term of ``trauma'' because I don't know how to use it). Not sure if I'd be ready by August for a possible chance of another relationship.

Maybe I'll never be ready. But it's okay---I do what I can, live the best life I can through refinement towards Christ-likeness, and let God do what He wills.

If it's meant to be, it will be. If it isn't, it won't. And in either case, it'll be God's plan, not mine.

Amen.

Fear of the Future

I fear for the future, and not in the typical ``AI singularity is taking over the world!'' sort of way.

I fear for the future because of the amount of hand-holding and retraining that we veterans of the workforce need to do due to all the traumatic nonsense that has come from ``the COVID years''.

Let's math it out, shall we?

COVID-19 may begin in 2019, but let's make it easier on ourselves by starting in 2020, where much of the real pain truly began. The entire global epidemic lasted for roughly 2+ years (let's say 3 for an ``absolute range''). So folks in their formative years are affected if the said formative years are between 2020 and 2022 (inclusive). Let's also take into account the access to ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs), which is end of 2022 (more specifically, 2022-12 onwards).

The 95% confidence interval for freshmen ages is [18,21] (non-scientific), and if we consider the earliest entries (18 years old at 2020) and the latest entries (21 years old at 2022), we'll find that the graduates will start streaming out from 2023 to 2025, which is about now. The few fresh graduates that I did manage to hire during this period were bright, could work well enough via quasi-remote settings (i.e. via text messaging systems and teleconferencing mechanisms), but had some minor deficiencies here and there with respect to social interactions in meatspace, which feels funny to declare considering that (1) I'm not exactly a paragon of social interaction, and (2) I'm not exactly someone who has a statistically significant number of subordinates to make a meaningful statement on this.

I would say that with respect to the COVID-19 impact, it's probably minor. Social cues are things that folks will eventually learn when they are out and about in the working world, mostly because there is still a larger number of old fogeys out there establishing/maintaining the norms that anyone with even a small amount of emotional intelligence can pick up on their own, or have their social norms forcefully recalibrated through someone 讲-ing them.

That's the easy part.

The bigger problem is the rise and abuse of ChatGPT/LLM systems. Using a similar methodology as before (95% confidence interval for freshmen ages being [18,21] (non-scientific)), we see that the earliest graduates are coming out into the working world at around 2026, or next year. They are probably not as problematic, as their abuse of ChatGPT-esque tools is limited to the last three years of their formal education, though to be fair, the intensity of those three years may make the effective qualitative outcome ``bad enough''.

The bigger problem is the one where we are talking about secondary school children (i.e. 13 years old at 2023). They are more apt to abuse ChatGPT-esque systems more, and for longer, and since the teenage epoch is usually a formative one that determines one's future outlook, it means that this generation (and possibly successive ones) is likely to have the most problems with respect to actually thinking and solving problems on their own without the abuse of ChatGPT-esque systems.

This is problematic because these folks are supposed to graduate into the working world (assuming college attendance) some time in 2032. That's seven whole years of possibly abusing ChatGPT-esque systems, where the long term cognitive effects are not known at this stage.

Seven years is an eternity in that space, especially when considering the so-called ``Moore's Law of AI'' that is a 7-month duration between the doubling of the human-task duration-equivalent metric of AI performance.

I'd be nearing my sixth decade by then, and hopefully on the path to retirement (I'm kidding---in SIN city, I don't think we're allowed to retire, what with the pathological perversion of seeing ``numbers go up'' while the quality of life hits a stagnation point).

``MT, you keep saying `abuse of ChatGPT-esque systems'. What do you mean?''

It's about delegating the reading, understanding, and critical response aspects of what an intelligent human is supposed to do to some AI model that touts to be good at all those under some very restrictive interpretatons. I like tools that help me work faster and more productively, but I only use the tools to take the short-cuts only after I have developed a deep enough understanding of the underlying matter to make the short-cuts meaningful. I like to think of this as how we all have to ``earn our way'' towards using calculators by demonstrating understanding of basic arithmetic at first, and basic differential/integral calculus next. The tools that make our life easier presents either an algorithmic short-cut or a data-driven short-cut that is best understood as what I said---a short-cut. Using these short-cuts without any form of deep understanding is dangerous in the future economy because the future is not powered by the ability to replicate without thought---the true value has always been about a new form of intellectual property. If all the ideas and outcomes that one creates is based purely on the output of such ChatGPT-esque models, then one loses the ability to actually create, which is dangerous.

It is the same form of argument I have against automated driving systems. We always assume that the automated driving systems should have a human ``in the loop'' who can take over the handling should the environment exceed the normal circumstances in which the automated driving system is trained on, but if everyone uses the automated driving systems from the get-go, the quality of skill/decision-making needed to handle the exceptional situation paradoxically degrades drastically instead, all because people took short-cuts and never really internalised the foundational information.

``So MT, what's your point at the end of it all?''

I'm just scared. I don't know what kind of people we will get when 2032 comes around. I may be one of the few ``crazy old man engineers'' left who are strongly straddling between the old ways and the new, and I pray that I have enough strength and determination left to train the newbies in the old ways so that they can harvest the effects of both worlds to truly shine.

Because the effects of a failure to do so are too catastrophic for me to even start thinking about.