Dust and Fine Ash Everywhere

So, I'm running a headache now. Not sure why, not sure how.

But I've gotta write an entry for today to keep that streak going. So here goes.

I bought the HATTEFJÄLL office chair back in March. And it was only yesterday that I realise the back of the chair had five different height levels that could be triggered through a ratchetting process that involved lifting and releasing it. It was in the manual---but somehow, I think I didn't remember that bit at all.

That would explain why I was feeling really strange back discomfort, and why I could suddenly rest my head on the top of the back-rest.

🤦‍♂️

I was working on Eileen-II today when I started to hear some crazy mid-frequency vibration. There were only two things that moved within Eileen-II---either the left fan, or the right fan. I was afraid that something bad would happen, and so I quickly powered down and unplugged everything, before bringing out my screw driver to open up the rear.

As expected, there was fine dust on the fans. They were not clogging them to the point of non-movement, but since these fans were super efficient, any amount of disruption of their balance would cause loud and unnecessary vibrations. I cleaned it up with some cotton buds and isopropyl alcohol and put everything back together. Eileen-II has been operating really quietly ever since.

This was not the first time that such dust caused the vibrations. I think the last time that I had to clean things out was maybe about 6 months ago, while it took nearly eight months before I had to do that before.

I think there were two big contributions to this slightly more frequent occurrence:

1. There has been more construction-related things, as well as more incense burning as somehow some folks decided to set up some altar at the void deck under my block that wasn't previously there before. That latter meant that there were now three incense burners diagonally opposite from my window which were used to burn incense into some fine ash that would eventually blow into my room, as is the concrete dust from all the drilling. All these would eventually make their way into the fans through normal operation.
2. I keep switching out between placing Eileen-II flat on the table, and on legs, using the latter for all the situations where I would not be typing for an extended period. All that means that there was always movement which angled the fans in one way or another, which led to the layer of fine ash/dust getting more jostled about. That jostling could create the situation where some of the dust falls just in the wrong angle and upset the balance of the fan blades, giving that awful vibration noise.

There really isn't much I can do about all these---even when I was rocking a desktop, dust was always a problem. I can't stop people from burning all sorts of incense, and I do not know why people are suddenly setting up random altars at the void deck when there had been none over the past thirty years. I don't even know how such altars are allowed to exist in a common area that is not a designated Residents' Corner. I don't even want to get into the whole spiel of why people think it is a great idea to burn all sorts of incense that smoke like crazy immediately under an apartment block, where the wind will blow the smoke into the apartments themselves.

All I know is, my eyes are drying up, my nose is shot, I have a headache, and my laptop's fans were clogged with dust/ash that had to be cleaned out.

Till the next update.

Whachu Talkin' 'bout?

Live and let live, am I right? That seems to be a pretty sound principle for navigating through this world with so many people who are different from one in one way or another.

Then of course, the exceptions start coming in, eventually, like all ``short'' enough principles.

The problem with ``short'' enough principles is related to the whole issue relating to information transmission/understanding in general. The chunking nature of memory combined with the pattern recognition architecture of the mind means that humans tend to find low Kolmogorov complexity concepts much easier to retain, retrieve, and apply as compared to the high Kolmogorov one. This is just a long-winded technical way of saying we prefer simple concepts over those that require us to keep track of ``too many'' attributes/properties before reaching a conclusion.

Reality is nuance filled---it is, therefore, high Kolmogorov complexity in general. It takes an entire Universe to represent the universe, and so far, our attempts at ``compressing'' the information contained in the universe isn't fantastic. We do have quite a few physical laws that we have divined from observation and experimentation, but those are inductive in nature---they do not contain the so-called seed information that is needed that can kick start the entire process of generating the Universe from ``scratch'', which allows us to predict all the associated emergent behaviour. By constraining ourselves to various subsets of the Universe though, we do manage to get pretty good ``compression'' of the information of that localised system, examples of which include the Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics.

And that's what models do. They provide a ``compression'' of the strongly localised region [of the Universe], where the number of seed attributes is much easier to comprehend/control, from which the inductive laws can be applied to predict the behaviour from the statistical perspective.

``Models'' is just the technical term. In the context of this blog entry, the ``principles'' that are referred to can be considered as a concrete version of a type of ``model''.

Anyway, I lost track of what I wanted to get at---maybe there isn't anything that I want to get at in the first place. My mind is drifting off into finding convex hulls in 3-space, and maybe I shouldn't have started this blog entry at the time I did.

But eh, it's me ranting/intellectually masturbating. Gotta have my daily writing fun anyway. Till the next update or something.

Social Media?

It occurs to me that the rise of social media and platforms operating similar to social media are some sort of natural experiment with respect to culture building and interaction of the sort that would be impossible/unethical to conduct on non-social media platform communities. It's probably not a new thought, seeing that there are sociologists who have published papers studying various effects of such interactions as they intersect with existing real-world alliances/cultures.

But unlike the real-world alliance/culture, there is one major difference: there is an overt overlord over the social media platform that is more understandable than the covert overlord over the real world (i.e. God). God's will is unknowable a priori; even prophets generally can only get the rough vibe of what is to come without necessarily knowing when it is to come, thus missing the second key ingredient of a prescriptive-type premonition. Social media platform owners/operators though, their will is much easier to comprehend.

Whatever allows them to generate profits to perpetuate the existence of the corporation.

That's why the recent punitive actions of Facebook against researchers working on discovering how disinformation works within the platform doesn't surprise me the least. Each platform is basically its own reality, with associated physics and emergent social rules determined by the platform owner, the former explicitly, and the latter through in-world ``law enforcement'' or moderation. No matter how strong the laws of the real world may be, in the reality as defined by the platform, the source code (as controlled by the owner) is god of that world. These platforms are probably a different type of threat against the sovereignity of national governments, though they share many commonalities with the old colony corporations; the key difference being the lack of a military arm, since much of the territory is controlled digitally with little to no physical presence.

Governments tolerate socia media platforms only because the latter does not ``steal'' any physical assets away from the country/nation that the government is running. Any physical assets that are used by the social media platform (like data centres) are paid for, and so can be considered as a net gain for the government since it is contributes directly to the economy.

Digressions aside, the intersectionality between the social media platform reality and the real-world community provides an interesting study of influence and what I would unceremoniously call ``mass hallucination''. Social media platforms are walled-gardens---do not let the ease of creating a new account on any platform by anyone fool one into thinking that it is as open as going out in the middle of the street and just shouting something. The rules that operate in social media platforms, both physics and social, may not share the same values as that of the real world in which they appear in. This is well-understood by governments a long time ago, as shown by some rather draconian measures by some countries' governments to force the values to be the same through controlling the context by isolating the network to within the sovereign control of the country. What is funny though is that despite doing that, the governments haven't really taken the logical leap of running their own social media platforms for their people, to act as the modern day digital equivalent of the piazza, where the official narrative can be disseminated from a known safe source, and where the digital divide that exists between the poor citizens and the rich is bridged through universal access to all digital services and its associated discussion fora.

In many recent instances of disinformation/misinformation in social media, we find that it really is a replaying of old Cold War tendencies, except with much higher growth rates due to the ease of starting an exponential spread event. As to how such disinformation/misinformation can benefit the party creating them, I remain mystified. I know that the outcome is always about obtaining more relative power, but the path to get there which has disinformation/misinformation on issues relating to a global pandemic is fuzzy to me.

Anyway, that's enough mouthing out of me. I'm still making my way through the 1048-page The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa: Book 3: Vana Parva as translated into English by Kisari Mohan Ganguli, roughly reading 406/1048 pages.

By the end of this week, the prison gates will open, and I can head out to my favourite bar to drink and read once more; a much welcomed change of environment.

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

A Manual Would Have Saved Me 6 Months of Time

I managed to play with a cat within the past day or so.

All's well with the world.

------

In other news, I've been an idiot. I kept on complaining about how Eileen-II was always running too bloody hot. I started with undervolting (correct thing to do, though the undervolt offset was best applied uniformly across all applicable components instead of just the CPU for stability reasons), then started messing with the Turboboost ratios at 100% load (sketchy) while keeping an eye on the temperature, then messed with EPP values which lowered the temperature but introduced lag spikes/stuttering from sudden downclocks, before starting to use the alarm function in Throttlestop to trigger a much cooler profile setting while simultaneously using the original (but undervolted) turbo-ratio options.

Mind you, I was trying my hardest to ensure that the sustained temperature did not heat up the keyboard to an uncomfortable level. That was empirically determined to be about 85°C two months ago.

After one bloody big round, I just realised this little item hiding in the corner of the Options screen:

Oh my, what is this I see? PROCHOT Offset?

That's the bloody option to set the temperature threshold from which the CPU will auto thermal throttle. In this case, it is technically the number of degrees Celsius lower than 100°C that the processor is allowed to reach before it will be forced to thermal throttle.

🤦‍♂️

That would have solved all my stupid problems without doing so much crazy stuff.

Anyway, after discovering that, I applied it, and did some additional adjustments and associated testing of the parameters:

1. From experience, the PROCHOT value does trigger maximum sensed values about 7°C higher than the actual threshold(!), so for the default value of 100°C, HWiNFO64 does show a maximum CPU package temperature of 107°C; I'm not sure why this is so. Thus, the PROCHOT Offset is set to 20, which is equivalent to saying ``throttle if we exceed 80°C''. Empirical evidence shows that the 10-minute average of 500 ms temperature samples were steady at around 80°C, with very rare spikes of 87°C as predicted.
2. I've set the AC Timer Resolution to 1.00 ms so that the CPU can adjust its clock speed much faster to avoid triggering that higher-than-expected temperature. Since it only applies when plugged in, the cost is negligible.
3. I am still using the Alarm (and by extension, the higher poll rate for Throttlestop). I did adjust the settings so that it will trigger off at temperatures at 90°C or higher, using a new setting that basically just disables Turboboosting to allow the CPU to cool down faster.
4. I pushed the EPP down to 16 (instead of 32 as noted last time).
5. Thermal Velocity Boost is completely disabled across all the profiles since there really isn't any thermal room for it; that way we don't waste time for the CPU logic to do crazy ramp ups only to ramp down before ramping up again.

The result of it all is much better average performance with much better thermal performance.

Man, just what have I been doing all these while?

In defense, it's not as though Throttlestop has a reference manual or something. The features may exist, but there is little to no explanation of what they do. Each time I make an update here about something else I did came about because I stumbled upon some forum post that described the feature with enough detail for me to learn how it affects both the temperature and the performance accordingly.

Now, the use of PROCHOT Offset means also that I can, in theory, run Eileen-II without using some standing legs. However, a test of running Grim Dawn while watching Ina's Minecraft stream in Waterfox showed that the 10-minute average of 500 ms Core ratio samples was around 19×, while doing the same with the standing legs for ventilation reached 24×. Note that while both numbers are much lower than the base ratio [of no more than 26×], the ventilation did improve the thermals enough to allow a 26% increase in clock speed. Of course, clock speed isn't everything (actual processing load is also as important), but empirically from within Grim Dawn, it was a difference of about 10--20 fps. So yes, the ventilation did make a substantial difference.

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

Short and Sweet(?)

This will be a short entry to comply with my goal.

It's been a roller-coaster of a day so far. They are continuing with work on the covered-walkway just next to my window, and so the day has been full of drilling/welding sounds no more than 5 m away from where I am sitting. Hopefully they will be done soon.

It's a roller-coaster of a day because I feel somewhat emotionally impacted. Doesn't matter much for now though---I don't want to talk about it. Maybe after things are done.

The weekend is upon us soon, and it'll be a new day.

Just need to get through each day, one second at a time. We'll all reach the end, so there's no rush.

Till the next update.

Hmmm

Hmmm.

Another week to go before I am deemed ``fully vaccinated'' by the powers that be. I'm a little eager for it so that I can go visit my favourite bar again and enjoy a pleasant afternoon reading outdoors-ish while drinking beer and eating luncheon chips (among other foods).

I've got about another quarter left to go before I need to commit to either finding a job, creating my own job, or get into the hikikomori lifestyle. Despite all my bluster, it seems most likely that I am either finding a job or just going hikikomori.

It also seems very likely that I might end up, as what they say in economics, under-employed, doing some job in the sub-3.5k+ per month (gross) category, mostly because I don't need the stupidity that comes with the higher-paying jobs. Can't play nice with people whose motive is to backstab their way to success.

Not wanting children, and almost to the point of eschewing a spouse also means that I have suddenly freed myself from a lot of potential financial obligations, which means a much lowered upkeep cost, making it easier to operate with a much lower income.

There are some days I wish I were born with half of my thinking power. At least it would make it easier to pass the day quietly in ignorance, not having to worry about things like whether a job is ethical, or if there are problems with management/the world and the like.

Knowledge is seductive when one is ignorant, but once that is attained, a lot of the magic goes away and one will get steadily confronted with the harsh realities of the prettiness that has been allowed to paper over what truly is.

It's true for physics and sociology. It's also true for when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God cast out Adam and Eve from Eden after they consumed from that tree not just because they disobeyed His instructions, but that the serenity of Eden would expose the inner turmoil from having too much knowledge about reality that would lead to the eventual destruction of the Garden itself---getting thrown into a world where suffering is prevalent is a great way to distract one's realisation of what is out there and prevent rampancy.

Still, I do have a quarter left of my sabbatical. I'll make good use of it, and then spend the time needed to get into whatever it is I would want to get into after my sabbatical to start the next chapter of this sorry-ass life.

Till the next update.

Remembering to Keep Things Fun, and Them EPP Values

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------

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

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

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

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

What Balance?

Where is the balance point between ``I'd like to share something that I find to be cool'' and ``I am just craving attention for attention's sake'' these days? I think that some of my internal monologue is directed towards this particular question and its associated ramifications.

I mean, at some level I'd like to share what I think is cool with people I know. And yet, I cannot shake that feeling that by doing so, I am really just trying to grab attention for attention's sake at a subconscious level.

I want to operate on my own terms, yet cannot walk away completely from the mainstream for fear of total ex-communication and being one iota away from being an outlaw. I'd like to be recognised for the good I do, yet cannot live with the thought that I would be under the scrutiny for the very same.

Where then is that balance point?

Flipping the thought the other way, perhaps all that selection bias that I perceive that is present on ``social media'' (man, I still dislike that term a lot) is the take that others have on the same question, with the big difference being they'd care much less about whether their action may be attention for attention's sake as compared to me.

Does it mean that at some level, I am just envious of what they are showing?

I would be lying if I said no. It is probably human nature to envy, and in a bleak outlook that comes from the friendly neighbourhood global pandemic that is COVID-19, liberties that remind oneself of the current predicament do end up triggering off much stronger amounts of envy.

I did demonstrate that earlier in the year when my friends in the US were already getting their second vaccine dose for COVID-19, while I was still waiting [im-]patiently for my turn even as my demographic got repeatedly penalised from the actions of the elderly ``at-risk'' group who don't seem to give too much of a damn, but still somehow got much sympathy applied to them. Yet after I personally have been given the second vaccine some time last week, I didn't do the same thing at my friends did via bragging about it on social media.

Instead, I wrote a rather sedate version of it here, possibly in defiance to the on-going trend of doing so on social media.

Am I virtue signalling in a different way then? If so, am I just another hypocrite?

Yeah, it's probably correct to claim so. I don't have any defense.

I'm just resigned. Tired.

Eh?

Check it out: stupid o'clock came early today!

Alright, that was a joke, sort of. The joke part is on the timing, the sort of part is the type of content that is coming up.

I like to think of ``stupid o'clock'' posts as those that have a stronger tendency to be more rant-y and personal, as compared to the arm-chair critique type stuff that I end up talking a lot about when posting at a more orthodox time.

I suppose there is that magic that comes with a quiet and cool night that makes the mind take a less combative attitude towards the world, and along with that comes the lowering of the conscious barriers that keep the sad inside.

Sort of like why people prefer drinking heavy alcohol when it's starting to get dark outside as opposed to during the day. The darkness is more permissive to a more candid view on things.

That's why campfires exist from back in the day when humanity was still hunter-gatherers.

That is also why it is important, from the morality standpoint, to literally operate in the light. So that we are always consciously aware of what we are doing, and are thus able to exercise our willpower and self-control as things are shown in their full glory under the light.

Digressions aside, today's ``stupid o'clock topic'' is inspired by yet another Facebook post. This time, it is from the sharing of the happy times of a friend and the said friend's spouse celebrating yet another temporal-based milestone.

I've always been a bit miffed by the whole idea of sharing one's temporal-based milestones like that. Partly because of the semi-staged nature of the whole thing [instead of just taking in the moment], and partly because it is yet another self-selection of good events that portray an imbalanced perspective on social media.

Be znlor V whfg unir zvkrq srryvatf juvpu vapyhqr fbzr yriry bs rail naq naablnapr ng jung V ab ybatre unir, naq znl arire unir ntnva. Pbafvqrevat gung guvf vf n ``fghcvq b'pybpx'' cbfg, V'z zber vapyvarq gb guvax gung guvf vf gur zber inyvq ernfba.

Vg'f orra zber guna n lrne fvapr gur ovt oernx-hc. Jungrire grnef gung V pbhyq unir furq, V unir nyernql furq. Gur jnyyf gung jrer bapr qbja sbe fbzrbar unir, bire gur pbhefr bs gur svany zbaguf bs wbo qrfpevcgvba qrivngvba, cnaqrzvp-vafcverq abafrafr, naq gur nffbpvngrq vfbyngvba gung pbzrf sebz gur pbzovangvba bs gur ynggre jvgu zl frys-vzcbfrq rkvyr va gur sbez bs zl fnoongvpny, fgnegrq gb erohvyq gurzfryirf ntnva.

I don't feel a strong connection with people any more.

It's truly hard to put into words what I feel here. It is not that I am going to cut myself off from human interaction completely (even though it seems to be that way now), but that I just don't feel inclined/motivated to open myself up to anyone anymore.

Crbcyr ner zber nxva gb guvatf gung zbir nobhg va gur onpxtebhaq nzbat nyy gur bgure guvatf gung rkvfg arneyl fgngvpnyyl va gur onpxtebhaq. Fbzr bs gurfr crbcyr jr vagrenpg guebhtubhg gur pbhefr bs gur qnl sbe gur fnxr bs trggvat fbzrg guvatf qbar, ohg bgure guna gung, gurl qba'g frrz gb znggre nf zhpu nal zber.

Vg'f n ovg yvxr bcrengvat cebtenzf ba n pbzchgre. Gurer whfg vfa'g n pbzchyfvba gb yrnea qrrcre nobhg gur cebtenz bgure guna gur bppnfvbany arrq gb eha vg gb trg fbzrguvat qbar.

Vg nyy fbhaqf yvxr guvatf unir orpbzr zber genafnpgvbany va angher. V zrna, va n jnl vg vfa'g jebat, fvapr n eryngvbany glcr bs eryngvbafuvc fhttrfgf n zber tvir-naq-gnxr glcr bs nggvghqr, n glcr bs obbx-xrrcvatyrff glcr bs onegrevat bs vasbezngvba.

It feels at some level that I'm just taking a lot, and have nothing to give back in return. And I do mean this for many of the remaining relationships that I have left, assuming that I still have them at the end of the day.

Senaxyl, V jbhyqa'g or fhecevfrq vs V fhqqrayl rvgure raq zl yvsr, be orpbzr fbzr xvaq bs znavchyngvir cflpubcngu. Va obgu fvghngvbaf, n pbzzbanyvgl vf gur ynpx bs n fgebat pbaarpgvba jvgu crbcyr.

Fb sne, V unira'g ernyyl tbar qbja gur veerirefvoyr cngu bs qvffbpvngvat crbcyr vagb zrer guvatf. Jung V fnvq rneyvre vf zber bs n zrgncube qrfpevovat gur graqrapvrf gung V srry engure guna n qrpynengvba bs na npghny nygrerq gubhtug.

I spend more time ``talking'' to people through typing stuff out via various messaging systems, and at some point, it feels no different from just interacting with a computer with no one on the other end, even though I am well aware that there is really someone on the other end of the conversation.

It's just that the thread of humanity that seemingly connects us seems to be a tad too frayed to the point where it gets too de-personalised.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not really a stranger to communicating with people almost entirely over text messages---I have been doing that for a long time, and in many cases, it is the only form of connection that I can maintain with people, since most of my friends/acquaintances are geographically far away from me.

Eh, what else is there to say? Maybe I am really losing my marbles.

V qvq fcraq fbzr gvzr guvaxvat nobhg ubj V pbhyq jevgr na raq-zl-yvsr-cyrnfr qverpgvir gung V pbhyq fgnaq ol fb gung V pna or bssrq ng n cbvag bs zl bja pubbfvat vafgrnq bs jnvgvat sbe zr gb ybfr zlfrys pbzcyrgryl, tenqhnyyl be bgurejvfr. Fhpu na raq-zl-yvsr-cyrnfr qverpgvir fubhyq vqrnyyl or choyvpyl ernqnoyr fb gung gurer vf ab qbhog nf gb zl jvfurf.

Gur bayl ceboyrz jnf gung V pbhyq abg pbaivapr zlfrys gung fhpu n qverpgvir jbhyq pbire gur evtug fvghngvbaf, naq zber vzcbegnagyl, jvyy abg or zvfhfrq ol bguref.

V zrna, vg pna or engure boivbhf jura V ybfr zl zneoyrf fhqqrayl---gur punatr vf qenfgvp, naq bsgra abg sbe gur orggre. Na raq-zl-yvsr-cyrnfr qverpgvir sbe fhpu n fvghngvba pna or engure fgenvtugsbejneq.

Jung vs V ybfr zl zneoyrf tenqhnyyl? Jung xvaq bs yvar fubhyq or qenja fb gung gur raq-zl-yvsr-cyrnfr qverpgvir pna or nccyvrq? Guvax nobhg qrzragvn. Va fbzr jnlf, gur cngvrag jvgu qrzragvn vf fgvyy fbeg bs gurzfryirf naq va fbzr xvaq bs pbageby. Rkprcg gung gurve ybphf bs pbageby unf vgf onfvf frireryl nygrerq gb cbvag ryfrjurerr bgure guna ng onfryvar ernyvgl.

Fubhyq zl raq-zl-yvsr-cyrnfr qverpgvir fgngr gung vs V nz bhg bs gbhpu jvgu onfryvar ernyvgl, V fubhyq or raqrq? Jung vs V, va gung qrzragrq fgngr, nz cresrpgyl pbagrag, gubhtu V nz abg gur zr jub vf jevgvat guvf abj? Vf vg evtug gb raq vg gura?

Dhrfgvbaf yvxr gurfr ner jul V pbhyq arire oevat zlfrys gb jevgvat na raq-zl-yvsr-cyrnfr qverpgvir, yrg nybar chggvat vg va n choyvp cynpr va pnfr V arrq fbzrbar ryfr gb rkrphgr vg orpnhfr V oybbql uryy pnaabg.

Ru... jurer jnf V ntnva orsber V tbg znffviryl fvqrgenpxrq jvgu gur raq-zl-yvsr-cyrnfr qverpgvir? Nu evtug, ybfvat pbaarpgvba jvgu crbcyr.

I don't think that my existence has been a positive impact on people. Doesn't feel like it. Can't prove it one way or another. Can't tell if people saying things like ``no, you are precious to me; I would be sad if you were to go away'' are reflexive platitudes or true emotions; don't know how it should affect me if it is one way or the other.

Truth is, eventually all of us are going to die, and we are going to die alone. There is a specific day in our lives beyond which we are no longer alive. We all know that, but we don't know which specific day it will be. And so, we just mark off each day as it comes, and when the specific day shows up, most of us would be quite surprised by it, as will many people around.

``I didn't expect him to pass away so soon.''

Fcrnxvat bs cnffvat njnl, V'z gbgnyyl abg rkcrpgvat crbcyr ng zl shareny jura vg pbzrf. Bxnl, znlor zl fvfgre'f snzvyl, naq n cnfgbe sbe sbeznyvgvrf. Gung'f vg.

Walls man... those are killer. It can feel very safe behind the many [emotional] walls, but the flip side of it is that if nothing can go out, nothing can come in either.

Ohg vs bar vfa'g rkcrpgvat nalguvat gb pbzr va, vfa'g vg nyevtug gb xrrc gubfr jnyyf hc gura?

I don't know. ``Stupid o'clock'' isn't meant to be full of solutions---it is just a brain dump with little to no inhibitions, not even designed to be thought-provoking even though it is likely that the [mostly] unfiltered response may provoke other thoughts in the reader.

And that's all the brain dump that I have for this ``stupid o'clock'' post. Till the next update.

Sometimes ``Default Setting'' is the Best Setting

Let's begin with a confession. I've been an idiot with regards to trying to control the thermals of Eileen-II. I had focused so much on the CPU side of things that I cleanly forgot about the GPU side of things, despite commenting before on how both those two share the same cooling system.

The thing is, I had tweaked too much of the Nvidia Control Panel settings to the point that the GPU was always running at maxed out clock speeds all the time, regardless of the associated workload. This is a terribly inefficient use of the available power into the system, and has a tendency to continuously generate excess heat that needs to be dissipated. The sad thing is that it is not as though those tweaks were improving the overall throughput of the rendering by much.

And so, I decided to reset all the settings to default and just tweak the FPS limiter to keep it at 142 fps (compared to 144 Hz screen refresh rate). I tried running Grim Dawn, Minecraft (with Optifine on default shaders), and Halo 4.

The thermals were significantly lower, with nearly the same performance as expected---we're talking about idle temperatures of 37--42°C (compared to the 50--60°C prior for the GPU), and 35--42°C for the CPU (compared to 50--70°C prior for the CPU). My first attempt prior to the default setting was to tweak the power management setting to adaptive while leaving all the other tweaked settings in place, but it ended with a hard crash---I was miffed and decided to apply the most reductionist thing I could think of, having remembered the observation that people have a tendency to want to add more [constraints] to improve something, instead of taking things away.

I had also turned off the Alienware overclocking [of the GPU]. That additional 50 MHz wasn't really going to help do much considering that the GPU clock rate could already peak out at 1.9k+ MHz without that over-clocking (while idling sedately at 300 MHz under a power-optimised setting).

The only draw back from the original 142 fps limitation was that when Grim Dawn's visuals got sufficiently hectic, there were some serious lag spikes that dropped the frame rate to about 40 fps---I mitigated that by setting the limitation to 164 fps to give enough head room to handle the spike better. My very first frame rate limitation was set to 288 fps, but I dropped it down to 142 fps to avoid having to use VSYNC, before switching to 200 fps. The final selection of 164 fps was the observation that for Grim Dawn, even the most sedate scenes didn't bust the 170 fps consistently; it was more like 165 fps or lower.

Setting the frame rate limit is important. For one, it avoids destroying GPUs through bad programming in game or bad components in GPU since it provides the final ``hard'' limit to prevent the scenario of unbounded workload application. For two, setting a frame rate limit higher than the screen refresh rate improves input latency since the input processing [that leads to the rendering of a frame] is more frequent, making any interaction register much quicker than otherwise. VSYNC isn't needed when the screen refresh rate is this high, because any tearing that may occur can happen only in the reciprocal of the refresh rate---so, for my 144 Hz refresh rate, the screen tear occurs for a duration of 7 ms, as compared to the 17 ms from a 60 Hz refresh rate. 7 ms is a really short amount of time, and in this case it is less than half the duration of the 17 ms that happens in a 60 Hz refresh rate screen, which is already considered a gold standard for console-gaming---it's basically negligible.

So with a sufficiently screen high refresh rate, VSYNC is basically obsolete, and with a powerful enough GPU, the latency can also be reduced through setting the effective computational frame rate higher than the screen refresh rate.

But back to thermals. I've not seen such low idling thermals on Eileen-II; I have seen something like that for the PC that I built for mum, but to be fair, a PC has much better cooling characteristics than a laptop even without any special effort to do so, simply because there is so much space for heat to move out by convection via the mass of air that can flow through.

I'd still float Eileen-II to improve air in-take when I am doing more heavy processor usage (like when gaming) though---it's just a good idea in general whether or not I have improved the thermals through not being an idiot.

------

Anyway, today is National Day. Yay. We remember SIN city's independence some fifty-six years ago. Everyone virtue-signals through their colourful patriotic display of wearing red and white (while not hanging out flags at their windows outside of their apartments), talk about how SIN city is awesome, and show off the little liberties that they have taken on this public holiday to celebrate the occasion.

And then when tomorrow comes, it's back to cussing out everyone else's stupidity, the confuddlement of policies, and the capitalistic tendencies of SIN city in lieu of taking care of its citizens.

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

Sunday Mumble

And it's Aug 08 today. I don't know when it started to become a tradition, but various popular online shopping platforms in SIN city have created monthly ``special sales'' events surrounding dates which have the same month and day. And their marketing blitz has always been relentless. I remember that when I was still working at my old place, the advertising screen at the lift lobby would always be playing some heinous version of one of the shopping platform's jingle, with the almost customary mid-riff revealing background dancers who look like they are high on something even as the entire jingle was basically the shopping platform's name repeated ad nauseum.

Thankfully, I don't get to see such ads when moving about online from my phone nor PC. My beef with advertising over online services comes from these few perspectives:

1. Unlike television, each time these advertisements play, they consume bandwidth that I paid for, which is made worse when the bit-rate quality of these advertisements are higher than the source media that I am looking at;
2. These advertisements tend to be obnoxious in their bid to gain attention, from being generally louder than the content that is being played, to taking up the whole bloody screen and locking controls on my web browser/screen;
3. There relevance has always been missing, and are generally tone-deaf in nature; and
4. The laziness of some content creators/platform owners in curating these advertisements, relying on surveillance and the black-box of data mining/machine learning to feed third party advertising networks that have no interest in doing good, leading to yet another attack surface for malware.

I mean, if a company is sponsoring a content creator (whether video maker, live streamer, or writer), and the content creator gives them a shout-out from within their video, I will generally sit through it to learn about their product/service, for the two reasons of (a) they are supporting the content creator, which is relevant to me; and (b) the content creator trusts the company's product/service enough to plug for them, which again raises the relevance factor to me.

I think the whole premise of ``we must collect all data from everyone so that we can know their preferences and determine relevance'' is incorrect to begin with. It makes the assumption that the consumer is a dumb-ass who does not know what he/she wants, and therefore needs the use of fancy statistics to ``inform'' them what it is that they are missing. It takes agency away from the consumer and forces a top-down authoritarian approach towards choices.

``Corporations ain't God, and so I don't trust their moral compass,'' I say as I write and publish my blog entry on one of the platforms that is owned by a corporation.

I think that this clash between ruling purely from statistics against being guided by the statistics while acknowledging individual choice is that drives much of the recent debates/non-debates, particularly on pandemic-related instructions. Statistics always describe the large-scale population-level behaviour, but when it comes down to the individual level, it will collapse to an actual outcome that can be colloquially called ``defying statistics''.

Classic example: the total fertility rate (TFR) of 0.84 in South Korea in 2020. This means the average number of children that would be born to a woman over her life-time (subjected to various assumptions that are unnecessary for my point) in South Korea is 0.84.

But what is 0.84 of a child? There is no such thing. Each woman can only have a non-negative integer child over her life-time---the statistic of TFR does not correspond to any single outcome for each woman. If we can understand such a concept for something like TFR, why is it so hard to realise the limits of the statistical black-box that is machine learning/data mining and not oversell the bloody thing too much?

``Okay MT, so assume I get your point. Using population-level statistics to rule individual actions directly is probably a bad idea---let's say I agree with that. Isn't that why they are trying to improve upon that by gathering more data per person so that they can figure out the details to guide the person to the right outcome then?''

That's assuming that there is some consensus on what the ``right'' outcome means. For public policy, having society turning towards a certain direction that increases the maximal amount of happiness/contentment/some other society-agreed-upon criteria might be the ``right'' outcome to justify the level of data collection [per person]. Things get much murkier when we get to the corporation level. To them, increasing profit through either increasing revenue or reducing expenditure is the ``right'' outcome for every decision that they make, ergo the people whose data are being collected are not part of the beneficiaries of the invasion into their personal space---in that sense, perhaps this ``right'' outcome for the corporation isn't really the ``right'' outcome for the people then.

The arbiter of that exists, but unfortunately He operates at a scale that is literally beyond our ken, so we are stuck with working together for now. This means that such data-driven ``guidance'' will always be a tightrope walking exercise between what the numbers say against how the people will feel about the outcome with respect to the quality of life. I think that at the very least, we can all agree that striving for a positive quality of life is usually the default goal, with the main disagreement on what time scales we are looking at, and what constitutes as being a ``positive'' quality of life, both of which are contextually determined by the socio-economico-politico environment, which in turn has deep roots in geography and culture.

I maintain that life is emergent and not stochastic nor deterministic, and the profound consequence of this is that a purely qualitative approch or a purely quantitative approach will never be sufficient to explain/guide the future, which implies that any system based on either of these two approaches alone is bound to fail.

The gamble then is to ensure that it fails after the time span of interest and outside of the space where accuracy is cared about. So far, I think they are losing this fight.

Will they ever win? I'm not going to prognosticate.

Tomorrow's a public holiday, and as one who isn't working now, it'll just be like any other day. That is all I have for now, and so, till the next update then.

Thinning of the Brain Fog

Two days till Aug 09, the national day of SIN city.

The parade's shifted to Aug 21 instead, thanks to the new restrictions that were put in place, and what I suspect to be a deliberate attempt to get some better news to show up during the parade itself instead of holding it in the middle of the totally-not-a-lockdown-lockdown and thus doing the equivalent of having the right hand slap the left cheek.

I... simply don't feel a thing. SIN city as a construct is as dry and dead as it can be. It exists as an ode to the age-old pass-time of merchants using money to make more money, even from the very early days of the city's founding back in 1819 (``founding prime minister'' myths aside).

SIN city's relevance to the world is basically nothing if global trade wasn't a thing. And so, here we are, a cobbled together society of immigrants who have dissociated from their ancestors' origins and staked a claim on SIN city as their home. The irony here is that despite all that rhetoric of staking claim on SIN city as their home, it is all starting to look really shaky within the past three to four generations.

Today's blog entry isn't really for contemplating the socio-ethnic make-up of SIN city; it's just a personal reflection of what SIN city means after a prolonged fight against the worst epidemic/pandemic that we had personally experienced in recent history. And that personal reflection is: well, we still exist, just devoid of a common sense of identity (other than that once-a-year time called ``national day''), and seemingly still having all the stupid race-related issues that we were supposed to have dealt with twenty years ago.

What the hell went wrong?

Simply that race-related issues have been conflated with socio-economic issues, causing ethnicity and recency of one's status as ``citizen of SIN city'' to act as proxies to the real socio-economic issues. What I mean is that, when I say that SIN city has race-related issues, it isn't really about race-related issues, but is more on socio-economic issues that masquerade as race-related issues due to correlation and association over true causation.

It's easier to bitch out someone who looks different from one than someone who acts, and only because looks are that much easier to observe and thus describe over that of actions.

Saying that someone is of green skin (for example) is much easier than saying that someone is really a rich person who has been living in his/her ivory tower and is causing big inequalities.

To move people, one needs to communicate, and it has been shown time and again that the most effective messages that spread the fastest are the ones that have the lowest Kolmogorov complexity, or in layman's terms, ``the shortest messages travel the farthest''. The accuracy of that message matters not the slightest---the easier the message, the farther it spreads.

Much of disinformation/misinformation spread is due to just how short the distracting/misleading messages are compared to truth, whose nuance often requires some stupid paragraph to even be accurate, let alone to be precise.

It is, unfortunately, a flaw of human nature rather than [just] a failure of education. The bad way of saying this is that humans are lazy and want to remember the least amount of things that they can to function, even if that least amount can be wrong sometimes (or even often times); the good way of saying is that humans are more effective at chunking information through their application of very strong pattern recognition skills to simplify concepts into various archetypes that can be retained in a more compact form. That compactness becomes useful because it takes less effort to recall, as compared to the nuanced one that is more reflective of reality.

SIN city hasn't had a static-enough state for folks to develop a strong enough archetype to describe it; in other words, SIN city as a whole has been changing so bloody often that there isn't any time to develop any form of strong common identity that the citizens can share and stand together truly united. Cities all over the world have existed for hundreds of years and have their own developed identity---even [recent] migrants to those cities have something that they can strongly identify with and make them unify somewhat under the banner of the city.

We can't do things like that here when even our architectural landscape changes every five years, let alone our social landscape that has seen increasing numbers of immigrants and other temporary workers assuming a different class from the rest of the citizens while the rich stay where they are and continue to be entrenched instead of leading the way towards helping to carve our own social identity.

Don't get me wrong, SIN City Inc is alive and well---the business identity of SIN city is very well-established in the world. But the business identity is not the same as the so-called humane identity, the type of identity that makes one proud as a citizen of SIN city on all days, and not just that one bloody day in the whole year as an annual remembrance of the forced separation from boleh-land. If anything, using the business identity as a replacement of the humane one means that being a citizen of SIN city is transactional as opposed to relational, in which case the question of loyalties will start to arise from those who were born in SIN city.

The year-and-a-half extent of COVID-19 has exposed that at some level, SIN City Inc is not completely heartless---vaccines for all residents within SIN city were procured by the government, possibly at great cost due to needing to secure supplies at the times that they are wanted. But a cynical take on things can say also that it was not an altruistic step---not having anyone safe from COVID-19 means that SIN City Inc's operations can ground to a halt, which mars the business identity that has been crafted; a true sense of whether SIN city's relationship with its citizens is transactional or relational should be seen in how the latter's entire life-cycle from birth to death is treated within SIN city's policies, where even as much is expected from the citizen to uphold SIN City Inc's business requirements, the returns thus obtained is re-invested into each and every citizen's life so that everyone who is a citizen does get to live a fulfilling life even as they contribute towards SIN City Inc.

Idealistic? Sure, why not? I mean, public service/administration is basically providing an authority or custodian over resources that can easily suffer from the tragedy of the commons, or if leaving it up to private enterprises would mean a moral/ethical failing at some level that is detrimental to the operation of society if pure capitalistic principles are applied to it.

Well, after the rant, I suppose I do feel something about SIN city after all. If I really didn't feel a thing about SIN city, I wouldn't get all worked up just talking about the issues that are being faced now, wouldn't I?

------

The brain fog is clearing up slightly, and I tested it out by going through a fairly brain-dead all-execution round of Halo 3 to complete the game. It was progressing smoothly till one point when it decided to crash out with some kind of weird UE4 fatal error, and it didn't want to start up even to the menu screen.

I left it alone to work on adjusting the transcription of 乙女解剖, tweaking note lengths to better match what Nekomata Okayu was singing (see this stupid o'clock post for the associated videos). I then did the transposition to the B♭ saxophone like before, but since I took out the so-called ``backing'' sections (i.e. non-singing parts), the lowest concert pitch note was just a F as opposed to something stupid like low B.

I then realise that using the B♭ saxophone was a stupid idea: switching to the E♭ saxophone was much easier. For those who are confused, it means writing the part for an alto-saxophone as opposed to a soprano or tenor saxophone.

Under that transposition scheme (recall that Okayu sings the original concert C♯-minor at concert G-minor), we can just play Okayu's part as instrument E-minor (or instrument G-major), and we are gold. This is because concert pitch F (the lowest note), is exactly instrument pitch D, which is completely playable on the alto-saxophone. This has the effect of making the high note reach instrument E instead of some nonsensical altissimo A that I was talking about before.

I did test out the score on a B♭ 大笛, and it sounds wonderful (B♭ 大笛 is equivalent to an octave-higher version of the alto-saxophone). This means that on an alto-saxophone, we will be playing an octave lower than what Okayu was singing---I don't think that it will be a problem though, since the alto-sax has a nice phat sound.

After all that, I returned to Halo 3, and whaddya know, it ran! Well, sort of. My previous progress wasn't restored, and while I did manage to complete the game after loading the scenario from the mission select screen (with the default load-out in my Master Chief compared to the weapons I had from the play-through), it crashed shortly after I completed the epilogue movie.

🤦‍♂️

Aaaaaaanyway, that's all I have as a side story. Till the next update.

Second Jab and Jupiter Hell Version 1.0

Hey, check it out! Yet another stupid o'clock blog entry!

Well, yes and no. Yes as in, you are definitely reading an entry that was published at stupid o'clock, no as in I did not write this entry at stupid o'clock.

The same can be said for all the other ``regular timing'' posts for the week that just passed us by.

You see, on one of these days, I had taken my second dose of Comirnaty. I don't want to state on exactly which day that I took it, so I prepared five days' worth of blog posts to be published on schedule accordingly.

This post isn't prepared that way, but it is scheduled to go out at stupid o'clock of Aug 07.

By this time fourteen days later, I would be termed as being ``fully vaccinated''. That date shall be set as not earlier than Aug 20.

So far, I am only getting a bit of brain fog from my body's reaction to the second dose, in addition to the usual soreness of the deltoid muscle from getting traumatically poked with the needle. The heart palpitation-related feelings will probably start coming in some time next week, if the effects of the first dose are of any indication. Interestingly enough, they did update their instructions in the information booklet to avoid doing anything strenuous for 7 days, up from the original 12--24 hours. The weather has been somewhat kind---it's still hot and humid, but it hasn't reached the levels of discomfort that would drive me insane, though I have been chugging stupid amounts of water and sleeping as much as I could to mitigate everything.

Incidentally, there has been a rash of updates on the control measures just on Friday. They include:

1. Relaxation of dining restrictions to groups of 5 for ``fully vaccinated individuals'' from Aug 10 (the unvaccinated can still gather, but in groups no larger than 2, and not for dining in);
2. ``Fully vaccinated'' status being applied to all vaccines that are currently approved under the WHO emergency list (still requiring the two weeks of waiting time from the last dose to be truly considered ``fully vaccinated''); and
3. Relaxation of stay-home notice execution processes for 8 countries when the travellers are ``fully vaccinated''.

All these are good news for sure, since it is an actual sign that there is actual movement towards something that is commensurate with the progress we have made in fortifying the people against the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The only missing step, I think, is the declaration that after a certain date, the task force will no longer focus on active measures to reduce severe cases and death, since the associated risks have dropped enough to the point that they are no higher than base levels of a seasonal/controlled pathogen, which makes reacting to them with strict control measures a strong case of over-reaction that is not at all helpful to bring things back to a better level of functioning.

But I'm not expecting that any time soon. It is political suicide to say things like that directly---what I am expecting is the gradual narrowing of the wiggle room for stubborn naysayers to comply or continue to pay their own price. But that's talk for a different day.

All I want to say is, after waiting for nearly three quarters of the whole year, I have finally received my injection. And as predicted, I (and my demographic, really) are indeed among the last in priority to receive the government sponsored vaccination injections. Ah well.

This concludes the deliberately scheduled posts to ensure that even if I had been knocked out cold from the effects of the second dose of Comirnaty, I would still keep my daily write-up streak as promised to myself.

I will get back to my regular programming soon.

------

In other news, Jupiter Hell has its first version full release today/yesterday! As at the time of writing, there is a 20% discount, and I strongly recommend folks getting it to play, not because I was a whale-level supporter of the game, but that it is hard but fun.

Want to play first person shooters but never had the reflexes, or like board games but feel chess is too mundane with the fixed everything, why not consider the rogue-like that is Jupiter Hell? You get to shoot monsters, have lots of time to think before you move, and yet have enough variety to keep replaying it. There is no meta-game element that requires grinding enough early runs so that later runs can be easier---each run is as standalone as it gets. All more runs unlock are bragging rights and more difficult challenges.

So, why wait? Go grab it before that 20% discount goes away! And version 1.0 isn't going to be the last version either---I've talked with Kornel Kisielewicz recently about how things were going, and he's told me that the things that were promised in the Kickstarter will be done right in later updates instead of being rushed in to get out of the door. Might not sound like much, but I've been a fan of his work for years, and so far, he hasn't disappointed; I see no reason why he would do that now.

Anyway, if you can't tell, I am excited for Jupiter Hell, and I think that you should too.

Till the next update then.

Missing My Favourite Bar

I miss heading out to my favourite bar for a lazy afternoon of drinking Guinness and reading whatever the heck I want, while nibbling on some luncheon [meat] chips, and having a burger/steak. Apart from the difference in the environment as compared to reading at home, I think that one of the reasons why I look forward to it is due to the need to dress up before heading out.

In these days of quiet solitude at home, ``dressing up before heading out'' is kind of a big deal. It is a change from the familiar to the less-than-familiar [now], an act of transformation that reminds one of a world that still exists outside, a world that, while I am on a sabbatical in the middle of a pandemic, I have been actively staying away from. It is a means of reconnecting with that society every now and then to ensure that when the day of the end of my sabbatical arrives, I am less likely to commit faux pas despite my general disdain in the way my part of society is run.

``Dressing up'' is important. There are many active choices involved, from what shirt to wear (polo T-shirt, regular printless T-shirt, buttoned shirt, or ``muscle'' shirt), what pants to wear (dress pants, or jeans), and what shoes to wear (hiking boots, or dress shoes). These active choices and the excitement of seeing other people (friends or strangers---it matters little) do help improve the mood, no matter what mood it was. One of the ways to combat depression, as described by pop-psych articles, is to just get into a routine, starting small, and slowly building it up so that there is some other purpose in one's life other than facing the bleakness of how society will eventually crash out from its capitalistic trap where only the rich lead happy lives while the rest of us are ground into dust from the trap of working to death without necessarily receiving a pay and personal time that allows us self-actualisation.

And just because I mention a reference to a coping mechanism here is no declaration that I am depressed---ain't diagnosed, ain't depressed. Feeling down---yes, but not to the point where it can be called ``depression''; saying so would be a disservice to those who truly are suffering from depression itself.

And we all know how well SIN city deals with mental health issues [in schools]. They outsource it away to untrained peers, if that article is to be believed. I am not saying that the method proposed is completely useless; there is some merit in that it allows folks to vent a little bit more, which is great in this highly repressed SIN city. However, this risks the echo chamber effect when peers of highly controlled environments (i.e. schools) start discussing together about their issues without different perspectives being made available. More importantly, if the situation arises that someone needs professional help (i.e. it is more than just a ``today's a bad day 小明'' situation), this peer support system as described does not seem to provide a fast path to getting that professional help.

Disarming the stigma of seeking mental health professionals should be the goal, with these peer support systems being supportive in nature, as is building a better funded/manned mental health professional infrastructure.

But I heavily digress.

SIN city is repressed in many ways. Us denizens of SIN city have emotions like every other person out there, but unlike every other person out there, we don't really learn how to express them, and relatedly, how to manage them. This doesn't just apply to our thoughts on government policies---it also refers to people at personal levels. That apathy that is claimed to be a defining character trait in SIN city is a manifestation of these repressed feelings, as is the disdain displayed against people who are willing to stand up for their thoughts/emotions, with them being called as ``troublemakers'' by everyone around. This repression is masked under the guise of ``meritocracy'' as practised by the self-declared technocratic mode of operation.

In short, SIN city has long since lost its humanity in the bid to beat the world in numbers for whatever metric that they care about.

I think that only the most ambitious who have chosen to sacrifice their humanity for riches can survive in SIN city---the rest of us are doomed to being shafted by all the institutions that are said to be created for our benefit. If that is truly the case, then perhaps it would really be worth it to go elsewhere.

But the question then becomes, go where?

Life's A Story

We live not because of others.

I don't even think that we live for ourselves either.

I can concede that we live to glorify God, which is great on one level, but still generally terrible from the immediate day-to-day running of one's life when free will is taken into consideration.

I do have a hypothesis though, that we live for the stories.

I had mentioned before a long time ago that humankind's superpower is discipline. But discipline alone isn't sufficient to explain why we do the things we do, from the daily routines that we are used to, to the acts of service that we ought to be doing to glorify God, evangelise to the lost, and edify the saints.

What's the whole point of doing all that we do if not for the stories that we leave behind?

I had mentioned the concept of emergence in an old entry, and I think that I managed to refine a little bit more about the love of emergent systems over stochastic/deterministic ones. That refinement is the idea of developing a narrative in the form of a story.

Prior to the creation of symbolic logic and the terseness associated with it for precise communication as used in science, knowledge had passed from one generation to the next in the form of stories. Tales of creation, of appropriate social behaviour, of why certain places are visited during certain time periods, of why those guys across the river were Bad News were part of the proto-knowledge transmission process. One of the first few things that a young child learns after basic vocabulary is the creation of stories that they tell and re-tell to anyone who was around to listen. We call children who can create their own stories in play ``imaginative''.

Even as adults, we find that we generally learn and promulgate information best in stories. Naturally, we have to make it all serious and call it by a different name: the ubiquitous case study. A case study is the ``professional''-speak version of constructing and telling a story, where key elements of the world as it was (assumptions and previous behaviour), the world as it is (observation of an opportunity and manners of exploiting said opportunity), and the world as it would be (predictions about the consequences, listing down both advantages/disadvantages with associated details as needed) are all told, just like how storytellers and bards of old used to do so, less all the ``fancy'' slide decks and templatised forms.

Work aside, the sum total of one's life is often reduced to a set of stories which had the person in it---that is how one will be remembered. Even God left His Word in the form of the Bible, a collection of books that tell stories that captured the most important aspects of His Will, and on how His Son is the final propitiation for our salvation. In the end, we seem to learn more about things or someone if he/she/it has starred in a story that we have heard, as compared to a list of dry attributes/properties.

The associative memory system that we have in our brain seems well-suited for handling information transfer through stories; the ability to remember abstract principles devoid of a linking narrative is a trained one that is atypical, which explains the relatively few people in the world who are actually good at manipulating symbols all day long [in their heads] without the need for creating a story.

A life well-lived, or a life fulfilled then is a life that has enough stories in it for a person to feel contented. To me, ``contentment'' means that feeling that one has that all things that one has desired to experience (i.e. make a story with) have been achieved. There may be more [side] stories that can be created, but as far as a contented person is concerned, they are optional since the ``main story'' (so to speak) has already been completed. Everything else that comes after just goes into the epilogue. Conversely, if the new narratives create a new chapter in the person's life, then the implication is that he/she is no longer contented with what he/she has experienced.

Maybe that's why I feel the way I feel. In some sense, my main story has completed already, and that's why I have a decreasing need to conform to what society claims is the main story that I should be pursuing. I didn't expect to work on computer systems, I didn't expect to study overseas, I didn't expect to fall in love (and be loved back in turn), I didn't expect to be good at making music, and I didn't expect to make peace with God.

I have studied overseas on government money at an amazing university for my favourite subject of computer science; I have worked with computer systems, writing new ones and learning things along the way; I had fallen in and out of love, with the last one being so serious that it lasted for five years; I played my dizi at a level that has some grudging recognition of those who do that as a livelihood; and I have found my way to Jesus Christ.

What more can I ask for out of my life?

I can write stories about my life---I have been writing stories about my life. This blog is proof, as are the poetry blog, the prose blog, and even my NaNoWriMo entries. Each and every one of them is a testament to my life, a fragment of a figment of my life's story.

Should I die today, I already have my legacy ready. There is, of course, that minor problem of disposal of my material possessions, but that's a problem for the living, not the dead. Where I would be going once I'm done with this mortal life, I don't need those material possessions.

I will have all I will need---the stories that make up my life.

On Systems

The propensity for bad behaviour by humans to gain some form of advantage (real or otherwise) always boggle my mind. I suppose that's the source of inspiration for the well-known phrase ``The road to Hell is paved with good intentions''. It is also the primary reason why the Prisoner's Dilemma exists.

These types of behaviours are, surprisingly enough, much better understood by society's so-called lowlifes than anyone else who claim to be more cultured/law-abiding. The high-born are likely to know this extremely well too, though there always exists a fine line separation between the upper-most strata of a society and its lower-most stratum. To the high-born, they make the rules, and as people benefitting from them, know the true extent in which the rules cover and more importantly, do not cover. The lowlifes don't make the rules of polite society, but they live a more lawless existence than the vast majority of people, and thus have a stronger innate understanding of how base human nature can be. In both situations, while the source of understanding may be different in presentation, the essence behind the reasoning is more or less the same.

The real idiots in society are actually those who claim to be masters of the system---the engineers, the scientists, and anyone who claims technological superiority. They may know their machines and systems well from their own axiomatic approach, but they almost always fail to take into account how the very rules that they have put into their small universes may be bent to perform bad behaviours. They put too much faith in their ability to analyse systems, believing that since they designed the system, they possess mastery over everything that it works with, and thus they always know best, even coming up with terms like ``data-driven approach'' to justify their decisions, throwing shade at any decision process that involve qualifiable statements that are not quantifiable.

Ironic, isn't it? I am a tech-y, and in the same breath, I am also condemning myself as being an idiot in society.

I think I've mentioned before how not everything is quantifiable, and perhaps more subtly, the most important things in life/society that may be qualifiable may never really have some form of meaningful quantification. I did not make the much bolder step of declaring that science is not the start of understanding, but really the end of it, and that it is part of the ongoing dialogue to understand both the physical world and the manipulated ones that are dominated by the various types of human interactions.

Science is always wrong by definition, however what separates it from every other mode of inquiry is that it strongly encourages people to always challenge everything that is declared to be correct in science through reproducible experiments. Reality is what science looks up to---reality is the ``ground truth'' that everyone likes to talk about, and if a model in science does not conform to reality, it is the model that is wrong, not reality.

That last point is a very important one and deserves to be stated clearly:

Reality is what science looks up to---reality is the ``ground truth'' that everyone likes to talk about, and if a model in science does not conform to reality, it is the model that is wrong, not reality.

It is the innate want of spreading discoveries from observation that guides our scientific endeavours, as well as the subsequent control that we may exert upon reality through the ramifications that arise from the model that we had used to explain the observed phenomenon. That's the big reason why basic scientific research that does not immediately lead to a product is so important---the increase in the number of axioms we possess within the framework of science increases the overall expressivity of the engineering outcome exponentially.

But the ability to explain phenomena with models simplified from reality makes science practitioners arrogant---after a while, they ``get high on their own supply'' as some lowlifes may call it. They have too much faith in their systems that they demand that reality conform to their models, as opposed to fixing their models to fit reality. This carries over into the land of the engineers of various rule-based systems, be it information systems, laws, or anything under the sun.

As long as society exists, there will always be a need for interaction, and when there is a need for interaction, systems of rules governing what is acceptable behaviour will exist. But like regular science, much of these rules are post-hoc, and tend to be heavily generalised versions that can help the vast majority of rule-abiding people. They can never be complete and be easily transmitted around---the two properties are contradictory in nature. Given that then, it becomes clear that anyone who chooses to not follow the rules' intention but by their words can effectively do whatever they want, without any bad consequences since penalty/rewards are determined solely through the ``letter of the law'' as opposed to the ``spirit'' for the sake of fairness.

So tools like ``automatic banning of reported spammer'' can be abused to generate denial of service attacks by perpetrators against their victims, as are abuses to rules like ``warrantless entry of a dwelling to enact arrest without giving the chance for the person to escape'', or even ``be masked up at all times unless you are eating''. The intentions can be quite clear, but their presentation, for the sake of conciseness, transmission, and explanation, is sufficiently open that it can be abused to hell and back with little repercussions.

Which brings me to something to really think about: as the world's information systems increase their reach beyond the skilled knowledge workers of the past into the larger society of the now and beyond, what is the ethically correct way of dealing with this propensity of bad behaviour by humans?

Maybe if we can solve that at scale, the solution will be what we have been calling ``artificial intelligence''.

``What Makes a Man Turn Neutral?''

``What makes a man turn neutral... lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?''

As said by Zapp Brannigan from Brannigan Begin Again. As asinine the quote may sound in the beginning, a slightly deeper meditation applied to it reveals its innate profoundness, even though it was uttered by one of the dumbest characters within Futurama.

``Neutrality''. It sounds like a great idea in principle. The only problem is that it is actually not a practical principle to be applied in reality, for the simple reason that things in life are discriminative in nature. I posit that all decision processes are, at the end of the day, a system of discriminating between two or more choices.

Any decision process that does not end up with discriminative effects has failed its primary objective of reaching a decision.

Now, before the pitchforks come up, allow me to remind all that ``discriminative'' and ``discrimination'' as used in this context refers to the property of drawing distinctions, a means of separating a set of things into two or more sets. So in the context of a decision process, the outcome of the said process separates the world states where one choice was made, and another where the other choice (assuming a binary choice situation) was made instead.

``Neutrality''. It suggests a sense of balance, a position that neither contributes nor takes away from the other positions that it is neutral to. True ``neutrality'' isn't likely to exist---all things are according to the will of God, and if you are not a believer, at the very least you may agree that the physical concept of neutrality, equilibrium, is usually fleeting at a universal scale, but may be found in sufficiently localised sub-spaces only.

This balance then, is illusionary. Like all choice-related principles, the introduction of ``neutrality'' itself creates a new option whose consequences need to be addressed. In the short term, it may appear that one has wisely stayed away from the contested responses of all the other participants who are not neutral; but in the long term, the price to neutrality must be paid---that non-participation (at easiest) or active maintenance of being in the balance (at the most adaptive) will bring forth new contradictions that would not have occurred had one picked a side to begin with.

In politics, the price of neutrality is either the superficial aloofness (likely with some serious behind-the-scenes horse-trading to maintain that veneer of aloofness), or living in the gray area of simultaneously entertaining multiple perspectives/sides of any particular problem, an action that is best described as whoring out. The first form of neutrality may end up alienating the particular state from regional/world politics; aloofness means that the state practising it has accepted the position of being treated like a backdrop to not interact with, which means that in situations where the state may need assistance from other states, not helping it is a legitimate and ethically defensible position.

As for the second form of neutrality, the state practising it will likely to enforce a blanket of vagueness over its foreign policy, discouraging people from scrutinising too hard to reveal the innate contradictions that are necessary to keep that ``support multiple/all perspectives'' neutrality narrative. And when the scrutiny gets too intense, a deliberate nit will be shown as the reason why it is possible to maintain both seemingly contradictory positions simultaneously, claiming that the state does not discriminate on ideological lines but work towards a singular goal of problem solving.

To address Brannigan's quote, what makes a man turn neutral isn't about lust for gold nor power, nor was he born with a heart of neutrality. It's greed in the general sense, or more specifically, the lust for as many options made available as possible without committing to any of them until a decision must be made. Neutrality in the sense of taking no sides in a conflict sounds great in theory, but is rarely applicable in practice---consider it a momentary phase of unstable equilibrium as sooner or later, one will be forced by circumstances to literally pick a side.

Silence

Ever heard the sound of silence? What does silence sound like?

John Cage's 4'33" doesn't count since it is a meta-music piece that focuses on the ambient environmental sound that was always present but was obliterated by the musicians' playing of their instruments.

What one hears in a sensory deprivation tank doesn't quite count either, since at that low level of ambient noise, one is truly hearing the noise floor that exists within one's hearing system.

By extension, that includes sitting in the world's quietest place---an anechoic chamber located at Microsoft HQ, of all places. It is rated at −20.35 dBA, where the reference point is defined at 20 μPa.

Where moving particles exist, sound will exist due to the pressure changes from the mechanical movement. Ergo, where there are no moving particles existing, there will be no sound, i.e. silence.

Sadly, even the vacuum of space isn't truly silent. It has a reported pressure fluctuating anywhere between 1 mPa to 1 fPa---hardly the zero moving particles that silence is.

But am I deviating from my original question? I asked, ``ever heard the sound of silence?'', and yet it seems that I deviate to determining if there is an objective silence than can be heard.

No, no one can ever heard the sound of silence. Our ears simply aren't that sensitive, not to mention that in a situation where true silence exists, we as a human won't.

Silence is an absolute---the absolute definition of nothingness, a true void. It's startling how such a simple word encompasses one of the extremes of the universe that we can only hope to asymptotically approach. We may stumble upon it under sufficiently exclusive conditions, often including the smallest possible space we can conjure up in the fleetest of moments.

But it will go as quickly as it came. Ephemeral.

Silence is beyond. Silence is also ephemeral. Silence may be a true end of the universe as we know it---heat death.

Heyo Stupid O'Clock!

I really should be showering and then sleep. But instead, here we are again: the inaugural stupid o'clock post of August 2021.

I chanced upon the news that Qatar and Italy would be sharing the gold medal for high jump, and a small wave of happy emotions flowed through me for a bit, before the usual voicelessness takes over.

It's the same as the rain that I reported earlier---it came, it went, and the overall ambient temperature was still hot, though decreased by about 2°C.

These days, a difference of 2°C can be a matter of life and death, especially during the hottest parts of the day.

As Sundays go, it wasn't too shabby. Having curry chicken for dinner is always a good pick-me-up, calories notwithstanding. I dug more imaginary dirt as I was following some of my favourite VTubers' latest hijinks.

I also transcribed 乙女解剖, first in the original C♯-minor key, and then transposing it down to G-minor key (as sung by Okayu), before finally transposing that to fit a B♭ instrument like say a tenor/soprano saxophone, or even an F 大笛.

It's challenging for a saxophone---the range goes all the way to instrument high A, about the lower altissimo range, so the most useful candidate to play it would be the tenor saxophone as opposed to the soprano saxophone (hahahahaha... good luck with that).

In the case of the F 大笛, it ``just'' goes up to .6 using 筒音作2̣, (equivalent to :2 using 筒音作5̣), which is surprisingly playable.

I still need to shove in some rehearsal marks to make it easier to find the sections corresponding to stanzas, but other than that, it is mostly ``done''.

I do need to work on 21/06-29 though... the tune is still sitting in a sound file and not transcribed out to score form for actual composition. Maybe in lieu of passive entertainment (reading, watching YouTube videos), or passive ones involving the use of my still-screwy right thumb (controller-based games, mouse-based games), I can work on that instead.

Voicelessness. I wonder why that word came to mind as I write out this stupid o'clock entry. Could it be some kind of internal channelling of some sort, or is it just happenstance? Eh, I don't really know, and I'm not sure if I care enough to want to know.

I think that as I write here, I sound more and more incoherent.

Maybe there will be one day that I will stop updating this blog completely, maybe even deleting it. Maybe, just maybe.

Oh! I remembered something. Soma---this was the game that Ninomae Ina'nis was playing over the past three days. It's a game that explored what it meant to be ``alive'', and thoughts about consciousness.

If we accept that there exists a meta-entity representing the sum total of the information that represents who we are, then perhaps a successful isolation of this meta-entity, in whatever convenient space and encoding, will allow its transmission from one vessel to another, like how a computer program may have its binary code copied from one computer to a completely different one, or in a closer analogy, a virtual machine paused with memory dumped being copied wholesale to another one.

However, that successful transmission doesn't answer the meta-meta-question: which of the two (or more) copies will ``I'', the current conscious entity piloting this skeleton mecha in a meat armour exist in? Is it both, the ``source'' only, the ``destination'' only, or neither since any form of such information transmission requires a stop-the-world scenario, which basically means that the ``I'' that had been piloting the skeleton mecha in a meat armour has effectively died.

No, sleeping and waking up doesn't count, because the mind (widely accepted as where consciousness sits) isn't completely stopped the way a virtual machine's entire state is static on pausing with a memory dump. One may not be consciously aware of things while asleep, but one's mind still has some level of continuity from one moment to the next. Subconscious mind changes are still changes, and there is no one that can definitively claim that only the conscious mind constitutes that meta-entity that is the sum total of all the information that represents who we are.

If the spirit is taken to be the name for this meta-entity, does it then mean that those of us who are saved by our Lord Jesus Christ will have our spirit safely copied out of the dead hardware into the other as yet not well understood hardware to ``run'' so that we (in spiritual form, the essence of who we are) still continue to exist, while those who are not yet saved are doomed to letting their spirit be ignored by Him after corporeal death?

I'm not drunk enough for these thoughts. I think I'll stop here for now and go get that shower and sleep that I talked about.

Till the next update.

Where Did July Go?

And with this entry, the side panel expansion of all 37 entries in the month of July, 2021 gets hidden altogether. It's a psychological clean slate of some sort---a new month begins, a new phase begins; a simple one-to-one correspondence.

The day is starting a little less crazy, heat-wise, as the skies outside are filled with the cumulo-nimbus clouds that herald a downpour of sorts. Of course, it could just be a tease as it is wont to do, but having hope is one of those things that allow us to function in this world where everything that can go wrong will go wrong, possibly at the worst time possible.

...

Ah it did decide to rain. But we'll see if it's a short duration drizzle or something more... substantial. One can always hope, can't we?

I had a weird dream last night [that I remembered]. I was somewhere in Pittsburgh, somehow enrolled again in a place that based on a mish-mash of my memories of CMU and UIUC, with a building interior that is some combination of those places' buildings and Serangoon NEX. I was going about, doing actions similar to what one would do at college, with two small problems: somehow I hadn't gotten my living arrangements sorted out(!), and I didn't transfer enough cash to myself beforehand for expenditures(!!).

Could this be related to my annual donation to the CMU alumni fund, and more importantly, the fact that it is almost time to do so and I need to make the appropriate arrangements? You'll be the judge.

I enjoy donating to the CMU alumni fund. I don't actually donate to the UIUC one. There are two big reasons: CMU was really where, for the first time in a long time, I felt at home socially. Don't get me wrong, I had a decent time in primary school, and junior college wasn't too bad, but CMU was where I was among those whom I had only read/dreamt of but never met---geeks who weren't beneath expressing themselves. Yes, some of them were a little too arrogant, but then again, who wouldn't be if they actually had some skill in that department---the trick is to keep it under control and not be a dick about it. The sad thing is that for some people, that is hard to do, and they do end up beign a dick about it, but usually all is fine.

As for UIUC... well... it's a mixed bag. In some ways, it was a successful extension of my list of credentials, but in other ways a cold, sober look at things made me realise that perhaps that Masters (from a PhD) didn't really yield as big of a margin as compared to CMU's Bachelor's. Socially, of course, I did much better in UIUC as compared to CMU, but that's because the graduate life is much different from the undergraduate one. I just didn't feel that UIUC has actually done any good to me the way CMU did.

I only had/have enough funds to donate to one of the two, and so I chose to donate to CMU instead. Remembering one's roots are quite important, especially for those who helped one find their way in this messed up world. In some sense, I should also thank my secondary school, since I did acknowledge that a lot of my present character was shaped by my time there, but read a little deeper and you'll find that all that was largely borne out of surviving the persecution, and not some kind of active nurturing aspect.

Also, SIN city schools are already supported by the government monetarily, particularly those that aren't classified as being ``independent''. Chucking a chunk of money at them isn't going to do much other than ego-stroking, which I suppose can be an important thing if one wants to take the game of social hierarchies very seriously.

That all said, I am well aware of how loyalty works though. Corporations, no matter how benign they may be, have no soul---``loyalty'' is not commutative with respect to corporations. So, one can be loyal to a corporation, but do not expect the corporation to be loyal back to one---it just doesn't happen. This whole ``humane'' aspect of things is hard to quantify, and is often ignored when some corporation claims to be ``meritocratic'' or ``technocratic''---those are short-hand for declaring that they will use properties that can be easily quantified, and are likely to exclude other important properties that cannot be easily quantified in the name of being ``fair''.

Is that true fairness/justice? You decide.

------

Going back to my previous post featuring 乙女解剖, it seems that the original version by DECO*27 is in C♯-minor, while Nekomata Okayu's cover is in G-minor. Just a quick note to myself as I transcribe it into something that I can play on some instrument---not sure if I want it for concert flute, alto flute, some saxophone, some recorder, or even ye olde dizi.

Alright, time to put this away and enjoy the rest of the day. Till the next update.