Minecraft

If you're looking for some deep entry today, well, too bad---no deep insight of any sort today.

I built a 2.7k+ block railway bridge from my base in Minecraft westwards towards the Deep Ocean biome with the intention of building a mob farm, and doing some other exploration. I've been playing Minecraft single player on and off for a long time, but this was the first time that I had built something that used rail mechanics. I play on a local server, spending most of my time in survival, but with some creative liberties just to improve my quality of life and have fun instead of tedium, like not having my inventory dropped on death, or low-key aesthetic choices like block-lighting sources (Jack o'Lantern) for safety, and sand for smelting into glass for use to seal off the lava in the underground to form lava ceilings/floors as I dig out a 3-block high layer out. Other than that, everything else are from regular mining/smelting/farming activities.

I had recently migrated my Mojang account for Minecraft off to the Microsoft one, and it was... annoying, to say the least. I really don't like having so many things that are getting tied to specific [e-mail] accounts of one company---it concentrates risk into one place, and considering just how nonchalant many of these companies are in the way they handle false positives of whatever their fraud-detection algorithms go, I feel justifiably worried.

I mean, why should my single-player game behaviour be tied to some other multi-player game, or more drastically, why should a false report from fraud in a multi-player game penalise me through removing access to all of my single-player games, or to even up the ant&eactue; even more, removing access to software tools that are not game related that were mercilessly tied to the same account? It's definitely a worse form of justice than whatever we get from the regular governmental kind because such private and proprietary systems are a law unto themselves that have, so far, resisted attempts to be controlled by the lawful government.

I'm not saying that I want to be have all kinds of rules crammed down my throat. I'm saying that between facing enforcement from an entity that is unaccountable by virtue of being a private platform versus one that at least has a social contract agreed to by the electoral population, I would rather take the second over the first.

It's scary because more than ever almost everything that is of value that we use these days are no longer hours---that rental mentality has gotten itself much more deeply embedded within our consciousness over time. No longer do we ``own'' our things---almost everything is a rental. It's easy to see this for digital goods like e-books, videos, music, and games, but it is also catching up with the durable goods as well; the more ``smart'' that durable good is, the more likely that it will operate under a rental model.

Like why does my refrigerator need access to the 'net for? ``Internet of Things'' for my refrigerator to auto-stock up on things via delivery as a possible use case? ``Firmware updates'' for my refrigerator?? Why would my refrigerator, the product of more than seventy years of innovative life time, suddenly need the control mechanism of its being, i.e. the ``firmware'', to be updated? It is as though when we shove the ``smart'' moniker on a durable good, it suddenly loses all its operational stability from the days before it got ``smart'', and requires even more kid's gloves to handle.

That isn't progress. That is regress.

That's part of why I want out of the Infocomm Technology industry. We are peddling all manners of snake oil to everyone. There aren't many things that are done that actually improve life-styles---if anything, every new ``innovation'' increases the number of shackles we are slapping on ourselves to be further tied to the corporations. I love computer science, but I hate how the power of automated reasoning (and automated actuation from the mechatronics counterparts) gets abused to enslave humanity once more.

It's like that apocryphal story of the capitalist who was talking to the fisherman who was returning from his fishing with a bucket of fish, whistling a tune while looking at the sunset. The capitalist was talking about how the fisherman was wasting his potential, and how the latter should fish beyond what he needed so that he could buy more boats to fish, then form a company to run a fleet of fishing boats to make more money, so that in the end, he could just relax. To the gradiose statement made by the capitalist, the fisherman merely replied ``Isn't that what I am doing now?''

Some might think me nuts to suddenly decide to follow in the path of Jesus as a believer. But Jesus never tried to sell me snake oil, telling me to enslave myself to make a lot of money so that I can retire in comfort. Hell, even God in the Old Testament made it clear that even when He was providing [manna], each should get only what they need and no more, even actively punishing those who disobeyed. Work still needs to be done to earn one's keep---it is just good for society in general. But to be overworked, and have a lifestyle whose upkeep requires ever increasing amounts of resources to maintain... that's just Not Right.

That's enough out of this windbag for now. Maybe I'll play another couple of maps from Serious Sam 3: Before the First Encounter after my shower, or maybe more digging in Minecraft while watching some Hololive videos on YouTube in the background---I haven't decided which yet. Till the next update.

Moving from Evil to Good

Ideally, be not evil---be good instead.

But sometimes that is not practical, because it involves too large a change to be acceptable. Hence Jesus' statement in Matthew 19:23--24 (ESV):

²³ And Jesus said to his disciples, ``Truly, I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven. ²⁴ Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.''

But it is not completely hopeless, as even after that statement, Jesus follows up with pointing out that with God, all things are possible (Matthew 19:26).

But to put things into context, the rich person in the story was seeking for a definite ``almost instant gratification'' type answer after replying to Jesus on how he has been righteous enough thus far to follow the commandments that had been given since Moses' time. Since the question was posed in such a manner, the reply was just as straightforward: the ultimate pathway towards eternal life (or goodness in the face of God) is to walk away from the possessive ties of treasure of this world and follow Him into the next. What isn't obvious then is that the factor of time isn't taken into account, to a certain degree.

We easily interpret it as Jesus asking the rich man to dispose of all his possessions now to follow Jesus (who was then alive) due to the immediacy of the encounter, but as we now have the benefit of hindsight through access to the entirety of the Bible, we find that Jesus' explanation to the rich man is more of an instruction of the end-state while allowing us to be moulded over time by the Holy Spirit towards being more Christ-like in nature. In many ways, there seems to be an implicit acknowledgement that there is some internal personality inertia that needs to be overcome only with time and careful cultivation of the mind/heart that cannot be expedited. It is similar in substance to another non-biblical parable of a man asking a grandmaster how long it would take to master some skill, only to be told that it would take increasing amounts of time with increasing amounts of intensity as proposed by the man.

As a man of faith, I can see intuitively how Jesus' words make sense. As a man of science, I wonder: what is the nature of this internal resistance that can only be overcome through a measured application of effort over time? What are the mechanics that control this? Are these mechanics peculiar only for the mental system, or is it something that is more universally applicable to systems in general?

No answers, just questions for now.

But going back to the initial statement, it is always possible to move from evil to good, but the practicality of it has always been correlated to the amount of time that one puts into it. The longer the time frame, the less per-unit-time effort (or change) required. The total amount of change necessary to steer from evil to good is still the same, but the longer time frame introduces less strain into the behaviour of the system as compared to some kind of crash course. Being saved from God's eternal indifference is a one-time affair through the belief that Jesus is the Christ and is one's personal saviour, but living up to the standards of being God's child is always a work in progress as long as we are still living with our mortal coil.

I don't have anything else that I might want to add for now. So I will end here. Till the next update.

Fixing Bits of pbarwin.cpp

I got to test out pbarwin.cpp on Edythe-III and found a couple of interesting side cases. The key difference between Edythe-III and Eileen-II is that the former has two batteries while the latter doesn't. That introduces issues like whether the battery enumeration will show the missing battery (it does), and what happens with respect to the different charging. I had anticipated some of these issues before hand and wrote up the mitigation, but nothing beats actually testing it on a true situation.

I had to fix one of the indicator mechanisms that I was using for the ``small battery gauge''. Here's a ghetto-photo version of how it looks like after fixing:

The original way did not show any of the filled out bar if there were any such indicators, which made it quite confusing to determine in this case which battery is being charged, and at what level it was on. While fixing that, I managed to update my source code to use std::fill() over the ghetto-C way of using a for-loop to fill it up (the ``hardcore-C'' way is to use memset()).

Going back to the ghetto-picture, let me highlight the changes. I added the indicator sigils for the small battery gauge: `>' is for charging, `!' is for critical status, and `?' is for unknown status. I also have a contextual output of hhh:mm:ss that shows either the estimated time left to fully charge the current battery, or the estimated battery life left for battery discharge. It becomes ---:--:-- if the batteries are not charging/discharging, and if it is running on AC power. That was a feature that I didn't update into pbarwin.py that I could somewhat more easily pull off now.

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

Final Touches to pbarwin.cpp

The day's only half done, but I feel a little more accomplished than before. I took the battery information code that I put together yesterday and enhanced it a bit to use only one of the two APIs that I was using before (specifically just the one for enumerating battery devices), and to bring back some of the other features from aeons ago that involve generating estimates of time-left (while discharging) and time-to-go (while charging).

I also reworked the logic for various indicators, since I had access to individual battery information, thus allowing a better control over what to display. Specifically though, I was annoyed at the discrepancy that was showing up even in the screenshot from yesterday's post. With the better refinement, I think I have probably dealt with that discrepancy adequately.

And that's about it for this program for a while. It seems to me that during this entire sabbatical thus far, I have steadily fixed/updated the various tools that I have built over the years for whatever things I had. Non-exhaustively, I have:

1. Changed layouts and updated the fonts for my blogs while making them mobile friendly;
2. Update fonts and colour scheme for my personal information domain
3. Fixed and updated navigation for the same;
4. Set up a proper sitemap.xml generator for the same;
5. Updated my build-to-publish processors for my website to also be faster;
6. Created a tool that lists the number of pages among my e-books;
7. Enhanced my reading list/read list estimators;
8. Fixed auto-detection of terminal background colour to use the correct .vimrc settings;
9. Fixed the typematic rate problem; and
10. Sped up+enhanced the command line battery information.

I am naturally quite pleased with the productivity here. I still haven't done up the diagrams for the 笛子 Materials articles yet, but that's a different story for a different day.

All in all, a good sabbatical from the personal productivity front.

As for the introspection for the way forward, that one is a mixed bag so far. I learnt that I really didn't want to have children, and I am starting to wonder seriously if I am truly happier being single than if I were attached. I am also debating heavily internally about whether to continue the path of the corporate wage slave, or to be freer through bowing out of the rat race completely.

I have, at times, wondered to myself if I should give up on music-making as well. Even if I were talking about something community-based like serving in the music ministry, my staunch ``I'm not going to take a bloody certificate for music that I do as a hobby'' stance is going to disable me against the multitude of graded musicians and music degree holders. And going back to my roots of the community Chinese Orchestra, I don't even know if we are getting back together at all, seeing the lukewarm/cold response so far. At times I'm wondering if it is just an attempt to quietly let it die away amidst this convenient excuse of a pandemic restriction as our quiet community special interest group gets eclipsed by the better funded troupes with their professionally-led committees.

It's the start of the last third of my sabbatical. I will need to have some better answers than what I currently have right now, and I just wonder how I will get them. May God grant me wisdom to learn of what is to be done. Amen.

On the sloc...

By the way, sloccount said that pbarwin.cpp was 189 sloc, compared to the 204 sloc for pbarwin.py. Note that the sloc unit here is based on physical source lines of code. Since it is physical lines of code, take it for what you will---the numbers are small enough to be within the margin of error anyway.

I didn't set it up in my Cygwin environment; instead, I had fired up my Ubuntu Server virtual machine and just run it from there. I didn't have time to do it earlier because I was rushing off to meet up with YT.

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

Command Line Battery Information Finally Returns!

Well, I'm on a roll. Ever since I wrote that short program that auto-resets my typematic rates via Win32 API, I felt this urge to do something similar for a long-standing problem. But before I get into that, let me go back a few steps.

If you'd look carefully at this ancient entry from 2007, you would find that there's a weird cyan-coloured line in the console box in the lower left corner. That cyan-coloured line is the command-line output of the battery status of the laptop that I am running on. I find it necessary to have something like this for the simple reason that my taskbar is always hidden up in the top, which means that the notification area's battery information hardly ever shows up.

Combine that with me using console screens in near-full screen most of the time, its clear that I don't really get to see the battery status (or the time, for that matter, which explains the whole showing of the local time in rule aspect of my .vimrc file).

In the old days [in Cygwin], I could easily access battery information through the /proc/acpi/battery path, and parsing the information there using Python2 to generate what I wanted. This had two big advantages:

1. Ease of access of information without doing strange things; and
2. General portabiliity across both Cygwin and regular Linux.

Those were important back in the days where I dual-booted between Windows XP and Linux (Slackware).

The portability aspect diminished over time as I reached into the era of Windows 7 due to the use of virtual machines to run the Linux environments that I needed to get work done. It also coincided eventually with the removal of the /proc/acpi/battery interface in Cygwin, which gave me the problem of how to get the battery information to generate that information bar.

The answer was to use the wmic command, specifically the incantation:

wmic Path Win32_Battery

This incantation is a Windows-only way of obtaining all battery information within the system to stdout, after which it was just a case of parsing the returned text to generate what I needed. Since it still involved parsing of text, I used Python2 (and after that, Python3 since Python2 was no longer supported past 2020-01-01), with the difference that I would use a system fork() to execute the wmic incantation to receive its stdout process to operate on.

It worked. Sort of, in the correctness kind of way.

Truth is, it was slow as hell.

Since I was doing this every time the command prompt shows up, the noticeable delay was getting annoying. To be fair, it wasn't showing a multi-second delay, but it was definitely of the right order of magnitude to feel sluggish. Recall from yesterday's entry that 250 ms is sluggish in my book, that was definitely a no-go.

For the longest time then I had just turned off that functionality. It annoyed me of course. There was only one way to solve this, and it was to write an actual program using the Win32 API to do the query and output it all out without having to undergo all these crazy overheads of fork()-ing and then parsing [unnecessary] text when everything can be obtained in the compact binary way.

To me, using Win32 API used to mean ``install the gargantuan nonsense that is Microsoft Visual Studio, and go through the messy-ass process of defining an entire project just to compile one file''. But after yesterday's experience, I found that I could get away with it by just using g++ on Cygwin, with the Win32 API headers/libraries installed of course.

Unlike the FilterKeys code yesterday, this one is not that straightforward enough that I could just dump the source here. Briefly, I will describe what was needed:

1. For general battery information (needed for the overall battery status), the GetSystemPowerStatus() API was all that was needed, and this one is easy.
2. To get the individual battery information, it requires a messy-ass enumeration of the battery-class of devices with a lot of associated dereferencing. The general skeleton can be found in this MSDN documentation.
3. The documentation is incomplete though, since it doesn't specify what headers are needed. On Cygwin, it turns out that one would need the following incantation to work:

   #include <windows.h>
   #include <winbase.h>
   #include <Setupapi.h>
   
   #define INITGUID
   #include <guiddef.h>
   #include <devguid.h>
   #include <BatClass.h>

   Don't question it---I spent time figuring this nonsense out from source-delving and what-not.
4. Finally, the compilation process requires the linking of an additional library, the incantation being:

   g++ pbwarwin.cpp -lsetupapi

   Compare this to the FilterKeys code yesterday that didn't need anything extra.

And with that, I finished writing the program and did a quick test.

That's a one-sample estimate here, 220 ms for the wmic fork version in Python3 versus the 47 ms in this C++ program. That's nearly 5× faster, and even lower in latency than the 188 ms delay for my typematic rate.

Needless to say, I am pleased as punch at the success. In terms of stupid line count (I don't have sloccount set up heere), they are roughly the same at around 260+ lines, but the overheads are completely different, which result in this much improvement. There is also a subtle improvement here in the new C++ code: it generates detailed battery information for exactly the number of batteries that are present in the system, unlike the old version where I had to make some assumptions and hope for the best since there was no indication on the number of available batteries based only on the wmic output.

And so, I can now merrily have my battery information back. Till the next update.

Typematic Rates

Okay, let's talk a bit about typematic rates.

The idea of a typematic rate is simple: when a key is pressed and held, there exists some amount of delay after registering the first key-down event before the operating system decides that the key is considered to be held and should emit the same key code repeatedly at a given rate. The most obvious manners in which this shows up is from using the arrow keys to navigate through a document, or to move the cursor/caret back and forth horizontally through a line of text, or to delete/backspace through a whole bunch of text.

Or if one uses the keyboard to play computer games, any form of keyboard-related navigation will reveal this behaviour as well.

With that out of the way, let's talk about how these two parameters (delay, repeat-rate) can be adjusted.

In the old days of DOS, one would use the mode command in the form of

mode con rate=32 delay=1

to set the keyboard repeat rate to the highest value [of 32] with the lowest delay [of 1]. The rate is given in units of characters-per-second, or just Hertz (Hz), while the delay is provided in units of 0.25 s. So the most rapid that the keyboard can go is 32 Hz (31.25 ms) with an initial delay of 0.25 s (250 ms).

When Windows came about, there was a new keyboard repeat rate/delay control mechanism. This can be easily reached through Windows+R, followed by typing ``control keyboard'' in the ensuing box. This will bring up the ``Keyboard Properties'' dialog box, where the typematic rate is to be set under the ``Speed'' tab. Instead of hard numbers like the mode command, we get sliders that state delays from ``Long'' to ``Short'', and then ``Slow'' to ``Fast''. A cursory search did not reveal any information about any exact numbers here, but considering how the values seem to mimic the range of the old mode command, I will assume that they are similar. I will get to why I believe so in a bit.

Anyway, eventually though, even the fastest settings that were available felt sluggish to me, and I don't mean it just in the ``repeated key hold'' sort of way. Even regular typing was starting to feel sluggish, and this is after applying the ``performance tweak'' (deselecting ``Animate controls and elements inside windows'' under the ``Visual Effects'' tab from the ``Performance Options'' window that is called from the ``Settings'' button under the ``Advanced'' tab of the ``System Properties'' window) to force the newest versions of Microsoft Office to not fuck around with the apparent cursor speed with their ``smooth animation'' bullshit that completely deconstructed the responsiveness of cursor movement. Maybe it is because my typematic rate has increased, or maybe it is due to the higher refresh rate of the screens that I am working on, but no matter the reason, the 32 Hz (31.25 ms) repeat rate with 250 ms delay was no longer cutting it.

I had to go faster. But how?

Salvation came from a completely unexpected source: FilterKeys. Traditionally, this is one of those options that any person who games will want to look at immediately because of the triggering shortcut: holding the shift key for 8 s, an action that will often happen when one is trying to run for long periods of time in an FPS. FilterKeys when activated normally are bad for the reason that they tend to drop extra keystrokes as part of their accessibility slant---it allows people who have unsteady typing to have longer delays in between the emission of key code events to allow their slower finger movements to not generate spurious characters especially in typing.

But FilterKeys have a dark secret: they actually provide a means to fine-tune keyboard-related settings down to millisecond precision. And because of that, I have been using the following registry tweak to obtain my favoured typing rate:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Accessibility\Keyboard Response]
"AutoRepeatDelay"="188"
"AutoRepeatRate"="10"
"BounceTime"="0"
"DelayBeforeAcceptance"="0"
"Flags"="59"
"Last BounceKey Setting"=dword:00000000
"Last Valid Delay"=dword:00000000
"Last Valid Repeat"=dword:00000000
"Last Valid Wait"=dword:000003e8

The delay is now set to 188 ms instead of the 250 ms lowest value available, while the repeat rate is set to being every 10 ms (100 Hz) as opposed to being every 31.25 ms (32 Hz); a 25% shorter delay with slightly more than 3× the repeat rate---this is extremely noticeable. It really makes my typing much more comfortable than before.

That would have been the end of the story for today's post, except for one thing: there were some games on Steam that mysteriously destroy my keyboard settings after I exit out of the game. I could restore the typematic rate, but it would require me to log out and back in again to effect the changes that were in the Windows Registry. The notorious game that kept giving me this problem was N++. It was very problematic because I liked to play N++ in short bursts instead of having a long marathon session as a means of relaxing in between through a paradoxical hyper-concentration process on something completely unrelated. It started to get old each time this happened, and eventually I was annoyed enough that I uninstalled it from Edythe-III and never installed it on Eileen-II at all.

Unfortunately, my favourite game, Jupiter Hell started showing similar symptoms recently. I didn't want to have it go the way N++ did, and wondered if there was a more direct way of making the change happen without having to log out and back in again. It led me to the SystemParametersInfoA() Windows API using SPI_GETFILTERKEYS/SPI_SETFILTERKEYS with associated information set in the FILTERKEYS C-struct. I wrote a simple bit of C++ code and compiled it with g++ in Cygwin, where I had my Win32 API headers installed. The first thing I did was to use SPI_GETFILTERKEYS to probe and output the information for FilterKeys both before running Jupiter Hell and after to see if my hypothesis was true.

And yes, the probe program proved that the FilterKeys settings were nuked after running.

I brought it up to Kornel, and we had a discussion about it. Turns out that the upstream library used to support the changing of keyboard typematic rate from within Jupiter Hell did not actually preserve the original settings due to various technical reasons, and there were some strange Windows-based fuckery that would randomly trigger off the keyboard-related accessibility options. There was no obviously elegant way of solving this in a portable fashion in time for the full release, and a quick fix which nuked all accessibility options was done to ensure that most people would not be affected by it.

Converting the probe program into one that would set the values that I wanted was quite straightforward---the only thing left was to see if the changes would stick. I mean, it's so straightforward that I can put the code (with my personal settings as talked about earlier) here:

#include <windows.h>
#include <winuser.h>

#include <iostream>

int main(void) {
  FILTERKEYS filterKeys;
  BOOL fResult;

  filterKeys.cbSize = sizeof(FILTERKEYS);
  filterKeys.dwFlags = 59;
  filterKeys.iWaitMSec = 0;
  filterKeys.iDelayMSec = 188;
  filterKeys.iRepeatMSec = 10;
  filterKeys.iBounceMSec = 0;

  fResult = SystemParametersInfoA(SPI_SETFILTERKEYS, 
      sizeof(FILTERKEYS), &filterKeys, SPIF_SENDCHANGE);
  if (fResult) {
    std::cout << "Success." << std::endl;
  } else {
    std::cout << "Failed." << std::endl;
  }

  return 0;
}

I compiled it, ran it, and double checked with my probe program. It works perfectly.

So now I have a perfectly working workaround to handle this issue without having to do the log out/in dance. And so, N++ has been installed on Eileen-II now.

I think that's all I have for today. Till the next update.

SMS Musing #15

In response to a Facebook post asking about opinions on musical instruments made in China on the Flute Forum:

Which country a flute is made matters less compared to the quality control (consistency of output) and standards of said quality control ("student" grade versus "concert" grade). We use brand names as a proxy to determine these factors, because the well-known brands have an established track record.

Well-known brands can still produce duds, though that is likely to be less likely than some brand that is lesser known. Remember also that all well-known brands have started their lives once upon a time as an unknown one.

The only sure way to know if a flute works well or not is to play it for oneself. Trade shows are a way for the companies to showcase their best work. If one is looking for a steady supply of instruments, then it is almost necessary to visit the factories themselves to determine the two aspects of quality control I talked earlier before making a decision.

For musical instruments using more organic components (like wood, or animal skins) the question is more layered. It is less about it being made in a country and more about the ambient temperature/climate of the factory of origin. Organic materials are a bit more dynamic than metals, and can be affected quite drastically in their preparation and treatment in manufacturing. In these cases, the quality of control aspect extends deeper into the material supplier as well.

It's turning into an essay here, so I shall stop for now. 😅 I'm not here to defend nor denigrate "made in China" instruments, but want to advocate a more informed decision making process as opposed to relying too heavily on mental shortcuts that uses stereotypes.

``Renewable'' Rant?

Everything is ``renewable'' in the sense that for most things at the energy level that we can operate in, the conservation of mass (both in macro-scale and in sub-atomic scale) holds. Now, whether it is ``renewable'' at the time scale of the human being/race though, that's a completely different story altogether.

The thing is, the matter that make up everything that we possess have more or less existed since the formation of the earth---what has changed in between the aeons is the arrangement of them within the space-time dimension. Low-levels of energy are often stored in the form of chemical bonds between the atoms in molecules, and much of life on Earth is based on manipulating these chemical bonds to release energy to create other chemical bonds to adjust the underlying arrangement of atoms within the molecules to achieve various outcomes which can include things like locomotion or even reproduction.

Generating ``arrangements'' is an intrinsically mathematical way of creating complexity. It is how we take the two elements of 0 and 1 to generate first the countably infinite, and with careful reasoning, to an uncountably infinite. The universe is basically mathematics applied over an extreme space-time-energy scale, and we are the product from all that, as is our predecessors, and our postdecessors.

In the grand scheme of things, we are nothing. So even if the Earth raises its temperature by another 10°C, or if the days grow longer due to the slowing down of the rotation of the planet, it literally does not matter---all the matter that has existed will still exist, with the only difference that the arrangements that are more meta-stable will be different from the ones that are currently meta-stable. This is just a infinitesimal sample of how the large-scale universe operates, and it really drives home the level of awe one should have for the One God who created it all---literally unknowable by us.

But back to the topic. ``Renewable''. As I said before, everything is ``renewable'', but not everything is ``renewable'' at a time-scale (and with intermediate states of system-transition) that is favourable to humanity. Science and engineering are literal baby-steps towards understanding how the bigger Earth system works, and we are always prematurely optimising via exploiting whatever limited science that we have at hand to gain that advantage. That's why we have things like asbestos, leaded petrol, chloro-fluoro-carbon coolants, and tritium, all of which were heavily exploited within years of their discovery before the detrimental aspects of their [uncontrolled] use surfaced. I don't mean that because of that, we should stop all forms of science/engineering, but rather, I say that since we have now more or less overcome the basic problems of survival, we should be a little more careful in terms of how we choose to affect our environment in general, with an overall sense of leaving enough of it unchanged for our future generations of humans to live in.

The tendency of using science and engineering to fix things has always been to add more things rather than to remove, which explains the strong inertia by large corporations that have largely benefitted from all that ``new'' added stuff. In many ways, capitalism has always been more of adding new things than actually solving anything---the answer to a problem is not to do less of an existing [money-making] activity, but to do more of something that seemingly mitigates the problem away. Synthetic plastics from the complex hydro-carbons from fossil fuels were seen as more hygienic and longer-lasting versions of their ``organic'' counterparts of wood/paper, and yet it is this longer-lasting property that is currently causing a lot of the harm, due to the general incompatibility between long-lasting and feeding the consumerism that enables capitalism to flourish the way it is.

Why bother fixing something when it is much easier to toss it out and buy a newer version that is usually more improved than the old?

For those that are more sentimental in nature (i.e. whose value isn't necessarily from use-value alone but from some intangible prescribed emotional value) like musical instruments, nothing seems to beat the more traditional ways of doing things, albeit with improvements that come from more precise tool control. At the industrial scale though, sentimentality means nothing---it's all about whether it is cheaper to use/fix an existing machine/process, or to replace it with a new one. The largest consumers of a lot of the plastics aren't necessarily by the end-consumers (though they definitely contribute via their consumption), but are likely the many intermediaries that are involved in industry. To the industries, plastics are seen as consumables of production---to be used once and then discarded, either because it is cheaper to do so, or because regulation demands so.

Thus comes the paradox of using a largely cheap by ``non-renewable'' resource over a less cheap ``renewable'' one.

Would the situation be better if it were centrally planned as opposed to being left to the devices of the hidden hand of the market? Well, it will only be better if we know more about the ramifications/consequences, and no one has a good grasp of that since foresight is always orders of magnitude harder than hindsight. It is effectively a toss-up---on some matters, centralised planning can help, but on many, the interlocking sub-systems are too enmeshed that it becomes too complex to have a simple input/output relationship drawn up to allow proper dictation of a centralised authority. History will support that through the many instances when centralised planning was more effective and when that was more destructive as compared to a lassez-faire market-based attitude.

If both major principles of organisation are not perfect, then are we doomed? Maybe.

Only the future will tell.

Cleaning My Old Clocky

I've owned a clocky alarm clock since 2009. It's my favourite alarm clock, not because it can run about when triggered, but because it has a nice, loud, pseudo-random alarm, and uses 24-hour time for both display and setting of the alarm, without any other cluttering display elements. Each function also has its own dedicated button (alarm on/off, ``roll off'' on/off, snooze, hour advance, minute advance, alarm set, time set) without any silly touch screen mechanics. It's all digital, which makes setting things precisely that much easier as well.

It does run on 4× AAA batteries, but that's not really a problem. Each set of batteries last about a year or so---I didn't keep track of it because it is that infrequent that I need to change the batteries. There is a ``low-battery'' indicator that will inform me when it is about time to change the batteries, so it really isn't an issue.

I recently took apart my clocky alarm clock to clean it up. I've not cleaned the poor bugger for more than a decade, and the amount of dust and dirt built up is just... horrible. I did try to clean it every now and then when I was way put off, but without taking things apart, there were just too many strange places of dust gathering that could not be cleaned. I also screwed up one of the more recent cleaning steps by using 70% isopropyl alcohol to clean the window, and somehow it leaked through the adhesive and caused the interior to fog up, making it impossible to read the display without triggering the lighting mechanism via the snooze button. That was not ideal, and so I had to take it apart to remove that plastic window so that I can see the display again.

The first obstruction to taking it apart was that the four cross-head screws were covered up by a plastic screw cover that, over the years, had been shoved in deep. There was no way to non-destructively remove them, and so, they were destructively removed via drilling. For more details on the guts, consider checking out this page from Instructables.com.

Once that was done, everything else was much more straightforward to handle. I don't have any ``before'' pictures (those are too horrific to share), but here is a fully-assembled ``after'' picture.

Yes, the wheels are no longer pristine white, as is all the other plastic parts, but what can I say about a device that literally travelled with me throughout the world over the past 12 years?

Discolouration issues aside, the only other complaint I have after such a long operation time is that it has started to gain time at the rate of about 1 minute every couple of months or so. It's not that big a deal (I set my alarm clock to run 15 minutes ahead of local time anyway), but it is something that I need to remember to check on every now and then. That is just a good habit anyway for any time-keeping device that doesn't synchronise itself against the GPS constellation or the Network Time Protocol (NTP).

There aren't many electronics that last as long and remain as useful as my beloved alarm clock. Here's to another decade of wonderful operation.

Till the next update.

The Rules of the Internet

It's 2021, or rather, nearing the end of 2021. I've lived on the 'net for years now, and after mulling over all the nonsense that I had been observing that had been driving me somewhat nuts, I went back to my old roots to revisit The Rules of the Internet. I'll duplicate the current version here for records purposes:

0. Don't f**k with cats.
1. You don't talk about /b/.
2. You DON'T talk about /b/.
3. We are Anonymous.
4. We are legion.
5. We do not forgive, we do not forget.
6. /b/ is not your personal army.
7. No matter how much you love debating, keep in mind that no one on the Internet debates. Instead they mock your intelligence as well as your parents.
8. Anonymous can be a horrible, senseless, uncaring monster.
9. Anonymous is still able to deliver.
10. There are no real rules about posting.
11. There are no real rules about moderation either---enjoy your ban.
12. Anything you say can and will be used against you.
13. Anything you say can and will be turned into something else.
14. Do not argue with trolls---it means they win.
15. The harder you try, the harder you will fail.
16. If you fail in epic proportions, it may just become a winning failure.
17. Every win fails eventually.
18. Everything that can be labelled can be hated.
19. The more you hate it, the stronger it gets.
20. Nothing is to be taken seriously.
21. Pictures or it didn't happen.
22. Original content is original only for a few seconds before it's no longer original. Every post is always a repost of a repost.
29. On the Internet men are men, women are also men, and kids are undercover FBI agents.
30. Girls do not exist on the Internet.
32. You must have pictures to prove your statements; anything can be explained with a picture.
33. Lurk more---it's never enough.
34. If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.
35. If there is no porn of it, porn will be made of it.
36. No matter what it is, it is somebody's fetish.
37. No matter how fucked up it is, there is always worse than what you just saw.
38. No real limits of any kind apply here---not even the sky.
39. CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL
40. EVEN WITH CRUISE CONTROL YOU STILL HAVE TO STEER
41. Desu isn't funny. Seriously guys. It's worse than Chuck Norris jokes.
42. Nothing is Sacred.
43. The more beautiful and pure a thing is---the more satisfying it is to corrupt it.
44. If it exists, there is a version of it for your fandom... and it has a wiki and possibly a tabletop version with a theme song performed by a Vocaloid.
45. If there is not, there will be.
46. The Internet is SERIOUS FUCKING BUSINESS.
47. The only good hentai is Yuri, that's how the Internet works. Only exception may be Vanilla.
48. The pool is always closed.
49. You cannot divide by zero (just because the calculator says so).
50. A Crossover, no matter how improbable, will eventually happen in Fan Art, Fan Fiction, or official release material, often through fanfiction of it.
61. Chuck Norris is the exception, no exceptions.
62. It has been cracked and pirated. You can find anything if you look long enough.
63. For every given male character, there is a female version of that character (and vice-versa). And there is always porn of that character.
64. If it exists, there's an AU of it.
65. If there isn't, there will be.
66. Everything has a fandom, everything.
67. 90% of fanfiction is the stuff of nightmares.
72. If a song exists, there's a Megalovania version of it.
77. The Internet makes you stupid.

I remember up to Rule 63 (though Rule 0 seems new to me), the stuff after that is too new to me from circa 2007, especially since Undertale (the source game for Megalovania) only came out 2015, being in development from 2013 till then.

As flippant and strange as the rules sound, I think they are surprisingly relevant even in today's context of ``curated'' social media. The rules epitomise the concept of how not knowing history has a way of making the same mistakes from then repeat themselves. The platform in which the interactions take place may be different, the people interacting may not be technology nerds the way the old 'net was, but the basic principles of the interactions are still the same.

But who am I kidding? Newfags aren't going to look at The Rules of the Internet---each of them is too busy trying to repost the repost to win imaginary points and be the hippest most up-to-date totally non-mainstream popular person.

Yeah, this isn't good content for a blog entry, but I just want to have a copy of The Rules so that I can refer back to it for later discussion.

Till the next update.

SMS Musing #14

While dining out alone:

With much of the world staying connected through electronic networks, I wonder sometimes how hard it can get to voluntarily fall off it. I don't mean it in the sense of "going off-the-grid" in a prepper sort of way, but more like, how easy it is to "delete Facebook" and stay away from voluntary electronic networks. This means that those "not compulsory but you will totally suffer otherwise" government-related electronic networks don't count. Maybe it is really easy to do so... but the ramifications... I'm not so sure about that.

Will I ever be missed if I'm gone?

Off Tangent?

There is often a slight difference of mentality between writing a blog entry in the morning, and one that is nearer the end of the day. The morning entries have a tendency to be based on a whim/fancy that was struck during the hours of sleep, while that of the evening is after a whole day of exertions. To me, morning entries have a tendency to be more abstract and ``large scale'' in nature, with little to no direct relationship with the happenings of the world, while the evening entries tend to be inspired by the goings on that I had experienced throughout the day.

Considering that I am currently still on sabbatical, much of what I am thinking are based on what I have been reading and am already mulling over, as opposed to actually being reflective of what has happened. Because let's face it, when one is spending most of one's time at home looking metaphorically out of the window, there really isn't much of the outside world that affects one directly. The number of interactions with people are few, and even if there were, they had a tendency to be much more muted in affect. Besides, as time goes by, the state of my being on sabbatical and how the rest of the world isn't means that a divergent of general interests and behaviour is already taking place.

If I keep up this sabbatical for another year, it could well be the case that I might be a total and absolute hermit. At this point, I cannot convince myself that it is not that appealling an idea to pursue.

Extended sabbatical... isn't it just another way of saying ``early retirement''? Considering that my current ``goal'' is to merely outlive my parents before I set my on/off switch permanently to ``off'', it might well be the case that it is a worthy goal to pursue.

Realistically though, I will still need to get some kind of job to pay the bills. This isn't the era where hard work will grant one with the means of living a stress-free life ``in the future''---the old pension schemes that promoted that idea had been scrapped within the past thirty years once employers/corporations start realising that people are living, on average, twenty years longer than they were ``supposed'' to, which, as a result, confirmed that the predicted spending required to fulfil pension requirements was never going to be enough, more so if they expected to leverage on the future contributions of future workers to feed into the pension to pay off the current pensioners.

Sadly, the numbers will never match up for the simple reason that every economic system currently in operation is based solely on the assumption of growth. There are the usual platitudes on why it is believable: technology is always ``improving'' the way we can do more with less, there will always be cheap workers available for the parts that we cannot automate away, and more work is being done to ``value add'' to products beyond mere manufacturing.

Unfortunately, they are all wrong.

With much more at stake, technology is mostly in the ``exploit'' phase as opposed to the ``explore'' phase. There's a tendency to see more of the same, but ``at scale'' as opposed to something truly new/extraordinary that changes the way we do things for the better. The internal combustion engine, for example, is still going to be around for quite a while, no matter what they say about electrification, as long as last-mile electricity distribution isn't improved upon. Fiat money will still be primal no matter what the crypto-currency enthusiasts say.

The game of cheap workers have been one of arbitrage; it's actually symptomatic of the entire theory of economic systems. The basic premise here is that of exploiting competitive advantage in order to secure higher profits (not just revenue). The only ``small'' catch is that for certain types of competitive advantages (specifically that of labour), the margins will decrease the more they are exploited as the associated cost of living increases as the quality of life improves. In short, there will come a time when all places offer equally expensive labour. Labour is expensive because their replacement tends to take a while and have interesting scaling issues unrelated to just the quantity---the quality (available skills and competency) of the said labour counts as well. There isn't an economic system that prioritises self-sustenance and balance---and it isn't obvious how one can be created as such since all we have known over the past two hundred years of human history is growth, growth, and growth [in human population].

``Value adding'' to products after manufacturing is a bit difficult to understand, for the simple reason that it is likely to be a multi-dimensional manifold with many possible local optima. The objective of the game then is to identify enough of these local optima to provide the ``value add'', while using the least amount of resources. Put in more lay-terms, it means that one needs to identify and corner the market where the consumers in it want to consume the very services that one can produce, amidst a large and not-globally-well-understood needs space. It ends up with fragmentation, really. Think of it as the ``artisanal'' phase of service. Maybe at some point enough similarity of service requirements may be found to automate away, but there is still that intangible aspect of service that makes such automated means less welcome as compared to a real person.

Where was I again? Eh... it doesn't matter. Got my daily rant out of the way.

Off to something else then. Till the next update.

No Big Thoughts Today

No big thoughts today. Big thoughts take time to fester, to generate enough annoyance that it becomes harder and harder to not expel them all out with one long-winded rant.

Big thoughts get increasingly harder to come by the more contented one is. Not because that the more contented one is, the more ignorant one becomes, but rather, the more contented one is, the less one is likely to waste time worrying about things. Recall that to worry, is to spend brain-cycles on something that will, inevitably, not do any good at all because the said thing is by itself, outside of one's control.

So all that armchair socio-economico-politico commentary/rants here? Yeah, I'm not some angsty teenager---I know that merely talking about them here isn't going to change anything. Even if I were some kind of high-profile blogger, that would still be the case, for as long as no one decides to take action to enact a change, the status quo will always prevail for the simple reason of inertia.

Never discount inertia in any situation. Inertia is often times the most potent reason why an obviously needed change never gets off the ground. Inertia, to borrow from a physics definition, affects both motion and stasis---an object in motion (or stasis) remains in motion (or stasis) until an external force of sufficient sufficient magnitude to overcome the object's inertia acts on it to impart an acceleration to it to change its direction (or give it motion).

That's why mainstream trends are as hard to buck as it is to change an ossified bureaucracy to be made more efficient.

Alright, that's enough for someone who has no big ideas today. Till the next update.

Change

When people say ``the only constant thing is change'', they are making the observation that the world at large is an emergent system in the sense that from any specific time period [in the past] to any specific time period [future relative to the past], the overall system itself demonstrates behaviour that is consistent with one that has moved from one state to another often-times different one, especially so the system is taken as a whole instead of deliberately confining it to any specific localised region.

But that observation doesn't mean that:

1. The rate of change is a constant;
2. Change is always for the better;
3. We must all ``embrace'' change.

At this point after living through the transistor revolution (as opposed to the industrial one about three hundred years ago), the post-modern era people are more comfortable with noting that the rate of change is not a constant. It is hard to continue to accept that old [mis-]interpretation when we observe over the span of 10-year windows the rapid miniaturisation of electronic ``thinking'' hardware through the rapidly increased ability to do more with smaller and smaller hardware---the ubiquity of various ``smart'' devices are a testament to this, and can prove to be enough to convince even the most recalcitrant to acknowledge that the rate of change is not constant.

That second point of how change isn't always for the better is a little harder to get to, since it involves a judgement of value, which by itself is a far trickier concept to objectively describe and obtain a consensus on a universal scale of values. The usual way of doing so [particularly in economics] is to assign a dollar-value to the outcome, using the innate assumption that the dollar-value, as a mass hallucination, as a good enough fungible measure of value for trade, is also as good for determining the value of things outside of the context of trade. Naturally there are flaws in this method, and the type of change that I am referring to [in an emergent system] is the sort that isn't quantifiable, since quantifiable change can then be subjected to the rigours of differential and integral calculus to further analyse and work with them. No, the type of change I am referring to is usually of the social kind, the kind that involves trends in behaviours within the emergent system that is society. Is being a more liberal-minded society [as compared to before] ``better'' than one that is less so? Is a return to a theocratic mode of government ``better'' than one that is based on the oh-so-very-obviously-flawed version of democracy? None of these questions have acceptable answers, for the simple reason that any acceptable answer will eventually need to be decomposed into a series of judgement calls on what values are prized and what aren't within the particular society.

There are, however, some useful rules of thumb (or heuristics) to guide us. Generally any change that leads to increased individual agency can be considered as being better, since more knowledge (a side effect of our information-dense societies of today) often leads to more tendencies towards doing things using one's own way instead of following the proverbial herd. Any change that reduces harm to others is usually considered as being better as well, under the slightly tweaked utilitarian principle (instead of maximising overall utility, we are talking about minimising overall dis-utility---these two statements are not mutually exclusive to each other). Any change that can provide a pathway to those who do not wish to exercise their free will too much for whatever reason can also be considered better, since a purpose can then be ascribed to these individuals to avoid a situation where they may be swayed by a more destructive [to the system, or society in this case] power. The heuristics are not necessarily consistent with each other, hence the need for the judgement of value to be applied before the change can be considered ``better''.

That change is inevitable and therefore we must all ``embrace'' it is a two-part puzzle that needs unravelling. ``Change is inevitable'' can be considered an axiom in this context, an assumption of the behaviour of the emergent system that cannot be proven/disproven to be true. The idea of ``embracing'' change itself is a nuanced statement---in most contexts of lay-use of natural language, we would interpret ``embracing change'' as adopting wholesale the change that is happening/has happened, possibly adapting any old processes/assumptions that were used before to incorporate the changed elements. Reality is often more subtle than that, and conveying the entire nuanced character of pronouncements of various aspects of society with a compact/concise statement is truly an art-form on its own. Change should never be allowed to be taken in wholesale, because change itself requires a judgement of value to determine what parts of it are relevant, and of the relevant parts how can it affect the existing assumptions and processes, with the important distinction that the existing assumptions and processes have a proven track record (good or bad) as compared to the change.

What I mean is that it is back to the old ``exploit versus explore'' debate all over again. An existing assumption/process before the change in question has a history of its effects and associated adjustments. Based on the understanding of the system then, a certain amount of adaption in line with ``optimisation'' has been applied and has been shown to be working (the contrary concept of existing assumptions/processes before the change have been proven to be not working despite efforts of adaptation/optimisation holds as well). The change is new territory, not necessarily proven within the [localised] context of the emergent system. Maybe it is a better fit, or maybe it isn't---we don't have a good enough predictive system to ``prove'' the outcome without any doubt. Then it becomes a judgement of value call with a dose of risk assessment as well. To ``exploit'' is to declare a conservative risk appetite, and prefer the known over the unknown; to ``explore'' is to declare a higher risk appetite, and prefer trying out the unknown over the known in the hopes of achieving the possibly larger potential of the unknown.

But ``exploit versus explore'' issues aside, there is also a time element with respect to embracing a change that is often not taken into consideration. Over time, an existing assumption/process within the emergent system will require increasing effort to maintain, especially if the said change to them in question gets increasingly mainstream relative to the old practices. Here, the judgement of value is in play still: whether the greater value of retaining the older assumptions/processes is worth the effort in keeping them less tainted by the changes that are going mainstream. There are people who are willing to figuratively ``die on the hill they are on'' for their beliefs, and this is a representation of that. There are also those who are willing to ``reform'' their beliefs through carefully deconstructing their original assumptions/processes to isolate what is truly fundamental and cannot be discarded (judgement of value) and what is frou-frou that can be changed. That latter group requires much more thinking involved, and are often agents of change within their localised context. Their level of determined heresy is determined by how radical their excision of the frills go, and there isn't a pattern to describe what level of enthusiasm leads to a greater chance of success.

Ultimately though, any change as applied to an emergent system provides it with energy to move on to another state, and the resistance to change can be seen as an [increasing] expenditure of energy to maintain a previous state. It may be possible to hold off change for quite a while, but without enough long-term support, that holding off will still be overcome by the sheer amount of energy that change provides.

Can a change be ``undone''? Not in the literal sense of returning to a previously observed state, since each state of the emergent system is a product of the entire history of all its previous states. It's like the complex logarithm spiral---there is a component that can be ``undone'' to what seems to be a previous state, but due to the passage of time and the generation of histories, the ``actual'' position of the state is nowhere near the previous state; at some level, the ``undoing'' nature is really more illusionary than real.

The only constant thing may be change, but it doesn't mean that our treatment of it has to remain constant. A large part of how we deal with it boils down to exercising a judgement of value together with an application of risk assessment. In both cases, it requires thinking.

Maybe the reason why humans are the undisputed rulers of Earth is because we have vastly improved on our ability to out-think all other creatures on this planet. And as long as we can keep on thinking, we can keep on surviving and thriving, which makes all that anti-intellectual movements all the more terrifying to think about.

Till the next update.

Judgement

There are many things to disagree about in the world. But perhaps there are some things that we need to agree about so that we can still go through this life without injustice.

There are two kinds of justice that I know about: the concept of divine justice, and that of society-driven consensus-based justice. In both cases, ``justice'' still carries the meaning of righting the wrong, but their key difference is the time-span of enaction; divine justice is essentially unbounded in time, since whoever is in charge of it (in my case, God) is not a being of the universe and thus has literal free reign over all of space-time to righting the wrong. The other difference that is more subtle is the definition of what ``wrong'' means. Divine justice involves righting wrongs that are more cosmic in nature, the type of wrong that is done against a universal morality, while society-driven consensus-based justice can be seen as worldly implementation of divine justice, but with more cultural aspects to it. I cannot, however, say that divine justice is a proper superset of regular justice as we know it, since there may be cultural components that introduce concepts of justice that lie outside of a universal morality that may even be considered be blasphemous.

But in either case, we can agree that the notion of ``justice'' also entails the action of ``judgement'', a singular event that pronounces that an action is just/unjust, and the meting out of punishment/rehabilitation to correct the unjust actions to bring the judged back to be among the just. ``Judgement'', though stated as a singular event, has been known to be provided by any of these three types of judges: a universally impartial supernatural judge (in my case God), a society-driven consensually appointed human proxy (i.e. the regular judges in a court of [human] law), or a society-driven amorphous consciousness that simultaneously exists but cannot be precisely defined (i.e. public opinion).

The outcomes of a universally impartial supernatural judge's opinions are known in a vague way but not with the specific outcomes that can be pin-pointed to some specific space-time range; by definition, this judge is unknowable in many senses of the world. As such, we cannot reason about this judge in a way that is meaningful for discussion---the only true thing we can reason about is whether we ought to have faith in the infallibility of this judge or to not have faith in the infallibility of this judge, with the latter meaning either that the judge is fallible at some level that we do not comprehend, or that this judge simply does not exist. With that in mind then, we leave this judge out of discussion.

A society-driven consensually appointed human judge enforces human law, which we already have established as a particular implementation of divine justice that is itself affected heavily by cultural contexts. For the purposes of the exposition, ``cultural context'' here simply refers to the level of human understanding that a particular population comprises for that particularly defined society---it can mean a village of people, a country of people, an ethnic group of people, or even a religious group/cult of people. Human law is no different from that of sequential list of conditions and conclusions being applied to interpret a series of actions revealed through investigation to determine justice with respect to the [human] law, or what we would more commonly call as ``legality''. Judges of this sort are not necessarily as impartial as the universally impartial supernatural judge by definition, but they are generally among the most well-respected of people---they are believed strongly by the society-driven amorphous consciousness that simultaneously exists but cannot be precisely defined to perform their duties ``to the letter'' of the law that was agreed to by the said society from which all will abide by (and thus be justified).

In the case of regular judges, a principle of ``innocent until proven guilty'' seems to be in vogue. I don't think that principle is a correct statement: ``innocent'' and ``guilty'' are often misconstrued to being more polar than what they should mean in context. What I am saying is that ``innocent'' and ``guilty'' ought to be understood in the context in which a particular series of charges are being levied at---attributing more unnecessary context to these two words is one of the reasons why a legal system may be deemed to be unjust. Regular judges are well aware of this requirement, but the same cannot be said of public opinion.

And that is where character assassinations come into play through the use of public opinion.

It is never about ``innocent until proven guilty''. It has always been:

Let the plaintiff/complainant present their pieces of evidence and associated logical reasoning to demonstrate that the defendant is in violation of the specific laws that the defendant is charged with. The defendant may then be acquitted if they can present sufficient counter-evidence and proof of contradictions to the provided logical reasoning to demonstrate that the plaintiff/complainant has no case against them.

It really doesn't matter if the defendant is ``not innocent'' of other things not related to the specific charges---in the court of law, all they are answering to are the specific charges that are listed against them. If the plaintiff/complainant does not provide enough evidence and link them into a convincing enough narrative to explain how the defendant is violating the specific laws that comprise the charges, then the defendant must be acquitted---it has nothing to do with innocence or guilt.

That is part of the reason why good lawyers are so important. And it is also the reason why the law seems to favour the rich and powerful---not because they can bribe their way through the system (they don't have to, really), but because they have the means to hire the types of lawyers who are competent enough to mesh the evidence into a narrative that requires a formidable intellect to riposte against. As plaintiffs/complainants, their chances of success improve when the evidence are strongly linked into a narrative that requires an exceedingly improbable set of events to break either the evidence or the reasoning down; as defendants, their chances of success improve when they can break the relevance of the supplied evidence and point out alternative logical reasonings that contradict the proposed one by the plaintiff/complainant.

However, that's all technical; a classic demonstration of logos. The problem here is that public opinion (or the society-driven amorphous consciousness that simultaneously exists but cannot be precisely defined) runs on pathos, a distinctively different manner of reasoning. It's not about the logic, it's all about the emotion, the ``feels'', the type of intellectual laziness of lumping both the shortfalls of a person's character with the specific charge that they are being levied with. This is not helped at all by the media, social or otherwise, that thrives on generating lots of controversy (or as I would call it, ``stirring shit up'') to increase the visibility of that particular media to feed into the participation/relevance/advertising revenue-loop.

That is how someone who is exonerated in the eyes of the law can still be cast as a pariah of society. Because accusations get blown up into declarations of guilt in the court of public opinion, and where retractions of such mistakes never travel as far as the more controversial accusations. It is a classic example of a denial of service attack, in which case the ``service'' that the victim is denied is that of an unassumingly normal life devoid of unnecessary and incorrect judgement.

The problem is obvious, but the solution here isn't. How are we to deal with such manipulation in general? Can we even do anything about it at all? Sadly, I think not---humans are not rational by any degree, no matter what our economist friends might say (they are also starting to realise that homo rational is a simplifying assumption the same way that physics uses ``a spherical cow'' to create models to help explain a [small] part of how an emergent system works), with the added effect that the more we try to get people to be rational, the more they are likely to take those words out of context and twist it to fit their own pathos. Examples of the latter may be found through the many ``anti-vaxx'' arguments that can be seen out there that I don't want to reproduce for fear of damaging my brain even more.

Going back to my original statement, I think we really need to start thinking about the processes in which we take to thinking about things and developing our opinions. I think I might have mentioned before (either here or in meatspace) that it is often impossible to convince anyone from the extreme sides of a situation to change their minds---I said that ``they cannot be reasoned with if they don't want to listen to reason''. A recent musing that I read crystallised this concept into something that is a bit more proof-friendly:

Don't charge in to ``convince'' someone by throwing out all sorts of evidence, arguments, and associated reasonings---they are not likely to want to listen to all of that. Instead, ask these people what sorts of evidence, arguments, and associated logical reasonings that they are expected to see proven true or refuted before they are willing to change their mind instead.

I like that perspective because it forces contrarians to be more precise in terms of what they are contrary about. If an extremist can be articulate about the ``sacred cows'' that they hold dear to keep them in that particular polarity, then that person is no extremist any more---they are really extremists who can be reasoned with, as opposed to the intellectually lazy extremist who does not know what he/she is being extreme about, and opposes all forms of evidence, arguments, and associated reasonings because they can do so flippantly.

I guess this whole rant is just trying to see the link between how this new perspective gels in with what we believe to be an integral part of a functioning society.

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

In Brief

It's Sunday. I went to church online. It rained a lot---the weather was nice. I had curry chicken rice for dinner. I watched more videos from various Hololive folks while reading a few more pages of The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa: Book 3: Vana Parva as translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli. I played a little bit of Grim Dawn as well, trying to take my first player character through the Ultimate difficulty having failed to do so without twinking. I started on Voronoi diagrams in Computational Geometry in C (2nd Edition) by Joseph O'Rourke. I cut my own hair down to the shorter length that I prefer. I did area cleaning as well.

None of what I said above is in any particular chronological order.

That's all for today. Till the next update.

Grabbag: ``Fully Vaccinated'' and Mini Rogue

Alright, so it has been about two weeks since I had my second dose of Cominaty, so technically I'm now considered ``fully vaccinated''.

Since it is the pandemic after all, there were quite a few things that I had to do after the waiting period was over. The regulations have been updated from Aug 19 as noted in the Ministry of Health home page, replicated here because it will update according to changes.

The key point here to take is that there is going to be differentiated requirements for compliance for those that are ``fully vaccinated'' and those who aren't.

There are a few ways of demonstrating the vaccination status:

1. Status as shown in the HealthHub portal/app (I used this to confirm my vaccination status);
2. Status as shown in the TraceTogether app (I've never used the app, so I cannot attest to this);
3. Reconfiguration of the standalone TraceTogether scanner to beep differently according to vaccination statue (I've not seen this in action yet, since I've not gone out of the apartment yet);
4. Use of Verify via a binary blob ``certificate'' as generated by Notαrise (I tested this with the QR code generated in the document generated by Notαrise); or
5. Show the official document generated by Notαrise which states when the various doses of the vaccines were taken, and more importantly, the effective date from which the person stated was considered ``fully vaccinated''.

Of the whole lot, I only have the TraceTogether token, which is a standalone device that acts as a beacon/eavesdropper to determine close contacts. The token itself is tied to me the digital citizen entity in the grand database of the government, so for the purposes of everything related to COVID-19 contact tracing (and other ``extended'' uses), should be self-contained.

But frankly, I kinda doubt that the decentralised approach towards the whole checking in/out process ensures strong compliance. And so I took the time to actually generate the relevant official certificate and print it out nicely to fit into the A5 paper size. That document comes with a QR code that leads to the Verify site, a fancy single-purpose trusted (in the sense that it is ``obviously'' a government database) server, as well as a JSON document representing various information about the vaccination regime, both of which were generated and sent via email.

Digging through the JSON document reveals that it is a proof-of-concept work for the OpenAttestation project (created and run by GovTech). It claims to be a blockchain framework for handling these kinds of certificate information, providing guarantees of immutability of the data that is stored within, but frankly, I don't buy it as long as the only people who are running it is GovTech itself. Considering that all these certificates are government-issued in the first place, having a blockchain that is hosted by only one single already trusted entity seems like a waste of CPU cycles, and is just a way of checking off someone's KPI list.

I would happily take back my words if the network is allowed to be run distributedly across machines that do not all belong to the government; I wanted to say machines owned by citizens, but I don't think that the restriction is necessary. The key point here is that the blockchain is a means of demonstrating transparency in terms of the transactions that are taking place and the so-called ``state of the world'', and so expanding the participant list to include not-only-the-government would be the right thing to do and justify the additional computational expense from having to maintain a blockchain.

Anyway, that's it for me for the saga that is the COVID-19 vaccination programme. The next step in the ``fun'' is to see if they are going to order booster shots, and what the plans are for re-energising SIN City Inc, which will definitely include some form of relaxation of restrictions and mitigation of the accepted increase in risk as people start to re-contribute to the economy once again.

------

In other news, I have finally received my copy of Mini Rogue! I've backed it about a year ago and am glad that it has arrived on schedule. Just look at what it came with!

The Kickstarter Mini Rogue is a rework and prettification of the Mini Rogue micro-game that was created back in 2016. That version was a print-it-yourself-and-play one that was easy to set up, but still had quite a bit of fun in it. The new one is much more professionally produced, coming with its own nicely printed cards and various accessories to make the game complete. The level of support that I had in the Kickstarter gave me upgrades to the tracking board (they were thicker cardboard with inserts cut out to better hold the counter cubes and dice), expansion cards (more emergent gameplay!), self-assembling flat-packing dice throw tray, foil card replacements for the boss monsters (shiny, literally), and even a professionally printed of the original mini-game with updated mechanics as well!

It's basically the off-line version of one of my favourite genres of games---the roguelike. The randomness of events/dungeon evolution combined with the way I would react to them with my player character is just the right amount of emergent behaviour. That it is short is also a draw for the most part because the time investment in the character is just so, without having to worry too much if the current ``build'' affects something that will happen many hours from now; it is the same reason why I like the old DoomRL or the modern Jupiter Hell as compared to say NetHack, AngBand, or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

``Hardcore'' permadeath mechanics with meta-gameplay isn't something that I enjoy a lot of, because I cannot just start a game without remembering what over-arching thematic update I was going for. This is part of the reason why even though I have Desktop Dungeons, Cogmind, or Sword of the Stars: The Pit, I've never really gotten as deep into them as I was in DoomRL or Jupiter Hell. Life is too short to keep dying [in-game] just to gain enough meta-elements to actually have a better-than-miniscule chance of successfully pulling off a run. If meta was important, I would play something without permadeath mechanics. If I were younger and had way more free time, I probably wouldn't mind the meta-gameplay as much, though I would probably be annoyed if there was no way of grinding out all the benefits from the meta-gameplay to get the absolute beastiest of player characters for use in-game.

Permadeath mechanics with reaction-sensitive elements are also a game-killer for me. That explains why games like Spelunky, Crypt of the NecroDancer, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, Rogue Legacy don't appeal to me as much too. I mean, I have them on Steam/GOG.com, but I just don't feel like playing them as much, as compared to Jupiter Hell.

In other words, I'm saying that despite being a fan of roguelikes, there are certain combinations of mechanics that I do not like as much, and am unlikely to go round looking for them in the future.

Okay, I think that's enough for now. Till the next update.

He Who Fights With Monsters...

Now I know why the whole ``woke''/``cancel'' culture grinds my gears to no end. Or rather, I know how to put in words why that ``culture'' grinds my gears to no end.

One word: outlaw.

More precisely, being outlawed with no recourse through rational discussion.

Back in the bad old days, things were extremely authoritarian. If the monarch/warlord was displeased with any particular person, there is literally no recourse for that said person, no matter what status that he/she has, for the simple reason that there is no one with a status that is higher than the monarch/warlord. People were property then, and only the masters/owners of property can decide how they would like to dispense them.

The Magna Carta Libertatum was among the first attempts [in the Western world] of the leaders-under-the-monarch/warlord to be given a legal status that would allow them to operate some semblence of a rational law. It gets ugly for a while before the more famous Constitution of the United States, its associated United States Bill of Rights, and the eventual (less famous) Universal Declaration of Human Rights came about.

All those listed documents act as a framework to define what counts as lawful behaviour of people. There are, of course, national laws, state laws, and other ordinances that are defined at various levels of various societies as well.

The problem then of ``woke''/``cancel'' culture is the systematic throwing out of all these laws/ordinances with the declaration that the laws/ordinances enshrine systemic biases that are innately unfair to various sub-sets of people. It is the taking apart of the normal processes of adjusting laws/ordinances and the replacement with a more pathos-heavy reasoning process: ``it doesn't make me feel good, therefore it is wrong; and most important of all, if you do not agree with me that it is wrong, then you are wrong and there is no way for you to not be wrong unless you agree with me''. It is an extreme position that does not allow for dissenting views to be discussed with a better rule being created---it is militant in the sense of weaponising ex-communication, to make the person who dissents an outlaw, through the deprivation of effective protection of the said person as provided by the law through sowing fear, uncertainty, doubt via the loud and pathos-heavy path of the public opinion.

``Woke''/``cancel'' culture is quick to accuse, quicker to crucify, and slow to admit mistakes, never truly apologising/recanting statements made in error (intentionally or otherwise). It's about mobilising the momentum of public opinion to advance a narrative of extremes: everyone is either wholly bad, or wholly good, and ``goodness'' is defined as those that are with the accuser. The vehemence and vitriol that can be spewed disgusts me greatly---everything that is said by someone who is ``woke'' has a tendency to be self-centred with no room for understanding subtlety, with the usual claim that they had been trying to open communications with those who are in the system, but all diplomacy has failed, which leads to the completely un-erring conclusion that violent reprisal (physical or verbal) is the only solution.

To me, it's like watching a bunch of three-year-olds enacting their version of justice, only it is less cute because we are talking about adults who are deliberately doing things that make life a living hell for other adults, whether or not the receiving party ``deserves it'' or not.

I suspect that part of the reason why this ``woke''/``cancel'' culture is more prevalent now is due to the general improvement in the life styles of people that they no longer have to worry too much about looking after their food and shelter needs. It's like the three-year-olds all over again---their form of [extreme] justice works because they literally do not have to worry about when their next meal is coming, or if they have a place to sleep safely at night. It was the case that we would say that a child has ``an old head on young shoulders'' as though it were a good thing when the said child acts more matured than their physical age might suggest. But having reflected on the cases where such things happen, I come to a different conclusion: any child that acts more matured than their physical age has done so because they didn't have the luxury of living in ignorance of the daily toils that were needed to ensure that life could continue.

Am I dissing on people who are ``woke'' or practise ``cancel'' culture? Yeah, in a way. I mean, I can understand their intent in fixing a corrupt and broken system, but I do not agree with their methods. As Friedrich Nietzsche once said:

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

Funny enough, I just realise that this concept is behind Alucard's anger at Father Alexander Anderson in Hellsing when the latter decides to use the Nail of Helena to become a plant-type regenerator to fight Alucard, and his refrain of ``Only humans can kill monsters.''.

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

Hosting Bills: Paid!

Whelp, I'm glad I've enough to pay for my various hosting fees this year. They are usually small enough that I don't explicitly budget for them, but they aren't that small that they can be considered negligible, even if I am drawing an actual income instead of pulling it out of my savings as is this sabbatical.

For the uninitiated, the hosting fees are for a [virtual] server that runs The_Laptop's Domain, and another that is used to host my Apache Subversion code repositories.

``Subversion? Code repositories? Use github/gitlab lol!'' No, I don't want to, and more importantly, I don't have to. The use cases for these code repositories are strongly personal in nature, and are used mainly for me to track changes effortlessly. They also provide a fallback in case of a screw up that I did, or as a quick way to bootstrap a new system up. None of them are ever intended to become some kind of publishable code, and I am the only developer touching the code base anyway. So the centralised model of Subversion, running on my own server as opposed to a public one, is good enough.

I used to run my Subversion repositories off some other hosted platform for many years for really cheap. Then they had new management, and started to think that they were some kind of CI/CD shop (with Subversion), and tossed a whole lot of new features on it. All that was fine---I just didn't have a use for them, so I didn't bother. But then they decided to charge about 12× the price for all these new features that I didn't need---that was when I started exploring alternatives. I found that I could run my own Subversion server off Linode for like a third of the price, with the added benefit of having more space made available, and weekly virtual disk image back-ups. The caveat was that I had to manage that server on my own, but it was pretty low maintenance Linux administration work---it was basically fine.

And so I upped my roots from that old service and moved it over to the new one that I had up and running in well under a day. It cost about 4× the original amount I paid, but it was still preferable over the 12× that was the asking---and that was after the customer service representative was trying to give me a discount [for the first year(?)] to keep me on their platform.

``Linode? Use AWS lol!'' No, I don't want to. I only need one measly [puny] server to run what I want to run, and I don't want to have my entire life tied to the AWS eco-system where if any sub-system detects abuse (true or otherwise), I get kicked out of everything in the eco-system with little to no recourse. I don't need it to be scalable, I don't need access to crazy services, and I don't need it to be ``managed'' by AWS in such a way that if I want to up and go, I cannot easily do that.

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

Blurb

Headache's gone mostly. That's all I want to write today.

Till the next update.