Sunday evening 5 pm,

end of the year, dec 13

age 41, wonder how much more to go

all the years goals and resolutions are done, scattered like paper plates littering the parking lot after a party 

the epiphany is the salvation through the technique following lists dispassionately 

life  is now the watching of videos on calisthenics, tony robbins', atomic habits, vivaldi  ..  on youtube  , while the code compiles , has been so for the past year and half 

I wonder if any of the soul is left in the hard firm mature bamboos 

doing some work to alleviate the dark gloomy teatime of the soul, build's running

remember enjoying listening to Douglas Adams audiobook gotten from the Northbrook library, while driving. Was I ever happier after that ?

house lamps are not lit and it's not too bright , can see the colors of the books in the shelves but not the text

listening to Alan watts talks on zen, remarkable how alive it seems, compared to Brad Warner's dry academic sessions based on translations

the former relishes in spontaneity, and in a way being alive

we kept saying we'll move out of Java into building real systems. every year we become more firmly entrenched into the same.

the crowds are distinctly apathetic these days

around 14 years ago, we started blogging - made some friends, wasn't smart enough to keep any, weren't playing to win

build's completed ? time to go ..

wondering if Jackie Chan Adventures are available in DVD. guilty pleasures to fall to when tired at the end of the day, then guilt and regret 

in the mornings, assuaged by watching a productivity video,  who wil l do the work and when ?

build's failed . code is a pile of crap

for a while now, a curious inversion has happened . so occupied with setting up spaces to work in , i get so jaded/disconnected by the time i move to reside into those spaces, i am capable of not working nor having fun. 

some people have therapists. when does talking to a spouse feel like someone's running razor blades across your shoulders ?

Alan watts has a book named 'this is it', Sheldon Kopp's Esch. Laundry list starts with 1. this is it.

some people keep fit, others eat large carb meals and be dumb with a full belly. good for the state as per tao, not so good personally

the left hand types faster than the right 

reading casino royale, the first three chapters are promising, and puts the movie's jingping story introduction  in perspective

as ever , i only realise tests are an equal effort when it's time to do them. darkness grows

sending a linkedIn request to a former blog acquaintance feels like standing outside a friends' house watching them play ,  through the windows..

everybody seems to have a trick, have it figured, a schtick , i alone am so lost, wondering if the parts of me even add up to a full human, let alone a man 

past the boondocks, approaching the stinking cooum

bruce springsteen's 'streets of philadelphia' - this guy sings about the pain of being american ?

code quality found lacking by the static analysis tool, hello shovel ,where are you !

our tragedy is that we need to be part of a group that works to rid the earth of other groups so we don't have to see each other at all ..  

I remember reading YNHarari equivocating on domestic animals bred in captivity for food, saying they have a safe life have no diseases etc ..

I remember having a discussion with a friend couple on why we shouldn't have cars , one point in favour being that the chap walks to office and 'gets' the exercise as a benefit.  

'Getting' exercise when you ddin't ask for it, and also inhaling pollution over which you have no control , didn't seem like benefits to me. I speak from experience. In 2015 I walked to office. It gave me anxiety w.r.t getting there in time and not getting hit by vehicles, and having to see the slummy sides of bangalore, and eventually fell ill very badly .

people good in one area seem to think this makes them competent in others too

 thanks to ranprieur.com for another amazing link

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/747866835?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1

scarcity : how scarcity causes people to tunnel focus, thereby leaving out the important for the urgent

the power of meditation is to calm the fires and make the brain continue to focus on the important

however, this is not an attitude thing -it's a computation /resource calculation

 analogies and metaphors work by not being not part of the framework/hierarchy  of knowledge under use,  so they are only useful to get perspective , once  and maybe twice. after this they ring no more bells.

 

*  book recommendation

"high output management"

|_already a gold mine of tools and terms in the first few pages

|__ 

background

    scheduled delivery, acceptable quality, lowest cost

    process, assembly, test

     output, limiting steps, offset the steps against each other, 

    specialists, capital equipment, most cost-effective deployment of resources

     continuous operation, functional test, in process inspection, incoming or receiving inspection, opportunity at risk

     lowest value stage, 

management 

    forecast, variance, raw material inventory, equipment, manpower, quality indicator, pairing indicators,      measurement - output & activity ,physical countable quantity, 

    

* video recommendation

"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeqaIYchAI0&t=25s"

james clear seems to have all the tricks in a straight line

( i should read Locke some day !!!)

triangle band of level of detail to focus on

 de-stratified a bit yesterday post a status update that was a bit better than a non-thing and so eased out into fields of delight, in my case turns to cybernetics/systems , lisp and ai. 

(fields i don't do anything about coz the morning comes and the soul stratifies like the pair of trousers you stopped wearing before the holidays)

easing out has taken slightly more concrete steps beyond day dreaming, and beyond writing the names on pieces of paper that i carry around like some split personality trying to communicate to the other

anyways, reading sicpers.info has convinced me to move past scheme to lisp.

it means sicp can ease out of the scheme iron constraint

also , AI. means AIMA not PAIP

i had a copy of AIMA after the strand exit - before the yahoo/mu-sigma trench-mud-blood events.

in the gap, instead of AIMA or clojure, I did java and android due to phenomenal  gaslighting (they did it so casually and easily)  by a wondrous peer group and , of course, my low immunity to peer pressure and a narrow environment due to being jobless.

anyways, i now have aima, tanimoto-ai-lisp, and winston AI and winston lisp books. 

all the rambling of galcon,chess, pacman, trading bots etc all boils down to chapters of aima.

udacity also had the ball going and i have the ai classes downloaded too. it started with norvig ai course then all sub topics had courses. 

all i needed to do was sit down and grind away instead of watching himym

as i keep saying nowadays ( dunno why)   zen + lisp + ai = tao

the shift started when i wrote horrible code, bought clean code, wow'd and aha'd at the content, then wondered if using a framework would wash the blood off my hands and keep my code understandable

I chanced upon j-easy   (probably because I  subconsciously attract all easy), and thought

" I'll just rewrite my application in workflows, state machines and a rule engine"

The rule engine started a search on baeldung + rule engine ( naturally) , and that threw up JESS and expert shells, and that started a sideways shift to JESS rules in lisp,  then lisp,  then the tons of AI and LiSP books lying around in the ATT Bell Labs office which probably ended up getting mulched, and of which I picked none ( tragic, but that's the self-flagellating road I walked)

now to see if jeasy saves the bacon, and spares up time for the sidey mcsides campaign, or not.

we did conclude that Jim Rohn time ( time spent working on yourself) must be taken from work time, as there is no more personal time....  

also, side note - do not forget standing desks -they are the first pawn against a bad back

jack reacher

 

From sicpers.info

 reading sicpers.info articles

 - some are  hard hitting

Why programming so hard

 the one about mental conditions

With the succinct description of cognitive therapy exercise

So many oh my god you too moments

Last time I felt this was when reading zmm the first time

Searching for lisp got me gold

Tankard beard article (india is full of tankard beard)

No strange shit in lisp or self or io

Mobile apps universe is extremely shallow and broad and stops you from living a full life

(Music,writing, bicycles are long term beneficial high learning curve things -alan kay)

Computers are supposed to be bicycles for the kind  but are horrendously unnecessarily complex

And experts are those who know and suffer the shortcomings and pain of the language

Cross reference tankardbeards and community exclusiveness

Cross reference pay your dues

I will link the articles and detailed analysis soon

Ides have 5 levels of power, last one being past computational and few people get there

Just wow

How to do objects better

The pl personality test is humor but too accurate to dismiss

good vs smart vs truth 

godel showed no truths can be expressed in language 

kathy sierra has a post on when the glib win we all lose 

that leaves good 

pirsig said "do we need to be told" 

so ,seriously, there is nothing to be said 

yet the tao sells a lot of books !

 too late i realise i don't want to be a monk, monks ain't cool, why was i so obsessed with this stuff anyway ? must've been all the kung-fu movies ...... damn you shaw brothers

 Nobody sets out to do bad in cold blood. 

They always set out to do right, the good the profitable. 

It's more common to be 'profitable , morals be damned' , but even then there is almost always a  story rationalising  how the other side are better off, or had it coming, cos profitable don't accrue to an undeserving soul.

The soul happens to be a suite of stories, starring the self, and leaders have learnt to rewrite the stories of the multitudes at will.

There are no facts inside the head, only stories. There are no things inside the head, only metaphors.

Waking up needs two threads, one of  unpacking the stories, and another of taking genuine action. there is always a spark, a call.

You need to build out our story event by event, and reading others' stories only delays writing your own

it's necessary to be not-good-enough in all areas and aspects except one, and being just good-enough at that. else each effort will be tinged with  failure to meet 'greatness' standards, and the tinges will accumulate to build up enough spiritual plaque and soon enough you'll have a burn out - the spiritual equivalent of a heart attack

---

you cannot do what is right. you can only do what seems right to you. and if it isn't good to you, it fails the 'is-it-right' test. 

morality, like achievements, is what the last guy did. while it does get handed down to us on stone tablets , they are ( cue Captain Barbossa here)   more like guidelines. The Steve Jobs quote about walls is probably the most profound gift that the man has given to the world, and the ipod and iphone and itunes just being an illustration of that, the 'ma', and Emerson's "know what is true for you is true for the world ..."

==

the opening lines and points of all self help books stand like unsurmountable stone walls that I must break with only my head....    one day I will

==

one piece from Lord of War kept calling for my attention. 

Never go to war, especially with yourself.

Selling arms causes deaths, and unstable societies , and nasty brutish lives all around, and eventually finds its way home. (But all evil is just potential in need of transformation, later )

so, selling arms to make good for yourself, vs the world.

so, personal profit ,vs, the world. 

this is a question that will be asked every step of the way, but some large scale choices gives you time to build larger things and change status-quo s in more powerful ways. still large power of good breeds large power of evil (star wars, anyone ?)

--- --- ---

here's an idear. time spent reading email counts as addiction, and away from your real work of cathedral building. or tilling your own plot of voltaire land.

--- --- ---

in personal life, I separate the mind and body and personal, and in my work, I cannot keep the object model ,the domain model and the implementation model separate. 

thanks to sicpers.info, and sadhguru book.

--- --- ---

logic is an animal in the mind zoo. there are others too. and a 'human' is nothing more than an animal who can consistently put in a quasi formal-logical system what happens 'out there' in the world outside the darkness behind the eyes (credit TP)

 -- -- 

Locke said about 3 things the mind can do with ideas . A variation is to put the things that make you feel,  in a , and this is important , straight line

aside - inventory site for emotions and activities - a new face for the todo list. feedback will feed your heart rate and a manually added tag  - one of  :)  or :|  or :(  or :\ or :P.   to it, to set the sort order.

--

we could sell it to shrinks

--

----

For the well read but unwise, the own self and spark stand out as weird, as exposure to the variety out there will set yourself far from the mean, and unconventional and weird and to be stamped out,  when ironically, that distance from the mean is what makes one normal in the non statistical sense, AND defines normal in the statistical one.

Thus the conformist kills the spark within and wanders ,listening life ,like old herons in fished out ponds

All progress needs a paradoxical or complementary pair of attitudes, goals and or skills. 

Good and bad most always reside together in the same person.the analytical, with a list of goods and bans will never draw a line separating the world into two. 

And people see, hear and believe what they want. Sometimes, they want right, good and profitable.

Tools of the heart:applied buddhist technique

 Where is your locus of control ?

 Is it within  ?

 If not, its time to talk about  power of events over you, and boundaries, where they are , and how things,events and persons make you feel

 whomever the goddess of logic touches, are like klein bottles - not palatable by regulars

 

 "Social media are severely antisocial, health foods are empirically unhealthy, knowledge workers are very ignorant, and social sciences aren’t scientific at all."

NN Taleb, Bed of Procrustes

How profound and infinite your wisdom , when you say what I think !!

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

Stress happens when you mix abstraction levels/models  - if your code combines engine thermodynamic efficiency along with ,say stress on the tyres along with economic pressure to get it maintained,    your brain will stretch to an unholy dimension, and tentacled monsters wearing Charlie Stross's face will leak in and posses your body. 

The Researcher's Correspondence

Space is made of holes knitted together. As weird as this sounds, certain groups did come upon the idea much earlier  - see the Indra's Net metaphor that the Buddhists used..  Modern day quantum physics with  Schroedinger's cat and probability and multiverses complement the metaphor and build around it.

The original Bodhidharma could see into the holes directly , and could see the interplay of matter and energy and the arising states and how they would play out - because, you see, the emptiness is the playground where the original energy, and its derivatives dance it out . Hindus call this the Lila, however, they refer to one dance that they know.

Committee Report 

The programming language Java was  designed  to prevent this. It required multiple groups with very large muscles in their area of expertise -   a secret department of a space agency which has the technology , along with a top public facing government agency which has the opportunity and ability to  slush away funds from the torrent of public money passing through its hands  , a group of  monks of an unnamed cult hidden in an unnamed  mountains practising a surprisingly sane version of a modern religion - but more on that later

The  end product ensured that no single mind would be able to abstract and model a real world problem at any level of effectiveness, thus ensuring the safety of all minds, and closing the inter-dimensional gate. 

 A calculus was derived mapping the ability of the neo-cortex to process abstractions and variables within   . The cubicle dwellers of  behemoth technical consultancies served as unsuspecting subjects . Thresholds were established and normalised. 

A side effect was that LISP was mothballed and shipped off to the warehouse we glimpsed in Indiana Jones movies.  The committee seemed to favour hiding in plain sight . A Java-Lisp was funded and released, with folksy-technical narratives . The Navy Seals in this story -the Rust Evangelism Task Force was set up.

Developer Diary 27/10/2020 

yesterday , I stood on a large mountain of Java code and pierced the clouds and saw the sun. today ,the mountain has given way into multiple landslides  . 

Had to crack out my Metallica tapes just to keep sane.

 P

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  swag and loot, swag and loot, all else is moot

 

 

 every action you take outside your codebase - running queries in your sql terminal, starting port-forwarding, setting values - each action should be assimilated into your codebase as tests, scripts, end points etc.

- select * from db ?  - GET call !

- delete logs/ move -config - startup script !

ultimately you should not do

- verifying anything manually ?  test case !!

 french son of Egyptian sun god takes a category

genre

 the  programmer  exists and thinks  in a plane where there is no time, 

and only ways of doing things some of which are better , 

and in that ideal universe on a baseline,  (or as they say

apples to apples, I'd rather be ...)

automated grudge work is better use of your time, 

so that your day can be spent working on non linear hundred year problems

lab grown meat, matter compilers, molecular assemblers, robots to do the housework ...

 the larger problems of life - rather than the smaller banal tasks

 of linearly expending your breaths on things that  give you more breaths...

so that you can ...

 rich get richer, poor get poorer

them that has gets

positive feedback loops ,once setup, take care of themselves , growing until they dominate

governments ostensibly exist to take from the rich and give to 'society', but 'society' iteratively redraws itself into groups that leave out the poorer every time

only thing is, the no-accounting-for-taste concept

couldn't we setup a game where the top plays the game to move resources to the bottom in a way that is satisfying for the top ? like, an incentive that is not profit ,but is powerful enough ? like poetry praise and encomium

the next killer app will be mesh net implementations , encrypted transmissions, supporting discovery,  and available on the digital store 

cool kids will join  ephemeral  groups and leave them before you can say snap

it will be a policing and parenting nightmare. not touching natsec for now

might be a business opportunity to build a protocol with an embedded back door, so that cody hardwood/hubertus bigend types can farm micro cultures with ease, secure in the knowledge of the digital umblical cord tying the new wave of skateboarders/cap-backwards-wearers to the beloved mainstream  that they husband

* didn't notice the bigend/hardwood theme until now

telecom behemoths would ignore it first, as a bunch of cool weird geeky half-humans with pink/blue hair would try it first

then a small company would rise to success on its prowess

there will be a cultural movement spread entirely through this medium, which begat which shall never be known

and in the compressed lifecycle of tech, especially  with something already prototyped ,built, and real world tested ( Chennai floods), I predict the timeline to be 2-5 years before biggies start offering it as a feature, simultaneously weakening it by using captured data to setup cell towers wherever mesh-nets are prevalent.

 https://www.geckoandfly.com/22562/chat-without-internet-connection-mesh-network/

late realisation - 99% of all social interactions are people saying 'no' to you indirectly.

hoary chestnuts

maybe we are in Keynes world of the 15 hr week, and combined with the almost-permanence of ones'  place in the economic strata,  people have time to ponder, and need to be distracted ?

maybe division of labour has de humanised (adams,chomsky) people so much that any belonging will do?

 y'know, married life with kids puts me in the mood for work

"Supply chains don't supply chains unless it's a chain supply supply chain " - Chuck Woodchuck

 i hate the new blogspot.

 problem with trying to be your own coach is this -

a coach is required to teach you something that you don't know.

we need to  get around this definition, for you cannot teach yourself what you do not know.

we can refer to the concept of parallel of lazy evaluation in computation ,where functions that aren't defined can be referenced (but not called)...

as a coach, one can set a growth path, with vaguely defined progress goals, and somewhat less-vague real world changes - for example - 

vague -  in a few months, we'll have better BMI and muscle tone

less vague - in 6 months, we'll have a BMI that is 25 and some muscle tone that is visible.

the approach is the same, control the variables in one or two ways - eat less/ eat better / eat different / workout more / workout different/ try meditation or tai chi ...

the only way this can work is that one accumulates a series of experiment results and keep getting the power and resources to do more and more risky experiments to learn more and more, until the sequence works in your favour in terms of growth and swag

the economy, capital, and power,  like sourdough needs to keep growing

rock-paper-scissors is an effective model of power

once you do baking, the myriad forms of food of the world collapses into wheat-yeast-heat-and-eat

i believe a mechanic discovering welding feels similarly

if you see only what you believe, how can you get right beliefs so that you can see the truth ?

there is no truth, only ideologies mental models stories, that manifest as you go

constructive ideologies models stories pass for the truth and are invisible . 

science fails every day, yet we move forward on it.  Einstein (?) either believed Truth had a temporal component, or had trouble with the idea - I don't remember which.

destructive stories  pop-up regularly, as they have appeal, only because they are different from the 'party line'

one plugged it into Matrix knows at some level that it is all a dream and the urge to escape is like a splinter that needs picking

the first urge might be to destroy the world in the Matrix  on account of it not being real. however, the only change is that one has traded a working Matrix to a broken one.

absence is the solution, not the opposite

 kids learn best from doing, also from who they like

most schools do not focus on doing, rather on sitting down and listening.

any wonder indians are known for talking ten times more than  doing ?

money is the social version of oxygen, or water.

serves a purpose, absence is fatal. 

and social is not about popularity or customs or hosting a party - think  hobbes' leviathan.

as  water makes soup, beer, and laundry possible, money makes higher  maslow things possible 

of the 7 billion people on earth, I'm sure, no more than 1 million are doing something that is worthy use of human abilities.

tragically, art, music, literature etc , the 'useless' pursuits, are the ones worthy.

the rest are just running around doing not much more than barely staying alive & reproducing,  and working hard to keep the rest from doing no more than barely staying alive & reproducing. aimed at 9 % of the world's population ( the 1% has a separate eco-system that doesn't figure in mass-production)

we have the power of industrial production of goods . yet, quite a lot of it is squandered on producing gadgets to replace perfectly good ones that are obsoleted by design,

we have the power of industrial production of food . yet, quite a lot of it ends up as  junk food steering us towards diabetes or heart disease.

our era is defined by the principal-agent problem in politics. defined by how the populace is held in scarcity patterns by the integrators and the representers.

someone convinced us to mistrust our instinct for what makes us happy and satisfied. religion ? advertising ? More than coffee, this gets us up and running every morning ,searching for a quiet that we and peace that destroy with each spreadsheet we crunch each line of code we write, accelerating the economic machine and its ravenous appetite for chewing up delicate green of the earth and leaving polluted wastelands  behind.

man is well on his way to becoming an ant, earth a termite hill

the economy is the biggest matrix of them all, with no need for all the digital machinery . ironically it doesn't need to feed machines on the electricity provided

homo economicus is no more than the veal calf  or the foie-gras duck or goose forcibly made immovable and force fed and fattened. 

progress in the 'industrial' age depended on natural resources looted from the 'third world' . Europe modernised and the rest of the world became 'colonies' , its residents less than individuals.

today, the economic machine is a golem who needs work and will not sit idle. no corner of the world will be left alone, but won-over, domesticated &  harvested until it becomes a wasteland and its residents either slaves or terrorists.

kaczynski probably saw this all the way through early on

terence mckenna probably had a solution to one aspect of the problem

asimov got something when hari seldon made psycho-history.

sowell said it when he said it's about tradeoffs to handle scarcity.

the human has multiple identities - the tribe member, the team member, the family man, the individual ...

and also one per group he is member of . each one dominates at different times. On top of that we have the triune brain and the decision making.

*sigh

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee 

For appropriate regulation the variety in the regulator must be equal to or greater than the variety in the system being regulated

To depend on the  rationality & scientific method  to serve as a map is like turning the pages of a  dictionary looking for a story.

 a supra-local prosumer-powered mesh-conomy  is our best bet against the shortcomings of a centrallized currency

today, we have the technology net and computational power to survive in a disitributed economy-of-economies, with machine learning leading the assault on AI  driven forecasting and supply chain

when i met you, 
i knew you,
with every passing day,
i  knew you less,
 until today,
i leave forever,
a stranger

Up to a certain point in your career, knowing more increases your options in the future. 

after a point, everything you don't know starts becoming a liability

is life sacred ?
is all life sacred ?
all life, unless you are a plant, means death also, for all life subsists on other life.

is the life of a fox is more valuable than the chicken it feeds on ?

is the life of a human more valuable than the life of the chicken which was previously a chicken, is now a meal and is tomorrow equal parts human and poop ?

if yes, then life as such doesn't matter,  only utility.
taken to a logical extreme, cannibalism can be justified if a big enough utility can be found.

if not, what're you gonna do ?
 this is how you get fruitarians. 

we can't all be fruitarians.

 to sustain 1.2. 7.x billion people ( note, we aren't able to do this even now
WITH farmed meat, hunting, fishing etc),  you would need lots and lots of orchards
assuming no pesticides, you would still have displaced a huge amount of animals, birds, and insects, leading to their deaths.

or wait, if you could build a matrix, and stack humans 10 per sq. meter ( standing) , then you rope in all humans into a region built specially in a reclaimed desert or plain ( we have lots of these ) , just the size of New York City , then you have the rest of the planet free for planting orchards, and robots powered by ,well,  electricity derived from the pod humans, can run around and gather fruits from all over the world and bring them to the humans.
When the humans and the orchards and the robots reach a sustainable harmony, we can start exporting this setup to other planets. 
Sounds like the start of a great science fiction story. hopefully one in which things work out, and not go all dystopia where the heroine wakes up to recurring dreams of fruit gathering ( on earth, lacking electricity to generate simulations to keep humans engaged, the GoPro from the fruit gathering robots is collected and cut to form 3d for the matrix), and is told of her destiny by some local robots and hobos, and makes a trip back home to earth expecting a planet of orchards, only to find a silo (pods) and a cube (central software generator) and robots plucking fruits
//we could use terraforming robots that build platforms
//  logical terraforming to build programming platforms
// GPT3 based software and character generation modules in the cube
//a religion of chanting which uses a telephone book (?)

if my life is as sacred as all other life, then am i not required to sustain it, cost be damned ?
if you add that the universe cannot be known ( matrix - all that comes to our brain are electrical signals, plato - cave of shadows) , then i cannot know for sure that there is life elsewhere, only a reasonable facsimile of it.

the only working answer seems to be  "my life is sacred, i wouldn't answer for the rest"

Book notes : Dance with Chance

Dance with Chance : Chapter 12

Overall goal of the book : not be fooled by the  illusion of control, and to know where control is possible and available, and where it isn't

- Benjamin Franklin's method of dividing a sheet of paper into two columns, and writing the Pros and Cons
- technique to increase 'batting average' of decisions.
- this chapter will read like a book on 'how to improve your skills in ,say golf of tennis'
- will help you face your dilemmas consistently and methodically

- roadmap
- two types of decisions - repetitive and unique
- m 1 - blinking, or gut level decision making
- m 2 - thinking, dm via articulated deliberate process
- m 3 - `sminking` - use Simple Models or decision rules
- m 4 - opinions of others / experts

example of repetitive decisions
Company  making hire/no hire  decision on a fresh graduate applying . The same question keeps getting asked repeatedly, within the same context.

example of unique decision
graduate receiving a) an offer from company A,  b)while holding an offer from company B ,  c) while company C has given positive feedback but not yet an offer, d) also having  option to en-roll into an Ivy League school in a coveted Journalism major, e) while his girlfriend wants to tour Europe after graduation (separation, or join)
one-off life changing decision

Sminking - aka Simple Model ing
 1. Couples asked to monitor 2 variables alone - #times they made love - #times they argued
 2. Bell Labs had problem with bad debts - they gave 80,000 new customers access without deposit ( out of 12million new every year. (  Hadoop guys must be jizzing their pants)). This was the fore-runner of the credit scoring system.  points for how long they've held their job, lived in their house, whether they owned it, household earning etc. Saved around $137 million.

- in baseball, your batting average is the best bet.

counter argument
  - the human brain can process much more information and can make a better decision than simple rules - god knows what they are leaving out.
 - cuts out chance of  human intuition weighing in
 - cuts out experts who have depth in the area

counter counter argument
 - human brains make different decisions given the same information in different contexts, different times etc. There are also biases( Kahneman, Ariely, Munger, Bevelin, that 'you are not so smart' book.. )

misc :
  - such rules could be discriminatory ( or more like they expose the true state of society ? )
  - simple rules work only a majority of the cases. do not use it for unique decisions

experiment : A, B buttons, Red, Green lights . Green light = small cash prize. Red == 0.
Over time participants glean that both buttons bring up both lights randomly.
a little later, they identify that button A brings up the Green light more often than not.
They press A more, instead of doing only A ,which is the Simple Rule  conclusion.
Conclusion : want to feel in control, greed - want to out-predict the system
 - people are less like to gain control by ceding control to a simple rule.
Corollary - when stakes are increased - more reward, or a punitive, people stick to pressing A. Now fear of losing  is in the mix.

SimpleModel ing has saved billions of dollars
SimpleModel ing is not easy to build, depends on choosing the right variables. to do this, the difficulty is emotional, not cognitive.

SimpleModel ing is limited by inherent uncertainty

Decision making in Unique situations :  ask and answer the 3 basic questions -
1. What is at stake ?
2. What are the uncertainties (AAA approach) ?
3. What is our risk appetite ?

sample question
0 . while there are many offers, each one presents an opportunity cost, so no need to be over-obliging
1. does business experience help with experience and money for a degree in journalism later
2. does any of the cos publish a journal he can write for ?
3. is the relationship strong enough to survive separation ?
 
AAA approach
  - accept there are uncertainties, generate alternatives
  - assessment  - lay out what works what could go wrong how will things typically play out
 - augment  the uncertainty ( or rather, adjust the margin of safety, or in IT terms, add buffer) - eg IT projects suffer from optimism bias.

When uncertainty becomes threatening, there's an unwillingness to consider the consequences

approaches
   - take an outside view, imagine you are a consultant hired to make the decision.
  - consider and use benchmarks
 
(success in journalism is more about flair, networking and pushiness, plus a healthy dose of luck)

setting risk appetite
 -  fear and greed (and biases) kick in differently when decision is represented differently ( people might opt for a surgery  presented as with 60% success rate but not for one presented as with a 40 % failure rate). So consider both perspectives - what if you win what if you lose

Experts
If you consult an expert and the advice doesn't work out, do you say " hey, I did my best and got a good expert" and relax, or do you curse ? (Hint : it's your responsibility, and outcome.)

The Harry Potter Rule : There is no magic in our world. We are all muggles.

use expert advice as one of the  inputs in decision making. ask experts about other options, their personal recommendations ( to family/friends for eg), areas that you might not know of , other experts, sources, conflict of interest .....

Experts, fakes and Blink - Meegeren painted many Vermeer masterpieces what were exhibited in great European galleries until revealed as fake by him.  Experts didn't catch it .
Grand masters can 'blink' only after 10 yrs of extensive practice with  consistent, accurate feedback.
 If time allows, follow the grand masters , follow each Blink with Thinking.

Blink = good for muscular reactions.
Sminking rules can become obsolete .

Philip Tetlock (Haas), massive study , 82000 decisions by polsci experts => simple models are more accurate

Emotion vs Reason
 - the heart has its reasons that reason knoweth not - Blaise Pascal
 - ...reason is subservient to emotion - (paraphrasing) - Hume
-  the most important things are known by the heart (paraphrasing) Antoine St-Exupery - Little Prince
- emotional Bermuda Triangle - greed-fear-hope
 - note your emotion w.r.t the decision, defer decision until you can consider it under different occasions
-

How did I get here ?
via
https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Books/popular.html
Review(4 stars)  : https://www.amazon.com/review/R118HK6UBQM6DM/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Next :
Sowell :
Economics = scarcity + decisions on using resources ( aka trade-off-ing)

my soldier bookmark

if you toss a coin and get a head, you may not get a tail the next time. yet, if you toss a coin a million times, you are likely to get equal heads and equal tails. reeks of an eventually consistent system to me

a  hundred unread tabs open,
they tell us,
we often reach for more than we can grasp,
wisdom & fortune don't hide here,
this is the message of our times,
you can't have everything,
after all, where would you put it ?

( the autoplaying video hides very well indeed,
the medium is the message)

opposite of 'cost' as in 'belongs to a cost center' is not 'profit, as in 'belongs to a profit center'.
it is 'business differentiator', as in ' can make the difference between business success and business runaway success'

when you try to improve  or transform yourself, you run a great risk

if you know what your final stage looks like, i must ask, how do you ,before the change, evaluate how valuable the changed state will be ?

and you can't improve unless you declare yourself not good enough. and if your measuring rod is off, and you end up measuring against a standard set in the mind that you left in your old skin, then you are lost.

without objective measurement of progress, you are completely adrift in a sea in the fog

Some ideas are like electric chairs. one must sit in them gingerly, tentatively, and never all at once.

Big Money - P.G Wodehouse

SPOILER ALERT

1. Berry and Biscuit, both impecunious, scions of nobility

2. The former forced to become a working stiff, a wage slave, rush-to-reach-the-office-on-time

3.  The latter keeping up appearances, 'the touch' being the chosen and fallen-to way of generating income.

4. Biscuits 'Guvnor', a Lord, with a large estate eating taxes, lives the same way.

5.  Biscuit always dreams of fortune, is always open for the large jackpot, not beneath walking up to strangers and saying' I know your secret' and acting on the outcome. Berry shows no such appetite for fortune - he'd rather be out prospecting in the West, and be known as  ' as tough as they come'

6. Biscuit sniffs Hoke's scam, walks up to Hoke, says ' I know your secret', and is prepared to raise money to buy up all Horned Toad stock the next morning.
If the story has a comfortable ending with a large buffer of money,  it is this activity that brings it about.

7.  Berry facilitates by knocking out Hoke ( and  his Retainer, by knocking out the Captain).

the body is not a machine. it is a biological system. meaning if there is no immunity to a current pathogen, it can manufacture the tools needed ( antibody thinggies - templates, alerts)  and alert the. cops (wbc) to watch out for these.
a computer or a car cannot do that.
but an economy and state can ?

I started out reading (about)  'The System of Objects'  , my stand on OOP  (against) notwithstanding. I noticed that the content was more arcane than usual ;  I am used to going through multiple steps to 'get' a point being made, but in this case, the point never arrived.

Only later did I realise that  this system of objects was not like that system of objects,  like the one I had in mind - such as the one written by Luca Cardelli,  who is neither a chocolate ( blue ones have salt)  nor a female who played Velma,  but is(was?)  a computer scientist in the employ of Microsoft (when he wrote about Object Calculi )


As per the writer, things are, then man makes copies of them, which function well as proxies, then later the deluge of kitsch replace the reality, then we end up with William Gibson sitting in the back of a limo saying "We live in a mediated world".

I always thought Gibson was talking while standing on the shoulders of McLuhan(s).


Mouse : Do you know what it really reminds me of? Tasty Wheat. Did you ever eat Tasty Wheat? Switch : No, but technically, neither did you.

--- The Matrix (1. there's only 1 Matrix. there are no sequels, there are two other movies that share the name but are in no way related)

Mouse is talking about the taste of 'Tasty Wheat' and how no one has ever eaten some. Coz the matrix, of course. But are there real world parallels ?

Of course .

If you talk to older folk, like my grand parents, they'll tell you that the rice we eat tastes nothing like the rice we used to get ,that was real tasty etc etc. Modern day rice looks and tastes like plastic etc etc

A few hundred years of human breeding has 'taught' rice to grow up and out in three months, and not fall prey to a host of diseases and pests, and most importantly , be discoverable in a corporate's labs as well as lend itself to documentation.

Funny how the destiny of a plant is tied to its compatibility to an offshoot of Gutenberg's invention.


Of course, bananas looked like this without human intervention

attribution : Warut Roonguthai / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

the key is to work on something at which you get better with time. technology is a quicksand laden with landmines. you can spend all your life on building things with tech and come out a novice in a year as a few hundred dev stacks roll out. what makes the trap stickier is that they don't throw away what is there ,so you cleanly level up, there are still java developers who don't know reactive, and there are still folks who know mysql who don't know replication etc etc...

unless you get a handle on the business end of things , you are going to be in deep wank-land, coz it's nice to build a neural network that can recognise pictures of kate winslet etc etc , and  the line between business and hobby code is thinner than f, but one pays and the other doesn't.
and that makes all the difference.

What if there's just one particle in the entire universe, one super small sub atomic particle, and a very powerful probability generator which makes the particle appear all over the place, and simultaneously ?
if there's no conservation of mass, then is it not possible that at the subatomic level, the particleS are just a manifestation of a 3 piece probability function, and that time is an illusion there fore they seem to appear in sequence, but are actually different throws of the same dice (particle) ?

I think I sound so smart, but I wouldn't be surprised if I cringe at these lines at some time in the future

God's Debris makes so much sense ....

time is an illusion

"Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so"
  -

Am I conscious this moment ?
Yes
Was I conscious a moment ago ?
......


- Susan BlackMore , Ten Zen Questions


As per Wen the Eternally Surprised, time is an illusion and there is only the present moment. The universe is destroyed  at the end of it and created anew .

Scott Adams, God's Debris. goes on to say that between the destruction and creation, probability comes into play. And this accounts for all change.
In other words, Probability is, and in each iteration of the world, it manifests so that it looks like a thing is changing.
Brains are delusion generators and come up with stories  like aging and growth to explain chance.

// Hogfather quote - justice mercy

Zen harps on 'there is nothing' so does all buddhism

Right knowledge in Buddhism is Jhana or deep absorption states where the self is silent,
Nirvana is when the self is silent

therefore, it follows that the current noisy self is just a large distraction, a newspaper full of text and color and no content.

it is highly stressful for all to co-exist in presence. my recommendation is all activities have their own closed working areas as much as possible and some common tasks which need co-operation to be open areas.
 open overlapping work areas are a panopticon and a personality killer.