Tuesday, June 12, 2018

#rant

The simple alternative to office gossip is getting a meeting room. What then does gossip as a form of communication accomplish that a meeting can't? When is gossip "useful"?

1) when you want to be overheard by specific persons so that you can divulge information without taking responsibility for it.

2) when you want the listener to think that they are trusted in order to secure the "reciprocation" of openness.

3) when you want to be perceived by others to be trusted by the listener to gain some kind of authority though association.

4) when you are requesting a favor and you want to frame the offering of privileged information as a favor rendered to make the request feel more like an obligation.

5) when you want to manufacture consensus among people open to both sides of an issue

6) when you want to be perceived as being "in the know" to gain some kind of respect

7) when you want someone to act on a piece of information by framing it as being privileged and urgent

Friday, June 01, 2018

Sometimes i think the human race refers to that time when homo sapiens were competing other homo genus dominance. The day the last of the other genus went extinct would have literally been the end of the human race. 

Friday, May 25, 2018

This sentence has exactly six words.

This sentence has exactly six words. 
Six completely plain, simple, unassuming words. 
But that ain't gonna stop nobody. 
Ain't stoppin' nobody to be free. 
Free to write your own thoughts. 
Free to exhibit your own style. 
Free to punch life into words. 
Because notwithstanding, you are lit af. 
Don't let nobody, NOBODY, say otherwise. 
Uniform sentence length results in monotony? 
Man, you haven't seen it all. 
The instrument doesn't make the musician!
One single note, can make music!


Wednesday, May 23, 2018

The difference between news and entertainment is whether it affects your decisions.

Tuesday, May 01, 2018

Shortcuts take you places you can only dream of, but a strong foundation takes you places you can't even begin to dream of.

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Maybe AI is just the beginning. The end would be directly modifying human memory and synapse pathways. Then the age of post-intelligence would begin. And stupidity would be a treatable birth defect. Scary stuff.

Saturday, April 21, 2018

IMAGINE a product search site that lets you understand why a product is what you really want. 10 features:

- search by every product-genre specific feature of a product from hsv color to carbon footprint of specific components

- endorse products and search products/brands by endorsement of people in specified fields

- profile yourself and find products endorsed by people with matching profiles

- search product by durability and running costs and by reason for repair/replacement

- search product by appearance in social media

- view product in augmented reality, in social media photos and videos, and movies/mass media appearance

- view videos and photos in a special mode that lets you tap any product on-screen for purchase information

- search product by performance in specific fields, industries, and user scenarios

- filter product listing by availability/popularity in your GPS location

- search product by designer and profile of all contributing members, including funding shareholders

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Hotel California

So I called up Zuckerberg
"Please show me my rights."
He said, "We haven't had that spirit here since two thousand and nine."
And still those voices are calling from far away
Wake you up in the middle of the night
To see your status say

Welcome to the great Facebook Empire
Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
Plenty of data at the FB platform tier
Any time of year (Any time of year)
You can find it here

Mirrors on the ceiling
The pink champagne on ice
And she said "We are all just prisoners here, of our mobile device"
And there Analytica
Harvesting at the feast
They grab it with their API's
But they just can't kill the beast

Last thing I remember
I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
"Relax," said the night man
"We are programmed to receive
You can check-out any time you like
But you can never leave!"

Wednesday, April 04, 2018

IMAGINE: a bus stop where you tell a machine where you want to go and it tells you which bus number to ride and where to transfer to another bus.

Sounds dated? Except that buses are self driving and dynamically change routes to match traffic conditions and requested routes - buses with the same number does not mean it runs the same route everyday.

Why should we find buses that match our routes instead of having buses that find routes to match us?

Tuesday, April 03, 2018

自分の限界を知っておくのが大事。自分を制限するためではなく、周りの人が動けなくなった混乱の中でも、自分ができるはずなことをしっかりこなすためです。

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

The Bell Curve says that behind every extraordinary genius is someone equally extraordinarily stupid.

I think America had a lot of really brilliant geniuses.

Monday, March 19, 2018

余裕

余裕がない時には
まず深呼吸。
息を深く吸って
10を数えて
ゆっくりと
ゆぅくりと
吐く。
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
ここで、息を吸わずに
また10吐けますか?
ここで余裕を求めても
苦しくて当然です。

なぜなら、
「余裕」は誤字です。
現実の世界では
「余す」なんかしません。

余裕がない時は、
頭の中で
大きな
大きな、大きな
「予裕」を
想像して
息を吸ってください。
ここからが第一歩です。

Thursday, March 08, 2018

#aiproblems #rant

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, everything is running on AI nowadays and it's getting a little annoying for two reasons: 


(1) they don't learn fast enough to catch up with expectations 


Google board was amazing when i just started using it. But i realized its extremely dependant on me obeying rules like gliding over the actual characters i need. I was set up to expect it to read squiggles in a doctor's prescription but it's not getting there. 


(2) they predict what I'd want based on my history


My YouTube feed is spoilt. There are genres i like but i don't like watching things that are too similar. And i enjoy finding things i never thought I'd watch just like when you channel flip on a TV. But i keep getting the same (identical) videos on my feed - and i tend to remember videos I've watched even when YouTube doesn't. 


Probably because the AI was set up to maximize YouTube's or Facebook's or whatever service's experience of me rather than my experience of them. 


But also maybe these two are the inevitable fingerprints of current AI technology. When you feel like "something's just a little off in the most annoying way" maybe it means somebody's using AI. 

Monday, March 05, 2018

あなたご自身の時間は人生そのものです。

他人の時間は資源と呼ばれます。

給料とはあなたの人生を社長の資源に変換する魔法です。

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Rationing Attention

Rationing Attention

A different perspective:

extracting value from porn is more straight forward than extracting value from a video about particle physics.

People in sales are often very good at extracting value from wide ranges of content - they expose themselves to a wide range of ideas and learn how to talk with people with different interests as a living. They know how to survive on an omnivorous diet of content.

We need to ration our attention not because our time is limited, but because our ways of life are so specialized that we are unable to extract value from resources that do not fit certain specifications. We live within niches that reward the creation of value that matches the expectations of that specific niche.

What if the world changes at a rate where these niches are invented and abandoned faster than one can specialize?

I propose the opposite: the most important skill of the future is the enterprise of adaptation: to spend minimum effort and time to extract value from readily available information and satisfactorily respond to needs before they change or disappear.

Friday, December 15, 2017

There is no chicken or egg problem. A chicken egg containing a chicken foetus cannot hatch into anything but a chicken. But a chicken can lay an egg with a foetus that is not (purely) chicken.

The egg came first.

If a species that evolved into the first chicken did not reproduce with eggs, then that first chicken isn't chicken because chickens lay eggs.

Unless of course laying eggs was the final adaptation that made a chicken a chicken!

Thursday, November 23, 2017

The French and the Chinese

Okay I just found out that French has this weird pronunciation rule for making the "ent" suffix in verbs (and only verbs) silent, and it seems different languages have different prerogatives. Here's what it looks like in my knowledge, how different language express combinations of gender and plurality for the third person.
 
English differentiates between male and female when singular, but not when plural. The plural is just its own pronoun with its own subject-verb agreement rules.

Male Singular : He eats rice
Female Singular : She eats rice
Male Plural  : They eat rice
Female Plural  :They eat rice

To refer to a person in the singular, you are forced to reveal the gender. And in contrast, when referring to persons in the plural, you are forced to hide the group's gender. 


Japanese differentiates between male and female when both singular and plural, but when in the plural the is the option of not differentiating.There are no subject-verb agreement rules in Japanese.

Male Singular : 彼はご飯を食べる
Female Singular : 彼女はご飯を食べる
Male Plural  : 彼らはご飯を食べる
Female Plural  :彼らはご飯を食べる or 彼女らはご飯を食べる

While the pronoun forces you to reveal the third person's gender in the singular, one has the option of using the cultural convention of using the non-gendered honorary suffix "-san" with the surname. When referring to persons in the plural form, one has the option of revealing the group's gender only when it is female since the male plural is the default.


Chinese differentiates between male and female when both singular and plural, but when in the plural the is the option of not differentiating (same as Japanese), except that when spoken, the male and female pronouns sound exactly the same. There are no subject-verb agreement rules in Japanese.

Male Singular : 他吃饭
Female Singular : 她吃饭 (pronounced the same as 他吃饭)
Male Plural  : 他们吃米饭
Female Plural  :他们吃米饭 or 她们吃米饭 (pronounced the same as 他们吃米饭)

In speech you can only differentiate between plurality, not gender - you are forced to hide the party's gender whether singular or plural.


Hebrew differentiates between male and female in the singular and plural, both when spoken and written. Subject verb agreement rules apply for each of the four combinations.

    הוא אוכ  אורז Male Singular
היא אוכלת אורז Female Singular
הם אוכלים אורז Male Plural
הן אוכלת אריז Female Plural


Basically you're forced to reveal both gender and plurality all the time.


French Same as Hebrew, except that when spoken, the singular and plural pronouns and verb conjugations sound exactly the same. Subject verb agreement rules apply for each of the four combinations.

Male Singular : Il mange du riz
Female Singular : Elle mange du riz
Male Plural  : Ils mangent du riz (pronounced the same as Il mange du riz)
Female Plural  :Elles mangent du riz (pronounced the same as Elle mange du riz)
 
In speech you can only differentiate between gender, not plurality, so you are forced to reveal the gender of the party both when singular and plural, but you are forced to hide the number of persons you are referring to!
 
So, when you want to hide a person's gender, speak Chinese. When you want to hide your party's number, speak French!
 
Question: Do you know a language that allows you to hide both gender and plurality?

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

怪我する時考える事

①どんなトレーニングをしとけば今回の怪我が避けられたのか。


②早く治したいから休もう。


③無理しない範囲で今の体でどんな動きができるのか。

Friday, October 20, 2017

How to fix systems in 5 steps

How to fix systems in 5 steps

If it happens to one person all the time, fix the user

If it happens to some people some of the time, fix the engineering

If it happens to some people all the time, fix the requirements

If it happens to everybody some of the time, fix the management

If it happens to everybody all the time, fix the corruption

Friday, October 13, 2017

一二回あった人の顔次会う時誰なのかわかるのが普通かな?何回もあってないと会ったことあるかどうかすら分からない。軽度の相貌失認かも?

いつも待ち合わせで相手の顔分からないのが心配で、目が合う時にホットする。仕事も名刺交換すべきか以前あったことがあるお客さんか分からず、曖昧な話の流れでごまかしている。以前あったよねと言われる時正直ピンと来ないけど、はい、はい、で笑って流す。

人の真ん中にいたい気持ちがあるのに、これは難題だ、、、髪型ひとつ変えることで誰なのか分からなくなる時もあるし、名前覚えるのが苦手以前に顔が苦手だな