Trans-formers

Trans-formers
They should make an anime where people fall in love with spirits and marry them, and then they are fused with their spirits and gain power as they allow their spirit selves to express themselves. And the main character would be a high school boy who fell in love with the Queen Spirit, and goes through the process of discovering his inner queen...

Digital Poetry

Digital Poetry

Code is a little like
Digital poetry, set in motion,
It reads a little different every sitting
It grows on you so subtly
It becomes part of you: sometimes
It becomes partly you:
You live a little bit of life through it
As it takes away a little slice
Of all that needless mess you'd have to go through.
And when we have written
An app for every imaginable moment
We'd be able to put away
Every needless mess we used to call life
And be born perfect.
When the only thing left to do in life is the dying,
Maybe we'd start to see
We are like twenty-first century servers:
Ultimately mere consumables
Briefly energized by immortal code
Pretending we do not understand
The meaning of MTTF.

The 10 levels of mastery

The 10 levels of mastery
#notetoself
Stepping stone
Tool
Skill
Art
Perspective
Journey
Experience
Living
Reality
Lesson

Isn't it amazing that the earth can be so ferociously zooming across space and spinning all the the same time and we can be talking about staying perfectly still? When you feel like life isn't moving, that's what happening to you - you're riding on the wings of the gods, scaling distances "far" cannot begin to describe.

PRIVACY FOR SALE

PRIVACY FOR SALE
TNBT: Imagine a legal service app you can download easily and get legal representation every time you sign up for any SNS or web service that will replace their standard privacy arrangements with a pre-negotiated contract that allows you to get a cut from any profit made from your participation. You'd absolutely know where your information is going - and maybe even get a discount on your favorited brand, even before you know what you're going to buy! Yes, most of us don't know how to monetize our privacy, but isn't that exactly why it's a potential market?

Success is inevitable.

Success is inevitable.

The one reason we fail is that we cannot come up with enough reasons to counter our excuses.

The one reason we fail to fail is that we cannot come up with enough excuses to counter our reasons.

Plastic Dignity

Plastic Dignity
#myworld

Food is culture. Language is culture. The sitcoms we watch on TV is culture. We now share the culture we grow up in with an increasing number of people from different races. Why should race define culture - and indeed why should culture define race?

True fact. When someone says that maybe it's suppose to mean "it is a well-known/little-known fact that ... is true", playing on the idea that no logical statement is a fact, until it is actually known.

Understanding grammar is immensely useful, but that's what machines are good at. Reading what people mean is what you need for the next decade.

On AI

Can capitalism sustainably support a large human population in a post AI world?

If we choose to stick with capitalism, I've been thinking what activities/jobs we perform are enjoyed specifically for the fact that it is done by a human being - things like expression (not to be confused with creativity), performance (not to be confused with dexterity), political representation (not to be confused with fairness).

But this is probably the extreme end since we're still a long way before we can get quantum computers to do AI, so for the time being the energy consumption to take away complex R&D jobs will help them stay for a while.

On the other hand, if we took capital ownership away, we would remove the idea of "employment" as we know it - if automation can provide for humanity and free humanity to do their human things - like learning about each other, fixing poverty, imagining new ways of living and interacting, finding new systems of government that make life meaningful in a post-work era, challenging yourself for the sole purpose of understanding what a human being is capable of etc - why is AI a bad thing?

But this would profoundly change how humans experience the reality of life, and we have to collectively imagine what life can look like. Problem is, we have a lot of baggage that puts a lot of value in "making an honest living" - that fact that it takes effort to stay alive is woven into our biology.

Oops sorry for the verbal diarrhea!

Checklist : Can AI replace you?

Checklist : Can AI replace you?

Process stability
How easy is it to create a KPI that can be calculated without human intervention?

Probabilistic complexity
How many human beings are able to affect that KPI directly?

Human touch
How easy it it to quantitatively express the difference between the experience of having a need met through receiving the product or service, as opposed to a customer creating the product or performing the service directly.

Third Generation

(Beat: http://youtu.be/Z9gVvxa2sgQ start on the 22nd second)

Education
Language assimilation
Report cards trading for toys
Concentration - no girls for boys
No distractions
No unscreened friends
No unaccounted time
No unclean hands
This is the life of the third generation
Migrant in my blood
Survival in my hands
They taught me how to live
But I'm dead from my core
I can travel the world
But I'm always abroad
I have no language I have no home
I have no culture I call my own
I'm living on borrowed time
Rented apartments constructed lives
I'm whatever I imagine myself to be
My mileage is my history
I'm done with the metaphors of traditions
Of ideologies and of religions
I see the worlds I leave behind and can no longer understand it's what's and why's
Sometimes I dream what it'd be like
If I grew up hokkien or penangnite
Would reality be an unbroken line
Would I sing the same song in different rhymes?
But I'm still rocking it and I still have plans
And retrospection ain't one of them
I wanna see I wanna be
Everything that isn't me
Migrant in my blood
Survival in my hands
They taught me how to live
My Jekyll and my Hyde
I love the day I love the night
And maybe someday I'd love my life
I don't care what my skin may say
I don't care if my accent gives me away
This is what I paid for with sleepless nights
This is my crack, my meth, my ice.

I see visions... Visions
I see visions...

My mind is ever restless
I can't wait to get breathless

Visions...

I don't know where I'm going
But my feet are on the move
I just know it'll be a trip
And there's nothing left to lose
I'll just have to learn to be more laid back
Believe in myself believe in my bet
This is the life of the third generation
I'm free to write a story different than Dad's
Push myself nearer my imagination
My heaven my hell my life my death

Living in Japan made me realize there are two ways to run any organization - you keep your stockholders satisfied by acknowledging the inevitable sacrifice needed to realize a noble ideal, or you keep your stakeholders alive because every rent counts.

The problem with "nerds" is that we make them think what they do is not extraordinary, and then blame them for not understanding what the ordinary person is capable of understanding - because we cannot begin to comprehend the brilliance of their achievements. For those whose work we understand but whose means are beyond our imagination, we call them talented, so we need not go on the journey of questioning why we are incapable of something so beautifully obvious.

If someone says "easier said than done", they're probably not doing it.

IMAGINE: what if politicians in office don't get paid any salary, but every personal expense were claimable, subject to public veto?

News is how adults feed the idle mind. Imagination is how children feed the idle mind. That's why children can talk about the impossible that has never happened, but adults talk about the impossible after it happens.

Let Go (Death at 3AM)

I like it clean fast painless sudden and full
I don't wanna die slow
I don't wanna die old
I want my last memory be whatever I do
Don't keep me on hold
I wanna let go

I wanna live it fast make it good while it lasts
I wanna breathe miracles dive deep into life's lusts
I wanna know the happy and amazing I can see and do
I wanna know my strange limits when I get screwed

Like a typhoon earthquake rainbow and snow
I'm not here to stay
I'm changing everyday
Like the changing heavens I'm a phenomenon
I am real for now
But I will have my turn

When I go burn everything I have
Delete all my mail, let me leave no trail
Don't seek don't search you know the drill
And you'll always keep the memories of me when I was once real

Commitment is when you spend good money on a good stick - mastery is when any old stick will do.

IMAGINE: If one day technology provides inexpensive tools for the common man to directly alter and manipulate consciousness itself, all religion would undergo a profound change.

Danger without death
Progress without pain
Community without commitment
Security without struggle
Butchery without blood