Excursions

It is very tiring to make decisions. There appears to exist a popular perception that decision, once made, leads to some irreversible change to the currently “working state”. What, then, one has to decide is whether the change was good or bad, and so whether the decision made was right or wrong.

This judgement that follows after every decision invariably forces one to question whether it was worth the enforced change. The fear of making the wrong decision is the reason, more often than not, behind the lack inclination to change.

You can be deciding what gift to buy for someone or who to choose to be your life partner. It does not matter whether the decision to be made is critical or trivial. Our subconscious is always at work, judging our every decision.

However, it is up to you to not let this fear of judgement drive how you lead your life. It is easier to overcome the wrong decisions you make than to lead a life being too indecisive.

My sister recently bought a new iPhone - her first, switching over from Android - and was happily setting it up with all the apps she had been using. And many more new ones. I did observe one bothersome behavior while she was using her device. She was happily tapping around whenever iOS threw a permission prompt at her, without paying any attention to what the prompt said. “Sure, have all the access you need.”

And I do not think she is in minority here. I observe this behavior very often and every single time, I am left completely befuddled. Why would you not read what permission the app is asking for and why would you not question why it needs that?

For me, no app gets any permission the first time it asks for it. Everything is disabled by default. Especially the access to my location, microphone or camera. None. You need to convince me to the core at the right moment that you deserve this privilege. I prefer veering towards extreme stringency of access to my device.

As more and more connected, data-hungry devices surround us, it is becoming important to instill awareness amongst the populace of the fallouts minor negligence while using these devices can lead to. Not provoke moral panic, but train to be cognizant towards one’s privacy and security. If we ourselves don’t put price on our data, we have no right to expect the organizations to lend respect to something that is a primary and sole fuel to their profits.

There is no point ignoring sleep - you can’t steal hours from what the sleep deserves. You can be happy for a day because you got some extra hours in your day to work on things you enjoy. Or to “relax” by watching some mindless videos that YouTube’s recommendation engines serve you. Or to read those articles you have been adding to your Instapaper queue. Or to binge watch and complete that one season of the show you enjoy on Netflix.

Sure, you can do all this on a late night by stealing some hours from sleep. But it vehemently gets back at you. If not on the very next day, you have to pay back in the week that follows. For days in a row. It is better to let sleep carry on with its routine.

A brilliant essay at New Yorker on A.I. and intellectual debt, output of an often employed “approach to discovery — answers first, explanations later”. I was aware of, but never thought in detail on what would be the implications of letting independent, isolated machine learning models interact freely. This example is indeed eyeopening.

In 2011, a biologist named Michael Eisen found out, from one of his students, that the least-expensive copy of an otherwise unremarkable used book—“The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design”—was available on Amazon for $1.7 million, plus $3.99 shipping. The second-cheapest copy cost $2.1 million. The respective sellers were well established, with thousands of positive reviews between them. When Eisen visited the book’s Amazon page several days in a row, he discovered that the prices were increasing continually, in a regular pattern. Seller A’s price was consistently 99.83 per cent that of Seller B; Seller B’s price was reset, every day, to 127.059 per cent of Seller A’s. Eisen surmised that Seller A had a copy of the book, and was seeking to undercut the next-cheapest price. Seller B, meanwhile, didn’t have a copy, and so priced the book higher; if someone purchased it, B could order it, on that customer’s behalf, from A.

Each seller’s presumed strategy was rational. It was the interaction of their algorithms that produced irrational results. The interaction of thousands of machine-learning systems in the wild promises to be much more unpredictable.

Yep, indeed. May be such interactions need more control? May be we have one more thing about AI to worry about?

Much of the timely criticism of artificial intelligence has rightly focussed on the ways in which it can go wrong: it can create or replicate bias; it can make mistakes; it can be put to evil ends. We should also worry, though, about what will happen when A.I. gets it right.

Written languages based on alphabets are one of the great human accomplishments. (…) when I write the word “human” you can fill in what you imagine a human to look like. The word itself carries some fundamental attributes of being a human but the rest is intentionally underspecified. This allows us to use a single word that applies independent of gender, nationality, race, clothing, etc. That is the power of language based on alphabets, because the letters themselves carry no meaning. Even the meaning of a word can evolve over time. For example, the word “couple” at one point might have meant a male-female couple but is now used to describe any two people who are paired.

A thoughtful essay, but I completely disagree. There is an innate assumption here that everyone can read and write English alphabet. It is, in reality, not the case. There are tons of alphabets across nations and regions. In India itself, there are 11 alphabets. My mom can fluently read and write Devanagari, but that is not the case with English alphabets.

Emoji cross the confines of regions - primarily because it is visual. Is it perfect? Of course, not — we have managed to mess up the standards in implementation across platforms.

However, at least, I can send my mom a “smile” emoji without spelling it out in Devanagari. It was the first thing that lent her confidence to start using smartphones, way before Devanagari support was even introduced.

A fascinating read — instance when ML application is generally positive.

The goal is to better understand these ancient games and their role in human societies, to reconstruct their rules and to determine how they fit into the evolutionary tree of games that has led to the games we play today. They call this discipline archaeoludology.

The researchers have ambitious plans for their incipient science. They say the new techniques of machine vision, artificial intelligence, and data mining provide an entirely new way to study ancient games and to build a better understanding of the way they have evolved.

A really great article summarizing the perils of files and writes and file systems. And also on why exactly consumers should care. Especially, the below excerpt on cost of data corruption is bang on.

(…) if we look at how consumer software works, it’s usually quite unsafe with respect to handling data. IMO, the key difference here is that when a huge tech company loses data, whether that’s data on who’s likely to click on which ads or user emails, the company pays the cost, directly or indirectly and the cost is large enough that it’s obviously correct to spend a lot of effort to avoid data loss. But when consumers have data corruption on their own machines, they’re mostly not sophisticated enough to know who’s at fault, so the company can avoid taking the brunt of the blame. If we have a global optimization function, the math is the same — of course we should put more effort into protecting data on consumer machines. But if we’re a company that’s locally optimizing for our own benefit, the math works out differently and maybe it’s not worth it to spend a lot of effort on avoiding data corruption.

Nope.

These articles keep getting churned out every few months — and the frequency might even be on the rise. I always wonder why don’t we ask this question - “have we hit peak blogging”? Why can’t podcasting be made more mainstream?

“It definitely won’t be taped at a library where janitors are walking around, yelling in the background of each episode.”

Absolutely bullshit. Weren’t we convincing more people to write what they want? Encouraging them to open their mind, blog more - not think about readers? What’s so different about podcasting?

I picked up this book just as a filler — something I read in between when am in no mental state of anything serious. Or something that will make me think. Or will make me sad. So I had very little expectations going in. And the book met my expectations to the T. It wasn’t terrible. But I don’t think I will remember any part of it after even a month.

I have now given up on many “memoirs” which are nothing more than essays on varied topic. I have realized that they simply don’t interest me. Especially humor ones. Fact that I could sit through and complete this book is in itself a surprise for me.

One thing that might have worked in favor somewhat is that I listened to this book rather than reading it. I think the experience must have been a tad better. Because ..uhmm.. Ellen. But the content just was too patchy overall. Some essays were brilliantly written. They talked about some nice little ideas. And with Ellen’s easy-on-ears style of narrating, they made me laugh. Some even made me think. Her journal entries while on beach or her thoughts on having (not?) kids, to note a couple, are damn funny.

Others, however, - and there many to be frank - were terrible. Her haikus or bucket lists were just horrible. I don’t even know why were there in the book. They weren’t funny. They had no reason. They were just .. there. Wish if the chapters that weren’t funny at least made me learn something about Ellen’s life. Nope. Didn’t do even that. Few had just 4-5 words. Not something I enjoy - sorry. Even when I have very low expectations.

All in all, this is a terrible memoir, okiesh essay collection, a breezy audiobook. You can listen through it completely over a long drive. You won’t miss a thing while you place and collect your order at a drive through. Don’t pause. Don’t replay. Just let it play on through your drive.

Content gets 2 stars. Ellen gets another star. However, I don’t think I will pick up another of her earlier books any time soon though. Or any of the essay/memoirs. I am done with this genre.

Apple also wants to serve exclusive podcasts now. This recent craze of everyone coming up with their own exclusive content - movies, shows and podcasts now - is really nonsensical to me. Netflix and Amazon started it with their original content and, although arguable, achieved some moderate success.

However, we are already seeing trends - if Netflix’s recent quarter’s earnings are any indication - of people losing interest. One reason I believe (and suffer from) is the sheer quantity of the content available to be consumed. After all, there is only so much time a person can spend glued to their screens- in addition to the time he already spends scrolling through the unlimited stream of bite sized posts.

As I had argued earlier, podcast is not a light medium for consumption. It is not music. It is not audiobooks. It is a medium known for culturing the relationship with the listeners over years. Listeners choose whom they form that relationship with by subscribing to a podcast.

And they are already weighed down by the choices they have to make.