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.

Natural beauty always trumps everything artificial - allows me stay connected to our roots.

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.

I went very conservative while setting the reading challenge for myself this year - I have been very poor recently in completing any books. Was pleasing to find am 3 books ahead of schedule already. A routine with less podcasts and a lot more Audible gets the credit.

After months of neglect, I finally updated my /now page today. There have been too many updates recently. Plus too many things on my mind that I had to put down. Enough that many of my thoughts have missed their chance to be on the archive space. Whatever.

This is the snapshot of my daily habit tracker for August. I have started with a smaller list — but I want to make sure the task itself doesn’t become a burden.

• Morning walk/run
• 100 words published
• Measure weight
• Three meals a day
• Regular sleep 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.

Black coffee or a green tea - what would sit next to me as I get started on my next project? Uhmm … nah. Got to be the good old regular chai! ✍🏽

I’m seriously considering buying an instant camera — thought of having an analog note of a memory is genuinely appealing. However, I do wonder what am I signing up for? Would it stay locked in a drawer somewhere? What should I even look out for if I do decide to take the leap?