Just saw the new movie on Prime Video about the making and publication of the report on (the failures) of American Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. The story centers around the research and publication of the report circa first few years of Obama’s presidency.

I used to think Feinstein should be removed from senate for her failings being on the Senate Select Committee from a time before 9/11 through the exercise of EIT. But if she did what she did in the movie to bring the bad stuff to day light, maybe I was overly critical?

But still, shouldn’t someone get some blame for 911 and the subsequent useless application of EIT’s ?? Foremost, not discovering and stopping 911 seems like such a bad thing. Why isn’t there a report on that ? Why isn’t there a report on what the IC is prepared to do in the future in terms of forcing cooperation from enemies?

Watching the Senate discuss and debate is so boring. Nobody is changing anybody’s minds…. it’s such an act… but so poorly performed. Can they at least act like anything matters?

I feel very unhappy with how my tax dollars were spent and it seems the only way to change it is to elect someone else or run for the office.

Consider my tax dollars paid for my income in 2018. A big part of it may have gone to paying inefficient and uncompetitive farmers of America in subsidies to offset the Chinese tariffs. On top of that, I have to spend more for Chinese goods. In what part of the world out side of a farm is this fair? Why can’t American farmers be men and standup and compete with the world on production? It’s not like we don’t have the sciences or machinery. We invented most of the science and machinery for this stuff. Farm subsidies should only include Yang style UBI and maybe some tax relief on the real estate taxes for the farm lands. They can choose to stay lean, leave the land fallow, or they can choose to work, but effectively. What they cannot do is to just take my money and grow fat, all the while wasting energy, polluting environment, while pretending to farm.

Yeah, but strategically, we must have food, you say, that’s why we subsidize farmers. If the whole world dies of hunger, we can still eat. The problem is not that we need strategic capabilities to feed American mouths. The problem is that they are inefficient and unable to farm as effectively(cheaply) as foreigners. I mean, this is where the country either stands up and say we are independent of the rest of the world(and put the nose to the plow and get to work), or it plays nice to get what it needs. It should not choose to cuddle it’s farmers at cost to the entire population.

Why don’t they do a study on that too? I am so dissatisfied with the people we pay to do things…

But it was a good deed, to expose those inefficient and ineffective torturers.

Applauses

How come nobody has taken it upon themselves to find these robo-callers that target Chinese speaking people? Today, in late 2019, I received 3 different calls in an hour all speaking Chinese. Initially, I thought they were targeting those silly Chinese people who rely on the Chinese embassy or DHL, but soon I realized that whoever is responsible for making these robo-calls are not event waiting to take my credit card numbers. They just hang up as soon as I pick up. This is starting to feel like some kind of public defamation of Chinese people. By impersonating Chinese spam callers, the perp is trying to grow hatred for Chinese speaking people.

I wonder who in the public is a suspect for systematically and persistently inciting hatred among Americans in late 2019.

The worrisome thing here is that we always believed there are white hat hackers out there who are willing to serve justice and the public good. But in this case, no one stood up to identify the hackers making these spoofed spam phone calls. It has been years since these spam callers came online and nobody is willing to take up the effort to stop them.

Maybe all the white hats are mostly Chinese-hating white supremacists? That’s not unbelievable. Maybe the FCC or whoever else has legal jurisdiction over the phone lines are all white rats who couldn’t dream of a better way to make America hate Chinese people more.

Why has no one made any effort to stop these spam callers?

No, it would not make me happier if they started speaking Cantonese or Hokkien or Russian or Hebrew or Spanish or Vietnamese or any other language. And I would be just as worried about the sullied reputation of those races–all minority races here have suffered very bad racism when it was unchecked and they should never again. Hatred by a single race, is a root for hatred by any race, and we should not have any of it.

Of course, my future self could laugh at my naïveté when it is discovered that this was the first AI generated virus that took people decades to eradicate… in that case, we really should try to stop critical infrastructure from disruptive foreign invasions. Can we get Bill Gates on that? Let’s drop some big bombs on this bug!

Has anyone ever considered refining the label of Artificial Intelligence into different and intersecting labels:

• Human-made Intelligence (HMI) is a machine or system that is deemed intelligent and is originated by human with the intent of it being intelligent.
• Nature-made Intelligence (NMI) is a machine or system that is significantly influenced by the occurrences of nature that are not through human intelligence.

Most machine learning system could be considered HMI but after it learns from or interact with the world outside of human influence sufficiently, the learned intelligence will needs to be considered as NMI as well.

Another example would be evolved algorithms. The randomness explicitly used by the evolving machinery is uncontrollable by humans, therefore an evolving program is HMI but an evolved intelligence is also NMI.

I’ve decided to rename “Good Artificial General Intelligence” to “Good Computational Intelligence”

The word artificial used to be a useful word to distinguish computational intelligence with organically grown, evolved intelligence. But now we may refocus our attention to the core aspect of our new intelligence that it is the result of massive computations.

We of course keep the good for all the reasons why we added it before.

Little brother dragon went shopping with dad. It was the biggest shopping mall little brother dragon has ever seen. He follows daddy but there are so many blinking lights and so many toys and people and animals and dragons.

Pretty soon, little dragon was no longer following daddy. The big dragon in front of him was an elderly dragon, purple not blue like daddy.

Little brother dragon wonders around a bit and finally locates a police dragon. “Officer, I’m lost! I can’t find my daddy!”

“Gibberish gibberish gibberish?!” Says the police dragon.

“What?”

“Gibberish gibberish giblets!?”

This was not Dragonese that little brother dragon thought all dragon spoke. Why is this dragon police speaking Gibberish?

“Ugh!” Grunts little brother dragon, and he turns towards an old lady, “excuse me missus, could you please help me find my dad?”

“meow!!! Meeeeowwww? Meeeoooeoeoeoeooooow.” Meowed the lady dragon.

“What? What happened ? Why are you meowing in Catish?” Little brother dragon can’t believe what’s happening!

“Woof! Woof! Woooooof! Wuf woof wuf.” Barked the cashier dragon in front of whom little brother dragon now stood.

“Woof, meow, bark, Gerber Ferber” tried little brother dragon, regretting to his core that he didn’t pay more attention on the iPad app that taught foreign language.

“Gibberish gobbledygook blah Bow wow oink moo baba bark bark blergh!” Everyone talked in a complete mess of dissonant and incomprehensible unison.

Little dragon wishes this was a nightmare but it is worse than he can imagine. Has everyone gone mad? What is this different world he suddenly entered?!

Tears of terror emerge of his large dragon eyes! “Wahhhhhhhh!” He cried. In the back of his nape, he suddenly felt a tug of the string. The secret string he recently gained connecting with witch princess Alice on the other end. Little brother dragon tugs on it with his dragon whiskers.

POOF!

The loudest poof little brother dragon has ever heard drown out all the barn animal sounds. Alice appeared mid-air, in her bathing suite.

Ahhhhhrrrg!!

Came a blood curdling witch scream that drowned out the poof that drowned out all the dragon speak.

“I’m sorry” said little brother dragon, “I need your help!”

Ahhhhhrrrg!!

“Please, Alice, only you can help me” mumbled little brother dragon sure he is not heard.

Ugh!

Alice finally fell to the ground with a grunt.

“Little brother dragon! Why have you brought me away from my shower?”

“I don’t know, I can’t understand anyone except for you. I lost my dad and I can’t find him”

“Oh.” Alice looked at little brother dragon.

“Is that… is that a party headphone on your head?”

“Party headphone, what’s that?”

Alice reaches over and pulls off a set of headphones situated around little brother dragons large dragon ears. “Party headphone translates everyone’s voice into a different foreign language.”

“Are you going to pay for that?” Asked the cashier,

“Oh you poor dear” said the old lady,

“What is you address?” Asked the police dragon,

“Oh…” Little dragon suddenly remembered the last thing daddy said to him: “don’t play with toys we have not bought!”

Alice looks at her phone and says, “there, your dad went home after he lost you, let’s go home.”

Little brother dragon put back the headphones and Alice took him home.

I will listen to my daddy from now on, thought little brother dragon… that was terrible when I didn’t.

That was probably the only upside to Jack Ryan season 2 on Amazon Prime.

The story seems so forced. Why did they even make this? There was no new cool tech. The methods to evil were conventional. The fights were predictable. The result was unbelievably simple. The dialog doesn’t all fit. Fat chick got ditched for a younger leaner one… I find it difficult to care about the elements of the show…

I see, so it seems the problem may be that the story and characters were developed since the 1980’s. Maybe that’s why the Ryanverse seems boring.

For me, season one was more interesting mainly due to its believability. I felt more absorbed into the story. Season two seems maybe too real but honestly, it might just be that our media trained us to care more about middle eastern terrorists than Latin American injustices. I don’t know.

I just saw a poignant document-drama on Netflix about the Panama papers, Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Antonio a Andreas, Steven Sodernberg. What a power packed short episode on a serious matter!

The issues seems conflated and leaves way too much for speculation. The Chinese episode, again, the Sichuan accent here wasn’t very convincing, is pure speculation. The senior leaders of China, if we are to believe American propaganda, operate for the country–if they bought a house on the Rivera, it was probably following the party’s direction. If a plastic factory was installed, it was probably the party’s intention. Okay, yes, Bo Xilai apparently headed the party for Chongqing. But given how much monitoring happens in the world, I feel that his actions were probably not that extraordinary for people of his peers.

That is of course pure speculation from me.

But to mix it into a story about American taxes… it’s just not right. American public companies has stringent reporting requirements. Yes, everyone probably cheats a little tax here too, but in the case of Amazon, it seems believable for them to not pay corporate tax some years. Amazon is famous for breaking the PE ratio because it had very high stock market capitalization but zero profit for many many years. It earned no money because it invested in growths for decades. Okay, so that may be my speculation too… But have you ever seen Ex-Amazon employees? They are caffeine driven fiends that work crazy long hours at neck braking speeds. Their core values

* customer obsession

* frugality

* bias for action

* ownership

* high bar for talent

* innovation

(And more on their leadership page.)

It is commonly agreed upon that they live to their mottos.

For all those in Hollowood who wants to attack something, can you think of all the poor creatures who slaved under Bezos all those years to finally get your organic face peel, and, what was that expression used in WSJ, the rainbow fart fuel you guzzle, how they got it to you next day or today?

That took real work! That took a lot of real hard work and sacrifice to get it there. That took a lot of money investment to make it happen. And according to US laws, you can carry forward losses to deduct from earnings before computing taxes. I mean it used to be you can carry-back losses too, but not any more since 2018.

For other examples, you may find a lot of unicorns like Ubar, Luft, Teslo,…, Swuare, etc. etc. that is well in debt and losses but is committed to eventually making a kick-ass products or service. They’ll get to deduct their accrued losses too when they get there.

I can’t find myself hating them for making that deduction. I do find myself hating that I can’t deduct enough of my own misspent money, but that’s just not how our law works. If I buy an ice cream and it tastes like vomit, and I lose half a day of work, I cannot personally deduct that from my income. But if a company does it and loses half a day of work day, they get a lot of deductions.

The show, however does not clarify that this was the problem they are complaining about. It also doesn’t complain about expensive luxury office items like… new office buildings, which can be seen as extravagant and gratuitous, are also completely deducted from income. Amazon, and all these other growing and innovating companies are not bad, this show is bad.

Gary Oldman always does creeps so well. And Streep, of course. But this talent seem wasted on a wrong cause imho… or a good cause but hidden in a lot of awfulness.

Perhaps the team will work together and produce a sequel that explains the position a bit more. I do enjoy the onscreen drama.

Ps here is an idea for a new drama: the intricate story of the stories told by new content coming online at streaming media companies like Netflix, Amazon Prime streaming, Disney+, AppleTV, etc., to defame each other. That would be fun to watch.

I saw the tweet from Jack Dorsey live, yesterday–read it as the alerts came in. Twitter will disallow all political candidate and issues advertising. It chose to suffer this sacrifice to its income because it is felt that paid targeting gives political agents too much power to fool individual voters.

According to the news, Facebook has chosen to allow all political ads (for a few), in the name of freedom of speech. (And honestly, freedom of capitalism where the operations of capital is brought to bear in all organized activities)

I feel the righteousness of both sides. Hyper-targeting individuals, at their own stages of life, work, and living, at all times and places, it can overwhelm each of our senses so as to render our collective votes useless to the democracy. Scientifically, this theory stands. Rationally, the removal of organized political advertising means the discourse on twitter will be more democratic. It is a more real-time version of voting in some sense. This serves as a booster the value of each tweet as opinion of an entity and not effort of a political motivation. It corresponds to the source of what we value. It also boosts trustworthiness of the company possibly leading to more faithful users and promoters.

But refusing to sell a valuable commodity that you have an infinite supply of is very anti-free-market and anti-capitalism. What is this? A church state? The operation of business has to submit to the higher-than-thou self righteousness ?! That is so very un-American!! Who should decide what is a political issue and what is not? If climate watch group posts a new research, and advertises their finding, is that political or scientific? The detail of this scheme is devilish in that someone gets to make the call regarding whether a tweet is political or apolitical. This is a thinly vailed censorship with vast latitude for manipulation by twitter!

So, to organize these thoughts we can list the active constraints in this system

1. Capitalism: Money should be able to buy or manipulate everything under human control. How money is used is the freedom bestowed by Capitalism on its constituents. In an ideally implemented market economy, money works just right automatically. Any restrictions to the power and flow of money detracts from Capitalism with free markets.
2. Democracy: right of speech is necessary for the efficacious function of democracy. The purpose of speech as it pertains to democracy lie in the ability of speech to influence an audience, without audience and an affect, speech is irrelevant. (An extension of this speech-right-redux to right-to-be-heard might be the right to be found by internet search.) Reduction of the right to be heard detracts from Democracy. The increase of total paid political speech is effectively a decrease in everyone’s right-to-be-heard, and for all democratic intents and purposes paid political advertising is equivalent to buying away everyone else’s freedom to speech.
3. Technology: we should try to grow and leverage our technology as much as we can. History has shown that invention and application of new technology repeatedly drove social progress in very significant ways. But history also shows that technologies destroy, consequently we have also chosen to set boundaries on our technology to ensure individual and social wellness: cars have speed limit and you “can’t buy a higher speed-limit”. Highly focused targeting and damaging machination like laser pointers are disallowed in most circumstances–and you can’t buy a permit for that either.
4. Balancing Acts: the above constraints are balanced when interacting: One can only cast one vote, cannot buy votes no matter how much money or enthusiasm you have for a candidate or issue. Can’t lie in courts, can’t buy the right to lie in court. Cannot hack voting machines even if you have the technology and the money to do so.

I feel like the goalie at a world cups final overtime shootout–don’t know which company’s political advertisement policy to dive towards on this one.

But I will confirm that the fact that these two media giants feel enough freedom to take these divergent paths is great testament to American society. Our capitalism did not overwhelm every CEO to make the same decision when faced with trade off between those constraints. Our governments permits both paths to be taken. Our technology allows us to both implement and monitor the effects of these choices. The wide latitude they have to pursue that which is righteous is absolutely freaking awesome! That these transpired this week gives proof that America is greater!

Funny thing happened to me today. It’s like that time I found out about integer division // by googling during an interview. This time, it was not an interview, but still a hair raising surprise to me. So the following with numpy arrays:

>>> a = 16796160.0

>>> np.array([a,], ‘float32’) == (a-1)

array([ True])

>>> np.array([a,], ‘float32’) == (a+1)

array([ True])

Cool, huh?

The problem is 32-bit float has about 7 significant digits for integers and this number has 8 digits, the least significant is not kept. Even though numpy came out of the box float64 by default, some tool, somewhere among the Great Python Data-science Stack, the default for float is 32 bits.

The data we deal with now counts in the tens of millions and you cannot count it using float.

I’m observing this unadulterated joy of a young child doing exactly what you shout for him not to do:

Don’t touch that

Don’t eat that

Don’t jump on the bed when wet from shower

Don’t mess up the dress/shirt/hair…

Don’t scream before bedtime.

.

.

.

The more you say, the more serious you sound, the more urgency in your voice, the more joy and giggling and the more persistence.

I wonder if the pervs watching and mucking with my emails and calendars and every single thing I do are like this. The more I say that clandestine spying and interfering with my personal affairs are unfair trespasses on my human rights, the more joy and vigor their actions brings them.

Seriously, stop it.

No means no for men too.