Okay, let me just come out and say it. Having Capitan Lorca hint at Asian heritage because he loves fortune cookies, and the name Una Chin-Reilly looks like some Chinese girl married an English gentleman and then went to some remote galaxy…

But honestly, this is just an yellow face on white actor, and we should say it as it is.

I personally have zero zeal to exfoliate these matters due to some present physical ailments. But I do think of the trouble Asian actors… nay, Chinese-American actors and actresses had in America… Once eminent Chinese movie star Zhangziyi once said something to the effect that Chinese female actresses can only get roles for “whores and prostitutes…” echoing centuries of “exotic play thing” stereo type for all Asian women. This, really, sucks!

Anyways, it needs to be said because there’s still something really kinky about employing a Chinese women. Like, I don’t know how showbiz works, with revelation of decades of Weinstein, Spacey, I mean even Hanks… the all time wholesome guy that may have been role model to many young kids growing up, myself not completely excluded..

Would it be fair to say that the world has been merciful to Chinese women that they’re not lured and welcomed into this money and fame making machine? Lest they have to regularly perform these degrading sexual acts that they know their family, friends, countryman an ancestors would not tolerate. Would it be unreasonable to express gratitude to the world that these women were not entrenched in backstabbing business practices of this world? That they’re remain the wholesome persons that we think of?

Many will disagree with me. There might even be a (distinctively derogatory) name for the condition that brings about these thoughts in Chinese, and in English…

There’s yellow face in Trek. But it’s okay. I think the people involved are already working extra hard to enhance the world-view of its fans, broadening their ideal works to include Asian people. The fact this fictional future now seem to have Asian descendants of higher proportion, more close to present day proportion than there ever have been in this franchise, is something that we Asian Americans must celebrate.

That the producers and CBS/Paramount have to work in the early 21st century America does not in anyway diminish the significance in demographic shift, even if only in name, is very very heart warming. I never could have imagined today. An Asian Chief petty officer—one of O’Brien caliber, Another Asian face at Ops named Mitchell, a Muslim looking head of section 31, Capital Sulu,… every little bit is worth celebration. Our lives are wonderful. We live in a most marvelous century, best there have ever been!

But yes, there’re some very futuristic yellow faces here as well.

Btw, has anyone noticed that the story writing on this show is quite a different genre than Discovery and Picard? It’s back to more being about the collective known as the Federation discovering and experiencing as it’s individual constituents discover and experience. This vital element of Trek, where the growth of our volkseist hums along with the growth of individual. When Capital Pike grimaces and expresses disgust and intolerance at the child sacrifice in S1E6, it mirrors not only the audience’s feelings but also the feeling of Federation. I don’t see a doomed human fighting to lessen a child’s survival, I see myself and the future humanity fighting for him. This complex projection of tiny flickering pixels onto our psyches.

That is not to say the other shows lack German descriptions. Certainly Picard aims at the zeitgeist at its time of production, and Discovery attempts to attain weltgeist of our galaxy… and all in good fun. Picard calls the Jurati the “Doctor!”, like you know, in the British fantasy Dr. Who where everyone calls the protagonist the doctor. And of course Dr Who series 13 E5-6 just had to use a Trekkie Vulcan long-life-and-prosperity gesture for opening Sontaran ship doors. Great! Which btw, honestly, despite the words coming out of the mouths of the characters, I feel that Dr. Who is more of the Horror Fantasy genre, having poltergeists… I mean what’s with English creative people? Got too much fog? Harry Potter was so horrifying to read, for Ajish’s sake, is this really children’s literature? What in the name of all that’s good and wholesome are they smoking from their smog? Why they make evil Asure so absurdly revolting in a pretty way? That this happens in the founding place of the industrial revolution begs the thoughts that these must be result of multi-generational smog inhalation, exotic heavy metal poisoning and alien manipulation amongst many others. But I digress…

For older busy people who live stressful and sedentary lives, sometimes one develops constipation. Sometimes lasting for years leading to hemorrhoids and other problems. It seems that consumption of OTC fiber is not recommended for long term use as it can either cause one’s nerves to forget either how to detect the need to defecate., or cause the relevant muscles to forget how to do it.

I think I had accidentally watched some YouTube videos about a miracle formula mixed with a full cup of water. I started drinking large cup full of water just before sleeping. This seems to wake me at wee hours of the day with urgency to use the bathroom. And everything that needs to go passes easily at that time.

So, if you have aforementioned problems, and you are desperate enough to forsake an uninterrupted night of sleep for some regularity, give this trick a try. It might do you some good.

FAMx0.5, literally

Wow, that’s a very interesting spin on Trek.

Is T’pring actually kinda likable? That’s the opposite of what I seem to remember of her, maybe I need to rewatch some TOS episodes? At least this show is fair, naked upper bodies of both male and female in just a few minutes.

The CG is pretty awesome. Love the warp, understated but still subliminally powerful. uniforms are, not as tight or revealing as possible… again I feel the need to rewatch some TOS episodes for this… I mean at least same people should have same fashion sense, right ? Spock gets the hypospray in the chest, twice, maybe this show will have flirt after all.

“As you may recall, Vulcans invented first contact.” Okay, yeah, this show is going to have personality.

I feel my mind still swimming in Picard season finally… Honestly I’m still floating in a very pleasant haze of Obama-esk fond hopefulness, that humanity can still overcome, and that we must keep hope even in the longest and darkest winters of man-kind. The premier episode has this message embedded, but it’s effect is muted because of the timing of these two episodes.

Ah, yea, the continuation of underrepresentation of navy men in the production of the show really shows. From discovery’s using “You are officially my number one” (meaning first officer) to Pike giving Ortega “the comm” (CC confirms what I heard). For the uninitiated, it’s “the conn”… I made this mistake maybe through the first 3 years into trek, but it’s quite a different thing for an entire show to put this mistake on my screen. There are some military language,… “eyes upfront”, “Spock, on me” reminds me of 21 century armed soldiers or police that fight urban warfare.

Perhaps it is appropriate, it reminds us that Gene Roddenberry was a navy man, and that navy organizational structures, disciplines, philosophies… all the way to language, pervades Trek everywhere.

Anyways, I’ll conclude with Uhura’s conclusion

Cool!

最近在上网课多在youtube 上，次数多了说话时多少会提到这个邮图必耳，尊称为邮老师。

甲:你最近网球发球加快了好多呀！？在那儿学到的新姿势？

乙：那当然是从邮老师那儿学的啰。

😆

Did we just observe, like, the biggest crossover in Trek history? It’s really hard to tel a joke:

Picard: Picard to Rios, Picard to Rios, please come in. Are you quite done drooling over ancient doctors and all the while living with The Flight Attendant ??

Sheesh! It’s like, given the time travel nature of the current Picard-verse, the story seems quite plausibly connected….

Btw, Picard s2 is FAMx0.4; so far I have watched every episode more than twice on average. The show moves very slowly. Ao a second and third viewing helps to answer that nagging question:”what did I miss?” when the end credit comes on.

For attention mechanisms such as softmax have an interesting behavior when trained with weight decay. It seems that when a parameter used to produce the signal line becomes useless, as evidenced by reduction in the attention to it, it’s gradient tends toward zero. Ultimately the weight control will shrink this variable to zero. The parameter for the attention line for associated with this unimportant feature will continue to decrease into negative. However weight decay would actually reduce this believe that the feature is unimportant as the signal line decrease in amplitude.

In short, the bad feature gets to be relearned from fresh and the model can update its believe about the usefulness of the signal line.

One immediate idea following this view of the attention mechanisms is to update weight decay to decay towards an ideal “initial naive state” that may not be zero. Or one may alter weight decay to gain noise as the value of the parameter approaches the naive state. As an example, the bias term of softmax numerators may target shrinkage to -7, Shrinking to 0 causes the exponentiated result to bias towards 1, where as shrinking to a bias of -7 permits the probability of some classes to decrease to almost zero(1e-3). This reduction results in less label smoothing implicit in softmaxes with bias trained with weight decay. The same can be done during exploration stage we could weight decay the bias towards 1.0 or 2.0 forcing the model to reconsider and explore probabilities more.

My iPad just sped up 25%-40% after upgrading iOS 15.4.1 We’re starting to lose games because they, presumably, now run at their designed performance.

Notably in the news, this version fixes a security hole which allows arbitrary remote execution of code on the device…. So… the mind thinketh perhaps, in all of my memory with this iPad, someone was earning cents constantly mining some crypto coin?

The additional Apple warning about battery consumption increasing seems to indicate that perhaps it wasn’t malware slowing down the iPad. Apple might have simply removed the battery life preserver that slows down the cpu in order to use extend battery life. Maybe this is even liked tot he rumor that Biden may invoke the defense production act to make more raw material for making batteries. If that happens, the battery life may not be such a huge problem.

Anyways, a lot of speculations and lost virtual lives. Feeling kind of embarrassed to be self concerned at a moment when Russia invasion of Ukraine rages on.

Peace!

Has anyone noticed that there are a lot of families that will assign a gender identity to their child that is not the birth biological sex? I’ve encountered many on the playground with my kids. More girl-looking boys than boy-looking girls. My mind sometimes just cannot grasp why parents of perfectly beautiful girls, cute as a button and all, will insist that they’re boys, and the kids dutifully repeats the assignments, sometimes forcefully, after their parents says the sex.

(I should interject here, there is still a self in me that complains about malicious perturbations that fool our evolutionarily developed senses and instincts. The first time I mistook a stripper for a girl in a strip club was very embarrassing for me. For evolution this matter of reproduction is so important there are a lot of other auxiliary brain and body functions that serve to support sexual reproduction. I mean most sisman finds other men’s genitalia slightly to extremely repulsive. It interferes with his function. And obviously there are even more extremists in my brain that are sneering at the non-suggestion that a “boy” can be more virile than a bonafide unquoted biological boy when it comes to matters of reproductive insemination…, but let’s acknowledge their (potentially rightful) existence, but also recognize their nonsensical emotional charges chauvinistic nature… and move on)

But whatever the motivation. This sexual misdirection is actually quite good. Recall in deep learning we found it beneficial to either dropout data at many layers or else perturb the supervision like label smoothing. It improves the knowledge and skill learned.

Perhaps these perturbations, pernicious sometimes imho, will help our humanity to learn to be more true to peoples character than paying attention to superficialities like gender and skin colors.

In terms of the amount of perturbation we want, if we were able to plan it, the popular dropout rate is 50%. But clearly, at that level of perturbation, the society will cease to function in the same efficient way it does today. Label smoothing can be done with probability of 1e-3, which is 10‱ of the labels to be made not exactly right. For a school of 2000 students, that computes to 2 label altered humans. But then again, human learning is not machine learning, so perhaps we need more reinforcement.

Maybe my kids should identify as Hispanic or black… although I’d hate to be blamed for inappropriate cultural appropriations. Seems only safe thing to do is pretend to be a white American? Or opposite gender… for the sake of humanity progress.

P.s. BTW, I am not proposing that it his is a good idea normative. Labelsmoothing tend to be performed at random on separate instances. In real practice, it would mean that speaker occasionally selects a random pronoun to use instead of the actual intended pronoun. The listener will occasionally respond to a randomly selected pronoun instead of their actual pronouns. Persistently mislabel an example could cause strange biases due to population inequality. One (persistently) mislabeled black person does more than one (persistently) mislabeled white person…. Among other problems.

I recently learned about this idea that there is unacceptable cultural appropriations when the Chinese-American actress Aquafina quit Twitter due to massive and hurtful complaints by African Americans that she uses Black English when it suits her (most of her famous roles) but then revert to normal English when it suits her not to do so.

I honestly felt that she uses this so called Black English in genuine admiration, that she really does think it’s cool. I mean she even raps… I don’t really see her mocking, belittling or wrongfully use something that belongs to Black Americans.

But I of course will acquiesce to the fact that I do not know for sure because I’m not Black American. I cannot truly understand them like I truly cannot understand a bat. (That’s saying there is an objective difference that cannot be compensated for by our brains, not saying Black Americans are lower form of mammal.)

But one does wonder why other cultures don’t care so much. Recently I encountered a very antagonizing grandma at local library. She kept on coming over to the crafts table and asking for material repeating “I need this for my younger grand kids…” in a British accent. Her kids are actually older than my child with whom I worked on a Shamrock for the St. Patrick’s day event. There is an silent echo in the library that screamed in a ghostly voice: “GO BACK TO WHERE TOU CAME FROM…” perhaps echoing the zeitgeist of the recent past. We all ignored it. For me, mainly because I don’t know if her ghost is screaming at me or my ghost screaming at her in either case the people involved were apparently all quite civil…

I have never seen mass protest of American appropriation of this religious saint. I’ve never seen tweets complaining about someone call for drinks or partying on St. Patrick’s day. I’ve never seen a religious zealot complaint about misappropriation of Catholic culture.

What about all this mindful crap that modern culture appropriated from ancient eastern hermits? Chinese Buddhism being one of many. What about all the white Americans making money on teaching yoga? What about all the white Americans teaching Asian martial arts?

I’ve never seen targeting of these people for misappropriating very practically useful and hard-to-come-by cultural elements , profiting from them, become famous or even “inventing” these things.

Honestly, it might be that we all don’t have the experience of hardship Black Americans experienced. It might really be a case of easy come easy go. I got my Chinese culture because my parents and friends made it available to me. I didn’t have to earn that. It was free. Maybe this is why I don’t really give a flying fork that some white dude stands proudly in the park teaching tai-qi to Chinese elders. I didn’t invent it, I don’t have that attachment to it, not enough to feel the anguish that black people felt when Aquafina used their language.

But my culture is also very open to respect. A white student properly respecting their teacher might learn some serious skills. This is why I felt that Aquafina appropriating the Black English with respect and admiration was not inappropriate. But it may be the case that not all cultures are as open minded as mine. Admiration and respect sometimes isn’t enough.

This is a puzzle that I wish to understand more in the future. There is definitely relativistic view. But an eventual normative ideal regarding appropriation of cultural elements would be pretty good aim.

Would you approve or disapprove a government clandestine agency from entering private properties to create mass hysteria that results in ubiquitous deployment of internet-enabled video/audio/motion monitoring systems.

(C) FAM Blog

Do you believe that individual digital integrity is a human right?

(C) FAM Blog

How much money would you spend to prevent $100 from being spent doing pure evil?

(C) FAM Blog

How much money would you spend to prevent someone from doing $100 of pure evil?

(C) FAM Blog

Can a law abiding citizen object to monitoring and interference from a government clandestine organization?

(C) FAM Blog

Can justice be done with some party unaware of all aspect of the matter?

(C) FAM Blog

Is just orderly society possible without clandestine government agencies?

(C) FAM Blog