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

Listening to Freakanomics Book Club interview of Economist John List about his book The Voltage Effect. List is frank when discussing his time at Uber that he felt no powerlessness any minorities of the skin color, gender and sexual orientation varieties. It is asserted that he is adept to the environment of hyper-rational, high pressure, continuous criticisms and white high-power culture (let’s call these mean organizations—meanorgs) because of his academic training, that most people, like those who couldn’t deal with Uber competition, are more like Homer Simpson—they’re dumb.

This is a truly hard red pill to swallow. For one thing, it is being delivered by a white economist who is prized for his white childhood poverty—His being white and working low wage jobs while growing up is what makes him special. His idea is that most people are dumber than economist(and people who scale up things) assumes them to be. While he does sprinkle in the familiar refrains of diversity, it just sounds so disingenuous. Why would any existing meanorg want diversity of ideas when most people are dumb and irrational ? His thesis is self contradicting at best.

So, what do I want? If all these highly prized smart white people are coming up with nasty ideas, what exactly would I prefer?

I don’t know, and this isn’t a snarky comment about myself being a Homer Simpson too. And honestly, minorities finding themselves poorly prepared for meanorg is not an inaccurate observation. What is lurking in the back of some minorities’ mind might be that the meanorg isn’t the best way and that we refuse to conform to its norms and demands. We don’t want this, we don’t want to tie someone up and whip them into submission and we don’t think leaders should either.(for example) There shouldn’t be formal alphas, betas and gamma assignments in society even transiently. I mean, this is one of western prime objections to Confucianism is that it assigns roles to different humans with associated rights, duties and powers. We do not conform Confucian prescriptions any more. Just as we might want to abolish meanorgs .

It’s just a thought, followed by regular disclaimers that I grew up in a land where they chose a very volatile and violent cultural revolution to discard old and unacceptable social and cultural norms. That I am not saying that’s right or wrong, just that path occurs in my thoughts.

On some days, I have this nightmarish vision of a just retribution against me. As parents, we try to optimize money expenditure while our children are growing. For families with parents who have experienced atrocious childhoods in uncivilized land under evil parentage themselves, it often is comfortable, for the parent, to buy larger than fit clothing items for children to maximize duration of utilization per dollar spent.

What? The jacket drags on the ground? That’s fine!

What? you tripped on your shoes because it is far longer than your foot? You’ll get use to it, TWO years is plenty of time to get used to them.

What? Underwear too tight? Socks cutting into flesh? Belly button showing under t-shirt? but I can’t see it, you have to complain several months before I do anything about it.

In a few years’ time, the sons and daughters hopefully will be intelligent enough to understand that these unnecessary sufferings could have been prevented by having a better parent. Perhaps they will say to us:

Mom, Dad, I bought a coffin for both of you, don’t worry about the size, you won’t feel it when we stuff you in there. You’ll grow into it.