I'm a little frustrated that wildcard DNS certs are fairly expensive with the registrars I want to use. I'm not a fan of LetsEncrypt, but this reminds me of one reason why people like it. Anyhow, it's finally become solidly Summer-weather, and NYC is muggy as it always is this time of year. I've been catching up on a number of health-maintenance-y things recently - regular checkup (with bloodwork), cat checkups (also with bloodwork), and have been reminded by the latter how much subsidies count for keeping costs down for human healthcare. I'm glad I finally have a vet that doesn't do alternative medicine though.
The yearly trip for work is coming up. I still feel I'm not good at vacations - I don't really know how to relax and I don't get a lot out of luxury. Maybe I'm learning though - the opportunity to get out into open water and swim is something I dig. Probably the best part of the trip. Recently I've had the oddest sensation of finding it the best thing in the world to just hold my hands underneath water for a prolonged period of time. Feels weird that it's so good.
I've been poking fun at a British coworker for liking PG Tips (as it's made by the Lipton company under another name), but she finally nagged me into trying it again, so I bought a box for my apartment. Having tried it a bit, I still don't think it's great tea - it's a blend that has a very particular unusual taste profile, a little like Earl Grey (which is kinda bleh compared to proper teas - the Bergemot masks the taste of the tea too much). I guess I can understand why people like it though - it's okay in a sense mostly distinct from what tea snobs actually look for in a tea. Still, I'd be unhappy if I had to drink only this tea for the rest of my life (or in fact if I had to drink it very often).
A few takes:
Earlier this week I had a morning where I woke up and some of the details of PCA that had become fuzzy to me (where I had meant to spend some time to clear it up) became entirely clear again. It felt like I hadn't spent much time on it, it just was suddenly clear, and it's remained clear since. The accessibility of intuitions are like that - it reminds me of past (tough) interviews at big tech companies where there are brute force solutions, and then a series of insights that offer headway on the problem and increase the efficiency. PCA is more pass-fail (although approximate PCA is another matter).
Over the last few weeks my sinuses have been really bothering me - this happens twice a year, but it finally seems to be on a downslope today - slept a lot last night and a lot of the discomfort was gone when I woke today. Optimistic that it's gone for good. The yearly company trip is coming up, and I'm glad it probably will be entirely good by the time I'm out there.
Been feeling a little less politically threatened recently because two radical groups finally have a counterweight - I'm coming to learn that I mostly care that no energised group feels that it's winning, rather than who is making headway. Just as it took society some time to learn to argue against Libertarians in the 90s but now people are used to it, there needs to be time for people to learn to argue against other kinds of activism, and having more than one side show up at the various debates helps make nobody show up with feelings of triumph that lead to terrible outcomes for those that disagree. These two examples are a group called "Code Pink" that's spent a lot of credibility supporting Maduro (surprisingly), and another where NYU's sociology department has been trying to cut off the israeli branches of the same university - they're getting strong pushback and that's great. Although I think they're also not entirely wrong (I generally loathe sociology departments for being radical activists demeaning academia by pretending to be scholars, but it's also important to push back against Israel's being allowed to be the one terribly regressive place that gets a free categorisation of being highly civilised despite these failings). I hope this tension never ends because it's productive.
A few takes:
Been thinking a bit about placid and turbulent notes in lake weather, and human bodies that are easily ill and easily treatable versus those that are locked to a course and slow to change. And whether my life has enough noise in it. I often think not, despite the benefits. Although the idea of changing these things makes those benefits seem like a lot to give up, and I balk.
This past week I had a checkup w/ my Doctor. I had left this undone for too long, but I still always enjoy it when I have the right rapport with my Doctor. Maybe it's one of the few remaining "check in with a parent" type thing I have in my life - at this point I interact with my parents like generic family rather than the specific "check in with the authority" type relationship I had earlier - it's not that I think they still don't have things I might learn from them, but rather that that trait has come to resemble that of other family, just leaving the "we have a bond" thing that family have. With a doctor, there's expertise in what's otherwise a generic realm of life, and a certain (admittedly paid-for) feeling of care, just slightly abstracted into being one-directional (would we weird to ask my Doctor about their health). Still, these ties are true even if the economics arranges them. In the same way that older co-workers still feel like elders to me sometimes. The roles just fade a bit as I age and the differences-of-percent fade. I sometimes wonder with much younger coworkers if the opposite should build... but that would make me even more lonely.
Life has given me a lot of painful memories. Recently been trobuled by my one marriage proposal and getting a no. I realise it may not have seemed as much to the other person, but it actually meant a lot to me. I still wonder what life had been like had she been at a point in hers where she felt like taking that leap. Although perhaps it would have failed for different reasons. I am amused at recalling the "let's work this out" I did in calling my parents and telling them. Guessing they would've thought it was me being daring for one of the few times in my life. Perhaps reckless. Although I think they met her once? My memories have grown a bit fuzzy. I guess that was 8 or 9 years ago now.
On another note, I wish I were better at emotionally handling confrontations, even when necessary. Recently I asked someone to shut off their car radio when they parked on my street and were sharing their reggae-and-blues music with the neighbourhood. And I was polite and careful not to insult their musical tastes. And they did. So it worked, but I really didn't like doing it. It's really only on some issues that I can do that without any of this emotional stuff, and even then only sometimes. I try to act tougher than I actually am. I think it's harder when I need to start the conversation - if someone comes to me, and I can categorise the way they do it as rude, it's easier for me to be rude - someone threatens me with a car (knowingly or no) and I can wave my middle finger at them. Soneone comes up to beg money off of me? I can swear at them with little guilt. It's more the "hey, do you mind cutting this off" that I need to do that I don't like doing. Not sure that can change easily. Last weekend at Union Square, on the edge of preachers doing their thing, there was a guy going nuts because some interpersonal tie he had to another heckler had really broken down. The whole time he was talking about how much he emotionally gave with the other person having betrayed him, I was just thinking "when I get angry enough with someone in my life, I just cut them out of my life, often without even expressing my anger". I was wondering why he didn't just do that, because I wasn't sure how things could've resolved okay (the other guy didn't think he had done anything wrong). I was a little weirded out at the end that after the angry guy vented enough, the other guy expressed that he probably wasn't being thoughtful, and they reconciled, and seemed to be friendly again at the end. It was strange because for a time it looked like police were going to be needed to resolve things .. and now as I write this it makes me wonder about my "cut people out of your life when things don't seem to be working" thing. In that case, I would've just cut the ties and walked away and never seen the other person again, and I would've missed out on the reconciliation that I saw (which I really did not expect). I guess I also missed out on the people stepping between me and someone I was angry at multiple times, and on all the versions of that scenario that ended badly, but how many times did I step away from personal ties that would've remained turbulent but possibly worthwhile? And are there other times in life, like jobs and other things, where having a bit of a tussle or some noise could've saved things worth saving? These questions don't easily get answered - they'd need to boil down to specifics and specific analyses, and a conclusion could only come from careful cross-event analysis (which I have not done). I hate this impression of loss and of having missed out on so much in life though. I strongly suspect I've missed out on a lot because of a low tolerance for drama.
Today at work, at one of the regular lecture-meetings, the speaker (a relatively young post-doc) provided a really nice framework for understanding machine learning without a set number of layers, with all the right incentives, to go after some aspects of cross-domain learning. I loved it - some years back when I was considering getting a degree in neuroscience at CMU, I thought that cross-domain learning, if I were to enter neuroscience, would be a problem I might devote the rest of my life to. At it turned out I didn't do that, but I always wondered what would've happened if I had (another possible scientific question that's interesting enough for me to have considered this would be to study mechanisms of cell specialisation. It's strange at this later date to have met people who did the specialisation and have insights to share. And sometimes a little sad. I like the path I've taken in my career for the variety, but the path not taken often invokes curiosity.
The other day there was a public lecture I attended - the speaker tried to address the question on whether theories can get at topics that are not directly empirical, the example being whether other universes exist in a multiverse structure (the talk was on physics in counterfactual universes). It was a good talk, but on this question I think he reached the wrong conclusion - he argued that if an existing theory that is itself strongly empirically supported on empirical topics also implies conclusions on these less-empirical topics, it can give us strong reason to reach conclusions on these topics. I believe this is only true if we have good reason to think that the link between those empirical topics and the less-empirical ones is present in all theories that can fit the facts, and consider the space of all possible theories that do so. Without at least a good reason to justify the presence of side-commentary and soft dependencies on those other topics, a successful theory risks capturing more conceptual space than is warranted.
Recently I've been learning that for my own sanity I shouldn't read anything written about MongoDB by people who are still employees there. There's so much misunderstanding of industry and the product by executives of the company (who still like talking about it), while people with more of an engineering bent don't understand industry at all and seem to be really into .. motivated reasoning .. which usually manifests as desperate somewhat-troll-y logic. It can be fun watching someone chew through bad posts, but it's probably best not to read the crud to begin with - there's no value-risk in doing so as I can already make the case for only using Mongo in cases where it's strongly justified, and using Postgres in most other cases.
I think we need to develop a societal consensus (and laws protecting) against the views in this article - while the opening example he raises are fine (work uniform being a voluntary matter), in the general case workers should be able to live their non-work hours as they see fit with no interference (or threat of being fired) from their employer, with only a few obvious restrictions that are avoidable. And if that personal life leads people to pressure the employer, the employer should ignore that pressure (and should in fact be legally required to do so). I would accept a few reasonable limits:
I find scorecards to be interesting vehicles of values propogation - Foreign Policy For America is a liberal-leaning org that recently entered the game. Looking over that, I find that I largely (but not entirely) agree with their values. Disagreements and things I'm not sure about:
Got back from Berlin late Thursday. Gave me a lot to think about - the two sides (vacation first, then conference) were pretty different, but they had some common themes. With both, the role of other languages was brought into focus - for a very long time I've lived with a number of languages I kinda know as extra parts of my mental world - they didn't play the role that human languages do so much as a private code, part of my personal myths. And my cosmopolitanism was turned at an angle because I've become reclusive; I've hoarded these things for primarily myself, and rarely tested them against other people or reality. In that sense, the trip to Germany dragged a lot that was private for me out into the light, letting me see them from other angles. This is hard to express correctly, but I think the above does at least a reasonable job.
The trip was, the above complexity aside, a good practice of my German language skills, and I learned that apparently my pronunciation is not bad once I'm immersed, and I usually can make myself understood with little effort, although any followup questions easily go outside my vocabulary. I think it wouldn't be a lot of effort to hit fluency if I were to have more frequent exposure. More difficult was navigating a foreign city - not knowing how to navigate the transit system, cultural norms (e.g. not eating pizza with hands, and tap water being largely unavailable), things like that. Broadly, I found it easier to interact with people there in some ways - my concerns and interests are less alien and the cosmopolitanism that I believe in is also fairly common. I was able to get answers to some questions on the meaning of some lyrics in German bands I like, talk about things that felt consequential, and I felt far less lonely than I normally do. There are still some things that I regret, as usual - a need for connection often means I open up more than I wish I had, and when I revisit the conversations in my head I wish I had kept back more.
Things to see:
The day after I got back I went to an IQ2 debate on whether solar engineering to assist in lessening climate change is a crazy idea. I brought a coworker whose company I enjoy and his wife. It was a good, educational, debate, but also strange in that it was won (for the nay side) by a very wide margin based on their successfully framing the debate a certain way - that more research is warranted, and that the proposal of the debate (interpretation of crazy) was that it was so clearly a bad idea that no further research is warranted. Having successfully done that, their victory was sealed. I wasn't caught by that framing, but I think most of the audience was and so they won by one of the biggest swings I've ever seen. A strange win.
It's good to be back home with my cats, in a city which I entirely know how to navigate, and whose norms and how I fit into them I understand fairly well.
Another day's adventures in Berlin. I slept in until noon today, and then set out for the local museum of Technology, stopping at a greek restaurant along the way for something like a large spanikopita (wasn't so much a conscious pick as being hungry and stopping at the first place that looked okay). Leaving there, I passed by Checkpoint Charlie that felt like a tourist trap (it was nice to see some stern words to Russia on a flag outside about their occupation of Crimea). Further on the walk I saw a fascinating building structure - two concentric rings surrounding a park, with one ring being small stores and the other being residential dwellings. The homes were not large, but the design felt very social and I imagine it would be nice to live in a community like that. Wikipedia now tells me it's called Mehringplatz. Walking west on the south side of the river, I ran into two Irish gentlemen and had a very pleasant conversation in English - my first real conversation outside of work for quite some time. I liked them - I think they were hoping to ask me for directions but after it was clear I knew little more than they did but I was from the States, there was some instant camraderie. I have a certain positive prejudice towards people from Ireland that this fed into. We walked the same way for a bit until they reached their hostel, at which point we parted ways and I continued to the MoT. It was pretty great. I stayed for a few hours (was clear this was the kind of museum you can't reasonably get all of in one visit), seeing exhibitions on:
A few more impressions - lots of people ride bikes here and the city is well organised for it. Seems that almost everybody smokes. I wonder if part of it is the cold. It's unsurprising that I only felt I was seeing the real city once I ventured far enough east - comparing the highly-public areas was still interesting but less so than the places people actually live. And I'm also glad I visited during the political campaigning - I can understand most of the campaign posters at least reasonably well. One of them talked about someone having worked a very long career and how that earns respect, another about how Europe was the best idea Europe ever had.
All this walking has given me some pretty bad blisters. Good to have my feet up. Have had plenty of time to think about plenty of things - thoguht a bit about the cslounge events and am still deeply angry and hurt over that. But also about work, and shape-of-life kinds of things. And language - the more I relax the more that German words are coming back to me. I'm using translation apps to make sure they're coming back correctly, but they often are. I'm not sure this is a place I could live long-term, but if for some reason it came up, perhaps it could be. Had some fanciful daydreams of needing to flee the United States for some reason and just endlessly walk around Berlin in exile, somehow given funds for food and nightly shelter and nothing else, as part of a larger community of people doing so, each mostly keeping to themselves. Lots of other daydreams too.
Tomorrow's the last day that I have entirely to myself - on Sunday I check out, travel down to the conference centre, check in, and the conference starts. I haven't yet figured out what's on the agenda for tomorrow - may go to the park or another museum. Will likely rule out the day-trip to the south because I'm not warmly enough dressed and don't want to stray too far from stores. Today was colder than I'd like and that trip sounds like it'd be another cold day.
In Berlin a few days early for a neuroscience conference. This is my first visit to Germany - been enjoying walking around the city and learning its sense of normal. My level of German is turning out to be useful but limited - I can reasonably easily make myself understood, but people often ask me questions involving words I don't know. So for me it's like a write-only language. Kinda. Simple exchanges work well, particularly if I talk first. English is fine as a fallback, and there's a surprising amount of (slightly off) English around. If I lived here I'd be tempted to drop off sheets of corrections to storefronts that have English below their German. Still, I'm trying to speak as much German as possible while here, and I'm getting used to the tonal patterns in nearby conversations I don't quite hear. The city Berlin reminds me the most of so far is Philadelphia, with some street design from San Francisco, and much cleaner than either. One of the things I was curious about was whether the former boundary would mark a dramatic difference in architectural style or general feel, and while I can still trace that boundary by many streets changing their name over certain lines, most of the differences are subtle if still present at all. It's been too long - I regret not getting to visit closer to reunification. Berlin in general seems to take culture pretty seriously - like Boston I see a lot of mention of famous musicians and philosophers of the past, and one nearby store offers a curious service - a personal cello concert (the cellist was playing alone in a storefront as I walked by). I think it's also election season - there are endless adverts for various political parties on the streets, talking about healthcare, attitudes towards the EU, and so on. People? Nobody here would be out of place in New York (even speaking German there). The one surprise that I've seen so far is the canals, which are quite prominent. Foodwise I'm doing okay - not great (travel is always hard on that front, but just like my visits to San Francisco, people here seem to have a different food aesthetic than I'm used to, and the attitudes towards water in restaurants or availability of other drinks are frustrating). I slept poorly on the plane last night so I was tired today, but I expect to have more energy tomorrow to see museums and other things. There's a lot to do.
I'm more lonely than normal - I don't have many people in my life at home either, but the familiar habits help there. As I write this I'm telling myself that I should try harder to build connections because work will only last so long and I don't want that to be all there is for me. But I know promising myself things is cheap and I've done it countless times over the past years. Anything real must come from more than a realisation that things *should* change. On some level I'm impressed that I can function without a social life because at times it really rips at me emotionally, but on another it's deeply miserable and not even something I feel I should do out of some ethics or choice.
About the Never Trumpers - I've followed several on social media as Trump's presidency continues. I don't think they're pulling me towards their view, but it pleases me to see one bright spot in Trump's disasterous presidency - that principled people on the other side stand out. And that in this era they're probably becoming more principled and that helps me see principles I have in common with them. They still occasionally remind me of our political differences - Tom Nichols, for example, recently rattled off a list of major government agencies he'd like to remove, sometimes with very flimsy reasons (e.g. the Ed, with a justification that most people don't understand what it does). Still, a belief in princple and long-term thinking is refreshing. Particularly given that it's about as rare on the left, and presidential hopefuls are eagerly exploring ideas that either strike me as a bad idea (Sanders looking to use precedent-breaking ways of trying to pass a universal Medicare plan, or Warren looking to end the filibuster in the Senate) or as crossing a red line (Cory Booker pushing a reparations commission bill, which is to me an absolute disqualifier for my vote).
On that last point, I feel I should explain - progress in fixing divides in society is primarily about moving people's behaviour to the level where in the important domains of life (employment, finance, daily necessities) they ignore the distinctions at hand, generally treating both genders and all races the same. That's the primary driver of dealing with these issues - there are some rare, time-limited circumstances where we might accept other methods that are in fact incompatible with that primary driver, but they run the risk of damaging it or just not achieving much good. I believe that reparations are a logistical nightmare which are unlikely to accomplish much good and which significantly damage that primary driver (I support affirmative action in education precisely because supporting it for a limited duration limits damage to the primary driver).
Anyhow, I should probably be asleep right now to make sure I'm up at the right time tomorrow - time zones are tricky.
Just wrapped up my taxes (selling most of my MongoDB stock meant I paid NYS and the IRS a lot of money this year, ick). Feels good to have it out of the way, and to have made all the transfers needed to pay for it.
Preparing for my trip to Berlin next week. Brought my work laptop home so I can use it for the poster session (if needed), otherwise trying to flesh out a list of things I can do if I feel like it while there. Right now learning about options for fondue. One of the places I'm considering, Schwarze Heidi, weirded me out because, as I read some reviews on Yelp and visited Google Maps to see how close it is to where I'm staying, I mentally transposed it to "Black Heidi" (english translation). I've often had this kind of confusion before - I don't think it's exactly that I translate it to English as I read it so much as my inner representation for the languages is not particularly distinct-for-each. The effect is more pronounced when I have the translation absolutely solid in my head - the subset of German words that I'm almost certain not to forget. Interesting to think about how all this works.
Perhaps there are parallels - the list I'm building is like translating lives - I want to have as many readymade evaluations of places I might go to as if I were to be a resident. I'm not making a plan, I'm simulating a glimse into another life.
Today's been less than smooth; the loss of G+ is annoying, but the loss of Inbox (so far only on my phone) is disabling. I spent a bit of time starting to make sense of the new world, and it still feels like traveling back in time. And ... my vet called to ask about an appointment for Torts and I had to tell them that I wouldn't be coming back because of their offering homeopathic "treatments" (I consider them malpractice). I am not a fan of confrontation, and really only doing it with an activist, or otherwise feeling that it's necessary in some way makes it easier to bear. In cases like this it's just exhausting. And ... my neck is being bad to me again. Realising that it's leading to a lot of tension in my back too.
I have a perspective about a lot of software I use - to me they're often tools I work with to set policy for my data - I don't always care if I'm using them the way the authors meant so long as I can achieve what I want with them. During the year or so that Google Music let me rank songs from 1 to 5, I decided that 1 meant the song was on a list where I'd eventually go through and remove them from my library, 2 meant I would keep it but mostly for either the sake of completeness (album), or for other rare occasions, but I'd prefer it never come up randomly, 3 meant that I had heard it and didn't decide to give it some other ranking, 4 meant that I liked it and wished it would come up more often, and 5 meant that I loved it. Nobody gave me those meanings, but they gave me the means to assign them. And .. then Google took it away and decided that a thumbs up or down was enough for everyone. Sigh. My email box is home to a lot more thought like that, and I used Inbox's tools to build my own habits, and Google's going to take that away too.
Some years back I was in the state where a good subset of the software I used for everyday things was stuff I wrote. I gave that up for two reasons. Firstly, I didn't know how to solve the problem of spam (Google's been pretty great on that front), and secondly I wanted a good mobile client. I got a lot out of that choice, but I lost so much control and Google keeps providing a shitty experience by either taking away things I like (such as Inbox or Reader) or letting their UI people screw them up (such as Google News). It keeps making me wonder how hard it would be to go back.
Anyhow, feeling grumpy and my neck hurts a lot.
Pigged out on a videogame for most of Saturday - a satisfying game of Endless Space 2. Today I'm hoping to be a bit more productive - at Art Lovers Cafe right now, eating a cookie that seems bo somehow be both stale and burned. On the way here, I passed by a large group of women, one of them telling a story to the rest. The only bit I caught (didn't stop) was: "Chaim whispered to me: I'm sleeping in the truck tonight", at which they all laughed. Not sure about the name (not implausible in NYC). I spent part of the rest of the walk wondering what the rest of the story was (may have been a scary or fake-scary story based on her intonation).
Earlier this week I went to an IQ2US debate between 2 never-trumpers (one of them Jeff Flake) and two FoxNewsers on whether Trump should be nominated again for President. It was a surprisingly lively debate (wasn't sure what to expect). Covered:
I've been thinking further about soft and hard power since the meetup; it's obviously a spectrum, the chief differences coming from at one level actual force, another ruinous shifts in economics or other necessities, leaning towards the soft a concrete opportunity, and then at softest promises of consideration, goodwill, and things shaped like that. In an ideal world, hard power would be a rarely used thing, merely understood as an ultimate tool to safeguard the most vital interests of people or as a response to egregious violations of strong in-consensus norms. It's difficult to talk about these nuances in the abstract (at least, comparatively, where someone would criticise someone else with nearby-but-not-identical views on soft-vs-hard power in the abstract; the mapping is difficult. I wonder if it has to be, or if there are frameworks we might find to clarify the grounds.
Also been thinking - if someone had the ability to savescum IRL, is there a way we could detect it? First - savescumming is a term for player behaviour in some kinds of games that allow easy load/save, where they'd save the game, try something, and if it didn't go the way they want, they load and try again (often many times, usually in games where people are expected to start a new game when they lose something, and especially if they're running the game in a weird environment (e.g. an emulator) that lets them save far more freely than they usually would. So, if we imagine either a general trying to win a war, or someone playing chess, or even someone trying to navigate through the significantly-random early bits of a relationship, where at the end of every day they have the ability to rewind and try it again, could we somehow detect that? The challege being, I think, that it's hard to know someone's mental state and analytical abilities and information sources to reliably tell in the general case if they're breaking reality, or just very intuitive, good at parsing information, and lucky. So in the general case I think it'd be hard, but perhaps there are tricks and traps someone could use catch it (countering it may be impossible unless the rewind is limited). Figuring out tricks and traps like that is an interesting intellectual exercise.
Been thinking further about my earlier idea of how IQ2US relates to argument maps or other ways of approaching disputes that are resistant to misrepresentation of facts (primarily hoping to deal with this by stretching the discussion out so people can go back and factcheck, or for independent factcheckers to get involved). Many of these ideas would also allow for a more methodical exploration of possible arguments to make and respond with. I was initially pretty sure this would be better, but I brought a line of thought in on how I think about democracy - one of the ways I reject the "we'd be better off if dumb people do not vote" argument I've heard from some people is that voting makes people vested in the decisions made and partly illegitimises violence against the system - with in this context it taking the form that these debates are important as debates at least partly because they're social events, and so they help reconstruct civic life here.