20210706

Tue Jul 6 06:00:01 EDT 2021 ======================================== Slept from ten-thirty to seven. Woke around four-thirty, and slept somewhat fitfully after. Mostly sunny in the morning, then partly cloudy with a 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs around 90. West winds 5 to 15 mph. Work ---------------------------------------- - check on PW Bullseye order status Done. (We finally have an install date.) - follow up on PrintNightmare CVE Done. Thirty-minute walk at lunch. Hot and mostly sunny. Saw a couple mourning doves and several robins. Heard cicadas and the susurration of leaves. Home ---------------------------------------- Spent a little time packing — mostly sorting books. Steve Jobs in Kyoto https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697386 https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/special/episode/202101020030/ Jobs apparently collected shin-hanga prints. https://youtu.be/1HUUTzGDGVA > Oshima says one of Jobs' favorite destinations was Ryoanji, a 500-year-old Zen temple known for its rock garden. Oshima took Jobs there three times. > "On our first visit, I told him about the temple's unique visual trick," says Oshima. "The garden has fifteen stones but you cannot see all of them at once from a single vantage point." > Oshima says Jobs immediately checked to see if this was true. He paced around, looking for the perfect spot to view the garden, but couldn't find it. > "Then I explained the significance of the number: 15 means completion. In the past, men were recognized to have reached adulthood at the age of 15. A night with a full moon is called 'Jyugoya', or 15th night. The reason we can't find all 15 rocks is that we're still in a work in process." > Oshima says Jobs seemed to accept this, and nodded, keeping his eyes on the garden. Years later, he brought his children to the temple and told them what Oshima had explained to him. > […] > At the end of the meal, Ohnishi asked for Jobs's autograph for his daughter. The Apple founder rarely accepted such requests but, perhaps in a good mood from the meal, said he would be glad to oblige. Ohnishi told him to visit again soon but Jobs said this would be difficult. > "He told me he was suffering from a serious illness and that this could be his last trip to Kyoto. It was shocking to hear. He also asked me to deliver sushi to his home in the US if he couldn't come back to my restaurant." > "All good things" > Jobs' autograph now adorns the wall of Sushiiwa. It comes with a message: "All good things", a shortened version of the saying "All good things must come to an end." > "He might have been aware of when his life would end, since he passed away just one year later," says Ohnishi. "Maybe that's why he chose not to write the whole sentence, and only the first three words." https://radiichina.com/wuhan-punk-history/ > I’ve previously written about the Beijing punk rock movement of the mid-1990s, led by underground bands like UnderBaby, Catcher in the Rye, and, later, by the “Boredom Army,” Wuliao Jundui. Beijing punks were backed by the rock community flourishing there in the 1980s. But 1,000 kilometers south of the Chinese capital, the city of Wuhan was at the same time also witnessing the birth of a punk subculture. > Who was first, Beijing or Wuhan? This is a very controversial question, as both cities claim to have given birth to Chinese punk. As always, the issue is more complex than it appears; the answer is not merely chronological, but also involves ethics and politics. Claiming that Wuhan is the true birthplace of Chinese punk means one favors political engagement over style, raw punk energy over complex musical arrangement. I am myself non-objective on the matter, as shown by the tattoo on my upper arm or the patch sewn on my jacket: I frankly lean toward Wuhan. For me, if there is one song that embodies Chinese punk, it’s not “All the Same” (都一样), the self-proclaimed “first Chinese punk song” by UnderBaby; it’s “Scream For Life” by SMZB. > Wuhan punks didn’t have bars owned by rockers like in Beijing, but they had something else: links to the underworld of the Hubei capital. They could find spaces not directly controlled by the authorities, and thrive in the underground. Most of the punks in Wuhan came from a working-class background, unlike the more “middle-class” upbringing of Beijing punks, and they were not afraid to steal their food, beer or their musical instruments in order to survive. > The favorite sport of Wuhan punk was — and still is — running naked on the streets (luoben, 裸奔) after drinking, often chased by the police. As sung by SMZB in 2014, they are the “Naked Punks,” both literally and figuratively: they truly had nothing to their name. > One important characteristic of the Wuhan punk scene is its politicization. Wuhan punk bands in general, and SMZB in particular, don’t hesitate to tackle very sensitive topics, from Tiananmen to Mao’s cult of personality, police brutality, or petitioners. Having a political stance as a musician can be risky: in December 2017, someone complained about the band on a Beijing municipal website, inviting unwanted attention to their performance. As SMZB sung on their 2002 EP Wuhan Prison, Wuhan punks “don’t just say ‘fuck’” — they put actions behind their words. In Wuhan, punk is something serious, as shown by the other key figure on the Wuhan punk scene, Mai Dian (麦巅), who used to play in Si Dou Le and later formed the band 400 Blows (四百击). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27746815 > Similar story of unexpected AI outcomes... > As part of my PhD research, I created a simplified Pac-Man style game where the agent would simply try to stay alive as long as possible whilst being chased by the 3 ghosts. The agent was un-motivated and understood nothing about the goal, but was optimising for maximising its observable control over the world (avoiding death is a natural outcome of this). > I spent sometime trying to debug a behaviour where the agent would simply move left and right at the start of each run, waiting for the ghosts to close in. At the last minute it would run away, but always with a ghost in the cell right behind it. > Eventually, I realised this was an outcome of what it was optimising for. When ghosts reached cross-roads in the world they would got left or right randomly (if both were same distance to catching the agent). This randomness reduced the agent's control over the world, so was undesirable. Bringing a ghost in close made that ghost's behaviour completely predictable. Added to notes about meditation. https://paulgorman.org/misc/headspace-meditation.txt https://whyisthisinteresting.substack.com/p/the-regular-expression-edition > The concept of a regular expression has a surprisingly interesting history that dates back to the optimistic, mid-20th Century heyday of artificial intelligence research. > The term itself originated with mathematician Stephen Kleene. In 1943, neuroscientist Warren McCulloch and logician Walter Pitts had just described the first mathematical model of an artificial neuron, and Kleene, who specialized in theories of computation, wanted to investigate what networks of these artificial neurons could, well, theoretically compute. > In a 1951 paper for the RAND Corporation, Kleene reasoned about the types of patterns neural networks were able to detect by applying them to very simple toy languages—so-called “regular languages.” For example: given a language whose “grammar” allows only the letters “A” and “B”, is there a neural network that can detect whether an arbitrary string of letters is valid within the “A/B” grammar or not? Kleene developed an algebraic notation for encapsulating these “regular grammars” (for example, a*b* in the case of our “A/B” language), and the regular expression was born. https://nonzero.substack.com/p/ode-to-a-world-saving-idea-f4b > Five weeks ago the psychologist Lee Ross died, and five days ago the New York Times published his obituary. […] the idea he is most closely associated with, an idea that occupies much of the obituary and is no doubt the reason Ross was finally deemed to have Times obit status. The idea is called “attribution error.” > Ross coined the term “the fundamental attribution error” in 1977, in a paper that became a landmark in social psychology. The basic idea was pretty simple: When we’re explaining the behavior of other people, we tend to put too much emphasis on “disposition”—on their character, their personality, their essential nature. And we tend to put too little emphasis on “situation”—on the circumstances they find themselves in. The Times gives an illustration: > > A 2014 article in Psychology Today titled ‘Why We Don’t Give Each Other a Break’ used the example of someone who cuts into a line in front of you. You might think, “What a jerk,” when in reality this person has never skipped ahead in a line before and is doing so now only because he would otherwise miss a flight to see a dying relative. > It turns out that our tendency to attribute people’s behavior to disposition rather than situation isn’t as general as Ross and other psychologists originally thought. There are two notable exceptions to it: > (1) If an enemy or rival does something good, we’re inclined to attribute the behavior to situation. (Granted, my rival for the affections of the woman I love did give money to a homeless man, but that was just to impress the woman I love, not because he’s actually a nice guy!) (2) If a friend or ally does something bad, we’re inclined to attribute the behavior to situation. (Yes, my golf buddy embezzled millions of dollars, but his wife was ill, and health care is expensive—plus, there was the mistress to support!) > Among the consequences of this fact is that attribution error reinforces allegiances within tribes and reinforces antagonisms between tribes. > So attribution error is one reason that, once a nation’s politics get polarized, they can be hard to de-polarize. Ten minutes of meditation in the evening. It came easily this time. Feeling slightly more relaxed. May try to go longer tomorrow. Servings: grains 5/6, fruit 2/4, vegetables 2/4, dairy 2/2, meat 1/3, nuts 1/0.5 Brunch: nectarine, tomato, egg, coffee Lunch: banana, bean and tomato taco Dinner: cheese curls

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