Bits and Paradoxes - 07
Idea Attenuation
Hi,
How are you doing, really?
This issue of the newsletter is a bit long in terms of contents because I tried writing a more in-depth perspective on a few sections, especially the one with facial recognition. So, please bear with me!
The week seemed pretty long (strangely). Most probably I was too busy with work and contemplating things rigorously. With almost all the experiments failing at work (not exactly “failing”), it once again made me realize how little knowledge I possess and that people really "overvalue" me (I guess) for the things I don't even know. But then work-life is like that. One thing I have observed throughout these years in the industry is how almost all the clients tend to hold Nirvana Fallacy (a logical fallacy in which one imagines a perfect solution exists and rejects realistic answers in favour of it), and that they don't seem to contextualize edge cases for problems. I know that's kinda bummer (difficult), but it does inspire me to push myself even more on learning many things.
The only "productive" thing that came out from work hours was writing this "intuitive" (and generic) framework to parallelize function calls (mostly to multiple Tensorflow servers) using external configuration. It's probably the only code I wrote the past 6-8 months that I feel good about.
Besides that, I have tried “bio-hacking” my sleep, experimenting on polyphasic sleep (both biphasic and triphasic). Too bad, it didn't go well. I became so much Sleep-Deprived that I had to take leave for a day to readjust myself. So yeah! That's that.
Nevermind! Those aren't the main subjects I am going to contemplate on this issue 07.
Idea Attenuation
This concept of attenuation of ideas has been haunting my mind-cave for some time now.
As hours turn into days and days to weeks and months, I feel there isn't any top idea in my head. This feels like a stagnation period of ideas.
As years pass by, I have started to find everything absurd (although they are exciting). I haven't been able to think thoroughly as I used to in the past. This, I feel, is “Idea Attenuation” where my mind has been saturated by a certain amount of things, specific schools of thought. On top of that, the mind feels like a ticking time bomb as it wanders through the indefiniteness of life itself. Maybe the reason lies somewhere along the line of me quitting from social media and highly reducing my interaction with people in general; trapped in a self-made "bubble".
Nevertheless, this attenuation is neither linear nor exponential. It might as well be like sea waves kissing the shore occasionally. But, sometimes they come in like a tsunami and that's where things might become eerily disturbing in some regards.
Let's pause for a while and think about our childhood.
(I don't have much memories of my childhood though).
As children, we used to be fascinated by almost everything. We used to dream wild, live life with curiosity. And somewhere between that childhood and growing up, we seem to have lost certain essence of our "self". For me, even during my engineering days, I used to move forward, learning. Now I just keep on staring at things, procrastinating, "over-nurturing" the feeling of where life is headed, devoid of much knowledge in my "current" field (programming, algorithms, and machine learning). I know miracles happen when you try to incorporate multiple domains. But then, I feel like a master of none. I know one thing for sure that I can dedicate myself to certain things if given enough time. But, lately, paralysis is taking over frequently (except when I get productive, the impact is very low). These emotions are perhaps stirred viciously with ongoing rejections from the universities (approximately one rejection every 2 weeks...yeah it sucks!)
I feel terrified (more like saddened, all phased out) of this very tangible stagnation. Plus, maybe "overthinking" has also acted as a catalyst where I can only get those doses of existential angst, nothing else.
Just this Thursday night, I intended to write a script to convert Obsidian markdowns to usable HTML files. 1 hour in. I was just staring at things, the terminal phased out. And I halted the tasks. The whole night I felt dreaded about these attenuations of ideas. But then, it's just a phase, hoping that this too shall pass like everything else.
It is also possible that it’s not about ideas themselves, but about a growth mindset - attenuation of growth (habits, beliefs). Maybe, that is also a reason that I want to connect dots more than ever, to disseminate my knowledge to more domains.
(More reasons to continue this newsletter I guess…)
Other than all these things, I have become more “aware” of what I consume. At the end of the day, I tend to refactor a few notes, few concepts I encountered the whole day. I think this has helped in some ways to not feel “tipsy” about idea attenuation. Still, the majority of it persists.
~ Reading ~
Improving Idea Flow
Nat Eliason | 4 min
The very first line Nat presents is so much in resonant with me:
"I've felt less interesting over the last year."
TL;DR
Reduce overlaps in idea sources
Improve ideas by clustering into relevant groups (memetic buckets)
Try to see why certain "crazy" idea sounds "crazy" in the first place.
Cut the middle man and directly go to the sources of ideas (might be anything)
Communicate. Write. This helps in two ways:
Ideas become more tangible.
Ideas get reinforced often
Do I Need to Go to University
Christopher Olah | 21 min
Insightful.
I've been wondering the same about going to a grad school. So, the question "Where can I find the best environment to grow myself as a researcher?" seems plausible.
We will always get tangled to the societal constructs of going on an alternate "independent" path (which is relatively riskier). For me, going to a university has proven to be beneficial in two folds:
Having long-term friends
Preparing a "naive" (and introverted) version of Nish for a more rigorous life out there.
Reading through this made me re-assess a similar conversation I had with [[Dipti]] on whether our educational systems are worth it, provided that we (still) learn most of the "skills" after graduation. The premise that skipping the middle system (not quite sure if it should be called “middle”) might be tempting, but in hindsight (let's face it) each system has taught us things; experiences are accumulated nevertheless. But like everything, this is also, yet another, conundrum.
Do things that don't scale
Paul Graham | 20 min
Treat startups as a vector instead of scalar:
What you're going to build?
Do "unscalable" things initially.
I really loved the idea of going manual mode initially and moving to automation later. This helps to fill in the user demands quickly. For example, manually send an email for verification first (if you don't have the necessary tech stack), and eventually move to automation.
A Hunger Artist
Franz Kafka
I've always looked upon the hunger artist as a symbol of alienation; the dissatisfaction you get with life (and society?).
Re-reading this sparked many such intertwined thoughts (more like putting my daily doses existential crises on steroids...).
The sentiment towards the end sums it all I guess. :
"because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else."
Another short relatable Kafkaesque story that hits close to home is [[Poseidon]].
~ Watching ~
The Super Mario Effect - Tricking Your Brain into Learning More
Mark Rober | 15 min
The core idea that Mark presents is [[Gamification]] of life.
Not sure what's my stance on this. But surely, the more you look at your failures, the more depressing life seems. But it depends on what type of person you are. One core idea to take away from this talk is to endure desires to quit and keep on learning.
Nevertheless, Mark recounts various situations in his life that motivated him and pushed him forward. People take “learning science” in a negative way. It might be partly because science is taught very poorly that people feel scared, and party because existing systems (mostly) don't make learning anything fun and exciting.
Everything is a Remix
Kirby Ferguson | 38 min
Loved it. One of the best video essays I've watched in a while.
The narrative and presentation are so smooth and concise that they are fun (and exciting) to watch.
One psychological aspect of copying is the narrative we tend to tell ourselves in copying and being copied. When we copy we try to justify, but when we're being copied we vilify.
Also, this made me re-visit a few concepts from this video by Tom Scott on copyrights.
Filming the Speed of Light at 10 Trillion FPS
The Slow Mo Guys | 13 min
Mind-blowing.
This gave a gentle nudge to my existential crisis. Even nanosecond feels like an eternity. Now imagine that on picosecond steroids.
To have a perspective on this scale:
with the full speed of light, you could travel around the Earth 7.5 times in 1 second.
Also, you'd want to watch the follow-up video, How do you film the speed of light.
Facial Recognition - Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
John Oliver | 21 min
It's true that technology like [[Face Recognition]] has enabled relatively "monitored" environments in automation such as in vehicles, person identification, verification, and such. But, the way it can be used for mass surveillance is scary. Imagine someone going to a protest, and later getting identified via such a system.
This is seen in Clearview AI which provides face recognition services to law enforcement agencies.
On quotidian life, imagine yourself going out somewhere. And someone tries to get in contact with you later just because they have captured your picture out there in the public. I am sure there are more "harmful" implications of this technology. But then, this all comes down to how corporates like [[GMAFIA]] (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, IBM, Amazon) and [[BAT]] (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) are going to handle the system.
The “societal impact” viewpoint reminded me of [[Joe Redmon]] (creator of popular real-time object detection framework, YOLO) quitting the development of YOLO after version 3. In his paper on YOLO v3, he says:
A lot of the people doing this research are at Google and Facebook. I guess at least we know the technology is in good hands and definitely won’t be used to harvest your personal information and sell it to.... wait, you’re saying that’s exactly what it will be used for??
Oh. Well, the other people heavily funding vision research the military and they’ve never done anything horrible like killing lots of people with new technology, oh wait.....
Other than that, I don't really have anything to say. As someone who is doing "research" on these sides of the tech, I am more concerned with inherent biases in these systems and how they are evaluated with “proper” metrics.
~ Fascinating Things I Discovered ~
Moon Gate
A moon gate is a circular opening in a garden wall that acts as a pedestrian passageway, and a traditional architectural element in Chinese gardens.
These look like portals to another world.
Beautiful. Simply beautiful.
Paper Airplane Designs
A database of paper airplanes with easy to follow folding instructions, video tutorials, and printable folding plans.
Image GPT
This is fascinating because the architecture is so generic that it works even for images. Treat each pixel as a token and use GPT-2 on computer vision tasks, predicting only the next pixel from the previous sequences.
Deep Learning lands an Airbus A350 through vision
This is exciting, yet scary at the same time because fully trusting on computer vision is probably not a good idea.
~ Music ~
Phool ko Aakha Ma - Ani Choying Drolma
Timeless. Heartfelt.
My friend Bibus has done a very beautiful “instrumental” rendition of this song on his YouTube channel here.
Inner Peace - Ani Choying Drolma
Enchanting.
Bon Iver & St. Vincent - Roslyn
This song lives close to my heart. So, sometimes I just keep on listening to it on repeat.
Ending Thoughts
Before I attenuate for another week, let me share one passage from Kafka’s Poseidon:
Poseidon became bored with the sea. He let fall his trident. Silently he sat on the rocky coast and a gull, dazed by his presence, described wavering circles around his head.
I guess Kafka's Poseidon is a prisoner of his own ego.
[Do share the newsletter to your loved or “meaningful” living entities (cats and dogs included…maybe cactus will also do fine) if you want to. It might keep my enthusiasm to “write” unattenuated…]
:)
Cheers,
Nish
Hi Nish, thank you for your weekly letters. I've been enjoying them for a few weeks already and so far I got to learn about a lot of stuff I otherwise wouldn't have stumbled upon. So I was looking at this tweet https://twitter.com/thegautamkamath/status/1287751617987715074 and it just reminded me of this post of yours. In case you haven't seen it already, I hope you find some "inspiration" in it. More power to you! Cheers :)
Thank you for the Speed Of Light video. Truly mind-blowing!