COVID-19

Note: I put up a new page for COVID-19. This will be updated with reference info.

Immortality

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution."
-Albert Einstein

Recently I've been making one deep dive after another into cloud and networking technologies, and although this would bore most readers, the available AI tools have lead me to some innovative ideas. Personality simulators are something that's fascinated me for a while now, and perhaps it's just the second season of West World that's inspiring me, but I feel like this is something we should talk about. 

The basic idea is that we could create a 'chatbot' which is so sophisticated that it is capable of much more than just superficially plausible conversation and can actually simulate the basic cognitive processes and personality of an individual, to the point that they could stand in as a proxy for the actual person. Depending on the nature of the person we're talking about, this could represent an impressive feat. We would have effectively cloned an individual's personality in an online simulation, allowing us to interact with that individual in a controlled virtual environment without the inconvenience of requiring the individual's presence. This idea has been around for a while, but big data technologies provide powerful tools for data aggregation and pattern recognition which make this more plausible than it has been up until fairly recently. 

Ignore Siri and Bixby for now; imagine that the technology will eventually take care of itself. Once we can get this to work, this would be an extremely powerful technology with far-reaching implications. As with most powerful new technologies, these bots would have both powerful upsides and downsides, and we do owe it to ourselves to discuss both. Some possible examples would include:

• Use natural language processing to develop a CharlesDickens-bot, which could churn out new works with all the same plot twists and turns, wit and wisdom as the original author
• Create an Einstein-bot to come up with new theories, making use of the imagination, which he acknowledged was so important.
• Create a bot version of a parent or loved one for a child who is unable to see them in person (i.e., overseas vets or even parents who die from incurable diseases).
• Create a bot version of business associates or friends to provide a practice version of interactions prior to actual negotiations. 
• And similarly, here is the inevitable downside:
  

Already the negatives are staring to appear even with these basically positive examples. The main problems would appear to be:

• Identity - if bots become so effective at simulating real individuals, they could be used to convince others of their actual identity or be used to obtain secret information about them.
• IP - bots with the ability to originate work could be capable of originating work that is similar or indistinguishable from that of the original owner. For example, if I could clone a living author like, say, Tom Clancy and generate new works by him, then those works would arguably take away from the readership which is rightfully his.
• Autonomy - we like to think of ourselves as unique and irreplaceable individuals. The thought that we could in any way be substituted by a bot is inherently threatening to us. As with previous technologies (outsourcing, automation), bots could have a very real and negative impact on individual incomes as well.

I don't have answers to these concerns, but as is usually the case, I don't see any way to stop this trend either. As one who faces terminal diseases in my professional life, I feel that the demand for this type of service would inevitable lead to its widespread adoption. However, one often unaccounted factor which may allay some concerns is that of randomness, as best expressed by Machiavelli. 

"Nevertheless, not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less."

--Machiavelli, The Prince

Our actions are inherently non-deterministic. Even if we were to bootstrap an individual's personality, any given decision point would contain a large amount of unpredictability (be it randomness or what M calls free will). So it's possible that we could have accurate simulations of clearly defined decision points (the yes/nos), but for most of life's small decisions there would be too little information to effectively predict them. In the end, this seems to be one more revolution that is on its way, and our best course is to come up with the means to deal with and perhaps benefit from it, rather than sidestepping it.  

Defining Labor

What, exactly is labor... Is it better to have a job which fully engages and inspires you or one which doesn't require much effort, leaving you with abundant free time which which to explore your own interests (personal or even professional)? This really is a question the entire working world has grappled with over the past 50 years, perhaps without even fully comprehending the way it has touched all aspects of our lives and values in this time. For example, while women successfully entered the workforce in large numbers during this time, allowing many to find new sources of engagement and inspiration in work outside the home, salary growth stagnated over the same time in real terms, resulting in families doing about as well today as they did at the beginning of this period, in spite of contributing roughly twice the amount of labor. 

The current generation of Millennials is said to be 'mission driven', valuing purposefulness over paycheck. It generally seems that employees want to do interesting stuff and make enough for it to be worth their while. Yet one can't ignore how a simple accounting of this seems to add up in the employers' favor, who have a natural interest in simply 'getting it done'. It starts to sound like a familiar story in which the 'mission' is to disrupt the fence painting industry, one bucket of whitewash at a time. One might also conclude that employees who wish to generally pursue the greatest career opportunities would do wise not to seek the most challenging roles, but rather the most boring and seemingly demotivating ones, such as accounting, where there is simply no opportunity for the pretense of a 'mission' or inspiration. Hence the employees dilemma: if you like your job and find it inspiring, then you are probably being underpaid. 

It all comes down to how you define labor. Traditionally economists spoke of a 'labor market' in which labor, a commodity, was priced according to the supply (number of potential employees or resource hours) and the demand (number of roles or project hours). Under this paradigm, employees sacrifice their own time through labor, and are compensated by employers, who place a higher value on this than what the employees would be able to gain personally through their own activities (i.e., I hire a nanny to babysit my kids at $50/hour while meanwhile I make $100/hour at my job). 

These days, this sort of talk could make you very unpopular around the office. Instead, we employees are like bands of warriors (vikings, pirates, those monks hitting themselves in the face with boards in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, if you're a grad student), and we simply need a leader to point us in the right direction so that we can actualize our goals in activities like standup meetings and hackathons. When it all comes together, you and your band of warriors share in the spoils and it's a beautiful thing. However, reality is often more like the jobs of our parents, but with longer hours and less security, making the myth seem all the more like a fairy tale. 

Perhaps we're just overthinking this whole concept. When I was growing up, my dream (one of many) was to play lead guitar for a rock band like Bon Jovi, and even though I still haven't got around to learning guitar, that particular career option still seems pretty appealing now. Why wouldn't you want to play sold out shows to adoring fans (and groupies) every night for a top-tier salary? 

It seems like the type of naive question only parents would need to address, simply, by explaining that only a vanishingly small fraction of guitarists ever come close to this kind of success and it often has very little to do with their actual talent. Yet the pull of the stage is strong and many a youngster has picked up a guitar in hopes that he can live this dream. And being one of these, I can't help but wonder if many of our other more mundane professions would benefit from the same parental lecture given the current employment market. Many of these opportunities which would have been considered boring and responsible in our parents' generation are now quite risky in reality, and yet the public has continued to entertain the same narrative. At the very least it appears that we could do with a thorough re-evaluation of the entire value proposition of labor from an individual's perspective. 

Robots

https://youtu.be/RDZu04v7_hc

Content Generation

This document could save a lot of time

http://officeipsum.com/index.php

Also... 

this command if you're on Linux:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=$1 count=$2 bs=1024

Domain Name Fun

I recently did an inventory of free domain registrars available on the Internet, and the most promising that I came up with was http://Freenom.com, a dodgy Dutch company, which gives out domain names with clunky extensions for free, and then makes profits off the abandoned or misused ones by selling ads on their remains. I had success in registering my very own http://juiceexchange.ml which I redirected to a bucket that I've been hosting this on (it's JUICE! the cryptocurrency for kids). I would recommend, but some things to remember: the extensions are dodgy, the site seems to really prefer legit email addresses (i.e., not from its own customers' websites) and you can get legit domain names for less that $10/year from Amazon and Google at this point, so there is really no reason to go with a solution like this except for laughs and/or experimentation.

Started Daycare

Day 1 of daycare. Sid looks happy.

Restructured Text and Sphinx

Restructured text is the broadly-supported approach to documenting Python code. It's basically a set of conventions to format text files through the use of punctuation, using the same basic approach that many people have used in contexts like email and readme files. Restructured Text basically formalized these hokey conventions into a slightly hokey set of rules that can be used to put together readable, formatted text files, which can be processed using utilities like Sphinx:

http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/

Sphinx is a documentation engine, developed to generate formatted documentation of source code. It is mainly designed to support Python projects, and it has cool features for documentation of Phython code. It can pull in structured comments (called Docstrings) directly from source code, using directives like automodule, autoclass and autofunction. Most importantly, it has the ability to assemble documents into a single internally-linked document structure, using things like toctree. Here's an example of an RST file for Sphinx:

.. Note This is a template for meeting notes.

  Update this as appropriate.

.. header:: Notes: Stephen

.. meta-data fields for Sphinx:

.. index:: template

.. sectionauthor:: Stephen 

.. Substitutions here:

.. |reST| replace:: reStructuredText

.. image:: ./image.png

.. sidebar:: callouts

    Include callouts here

Template: Notes

==============================================

Topic:

-------

#. Topic 1

#. Topic 2

#. Topic 3

This file is entitled "Template: Notes". It's got a lot of comments at the beginning, including the header and sectionauthor field. It contains a substitution directive, which lets you type "reST" instead of "reStructuredText". It inserts an image into the document and has a sidebar comment. When this is rendered in Sphinx, it will all get assembled into a document format of your choice: html, pdf or even ePub. 

Lately, I've discovered that RST/Sphinx is actually a pretty good answer to note taking applications like Microsoft OneNote and Evernote. RST files are lightweight and easy to read, and when assembled by Sphinx, they constitute a highly readable notebook that can be used to track personal notes over time (including searching and indexing.

I'd recommend taking a look at RST and Sphinx. The Sphinx engine is available for download from here: http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/. I've included a cheat-sheet of my favorite Sphinx terms below:

Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! - Nicholas Carlson

Of the accounts of Silicon Valley business adventures that I have read this year, this is without a doubt the most fascinating. I have come away with a new impression of Marissa Mayer's efforts to save Yahoo!. I had regarded Marissa's tenure to be at some level, a refutation of the Google approach--one which seems to work well in a company that already has an unprecedented first mover advantage and is wondering what to do with all of the money that it keeps accumulating, but doesn't really work in a competitive market. My new appraisal is more complex: she actually did a lot for the company, but far from enough. 

More than any other company, Yahoo's history traces that of the Internet, from its early days as a "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" in 1994, it has been a company focused on bringing the Internet to middle America. In its early days, 'The Internet' constituted a focused goal in and of itself, but as middle america came to embrace the Internet and our grandparents became adept at social media, nobody really needed a Yahoo to explain it to them. After a lot of fascinating history of early Internet companies including a failed takeover by Microsoft, Nicholas Carlson sets the stage for Marissa's messiah-like entrance in 2012 and leadership until its eventual acquisition by Verizon which wrapped up earlier this year. 

Marissa sought to bring Yahoo! forward into the modern Internet era. She made changes to the workplace that made Yahoo! more closely resemble a modern Silicon Valley company, including all those double-edged perks which make it so hard to stay away from work. I suppose that if Yahoo! had, in fact, come up with something totally revolutionary like an 'iPad' or a cloud computing platform, it might still be independent and we would all be singing Marissa's praises still. Steve Jobs breathed new life into Apple after his famous return in 1997, but this is because Steve's are amazing. Yahoo! did come out with impressive news, sports and entertainment services, acquired Tumblr and generally got better. However, no products were compelling enough to make Yahoo! the That! company, unless 'That!' is peanut butter, spread to thin or perhaps the world's largest data-breech company, including 500*10^6 user accounts in 2014. Without any deep insight, this appears to have been a legacy of Yahoo's continuous history from the insecure 90s, when security was not generally taken seriously, rather than any of Marissa's actions, but it does seem to have been the iceberg that struck the Titanic. 

Carlson provides an engrossing cautionary tale of a company that just couldn't decide what it wanted to be and ended up as nothing in the end. He does a great job of placing you in the room:

"It was Thursday: November 7, 2013. Everyone in the company was waiting for Mayer to say something to remind them that she was the CEO who was finally going to restore Yahoo to its rightful place in the Internet industry.

Mayer took a breath. She said hello to everyone. She reminded them of the meeting’s confidentiality. She said she looked through their questions and she had something she wanted to read. It had been a book in her hands, after all. A children’s book.
She began to read.

"Bobbie had a nickel all his very own. Should he buy some candy or an ice cream cone?"
Mayer held the book up, to show the employees the illustrations.
"Should he buy a bubble pipe? Or a boat of wood?"
Another illustration.
"Maybe, though, a little truck would be the best of all!"
Employees in URLs exchanged looks. At their desks, employees in remote offices grew confused.
What was Mayer doing?
She kept reading.
"Bobbie sat and wondered, Bobbie sat and thought. What would be the NICEST thing a nickel ever bought?"

Mayer seemed to skip a few pages. She read, with a slight agitation in her voice:
"He might buy a bean bag or a top to spin. He might buy a pin-wheel to give to little Brother. Or should he buy, thought Bobbie, a little pencil box?"

Mayer seemed to be reading with real frustration now, as though all of the anger and confusion in the room would just go away if everyone would just understand the story she was reading out loud.

“Bobbie thought—and suddenly a bright idea came,” Mayer read, reaching the book’s last pages.
"He spent his nickel just like this - - - -"
Mayer held the book up to show its last illustration. It was a drawing of a little red-haired boy riding a merry-go-round pony.
Hardly anyone could see the page.
No one understood what Mayer was trying to say.

Perhaps she should have read Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.

Book review: Brain on Fire

Brain on Fire - Susannah Cahalan

• This was an entertaining first-person account of the author's experience of a rare autoimmune disease, anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. This is one of the most well-researched first person medical narrative that I've encountered. Ito stood out from other works in this limited genre in its extensive inclusion of personal details, obtained retrospectively by the author from her own medical record. She manages to provide a large amount of technical details about the disease without interrupting the emotional thread of this narrative. 
• This book brought back personal memories for me, as I found myself recalling a guest seminar on anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis from my days in graduate school. This provided me with a new perspective on this illness. 
• After Googling this title, it looks like it's being made into a movie.