good things don't scale, part N

I've tried signing off twitter for the last 3 days and I think I might as well keep it up.

- a large part of my feed is indeed righteous anger about cops and racism; I can't argue with this, except that like... twitter has an incentive to keep us all maximally angry, because clicks.

(an interesting side note: I think from this recent deconstructing yourself episode, I've been trying to notice the difference between feelings that are pleasant, and feelings that just want more of themselves. anger is maybe the #1 of the latter. you feel so angry and then like - "but I want to keep feeling angry!" but you don't. a more skilled blogger, or meditator, than I could turn this into a whole post.)

- a big chunk right now is about slate star codex shutting down. this whole thing makes me sad. I love the shit out of this blog, most of the time. great stuff about like antidepressants and AI and brain things and whatever; solid creation of memes ("moloch" and "slack" have found their way right into my lexicon, for example); the occasional rambling about something maybe he's not qualified to comment on; this rollicking great fiction book. I dislike a lot of its followers. but I like a lot of its followers too. one thing that makes me sad is that somehow it's become positioned "against social justice warriors" - or maybe people who talk about it say that they're against social justice warriors. which like -- I kinda don't like some parts of social justice warrioring, but I really don't like people who go out of their way to be explicitly "against social justice warriors." we should all probably be sjws, like jesus and buddha and mr. rogers. sometimes an internet mob or real mob focuses on the wrong things. "sjws" is such a motte-and-bailey.

- some of it is the usual reminders that things that are bad: SF is bad at housing, every US city is bad at cars/bikes/humans, the US federal government is bad at everything right now but especially managing the pandemic

- a small bit is good jokes and comics! that used to be a big bit!

- some of it is neat computational-art things that it's cool to get inspired by. more of it is computational-art things that don't really inspire me, but that's art, I guess.

- another small bit is people I know, some of whom I can keep in touch with in a pretty low-contact way with a toot here or there, and that's pretty nice.

- another small bit is people I met once and will probably never talk to again but haven't unfollowed, :shrug:

most of this I kind of hate and maybe I should quit this. buuut, I'm often desperate for any kind of social interaction these days. maybe I should ... start a discord? I don't know, man - but large-yet-private places have been so much more rewarding than internet-scale public places. start a newsletter? heck, that's just like this. convince all my friends to join mastodon? I mean, yes, obviously; still follow me at @dantasse@mastodon.cloud.

I don't know, I'm still undecided, but getting rid of one of my dopamine slot machines seems healthy, anyway. next up, reddit?

CV, moving, cops, covid, Ring (see also: cops), art

Is computer vision Bad?

I'm doing some work with computer vision. Some cool things with GANs, some things with getting features out of images. In a sense, I want to reduce every image to a vector that describes it well. That's kinda the dream; reductionism is my job.

... most applications of this turn out to be Bad. And I thiiink I'm in a case where my reductionism is not so bad. (clothing images, eesh, it's fine.) But I'm open to the possibility of everything I'm doing being bad.

Related: YOLO creator Joseph Redmon stopped computer vision research due to ethical concerns.

IBM is exiting the face recognition business. Even this garbage about Amazon and Rekognition - though "we're suspending it for 1 year" seems suspiciously like "we want good press now and then will sneak it back in while you're not looking."

What went wrong in the move process?

Moving caused me a heck of a lot of stress, and that seems avoidable. Why was it so stressful?

• important scarce markets. I hate being in scarce markets; I usually try to just structure my life to avoid them. when other people want something, I try to want it less. like, theme parks and concert tickets - usually I just don't want them. but housing is always kinda scarce - especially housing for one particular apartment is really scarce, there's only one of it!
• not clear what you can logic and what you can feel. It's sorta clear; you can say "the apartment needs to check these boxes: N bedrooms, M bathrooms, X minute walk to the Bart, etc." But most of the things are not actually that clear! Like, I wanted an in-unit washer/dryer, but I certainly wouldn't say that was a deal-breaker. And even more shaky examples: "we need a place for our cat to sleep; will this little room be ok?" "bike storage is necessary... this one has a bike storage situation that is already pretty full, so, maybe that will be a problem for me. maybe it won't!"
• ego and pride while being in a powerless situation. all the garbage from this previous post.
• it's kind of stressful to keep searching. each new apartment you look at costs at least 2 hours: 1 hour setting up times to see it, 1 hour walking to/from it and seeing it and saying "nope." That's if it's very nearby and is a clear no; most cases are harder. Because people don't provide good information (like a floor plan), and because many listings are a waste of time (landlords are greedy, overpricing their place and just hoping), you'll spend 2 hours * a lot of apartments. So the decision of "do I want to keep searching another week" is roughly "do I want to do another 15 hours of work next week?"

In which our government turns covid-19 into Your Problem

edit: turns out I'm rather angry, which means the rest of this post isn't for kids, which I mention only so the babies out there will know how cool they are for reading.

our country has decided that we're just gonna spend our 3 "flatten the curve and screw your life" months fucking around and not bothering to increase testing or contact tracing or anything that actually makes things safe for our people, so there's a new constant danger out there, 1000 people will die every day, the rich will be mostly pretty protected, but even the rich might fall into the "unfortunate" bucket at any time and if you do then fuck you. (this seems verrry American, tbh; I'm surprised I guessed it might ever go another way.) Given all this, I'm trying to get a better sense of how viruses spread and what is more/less safe given that I know nothing about what anyone else's deal is; this article seems decent.

Protest and cop shit

I've mostly gone to "G-rated" protests that happen during the daylight, because I'm kind of ill-informed about protest time/places, kind of "too busy" (ugh gosh), and kind of a pansy. I feel like I'm failing a little bit; like, I firmly believe that those who are getting tear gassed are moving this conversation forward more than us. So, if/when I do go to PG-13 protests, I want to more thoroughly follow this article. Meantime, probably everyone should follow a couple steps in this article.

"Confessions of a former bastard cop" - I feel like this makes the case that ACAB pretty well? I'm kinda always curious for like, if I ever have a conversation with a family member and they're like "ACAB, isn't that going a little far?" I want to have the right backup, and maybe this is it?

(I do think ACAB would be easier to sell to family members if it weren't about the individual cops. like, yes it's possible to be a cop and not, holistically, a bastard in all of your life; just like it's possible to be a Facebook employee and not a bastard. What we're saying is, their work is guaranteed to be net evil, not that they are bad people; "x is a bad person" is always hard to prove. I guess I'd say something like "All cops are participating in a corrupt and broken system and therefore their work cannot be good" but ACAPIACABSATTWCBG doesn't have as nice a ring.)

Speaking of ring, I see Ring cameras around, and they've been pissing me off more and more. I was thinking about setting up RingSellsDataToCops.com, which would just link to some appropriate news articles and a PDF you can print "RingSellsDataToCops.com" onto cheap printable labels, and y'know if anyone just happens to print them out and stick them on top of people's Ring cameras, :shrug:. Activism by stickers, maybe this is my (tiny, pathetic, but manageable) thing.

Art

"my paint brush is alive"

SuperRare: owning online art. I'm not sure if this is the best or the worst thing.

"Folders is a language where the program is encoded into a directory structure." aw geez aw hell - I'm never surprised that this exists, really - just, I'm often curious about the question, "X is an idea that someone could do; is the world big enough that someone out there will do that?" In this case, the answer is yes.

June 2020, man.

ultimately, we did move. like, on the one hand, we picked the building that we want to live in. Our building has every convenience! It's gonna make life easy for me. I'm gonna be able to get things done! I will relax along with my loved ones!

on the other hand, definitely worry about the government, duh.

I've tried and failed at posting a few things. weird time, of course. I don't have much to say besides that it's all really hard (for personal reasons more than for societal ones for me right now, "everyone's fighting a battle you know nothing about" and so on, but the constant influx of injustice and virus certainly don't help).

I'm not very happy about the housing hoops we jumped through to find an apartment. It feels demoralizing and humiliating. (again, this is like 1% of the struggle people have with the police; I'd love to popularize the term ALAB but I'll wait until we've all agreed ACAB first.)

My company fired/relocated 1400 stylists (the part-time employees who pick out the clothes to send you), to save money (firing Californians, hiring elsewhere), and that feels pretty icky.

I got a year older and don't have much to say about it! I know that one thing I'm missing in my life is joy and celebration and I'd be happier if I did that more, but man, celebrating anything feels pretty bad right now.

a tiktok about SF home searching

(read this in the voice of one of those quick-cut videos)

"two bedrooms! ok, cool. so here's bedroom number 1, and ... oh, I see, bedroom 2 is if you just turned the living room into a bedroom, and then you wouldn't have a living room, but yeah I'm sure that'd be fine"

"wow, ok, newly renovated, granite countertops, great"

"three bedrooms! ok, so here's bedroom number 1, and bedroom 2, and ... oh yeah this 6x8' room could be considered a bedroom but it's more like a walk-in closet, ok"

"well ok that tiny room would work for our cat, he likes to sleep somewhere enclosed at night, otherwise he gets lou-- I mean uh nah he just likes to be somewhere small, he's so sweet, never a problem at all"

"yeah these granite countertops are really, uh, nice. and these stainless steel appliances! yes, I care what color my appliances are."

"oh great, it's got bike storage! ok, yeah, can we go see it? yeah, I'm sure it's great, but I just want to see it, yeah. yeah, just downstairs, sure, ok, ... oh I see there's one dinky bike rack crammed full of bikes, so there's, uh, not really bike storage, is there? haha, sure, it's cool, I'm sure we can figure something out."

"oh the bike storage is in this locked room? and you don't have a key? ok, sure, I'm sure it's good. do you ... have to reserve spaces? oh, you do? ok, glad I checked, and then, can I get it in writing that there will be two spaces reserved for us? because we are, like, two people, and haha we both have a bike! I know, how crazy. oh, there's only one space reserved. so you actually have half bike storage, kinda like if you had rented me a parking spot but only one of us was allowed to drive the car, huh? hahaha! that would be so crazy. anyway while we're down here is there anywhere I could store my amontillado cask"

"yeah, the construction next door that's kinda spilling into your property. they said it'd be done in 6 months? and... when do they start every morning? and... uh yeah no I'm sure they'll be done ahead of schedule, of course"

"granite countertops. it's like that's the cheapest way to say you "renovated" and make your place look fancy and modern, isn't it? haha! stainless steel appliances."

"oh, it was formerly a hair salon? haha, that's funny! well, that's neat, that explains why the layout is a little weird, and why one of the bedrooms is 8 feet wide, and why there's no windows in the living room, and literally zero closets, ok it's ... $5000 a month?"

"can I ask you some questions? oh, you ... know literally nothing about this place? do you work for the rental company? no? ... how did you get the keys here?"

"1300 square feet! that's great. hmm, but when we saw it, it seemed smaller than that. can you send us measurements of each room? just so we can, you know, plan where we'd put our furniture. oh wait, when I add up these numbers of room dimensions, it's like, 900-some. oh, you mean it's only 970 square feet? so you, basically, lied. or, more likely, made a pretty negligent mistake. your day job is as a realtor? anyway, yes, we'll still take it."

"in the lease here, you said "there's no extra storage allowed" but you did tell us there's bike storage, right? so, I don't know, maybe it should go there! oh, you don't want to, well, ok, that's fine."

"it says, tenant must pay with electronic payment, no checks. ok, so you've got a website that processes it, right? no? oh, paypal then? also no?... what do you mean, 'just have my bank send an electronic payment'? do you want a wire transfer each month? look, in our backwards-ass country there is no other electronic payment unless your bank happens to offer that service to customers of the same bank and I open an account at your bank and that is an insane thing to ask a tenant to do. I mean, haha, yes of course I'll do it."