Posts

I was walking my dog when the thought arrived — that Hayao Miyazaki’s films are a love letter to ordinary women. In Nausicaä, we see a little girl who believes in the friendly intent of nature, standing between her people and a seemingly hostile world, establishing peace through sacrificing herself for the things she loves. Similarly, in Spirited Away, Chihiro takes care of her family and her friends, starting as a person who doesn’t care much about anything but herself. She is a child, after all — moving from one city to another, new school and so on. Why would you expect any different? But then she grows through hard labor and a bunch of obstacles. She demonstrates care for people you wouldn’t expect her to care about — Lin, the girl she met in the bathhouse who became her friend, then even Yubaba’s baby, then Haku. They were all a little hostile towards her at first, and still that pulling desire to help, to save the day. ...

Examples of applying the POSIWID lens. Introduction In management cybernetics, there is a well-known formulation: “the purpose of a system is what it does” (POSIWID). It is commonly used as a practical way to analyze complex systems—organizations, institutions, social practices, and recurring patterns of behavior. The idea is to set aside declared goals, missions, and explanations, and instead observe the actions and effects a system reliably produces over time. Not isolated decisions or stated intentions, but stable patterns—especially those that become visible under stress, growth, or conflicting incentives. ...

Intro Another year is coming to an end. People summarize their year and make plans. Reflecting on mine, I once again noticed that books — like many other things we choose and spend time on — tend to reflect who we are at a particular moment in life rather accurately. This year, that mirror suggests I was more concerned with people and personal development than with technology. Perhaps that’s self-deception, or a way of avoiding other topics. It doesn’t really matter. Books are just books. ...

Recently, I’ve often heard that hierarchies are bad, supposedly representing nothing but inequality and oppression. This topic unexpectedly surfaces in seemingly unrelated contexts. I encountered it in a book about startup culture, my children brought it up from school, and there was tension in chats on unrelated topics whenever structures resembling hierarchies were mentioned. On one hand, I agree that some hierarchies can be built on force and suppression. On the other hand, I see them more as symbiotic structures rather than tools for power struggles. ...

There are people who feel like a flaming sword — the kind Peterson writes about in “We Who Wrestle with God,” burning away everything unworthy just by standing near them. We avert our eyes, or we try to dim their light. Analyzing my own reactions to such people I found envy, a reminder of failures, or weaknesses or a sense of a vast gap in the strength of the spirit. All of this is accompanied by a feeling of internal constriction and resentment, although it could be associated with the aspiration to achieve more and become better. This however requires accepting one’s own imperfections, which is valuable in itself, but also makes being near the ideal less scorching. Perhaps if you have never felt this way, you are already pure enough inside. ...

Intro There are two topic that people rarely discuss when in comes to data annotation. First, that annotators are not just things that needs to be trained, and whose performance needs to be closely monitored but regular human beings like any one of ourselves as people who can get tried, or distracted. And second, how the data we push through those people influences their annotators’ performance. As I feel compassion, and deep respect for annotators I work with on daily basis I wanted to cover that topic in one of my writing but never had time to do so as well as bandwidth to conduct a proper study. With help from, AI and all researches who has done the ground work, I can at least share a short summary. ...

Intro As continuation of my attempts to regain control over my attention, two month ago I switched my phone to first black, and white mode, and then I applied the same filter at 30% on my laptops and then reduced the filter intensity to 20-30% on all my devices. I helped a bit, actually black, and white helps quite significantly but it is a bit tiering to use. So after the first month I’ve noticed the following changes: ...

I’ve always wanted to have a way to build data processing pipelines in Python using pipes, like this range(10) | F(is_odd) | P(lambda x: x * 2), instead of functions and generators and maps and loops. So I’ve tried … The idea is pretty simple: let’s create a class with implemented OR and ROR operators, the pipes. def __or__(self, other): other.source = self return other def __ror__(self, other): self.source = ( iter(other) if not isinstance(other, (str, bytes)) and hasattr(other, "__iter__") else other ) return self The tricky part was implementation of __next__ since I wanted it to be a lazy operation. After a few trials and errors I’ve ended up with a pretty simple approach where the wrapping class implementing the pipe will call next to its source, added by OR or ROR, apply a transformation and then return the result of the transformation. ...

a simple visualization of the difference between frequentist and Bayesian power and how effect size, noise (standard deviation), and sample size affect the results.

I like the idea I got from one of Joscha Bach posts that everything we hear is automatically executed by our brain like it is own thoughts even when we don’t pay attention to it. And that it is a security vulnerability that it opens a gate for all sorts of exploitations. I keep returning to this thought frequently and so I decide to put it on “paper”. The summary of my thoughts on the topic. We have that loop hole that can be exploit in multiple ways from little verbal abuse, or manipulation to full-fledged propaganda attacks. The most devious part is that it can crawl under your skin even if you don’t even pay attention to it. It is probably even more contagious when you are not pain attention since your guard is off. You can resist certain ideas when you hear then once, twice, ten times but after a hundred of repetitions they will eventually get through unless there is something in you that will make those ideas completely unacceptable for you. ...