The difficulty of doing nothing

Doing nothing is not easy. I have to get rid of my fears and desires to really do nothing. Isn't it?

Science a short cut.

Science provides short cuts to otherwise human activities. These human activities are in general slow processes. They give you plenty of time to recourse the strategies, correct your mistakes. The damage is limited.

Science on the other hand is all about achieving short cut alternatives to these otherwise human activities. The results and reactions are fast. You need to be prepared with another scientific tool to handle and control the reactions. Study of pros and cons of a scientific activity becomes so so critical. A myopic attitude with science in hand is a sure way to commit suicide.

Computer programming is an art?

Not again. Computer programming is not an art!

The output of a computer program may happen to be a piece of art. But the input to a computer which is a program SHOULD NOT be a piece of art! The input to a computer needs to be very discrete and should not be vague/subjective like an art. These programs may be very ugly to look at too! Computers are not humans and they don't mind if instructions to them look ugly to humans.

Moreover, computer Languages are not supposed to be art too! Programmers need to understand very accurately(not subjectively) what other programmers have written. It is not about art, it is all about clarity and unambiguity.

And I think these computer Languages should NOT be called "languages". They are not languages, they are simply abstracted instructions to the computer. Of course few of them realized that early direct instructions to the micro-processors are not going to fly in long run. So they started abstracting these low level instructions. But even after these revolutionary computer "languages" set in, they are not like the languages we humans use. And actually these "languages" should never be like regular human languages. Some computer scientist must have taken things easy and declared that these mechanical instructions are also language in a philosophical way.

We should never write poetry in computer "languages", they are not meant for that.

Journey from individual to mob

There is a pattern.

All so called "great" humans in history started their journey to "greatness" with personal and individual ideas. Those ideas were not products of groups. They were personal observations/realisations.

Then comes the urge to "spread" the ideas! This strong conviction that they are correct is so overwhelming!

Then begin the rituals of marketing. Organizations are launched, monuments are built, words of mouth are sponsored. Starry eyes join the march for personal gains or for the gain of "humanity".

Soon the organizations turn into mobs. The bright ideas which launched the all this melee take back seats.

Why do organizations become more powerful than individuals? Why haven't the bright race of humans invented a structure where individuals are valued at least as importantly as the organizations? Why do these entities which are created by humans become more important than the creators?

The desire to control others? May be.. :)

The "regular" program is just a subset of overfitted hypothesis

In our "regular" programming scene the programmer knows all combinations of input/output and the program is "deterministic". If the programmer forgets about a combination, it leads to a bug. :)

If the input/output dataset is known exhaustively and is free of noise then this learner overfits/memorizes all instances. This can be seen as "deterministic" use-cases, which I mentioned above. In other words if you think like a tester and are aware of all input/output instances then you don't need to write code explicitly.

Of course, I am not talking about the efficiency of such an outcome here. ;)

Hail the rationals! Die emotions!

"Rational" humans always tend to demean emotions. They take pride in their "superior" ability to seal emotions away when they are reasoning. And I always hear it everywhere that we should not decide in "emotional" state of mind.

So I started observing myself, my "rational" and "emotional" myself. The "observation" is still going on. But I have already discovered something very disturbing on my way:

Each and every thought and action of mine is rooted/directed from an emotion. The so called "rational" actions and thoughts all point back to some emotion! When I am angry and hurl abuses at others I am emotional in the classical way. But while I am reasoning out my steps after getting angry at somebody (like a classical "rational" person),  I discover that I am being driven by the "desire of peace and desire of saving myself from harm".

I always find myself giving "reasons" to my deep seated emotions. Damn the hypocrite human mind! ;)

Opinions and Judgement

In machine learning terminology,
opinions = {hypotheses}.
judgement = Hypothesis which overfits the given dataset.

Before you accept the above hypothesis please grind it in your personal Bayes machine.

;)

My importance

The other day I thought I was so important and must be taken seriously! But today I came to know about some homeless who died unattended.

Human brain a wonderful approximating engine

Human brains are perfect approximating engines.

The Idealists are adjusted to become Practicals.
And lo and behold!
The Practicals are adjusted to become Corrupts.

All the languages are just domain specific languages.

In a software engineer's terminology, mathematics is just another domain specific language. It was developed to suit a very specific set of needs of humans. Try expressing Love in mathematics. Try expressing Kangaroo in a non-australian-native language. And then try expressing a matrix of 1000 dimensions in mathematics.

But does that mean that spoken languages are also domain specific languages? Yes, they are. All the spoken languages can't express everything. They evolved to serve the local and specific needs. Try expressing Kangaroo in a non-australian-native language. Ty expressing a matrix of 1000 dimensions in English. And then try expressing Love in your mother tongue.

All the languages strive to be short, precise and sufficient to satisfy local needs.

Creator, Objects and the Big Picture

There is something odd about creation. The creator creates an object with all sincerity and honesty but always leaves out one part: the object is never allowed to know all by itself.

The created object always needs the fellow objects or at least some sort of reflection to know things beyond. Interaction is the key to knowledge. Interaction could be destructive or constructive, it doesn't matter but it always leads to better understanding of the big picture.