My mind has been wandering around the concept of gamification for a few weeks now. In short, it's the idea of turning a task into a game to increase motivation towards completing it. And while there is no doubt that it works - just check all the stupid games that people play obsessively in order to gain some useless points - it was a day in the park that made it clear how wrong the term is in connecting point systems to games.



I was walking with some friends and I saw two kids playing. One was shooting a ball with his feet and the other was riding a bicycle. The purpose of their ad-hoc game was for the guy with the ball to hit the kid on the bike. They were going at it again and again, squealing in joy, and it hit me: they invented a game. And while all games have a goal, not all of them require points. Moreover, the important thing is not the points themselves, but who controls the point system. That was my epiphany: they invented their own game, with its own goal and point system, but they were controlling the way points were awarded and ultimately how much they mattered. The purpose of the game was actually to challenge the players, to gently explore their limitations and try to push boundaries a little bit further out. It wasn't about losing or winning, it was about learning and becoming.

In fact, another word for point system is currency. We all know how money relates to motivation and happiness, so how come we got conned into believing that turning something into a game means showing flashy animations filled with positive emotion that award you arbitrary sums of arbitrary types of points? I've tried some of these things myself. It feels great at times to go up the (arbitrary) ranks or levels or whatever, while golden chests and diamonds and untold riches are given to me. But soon enough the feeling of emptiness overcomes the fictional rewards. I am not challenging myself, instead I am doing something repetitive and boring. That and the fact that most of these games are traps to make you spend actual cash or more valuable currency to buy theirs. You see, the game of the developers is getting more money. And they call it working, not playing.

I was reading this book today and in it a character says that money is the greatest con: it is only good for making more money. Anything that can be bought can be stolen. And it made a lot of sense to me. When you play gamified platforms like the ones I am describing, the goal of the game quickly changes in your mind. You start to ignore pointless (pardon the pun) details, like storyline, character development, dialogues, the rush of becoming better at something, the skills one acquires, even the fun of playing. Instead you start chasing stars, credits, points, jewels, levels, etc. You can then transfer those points, maybe convert them into something or getting more by converting money into them. How about going around and tricking other players to give you their points? And suddenly, you are playing a different game, the one called work. Nobody can steal the skills you acquire from you, but they can always steal your title or your badge or your trophy or the money you made.

What I am saying is that games have a goal that defines them. Turning that goal into a metric irrevocably perverts the game. Even sports like football, that start off as a way of proving your team is better than the other team and incidentally improving your physical fitness, turn into ugly deformed versions of themselves where the bottom line is getting money from distribution rights, where goals can be bought or stolen by influencing a referee, for example.

I remember this funny story about a porn game that had a very educational goal: make girls reach orgasm. In order to translate this into a computer program, the developers had several measurements of pleasure - indicated in the right side of the screen as colored bars - which all had to go over a threshold in order to make the woman cum. What do you think happened? Players ignored the moaning image of a naked female and instead focused solely on the bars. Focus on the metric and you ignore the actual goal.

To summarize: a game requires of one to define their limits, acknowledge them, then try to break them. While measuring is an important part of defining limits, the point is in breaking them, not in acquiring tokens that somehow prove it to other people. If you want to "gamify" work, then the answer is to do your tasks better and harder and to do it for yourself, because you like who you become. When you do it in order to make more money, that's work, and to win that game you only need to trick your employers or your customers that you are doing what is required. And it's only play when you enjoy who you are when doing it.

As an aside, I know people that are treating making money like a game. For them making more and more money is a good thing, it challenges them, it makes them feel good about themselves. They can be OK people that sometimes just screw you over if they feel the goal of their game is achieved better by it. These people never gamified work, they were playing a game from the very start. They love doing it.

Stay true to the goal! That is the game.

Lab Girl should have been the kind of book I like: a deeply personal autobiography. Hope Jahren writes well, also, and in 14 chapters goes through about 20 years of her life, from the moment she decided she would be a scientist to the moment when she was actually accepted as a full professor by academia. She talks about her Norwegian family education, about the tough mother that never gave her the kind of love she yearned for, she talks about misogyny in science, about deep feelings for her friends, she talks about her bipolar disorder and her pregnancy. Between chapters she interposes a short story about plants, mostly trees, as metaphors for personal growth. And she is an introvert who works and is best friends with a guy who is even more an introvert than she is. What is not to like?

And the truth is that I did like the book, yet I couldn't empathize with her "character". Each chapter is almost self contained, there is no continuity and instead of feeling one with the writer I was getting the impression that she overthinks stuff and everything I read is a memory of a memory of a thought. I also felt there was little science in a book written by someone who loves science, although objectively there is plenty of stuff to rummage through. Perhaps I am not a plant person.

The bottom line is that I was expecting someone autopsying their daily life, not paper wrapping disjointed events that marked their life in general. As it usually is with expectations, I felt a bit disappointed when the author had other plans with her book. It does talk about deep feelings, but I was more interested in the actual events than the internal projection of them. However if you are the kind of person who likes the emotional lens on life, you will probably like the book more than I did.

About 25 years ago I was getting Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia CD-ROM as a gift from my father. Back then I had no Internet so I delved into what now seems impossibly boring, looking up facts, weird pictures, reading about this and that.

At one time I remember I found a timeline based feature that showed on a scrolling bar the main events of history. I am not much into history, I can tell you that, but for some reason I became fascinated with how events in American history in particular were lining up. So I extracted only those and, at the end, I presented my findings to my grandmother: America was an expanding empire, conquering, bullying, destabilizing, buying territory. I was really adamant that I had stumbled onto something, since the United States were supposed to be moral and good. Funny how a childhood of watching contraband US movies can make you believe that. My grandmother was not impressed and I, with the typical attention span of a child, abandoned any historical projects in the future.

Fast forward to now, when, looking for Oliver Stone to see what movies he has done lately, I stumble upon a TV Series documentary called The Untold History of the United States. You can find it in video format, but also as a companion book or audio book. While listening to the audio book I realized that Stone was talking about my childhood discovery, also disillusioned after a youth of believing the American propaganda, then going through the Vietnam war and realizing that history doesn't tell the same story as what is being circulated in classes and media now.

However, this is no childish project. The book takes us through the US history, skirting the good stuff and focusing on the bad. Yet it is not done in malice, as far as I could see, but in the spirit that this part of history is "untold", hidden from the average eye, and has to be revealed to all. Stone is a bit extremist in his views, but this is not a conspiracy theory book. It is filled with historical facts, arranged in order, backed by quotes from the people of the era. Most of all, it doesn't provide answers, but rather questions that the reader is invited to answer himself. Critics call it biased, but Stone himself admits that it is with intent. Other materials and tons of propaganda - the history of which is also presented in the book - more than cover the positive aspect of things. This is supposed to be a balancing force in a story that is almost always said from only one side.

The introductory chapter alone was terrifying, not only because of the forgotten atrocities committed by the US in the name of the almighty dollar and God, but also because of the similarities with the present. Almost exactly a century after the American occupation of the Philippines, we find the same situation in the Middle-East. Romanians happy with the US military base at Deveselu should perhaps check what happened to other countries that welcomed US bases on their territory. People swallowing immigration horror stories by the ton should perhaps find out more about a little film called Birth of a Nation, revolutionary in its technical creation and controversial - now - for telling the story of the heroic Ku-Klux-Klan riding to save white folk - especially poor defenseless women - from the savage negroes.

By no means I am calling this a true complete objective history, but the facts that it describes are chilling in their evil banality and unfortunately all true. The thesis of the film is that America is losing its republican founding fathers roots by behaving like an empire, good and moral only in tightly controlled and highly financed media and school curricula. It's hard not to see the similarities between US history a century ago and today, including the presidential candidates and their speeches. The only thing that has changed is the complete military and economic supremacy of the United States and the switch from territorial colonialism to economic colonialism. I am not usually interested in history, but this is a book worth reading.

I leave you with Oliver Stone's interview (the original video was removed by YouTube for some reason):

I am writing this post to rant against subscription popups. I've been on the Internet long enough to remember when this was a thing: a window would open up and ask you to enter your email address. We went from that time, through all the technical, stylistic and cultural changes to the Internet, to this Web 3.0 thing, and the email subscription popups have emerged again. They are not ads, they are simply asking you to allow them into your already cluttered inbox because - even before you've had a chance to read anything - what they have to say is so fucking important. Sometimes they ask you to like them on Facebook or whatever crap like that.

Let me tell you how to get rid of these real quick. Install an ad blocker, like AdBlockPlus or uBlock Origin. I recommend uBlock Origin, since it is faster and I feel works better than the older AdBlock. Now this is something that anyone should do just to get rid of ads. I've personally never browsed the Internet from a tablet or cell phone because they didn't allow ad blockers. I can't go on the web without them.

What you may not know, though, is that there are several lists of filters that you can choose from and that are not enabled by default when you install an ad blocker. One of my favourite lists is Fanboy's Annoyances list. It takes care of popups of all kinds, including subscriptions. But even so, if the default list doesn't contain the web site you are looking at, you have the option to pick elements and block them. A basic knowledge of CSS selectors helps, but here is the gist of it: ###something means the element with the id "something" and ##.something is the elements with the class name "something". Here is an example: <div id="divPopup" class="popup ad annoying"> is a div element that has id "divPopup" and class names "popup", "ad" and "annoying".

One of the reason why subscription popups are not always blocked is because beside the elements that they cover the page with, they also place some constraints on the page. For example they place a big element over the screen (what is called an overlay), then a popup element in the center of the screen and also change the style of the entire page to not scroll down. So if you would remove the overlay and the popup, the page would only show you the upper part and not allow you to scroll down. This can be solved with another browser extension called Stylish, which allows you to save and apply your own style to pages you visit. The CSS rule that solves this very common scenario is html,body { overflow: auto !important; }. That is all. Just add a new style for the page and copy paste this. 19 in 20 chances you will get the scroll back.

To conclude, whenever you see such a stupid, stupid thing appearing on the screen, consider blocking subscription popups rather than pressing on the closing button. Block it once and never see it again. Push the close button and chances are you will have to keep pressing it each time you visit a page.

Now, if I only had a similar option for jump scares in movies...

P.S. Yes, cookie consent popups are included in my rant. Did you know that you can block all cookie nagware from Blogspot within one fell swoop, rather than having to click OK at each blog individually, for example?

The Brain that Changes Itself is a remarkable book for several reasons. M.D. Norman Doidge presents several cases of extraordinary events that constitute proof for the book's thesis: that the brain is plastic, easy to remold, to adapt to the data you feed it. What is astonishing is that, while these cases are not new and are by far not the only ones out there, the medical community is clinging to the old belief that the brain is made of clearly localized parts that have specific roles. Doidge is trying to change that.

The ramifications of brain plasticity are wide spread: the way we learn or unlearn things, how we fall in love, how we adapt to new things and we keep our minds active and young, the way we would educate our children, the minimal requirement for a computer brain interface and so much more. The book is structured in 11 chapters and some addendums that seem to be extra material that the author didn't know how to properly format. A huge part is acknowledgements and references, so the book is not that large.

These are the chapters, in order:

• Chapter 1 - A Woman Perpetually Falling. Describes a woman that lost her sense of balance. She feels she is falling at all times and barely manages to walk using her sight. Put her in front of a weird patterned rug and she falls down. When sensors fed information to an electrode plate on her tongue she was able to have balance again. The wonder comes from the fact that a time after removing the device she would retain her sense. The hypothesis is that the receptors in her inner ear were not destroyed, by damaged, leaving some in working order and some sending incorrect information to the brain. Once a method to separate good and bad receptors, the brain immediately adapted itself to use only the good ones. The doctor that spearheaded her recovery learned the hard way that the brain is plastic, when his father was almost paralyzed by a stroke. He pushed his father to crawl on the ground and try to move the hand that wouldn't move, the leg that wouldn't hold him, the tongue that wouldn't speak. In the end, his father recovered. Later, after he died from another stroke while hiking on a mountain, the doctor had a chance to see the extent of damage done by the first stroke: 97% of the nerves that run from the cerebral cortex to the spine were destroyed.
• Chapter 2 - Building Herself a Better Brain. Barbara was born in the '50s with an brain "asymmetry". While leaving a relatively normal life she had some mental disabilities that branded her as "retarded". It took two decades to stumble upon studies that showed that the brain was plastic and could adapt. She trained her weakest traits, the ones that doctors were sure to remain inadequate because the part in the brain "associated" with it was missing and found out that her mind adapted to compensate. She and her husband opened a school for children with disabilities, but her astonishing results come from when she was over 20 years old, after years of doctors telling her there was nothing to be done.
• Chapter 3 - Redesigning the Brain. Michael Merzenich designs a program to train the brain against cognitive impairments or brain injuries. Just tens of hours help improve - and teach people how to keep improving on their own - from things like strokes, learning disabilities, even conditions like autism and schizophrenia. His work is based on scientific experiments that, when presented to the wider community, were ridiculed and actively attacked for the only reason that they went against the accepted dogma.
• Chapter 4 - Acquiring Tastes and Loves. Very interesting article about how our experiences shape our sense of normalcy, the things we like or dislike, the people we fall for and the things we like to do with them. The chapter also talks about Freud, in a light that truly explains how ahead of his time he was, about pornography and its effects on the brain, about how our pleasure system affects both learning and unlearning and has a very interesting theory about oxytocin, seeing it not as a "commitment neuromodulator", but as a "demodulator", a way to replastify the part of the brain responsible for attachments, allowing us to let go of them and create new ones. It all culminates with the story of Bob Flanagan, a "supermasochist" who did horrible things to his body on stage because he had associated pain with pleasure.
• Chapter 5 - Midnight Resurrection. A surgeon has a stroke that affects half of his body. Through brain training and physiotherapy, he manages to recover - and not gain magical powers. The rest of the chapter talks about experiments on monkeys that show how the feedback from sensors rewires the brain and how what is not used gets weaker and what is used gets stronger, finer and bigger in the brain.
• Chapter 6 - Brain Lock Unlocked. This chapter discusses obsessions and bad habits and defective associations in the brain and how they can be broken.
• Chapter 7 - Pain: The Dark Side of Plasticity. A plastic brain is also the reason why we strongly remember painful moments. A specific case is phantom limbs, where people continue to feel sensations - often the most traumatic ones - after limbs have been removed. The chapter discusses causes and solutions.
• Chapter 8 - Imagination: How Thinking Makes It So. The brain maps for skills that we imagine we perform change almost as much as when we are actually doing them. This applies to mental activities, but also physical ones. Visualising doing sports prepared people for the moment when they actually did it. The chapter also discusses how easily the brain adapts to using external tools. Brain activity recorders were wired to various tools and monkeys quickly learned to use them without the need for direct electric feedback.
• Chapter 9 - Turning Our Ghosts into Ancestors. Discussing the actual brain mechanisms behind psychotherapy, in the light of what the book teaches about brain plasticity, makes it more efficient as well as easier to use and understand. The case of Mr. L., Freud's patient, who couldn't keep a stable relationship as he was always looking for another and couldn't remember his childhood and adolescence, sheds light on how brain associates trauma with day to day life and how simply separating the two brain maps fixes problems.
• Chapter 10 - Rejuvenation. A chapter talking about the neural stem cells and how they can be activated. Yes, they exist and they can be employed without surgical procedures.
• Chapter 11 - More than the Sum of Her Parts. A girl born without her left hemisphere learns that her disabilities are just untrained parts of her brain. After decades of doctors telling her there is nothing to be done because the parts of her brain that were needed for this and that were not present, she learns that her brain can actually adapt and improve, with the right training. An even more extreme case than what we saw in Chapter 2.

There is much more in the book. I am afraid I am not making it justice with the meager descriptions there. It is not a self-help book and it is not popularising science, it is discussing actual cases, the experiments done to back what was done and emits theories about the amazing plasticity of the brain. Some things I took from it are that we can train our brain to do almost anything, but the training has to follow some rules. Also that we do not use gets discarded in time, while what is used gets reinforced albeit with diminishing efficiency. That is a great argument to do new things and train at things that we are bad at, rather than cement a single scenario brain. The book made me hungry for new senses, which in light of what I have read, are trivial to hook up to one's consciousness.

If you are not into reading, there is an one hour video on YouTube that covers about the same subjects:

[youtube:sK51nv8mo-o]

Enjoy!

After a month of trial with no one to complain of HTTPS issues, I've decided to set the blog to redirect normal connections to the secure URL. Let me know if you experience any problems.

Democracy, like any other system of government or political system, is designed to keep the powerful in the driver's seat. It's not about the good of the people, unless they hold power. It was invented and implemented at times when having a large group of people supporting you meant something, gave you the ability to do things. Any other system: theocracy, tyranny, feudalism, communism, fascism... they all do the same thing and fail when the group they support fails to maintain power. Democracy is not about the little people, it's about how fast a system can adapt to changes in the structures of power. It is just the "agile" version of the same old thing. By declaring its ruling group "the people", democracy can survive any political change. The system outlives groups and groups of "people".

Consider the present, where we are split more than ever into voters and the indifferent. Does democracy help the young disillusioned people who more and more refuse to vote for anything? No. That's not a bug in the democratic system, but nor is it a fault or a consequence of not voting; instead it is a realization of a truth, that young people are a minority that is segregated from the old by technology, new ways of communication and networking and ultimately, completely different goals. In this image, the young are the indifferent, but there is a reason for that: they are not the powerful - democracy doesn't work for them either way.

Imagine you are part of a group of three people, each with equal voting rights. Every time you try to influence a decision, the other two vote differently. Will you continue to play the voting game or will you recognize it for what it is: a waste of time? Now imagine you are the king of the three people. How long will you maintain your position when the other two outpower you? Democracy helps the stability of the three-body system, but it does nothing for you. Suddenly, one of the three people starts to like you (or dislike the other) and he starts voting with you. Now you are part of the powerful and your decision matters. Conflict is again averted and stability preserved because as soon as the balance of power changed, the ruling party changed accordingly. It would be stupid for the weak single man to try to fight two, so he grumbles and complains, but does nothing.

In this day and age, there are so many different types of power: military, mediatic, technical, administrative, economic, etc. Democracy doesn't help the many anymore, because they lost their power. Having a lot of idiots in your group doesn't do much. Smart people, they start to realize it and also to understand that the game is rigged. Some try desperately to shift the perspective of the dumb amorphous masses, but if you could do that, you would be in power already because you already have it. Mathematical algorithms are being created to diagnose the health of a network, to determine the influential nodes, to determine the best outcome when the simple "wisdom of the crowds" fails miserably. They could work online, locally, maybe, but in real life? Never.

The Internet itself started as the true hope of mankind to evolve and change. A place where people meet on equal footing, have access to information, can connect and discuss and decide together. What happened? Same thing. A few companies and a few people hold the power to sway the vast hordes of connected people. When that doesn't work, legal pressure is applied from "without", from the real world. People clump together by interest and information source; essentially they become one voice, but one blinded, dumb and ignorant, yet convinced of its own truth. It is a sad moment when we realize that the monopoly of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and the like is better than the complete anarchy of a disorganized web. Do you even remember life before Google? When you would use different search engines to find something? When 99.99% of everything was spam or malware?

But all of this just underlines a very ironic fact: democracy is, in itself, redundant, even circular. It legitimizes itself, it graciously grants power to the ones that already have it. It's a game that covers a truth as old as the world itself. Its only purpose is to minimize unrest by permanently governing the weak. The only true enemy of democracy is not communism or terrorism, it's asymmetric warfare: the rapid accumulation of power in small groups. When a single hacker can challenge the status quo, when a "lone wolf terrorist" can cause much more damage than we can cause them, when software allows you complete anonymity to gather, think and plan something the powerful cannot supervise, that's when democracy fails. That's when the powerful become unsure of their power.

And we know what happens when power is fearful: abuse of power. Beware power, because it makes you an enemy of the state. Not because of shadow cabals or government conspiracies, but because of direct logical consequence. And when I say "state" I mean the whole state (of affairs). It means your neighbors, your friends, your city and only at the end, some sort of authority which, ironically, acts as the perfect agent of a democratic government. It is actually not at all different from the original meaning of the term, coined by ancient Greece, where every citizen could vote, but not all people were citizens. How many sci-fi movies show superpowered individuals being chased by government agencies? Why is that? Because governments are evil? No, it's because unchecked power is illegal. You are allowed power, you never generate it yourself unless you rule.

I predict a moment, not far from now, where democracy as we know it completely fails. Not because it is a bad system, but because we become too fast. Power would shift faster than the system could adapt. We already see glimpses of this in the fashionable "Facebook revolutions", where political outcomes thought to be known change over night because of one rapidly spreading trend. The system will desperately try to adapt and it will succeed, but in doing so will become something akin to the stock market. It will be automatic, it will split society into algorithmically equal sides, holding power for inconsequential amounts of time, having no meaning. Radical movements will gain ground, not because they inspire something, but because they are a little brighter than the bland hemispheres of the political system. I believe at this time the entire political system will crash, like markets crash when they get to this point. Corruption will be the only thing keeping politics together so when the system crashes, it all spews forth like black tainted blood. The new revolutionaries will be vindicated by this and gain a flimsy amount of power that will ultimately fail. Then, as with the Internet, maybe the corporate system will gain ground. Or maybe political capital will move just like economic one, being sold and bought transparently. Who knows?

What I am certain of, though, is that politics - as it is now - is doomed to fail. Not because we become smarter, but because we become too unpredictable.

I started reading the book knowing nothing of its author or contents or, indeed, the publishing date. For me it felt like a philosophical treatise on revolutions in general, especially since the names of the countries were often omitted and it seemed that the author was purposeful in trying to make it apply to any era and any nation. Only after finishing the book I realized that Darkness at Noon was a story published in 1940, by Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian-British author who was briefly part of the German Communist movement before he left it, disillusioned. The main character is probably a more dramatic version of himself. As an aside and a fun coincidence, in July 2015 the original German manuscript of the book was found. All the since published versions are based on an English translation after Koestler lost the original. Even the published German version is a retranslation from English by Koestler himself.

The book is difficult to read because it is packed with deep philosophical and political thoughts of the main protagonist. Like a man condemned to purgatory, Rubashov is a former party leader now imprisoned by the very regime he helped create. While waiting for his interrogation and sentencing, he maniacally analyses his life's work and meaning, trying to find where the great revolution failed and why. One of the last survivors of "the old guard", he realizes that the new version of the party is a perversion of his initial ideals, but a logical progression of the principles he followed. He remembers the people he himself condemned to death and tries to understand if he had done the right thing or not. Still faithful to his views that tradition and emotion should be ignored and even eliminated, progressing by logical analysis and cold decisions, he tries to collect his thoughts enough to find the solution, not for himself, but for the failed revolution.

Darkness at Noon is a relatively short book, but a dense one. The author makes Rubashov feel extremely human, even as he remembers his own moments of monstrosity. Repeatedly he reveals to the reader that he thinks of himself as an automaton, as a cog in a machine and that he feels little about his own demise or success, but greatly about the result of the thing bigger than himself in which he believes. Yet even as he does that, he is tormented by human emotion, wracked by guilt, pained by a probably imaginary toothache that flares when he feels his own mistakes and regrets his past actions. He never quite gets to a point to where he is apologetic, though, believing strongly that the ends justify the means.

I liked it. It is not a political manifesto, but a deep rumination on political ideas that the author no longer adheres to. While I am sure many people have tried to use it as a tool against Communism, I find that the book is more than that, treating Communism itself just like another movement in the bowels of humanity. It is almost irrelevant in the end, as the story goes full circle to trap Rubashov in a prison of his own mind, with many of the characters just reflections of parts of himself. In the center of it all stands a man, an archetypal one at that, the book raising his fleeting existence higher than the sluggish fluctuations of any revolution or political ideals.

I read on Wikipedia that Darkness at Noon is meant as the second part of a trilogy, but from the descriptions of the other two books they don't seem to be narratively connected. I certainly didn't feel I missed something discussed in other material. Highly introspective, the story is often thought provoking, forcing one to put down the book to think about what was read. It is, thus, very cerebral: the emotions within are not the type that would make one read feverishly to get to the end and the end itself is just a beginning. I warmly recommend it.

In the last few days I've read several articles that all seem to say the same thing: computer algorithms we use today are biased towards wealthy white men, because they are made by companies in wealthy countries and predominantly by white male developers. Therefore they are inherently racist, misogynistic and wasteful. Nice journalistic metaphors were used such as: "Sea of dudes", "discriminatory code", "green algorithms", etc. I call bullshit!

Computer algorithms need to be, most of all, money makers. If Facebook or Google tweak an algorithm one way or another, the result is immediately apparent in the bottom line because of their huge user count. It may be possible that somehow, by cosmic coincidence, wealthy white males would also be the ones making most purchases, moving the most money, and thus the algorithm may appear biased. But it's not. The algorithm performs as it was supposed to. If a face recognition algorithm classifies black people as gorillas, Asian people as blinking, etc, it's not because the algorithm is racist, but because the data it was provided pointed to that result. If looking for a movie title you get torrent links rather than the official web page of the movie it's because that is what people want more. It's not a glitch, it's the way a machine understands reality. An algorithm is no more racist than the Nazi ovens or the Hiroshima bomb.

What I am trying to say is that code, especially now when it is becoming more and more embedded with machine learning (which is a much better term than the terrible misleading "artificial intelligence"), represents an intersection point between specifications, people biases and data biases, to which you add horrible bugs. Algorithms, just like the way pieces of your brain work, are but elements in a puzzle.

"Well, of course, and to make the entire puzzle more socially responsible, we need to make all pieces socially responsible!" That's stupid. It's like working on the paint of the car to make it go faster. Sure, you can use some over engineered paint to reduce drag, but the engine and the wheels are still going to be more important. Male developers don't decide to tweak an algorithm to make it disregard women any more than a human resources female employee doesn't decide to hire developers based on how much they value women. Owners, managers, money ultimately are what lead to decisions.

Stop trying to appear politically correct when you don't know what you are talking about. If a complex computer algorithm that uses math as its underlying mechanism shows a bias, it's not because statistics are racist, but because the data it was fed was biased. The algorithm in question doesn't reveal the small mindedness of the white developer or of the male mathematician, but a characteristic of the world it sees. Even with people feeding them the wrong data, algorithms are more objective than humans - that is a fact - because often you start developing them before you know what you are looking for; a person always works the other way around. Why not use code to show us where we are wrong, or biased, or angry at how the world is, or plain stupid? We have such a wonderful tool to make judgements from formal principles that we can actually tweak and, instead of scrutinizing the principles, you go nitpicking against the developers and the algorithms. I find it especially humorous to see random data introduced into a generic algorithm producing results that are considered biased because you don't like what you see.

Bottom line: want to change the world and make it better? Here is an algorithm for you: take the world and make it better.

And BTW, I find that constantly accusing developers of being white and male is a form of sexist racism. What do you want me to do? Turn black? If you would truly be unbiased you wouldn't care what is the social structure of your IT department. It's only now when computers matter so much that you are bothered of how much the geeks are getting paid.

I have created a Facebook page for the blog, so if you are tired by my Facebook ramblings and only need the updates for this blog, you can subscribe to it. You may find it here.

Also, I've discovered a bad bug with the chess viewer: it didn't allow manual promotions. If you tried to promote a pawn it would call a component that was not on the page (an ugly component) and then it wouldn't promote anyway because of a bug in the viewer. Hopefully I've solved them both. It mainly affected puzzles like the one I posted today.

White to move. Can you draw? Can you win? What would you do? Try - I know it's fucking hard, but do it anyway - to think it through.
[FEN "5kB1/3p1P2/7K/2Pp1P1P/p6p/4P3/7P/8 w - - 0 1"]
1. Kg6 a3 2. h6 a2 3. h7 a1=Q 4. h8=Q Qxh8 (4. .. Qg1+ 5. Kh5 Qxe3 (5. ..
Qg7 6. Qxg7+ Kxg7 7. Kxh4 d4 8. f6+ Kf8 9. c6) 6. Qf6 Qf3+ 7. Kh6 Qf4+ 8.
Kh7) 5. f6 h3 6. Kg5 d4 7. c6 dxc6 8. exd4 c5 (8. .. Qxg8+ 9. fxg8=Q+ Kxg8
10. Kg6 Kf8 11. f7 Ke7 12. Kg7) (8. .. Qh7 9. Bxh7 Kxf7 10. Bg8+ Kxg8 11.
Kg6 Kf8) 9. d5 c4 10. d6 c3 11. d7 c2 12. d8=Q# 1-0

Here is the video for it, from very good channel ChessNetwork:


Enjoy!

Clippy is back, thanks to this nice project. So what else could I have done than add it to my blog? Just go to Menu and choose your "Assistant".

If the assistant is set, the messages from the blog come from the assistant. It also follows the mouse as it moves around and does various gestures depending on what one does or reads. Have fun!

I will give you this as a puzzle, so please try to figure out that White's move is going to be. This and a lot of cool other puzzles are presented by IM Andrew Martin in the following video.

[Event "Ch URS"]
[Site "Moscow"]
[Date "1956.??.??"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Tigran Vartanovich Petrosian"]
[Black "Vladimir Simagin"]
[ECO "A53"]
[PlyCount "95"]

1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 c6 3. Nc3 d6 4. d4 g6 5. e4 Bg7 6. Be2 O-O
7. O-O Bg4 8. Be3 Nbd7 9. Nd2 Bxe2 10. Qxe2 e5 11. d5 c5
12. Rab1 Ne8 13. f3 f5 14. b4 cxb4 15. Rxb4 b6 16. a4 Bf6
17. Kh1 Bg5 18. Bg1 Nc7 19. Rbb1 Na6 20. Nb3 Ndc5 21. Nxc5
bxc5 22. exf5 gxf5 23. g4 fxg4 24. Ne4 Bf4 25. Rb7 Nc7
26. fxg4 Ne8 27. g5 Qc8 28. Re7 Qh3 29. Rf3 Qg4 30. Qd3 Bxh2
31. Rxf8+ Kxf8 32. Rxe8+ Rxe8 33. Bxh2 Re7 34. Nxd6 Qxg5
35. Qf1+ Kg8 36. Ne4 Qh4 37. Qe2 Rg7 38. d6 Qh6 39. Qd1 Qh4
40. Qe2 Qh6 41. Qf1 Rf7 42. Qg2+ Kf8 43. Ng5 Qxd6 44. Qa8+ Kg7
45. Bxe5+ Qxe5 46. Qh8+ Kxh8 47. Nxf7+ Kg7 48. Nxe5 1-0

Did you find it? I have to admit I did not. The game is Tigran Vartanovich Petrosian vs Vladimir Simagin, played in 1956.

[well, no following video, because YouTube just randomly removes content without any way of knowing what it was]

Every Heart a Doorway started well. Here is this girl that arrives at a specialized institution for "wayward children" - runaways, boys and girls that somehow don't fit into the slot their parents have prepared for them. Like many young adult stories, the main protagonists are young people into a place that accepts them as they are, but is still formal, with strict boundaries. In this case the idea was that the youngsters each have found the door to another world, a world that not only is completely different from ours, but is perfect for them. They have spent some time in it, only to accidentally leave or to be thrown out, with no way to return. After some times years in that place, changed to their deepest core, it is difficult to readapt to the real world, which makes their parents send them to this kind of institution.

From here, though, Seanan McGuire just piles up the tropes, while the careful writing style and setup from the beginning of this short 173 page story decays into a rushed and inconsistent ending. Just like Hogwarts, the house is managed with ancient British style rules, fixed meals, absolute authority, etc. There are children and there are adult teachers. The headmistress is someone who went through the same thing and decided to help others, but outside of that she's just as certain of her point of view and as self righteous as any of the parents that abandoned their offspring there.

And there is this... style, this way of describing the interaction of characters, which annoyed the hell out of me, without being bad as a writing style. You see, the young girl that arrives at the institution is time after time met by people who finish her sentences for her, show her that they think they know better than her, and she accepts it, just because she's the new girl. With that level of meek submission, I wonder why her parents ever wanted her gone. Her perfect world - a place of the dead where she was a servant of royalty and the skill she had learned best was to stay completely still for hours lest she upsets the lord of the dead - was also about total submission, and she loved it there. Most of the people that explored other worlds were similarly bonded to dominant characters that have absolute control over them.

In the end, children start to get killed and the response of "the authorities" is to hide the bodies and instruct youngsters to stay in groups, while the main characters suddenly can use their skills in the real world, as it was completely normal, but fail to use them properly to find the obvious killer. The scene where a skeleton tries to tell them who the murderer is - even if that should not have been possible in the real world - but can only point a finger, so they give up after one attempt of communication is especially sour in my mind.

So yeah, I didn't like the book. I felt it was a cheap mashup of Harry Potter and 50 Shades of Grey, polluted by the author's fantasies of submission and not much in the way of plot or characters. And it's too bad, since I liked the premise immediately.

I've quickly finished the second volume, Metro 2034, by Dmitry Glukhovsky, in the Metro series of books, after reading and being captivated by Metro 2033. To me it felt more geared towards the sci-fi and the writing lore than towards the social satire from the first book. It felt less. There are fewer main characters, fewer stations, less character development, less monsters. The few people that do populate the book are so archetypal that even the author acknowledges it in the guise of a character nicknamed Homer, an old guy that searches for stories and sees his entire adventure an odyssey to be written in a book and his companions filling up the roles of Warrior and Princess and Bard.

Don't get me wrong, I liked it a lot, but I felt that the first book acted as a caricature of current society, with its many stations that each adhered to some philosophy or another, while the second veered quite a large distance from that and went purely towards the catacomb sci-fi thriller. There is still enough philosophical discourse in Homer's musings and it is interesting to see the post apocalyptic world seen through the eyes of someone that lived before as well as with fresh eyes: a girl that only knew one station her whole life. But the book was tamer and I am not the only one to think that.

Now, I scoured the net for some Metro 2035 love, but to no avail. I found a Polish audio book, but nothing else. It is ridiculous how much one has to wait to get a translation of a book written in Russian or how difficult it is to get even the original Russian text.