Tamseel's Weblog

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  • Testing again

    In

    testing smth

  • Sparrow

    In

    Today, a sparrow died in front of my eyes partly due to my incompetency. I buried her in the small lawn outside.

    She was a brown small sparrow, I don’t know the exact name of that species. That species has a nest on the lemon plant planted in our neighbor’s courtyard, a part of which extends over the wall to our courtyard. But I don’t think they actually live in the nest during night because in morning, because there are dozens of them, and they can’t all fit inside that nest. They mostly play on that tree and the wall on top of which our neighbors place edible seeds for the birds. Our neighbors had gone out of city few days ago and had asked us to put the fill the clay plates resting on the wall with the seeds, after the dawn prayer. Like the previous days, I had filled them today as instructed. It was after the breakfast that I had went outside and noticed the sparrow strangled up very badly in the plant. Lemon plant has small twingled thorny twigs. She was caught a bit up higher part of the plant. I had laid the chaarpai there, but still I had to pull below the branch to bring it up close, and then attempted to cut the tiny branch along which it was strangled, but in this attempt, the whole plant had gotten many jerks and sudden movements, and she stopped flapping, which marked that she was no longer alive. I finally cut the twig and the sparrow fell on the chaarpai, but alas she no longer responded. I couldn’t verify if she was alive or not, so I took it inside in warm room and sprinkled it with water, etc. But after around fifteen minutes, it was clear she was dead. Looking at her tiny legs, it turned out that she was not just strangled in the twigs, but that there was a thread which had been gotten tightened around her leg. That thread also got cut when I cut the twig. Later, I found a long thread tangled very badly in the twigs. It was perhaps fastened on the plant way long ago to hold it to a certain position but later it might have no longer been necessary, but got strangled in the twigs. So, it seems the sparrow somehow got the thread fastened around her leg, but also got stuck in the twigs and a thorn pierced her resulting in the blood. I don’t know how long ago, she had gotten stuck there. But I don’t think so, it was there before the breakfast. So she could have gotten stuck there anywhere between 1 to 30 minutes before I saw her. The unintended jerks to the plant in my careless attempt to cut the twig probably resulted in her death. Upon inspection, however, the piercing didn’t look too deep and the blood was also very little. Her body will now decompose and become part of the trees around which I buried her. I came back to courtyard after burying her. The sparrows were back hopping around, eating and playing by the plant and the wall. I feel bad for the companion that is no longer with them due to my incompetency.

  • Thought Rubberducking

    In

    The amount of times I have written something in an AI chatbot’s input field and not pressed enter, and, the proportion of questions I note down to ask to the ones I struck out, because I understand the point already, point out that the rubberducking effects of thinking-in-writing are much underrated, even among people who are somewhat used to writing.

  • Demolishing old models

    In

    I turned 22 a while ago. Which is an irrelevant fact here, as my writing this is in response to something I read1, and I would have written it even if I hadn’t turned 22.

    When I was a bit younger, I used to think that I knew how the world works. I used to think that from much earlier age I guess. But every few years, I would realize, how naïve I have been, and would get disappointed at my younger self for being so. I also used to think, apart from that, that I knew how the world ought to work. While I kept realizing every few years that how I thought how the world worked was so utterly mistaken, I never really realized that I was similarly mistaken about how I thought the world ought to work2. With new things unfolding in front of me as I poked at reality, I demolished things from my mental model of how the world worked that weren’t right and built new things to replace them that better fit reality. But for the other mental model of how the world ought to work, I merely built new things in respect to new things unfolding in front of me and never demolished anything. That model was very precious, and so I plucked out nothing but weeds and shrubs, but I kept building and building, with increasing sophistication, in order to accommodate everything and everyone and to handle all edge cases, the task becoming too complicated and too burdensome, but still failing to meet its purpose. Just like in a bureaucracy or corporation, where to solve a problem, you can’t remove anything, say, from a constitution or a codebase, only add more things. But the problem never gets solved, only evolves into a more complicated form to which you surrender to attempt to solve.

    Henrik in an essay wrote how he wanted to have a book that he could give to his 7-year-old that taught her how to handle being sentenced to freedom, borrowing Sartre’s phrase. It is at 22 that I realize with my full consciousness, that I have been sentenced to freedom. As Henrik quotes a character from a Dostoevsky’s novel, we humans long to submit to authority, and so did I, and actually still do, but that doesn’t change the fact. I feel as much frightened as does a 7 year old. But now I have grown old enough to stop seeking comfort in what’s probably not true. Even though I know very little of him, I gamble that truth also has some comfort to give me.

    The other model, of how the world ought to work, needed as much demolishing if not much more. But at this point, I will have to dismantle it very carefully. It’s not wise to just blow things apart. Because most of these building blocks are useful and important, and actually their much being useful to me was the very thing that made it harder for me to demolish the building. But I can dismantle it carefully, so that I can discard what I am not sure is right, and preserve what I think is important. Perhaps I don’t need to build something to accommodate everything and everyone. I can start from something small, a home for me.

    1. which acted as the prompt for this kind of response; the thoughts in fact had been embedding for a while ↩︎
    2. which consequently boils down to how humans ought to live ↩︎

  • Change of environment (alt title: a cool graph)

    In

    Change of environment sometimes does wonders.

    The last time I spent more than a week in Lahore was when I was working on my thesis. And those were very bad days. I was getting nothing done, and was enjoying myself neither. Getting back at home did improve things a lot.

    I knew I would have to come here again for a few days (i.e., in these days — the time of writing this), but when I changed my plan to stay here for a week and a few days, I was getting anxious that I might return to the same state as I was in those thesis days.

    I arrived Lahore yester-evening, and I turned out to write two essayish blog posts in two successive days (only a night’s sleep apart). A funnier way to frame this is this:

    Few days back I had shared this graph with a friend:

    I think my life is this graph on loop, super-imposed on a slightly positively sloped straight line.

    So, at the time I had shared it with my friend, I felt like I was at the purple point:

    Now, I think that, I was at orange point then1 and now am at the green point.

    So yeah, I feel like in the I’m so back phase and the peak has yet to come soon. Also, I realize this graph is a handy tool to share updates with friends. So, sharing this graph here, so that if you wanna share updates with me, you can do so by marking this graph. Thank me later 😂

    1. And tbh, it was literally so over (details are TMI and hence can’t be shared, but I am not referring to the thesis phase.) ↩︎

  • Wordless Thinking

    In

    Henrik had posted a new essay (When is it better to think without words?) some days ago and I had been holding out reading it. I think I do this because Henrik’s essays feel too sacred to be read casually. And it turned out right. I literally jumped off my feet–several times–as I read it today at dawn.

    What makes Henrik’s essays so lovely is that it’s like, there’s a sort of hum of a melody you had heard somewhere in childhood and the details of it are faded (perhaps you had only heard it from far off and your ears didn’t had capacity to perceive those details in the first place), and that faded hum stays in your mind for days and months and years, and then someday, you turn your attention to someone, and they start playing that precise melody that has been taking up your mind for so long, with such sharp and crisp details that your ears start savoring with great attention so as to fill in those missing details, and as the melody is about to end, you are startled as you realize there is more to that melody that you hadn’t heard of before, and what you had been repeating was merely a segment of an extended symphony.

    I think I have been doing this thinking-without-words thing, for a few years, even though much rudimentary compared to Hadamard’s. This description seems oddly familiar:

    He also saw something that looked like equations, but as if seen from a distance, without glasses on: he was unable to make out what they said.

    this type of deep, consciously-blurry concentration

    Often when, reading something or paying attention to something for long, excites my mind too much, I go for a walk, that sometimes continues for an hour or more, in which I think without words1. And I feel this strange tension, because there’s this wide panorama, really really wide, and I can see these bizarre connections between remote things, but when I try to zoom in or to look clearly into the details of that thing to be able to validate if that apparent connection makes any sense or not, the whole image shatters and falls apart. And so I am left empty-handed, retaining neither that wide panorama, nor any conclusions about validity of any particular connection/pattern. It’s a very unsettling feeling.

    This was how I had described that feeling a while ago:

    You can replace “thinking in pre-concepts” with “thinking without words“

    The thought reference was the essay Think by Talha Ashraf:

    [Deep thinking] depends on not only one level away from direct results but then another level away where you think about the effects of the effects and then again the effects of those effects and then also try to think about the results of these combinations. The only problem with this is that these levels exist as preconcepts, things that cannot even be defined with words because they are too vague at that point. Most of them you probably cant even identify as concepts so you wont be able to write them down and if you cant write them down you run into a very basic problem that everytime you start thinking about them you have to start from scratch. You cant start again from where you left off becuase the end was not a concept but a combination of vague concepts and their effects. This means that the only way to think in depth is through uninterruped chains of thought. You can only have uninterrupted chains of thoughts if you have time in solitude and the depth of your thoughts are then limited by the longest uninterruped duration of thinking that you can have. …

    Now there is one caveat in solitude allowing the longest chains of thought. Which is that you can keep thinking about vague concepts in vague ways without ever actually turning them into something concrete. And this is where a lot of people get stuck at. After you have spent sufficient time in your thoughts you actually want to try writing your vague thoughts by converting them into words. You are basically trying to think in “type” where instead of interrupting your thoughts to write, you think in writing by just starting to write down your thoughts.

    The thread in that screenshot was my after-thought to the difficulty I was having in thinking in type described in the thought-reference. So, I was basically having this tension where I was becoming ever more skeptical of my whole thinking (like, is the panorama even there or am I suffering from a thinking-schizophrenia?) because when I attempted to re-think those thoughts in words, they just wouldn’t come; without that multi-dimensionality there was nowhere to begin from. That was even more problematic because if somehow, I could grasp them in a concrete manner, I could at least shrug them off saying, nah they don’t make any sense, but now I couldn’t even do that, because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But also, if there’s no evidence, then on what grounds am I standing on? I can’t live suspended in the air.

    Reading Henrik’s essay clarifies a lot of things.

    It seems the problem I have is this. What I have called the panorama is sort of a web of associations in a higher dimension space. It feels blurry because the eyes-equivalent-of-brain are physically incapable of looking at it in a distinct manner. What we can look at, is a representation of it that has been compressed into a lower dimension. But compression with minimum amount of loss, is very resource intensive. My brain is low in this processing power, which makes the compressing process computationally slow. Then, the working-memory of my brain is also very limited, and hence the residual accumulation exhausts it before the computation completes. The process crashes.

    The way to get anywhere, it seems, is to not to try to compress the whole panorama at once but some chunks of it, that are large enough to contain useful associations. If somehow, I can keep hold of at least two remote points and the association between them2, from the high dimensional space to low dimensional space, I will have something concrete to build further upon. And the good thing is that our hardware is flexible. If we keep exercising these compression computations, our working memory expands and processing speed improves, and thus we can bring in larger and larger chunks from the high dimensional space to the low dimensional one3.

    Looking at the writings in my weblog, it seems I have been able to run a handful of computations involving compression of very small chunks of that wider panorama, without crashing. For those of you who have seen me, I feel just as much progressed with this exercise, as I would feel if I went to a gym someday4.

    But the thing is, this whole affair is not about compression at all. It’s about building a better model in the higher dimensional space—a model that is closer to truth. That is why we compress it into lower dimensional space, in the first place, so that we can scrutinize it more thoroughly, looking for contradictions and flaws, and fix parts that need to be fixed, and demolish parts that need to be demolished, thus updating the high-dimensional model5. A very useful by-product of it though, is that we can share results of our findings (based upon scrutiny of the compressions) with others and read findings shared by others, and based upon our personal re-inspection of others’ findings, speed up the model-iteration process by magnitudes.

    1. Probably more often than this, I do the other kind of stroll in which I do think in words—or speech to be precise. It’s a conversation I have with myself. [Probably, that’s why I have become accustomed to circling on the roof my hostel or veranda of my home (where I am alone), instead of something like a park, because I find it very hard to have a deep conversation with someone in presence of others (regardless of whether others are paying any attention or not). Even though I don’t actually speak aloud the words when I am talking to myself, but it shows in my behavior (I laugh at funny things and even slap myself (though much rarely))]. ↩︎
    2. The other kind of stroll where I talk with myself (or think in speech/words) also helps make new associations, but those are mostly with points much closer in that high-dimensional space. ↩︎
    3. But, the compressions are still lossy. You can’t substitute them for the thinking in high-dimensional space. Physicists or mathematicians are able to talk to each other in words or symbols, only when they can map the compressed representations to their own individual thinking in the high-dimensional space. ↩︎
    4. Those who have actually seen me know that’s a false comparison. The state of affairs is much more feeble in meat-space. ↩︎
    5. If I am not mistaken about the technical processes, this happens with LLMs only in the training phase. Once an LLM model has been trained, it is not re-updating its model with every single computation it does—unlike human beings. ↩︎

  • Gall’s Law and Feedback Loop

    In

    Few days back, someone I follow on Curius had added link of this video on their Curius profile:

    This reminded me of the principle described by John Gall:

    A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.1

    If you think about it, you see it everywhere, from evolution of life, to all the technological progress, to the idea behind MVP.

    But the thing is that we live in times where technology has gotten so sophisticated that it is becoming harder and harder for us to imagine about simpler technology that works.

    Feynman had narrated an example of it about how when he was a kid, they used to open up radios and you could see all the component parts. Basically, when you opened up devices at that time, what you got was a diagram of how that thing worked, but as technology evolved further, it became more and more opaque, and you no longer got that diagram when you opened something up.

    But the underlying working principles haven’t changed much. We probably have uncovered more of physics in last 50 years. But the kind of physics needed to build or understand most of elementary things, is not really new; only its implementations have become more sophisticated.

    And I don’t intend to say that that sophistication is inherently bad. The technology was bound to get more sophisticated. There was no other way. What I am pointing out is that from the technologies we see around us, we now have a longer route to re-trace to get back to first principles.

    Similarly, we look at computer systems and software, and it’s so daunting. Like, just look at the graphics of any modern video game. And it seems unimaginable how humans can program something like that. But that’s because we have forgotten that we once used to play Prince of Persia, Mario, Pac-Man, Tetris and the like.

    We look at people accomplished in certain areas, say, for example, writers, and think the same. And fail to realize that it’s not like a person, one day, randomly decides to write something, and comes up with something like Macbeth2. I’m not saying that one can’t one day randomly decide to do something he hasn’t done before and still come up with good results. I think quite the opposite: if someone’s the right kind of person for the job, he is highly likely to come up with good results in his early attempts, provided that he starts with a simple version. A writer doesn’t need to come up with a very sophisticated insight, or a scientist a complicated discovery, or an engineer with a complex invention, in early iterations, he only needs to come up with something that works3.

    Now, this seems to be gravitating to very cliché ideas, and so let me turn this around.

    Even though all complex systems that work evolve from simpler systems that also worked, starting from a simple system that works, does not guarantee in itself that it will also evolve into a complex system or that it will continue working if it evolves.

    What makes a simple system evolve into a complex system that still keeps working is a strong feedback loop.

    Those systems that don’t have a very strong feedback loop to guide their evolution, will either have to slow down (stop evolving) if they have to stay working, or will fail at some point if they keep iterating further on whims without any feedback loop to guide them.

    A strong feedback loop is one that is strong and both of its ends, i.e., it is (i) highly perceptive at the sensory end, and (ii) it’s highly precise and moderately4 fast in it’s execution.

    I think systems get more and more risk averse as they increase in complexity, and that is why most of them stop evolving, and hence we end up at local maxima, never seeing the light of what a global maximum looks like.

    1. This is popularly known as Gall’s law.
      Source: John Gall (1975) Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail p. 71 ↩︎
    2. I haven’t read Macbeth and don’t really know what’s so great about it, and thus, I shouldn’t probably use this example, but I can’t think of any for now, so I am just assuming that if mathematicians use a literary work as an example benchmark in their theories, it must be good enough. ↩︎
    3. I had earlier written “come up with something useful” but the usefulness is context-dependent and the term works in itself contains the context. For instance, if someone is writing something funny to amuse someone, and it actually amuses them, then it works whether or not anyone thinks it useful. ↩︎
    4. I say moderately fast because there seems to be a tradeoff between preciseness and speed of execution. ↩︎

  • Memorizing whole sentences instead of words

    In

    There’s this problem with repeating a certain reference work (even with word-by-word translation) on repeat in attempt to learn language. That is, your brain start memorizing whole sentences and their meanings instead of forming individual word by word associations. Even though, one might be able to fully understand the readings on which the language learner has done his exercise, he might not be able to extrapolate that learning, even to another passage that uses the very same vocabulary. Language learner should thus be wary of this illusion and constantly stream himself newer stuff (even though containing same level vocabulary).

  • Chair

    In

    A chair is an enclosing structure. A low-height table with which you are supposed to sit on ground is better than an elevated table and a chair, because on ground, your body is not enclosed in a structure and hence enjoys greater deal of flexibility while moving around.

    Example of a good work setup

  • Learning

    In

    Learning is not acquiring of information. Learning is an act of discovery. Perceptive observations and skeptical inquiry are what drive this act. A teacher is a person who trains a disciple to become better at observations and more thorough in his in inquiry.

    A student’s discovery is distinct from his teacher’s discovery. Teacher’s own discovery is no substitute for his student’s. And a student’s discovery needs not to be less insightful than teacher’s own. The student-teacher relationship is asymmetric in time but not in value. Both benefit from each other’s discovery.

    Books are not a store of information to be acquired. Books are field-diaries of people involved in act of discovery, and hence a highly useful resource for one’s own acts of discovery.