[Please note important boldface corrections in this post – Feb. 1, 2022]

Just in case you’ve started getting notifications on your Mac that “Software from ‘Fei Lv’ added items that can run in the background. You can manage this in Login Items Settings”, here’s an explanation that I could not find anywhere on the Internet.

This seems to be coming from NordPass [Nope. Coincidence.], which I have been trying out as a replacement for 1Pass. a password manager. I like 1Password and it is a well-regard and trust password manager, but it’s UI has been getting overly complex for my tastes, mainly because I’ve entered too many redundant, broken entries. I recommend 1Pass and will probably be going back to it. But NordPass was offering a great intro deal, and I’ve been a satisfied user of NordVPN for years now.

I started getting the annoying Fei Lv notifications, and struggled to find what app, piece of software, or sneaky malware was causing them. Apple does not make it easy. It’s relatively easy to find in the log that the notification is happening, but not which app “Fei Lv” applies to. Neither did Google or Bing searches.

Trial and error, however, worked well. It looks like it’s NordPass [Nope]. So, if you’re hearing from the mysterious Fei Lv, try turning off NordPass through System Preferences and see if that does the trick. [It won’t] It did for me [For a few days].

i’ll consider turning it back on if NordPass reassures me that Fei Lv isn’t some malware that snuck on to my computer. [NordPass is not the problem. I still don’t know what is.]

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Our 3 year old grandchild was randomly typing on my wife’s Chromebook and somehow made all of the images go wonky. This includes all images displayed in the browser, the system’s wallpaper, and even the icons.

I could not find any mention of this problem anywhere on the Internet, apparently because I insisted on using the word “posterize” to describe the images’ condition. The rest of the world apparently calls this “inverted.” I have been calling inverted images posterized probably since the late 1980s. It has never before steered me wrong. But according to dictionaries and what Google Search has learned from the Internet, I’ve definitely been misusing it.

But first, the solution to the Chromebook problem. I learned this from Iain Tait (@iaintait) who responded to my tweet asking for help. He pointed to this article in Chrome Unboxed. Our granddaughter unwittingly put the Chromebook into “high contrast mode.” Clicking Ctrl+Search+H will undo the little devil’s mischief.

Now, back to how I went wrong.

Posterization apparently was coined in the 1950s to refer to the process of turning a color image into the sort of stylized image often used in posters. Gradations in color are flattened, colors are brightened, and so forth, until the image would have been acceptable to The Beatles in their late psychedelic phase. Inversion is a 1:1 clipping of colors so that the original looks like what I think a color negative of it would look like, but I’m probably wrong about that too.

Here’s an example using a photo of our post-Thanksgiving walk (CC-BY-SA-NC by me).

Original:

Posterized:

Inverted:

But the real point of this post is to let Google Search see a few more instances of posterize, posterized, and posterizing in the same sentence as image inversion and Google Chromebooks so that the next fool who confuses posterization and image inversion when faced with an image inverted by Chromebook will find at least one damn entry that clarifies a mistake that apparently no one else has ever made.

Posterize inverted images Chromebook. Posterize inverted images Chromebook. Posterize inverted images Chromebook. Posterize inverted images Chromebook.

(The transformations are by Pixelmator Pro.)

* * *

Isian has written a lovely post about how our paths crossed after many years.

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I had never heard of meteor scatter communications before. After reading the Wikipedia article, I can only say it is beautiful. Literally. Messages bouncing off the ionized trails of meteorites at the end of their journey? It’s haunting, like the Harmony of the Spheres.

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Google has just launched a new podcast that Yannick Assogba (twitter: @tafsiri) and I put together. Yannick is a software engineer at Google PAIR where I was a writer-in-residence for two years, until mid-June. I am notably not a software engineer. Throughout the course of the nine episodes, Yannick helps me train machine learning models to play Tic Tac Toe and then a much more complex version of it. Then our models fight! (Guess who wins? Never mind.)

This is definitely not a tutorial. We’re focused on getting beneath the metaphors we usually use when talking about machine learning. In so doing, we keep coming back to the many human decisions that have to be made along the way.

So the podcast is for anyone who wants to get a more vivid sense of how ML works and the ways in which human intentions and assumptions shape each and every ML application. The podcast doesn’t require any math or programming skills.

It’s chatty and fun, and full of me getting simple things wrong. And Yannick is a fantastic teacher. I miss seeing him every day :(

All nine episodes are up now. They’re about 25 mins each. You can find them wherever you get your podcasts, so long as it carries ours.

Podcast: https://pair.withgoogle.com/thehardway/

Two-minute teaser:  https://share.transistor.fm/s/6768a641

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I just listened to an excellent Marc Maron interview with Jerry Seinfeld.

When I first saw Seinfeld’s post-series 2002 documentary, Comedian, I really enjoyed it, although like many, I was made queasy by the film’s portrayal of the far lesser-known comedian Orny Adams — talk about punching down! Seinfeld’s idolization of Bill Cosby also has not aged well, to put it mildly; I don’t know how widely known Cosby’s decades of drugging and raping women were — Tina Fey was making references to it by 2005 — and I don’t know the degree to which Seinfeld should have known, should have heard, should have listened.

So within those two large moral bookends, one of which is overwhelming, what I liked about the documentary was its portrayal of the craft of comedy. I’m not the biggest fan of Seinfeld’s stand-up, but “I admire his dedication to, and clarity about, the work of getting a laugh”I admire his dedication to, and clarity about, the work of getting a laugh. I’ve always been interested in this, and if you are too, in addition to Maron’s WTF podcast, I recommend Jesse David Fox’s Good One.

Maron’s interview revealed rifts between the him and Seinfeld. Maron thinks, I believe, those rifts expose weaknesses in Seinfeld. I think they’re strengths.

First, Maron wants comedy to make a difference personally, socially, and politically. For him, subject matter matters. Not to Seinfeld. He’s famous for “observational” humor that gets laughs about the little things in life. In fact, part of observational humor’s humor is its finding humor in the trivia of everyday life. As Seinfeld says repeatedly in the interview, all that matters is the laugh.

Second, Maron wants to be authentic on stage. He wants people to see who he is. Seinfeld just wants his audience to laugh. To Maron, that seems superficial. To Seinfeld, Maron’s style — which is more or less the style these days— is self-indulgent.

These rifts meant that when Maron tried to get Seinfeld to talk about the psychology of comics, Seinfeld wasn’t biting. There isn’t any one psychology, Seinfeld responds. “Delving into comedy’s psychological roots therefore doesn’t tell you anything about comedy”Delving into comedy’s psychological roots therefore doesn’t tell you anything about comedy, although it does tell you something about the comedian. So long as you’re getting laughs, you’re a good comedian in Seinfeld’s book.

Focusing on craft is perhaps easier for Seinfeld — no, not because of his psychology, but because he is a comedy formalist. He likes to build a structure for his jokes so they are not just one-liners. The normal way to do this is to tell a comedic story that puts the joke into a richer context. Seinfeld doesn’t do that so much as build a structure in which the jokes are related by their ideas. It is a purer structure than most, just as Seinfeld’s process is purer than most: he writes jokes for two hours every day, or at least he used to.

I say all of this without counting myself as being much of a fan of Seinfeld’s standup. I was a big fan of his TV series, largely because of its formalist perfection, the stories folding in on themselves…and folding in on the characters’ exaggerated psychologies. You can probably guess how I feel about Hannah Gadsby whose formalism goes far beyond that of an exquisitely constructed farce; it is art and philosophy.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve appreciated craft more and more. I“ used to be ashamed of standing close to a great painting to see the brushstrokes” used to be ashamed of standing close to a great painting to see the brushstrokes that from further back turn into a sunlit church facade or a weary face. I like that magical transformation as much as I like feeling the painting’s sunlight or weariness. I am no longer ashamed.

This probably has something to do with my life as a working writer. As I’ve had the privilege to write what I want over the past twenty years, I’ve found that my main satisfaction is the process of trying to get sentences, paragraphs, or chapters to work. Publishing or posting them brings far more anxiety and remorse than pleasure.

As many have said, humor is as sensitive to words and rhythms as is poetry. In the case of a Seinfeld, we often laugh because of the joke’s formal perfection, even if all it reveals is our attitude toward Pop-Tarts. It seems I like watching craftwork purely formally as well. And as I write that, I’m only a little ashamed.

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I have switched late in life from being someone who organizes things on the way out to organizing them on the way in. This is a big, fascinating deal that is worth an entire blog post. Totally.

In fact, this is basically only true for the silverware basket of our dishwasher. A few years ago I stopped dumping dirty cutlery into that basket and instead assigned each corner a silverware category:

The teaspoons and the soup spoons have to be diagonal from each other to minimize confusion. Further, all must be placed handle down to make it easier to grab a handful without unsorting them, except for knives which go blade down for safety reasons. But since knives are the exception, they too are easy to withdraw from the basket in sorted handfuls.

If you have entered silverware incorrectly, I will sigh audibly, correct your error, and donate $5 in your name to your anti-favorite charity. Sorry, but I don’t make the rules, people!

As you have realized, there is no reason to find this interesting. But I have one for me: In 2007 I wrote a book called Everything Is Miscellaneous that opened a chapter describing the way I would dump silverware into a drawer and sort it on the way out as needed because that seemed more efficient to me. But now “I have betrayed my own principles.”I have betrayed my own principles.

Long have I pondered this disturbing change in my personality.

It may well be that sorting silverware on the way in is more efficient because we overstuff our dishwasher, making the boundaries of the quadrants indistinct. We thus end up sorting on the way out as well as on the way in, although there’s less sorting to do. That’s why I do not sort the big forks from the little forks until on the way out, although if I had a fifth quadrant I would. O, where is the appliance manufacturer with the wisdom to make a pentagon-shaped cutlery basket? In fact, you could make the entire dishwasher a pentagon so the dishes would face one another and you could play some version of Chinese Checkers with them. One drawback: the dish racks wouldn’t slide out. But this is just the sort of problem that excites the good folks at GE.

So, despite the potential overall increase in system inefficiency, I continue to sort on the way in I think for a fairly simple reason: The thought of facing a vertical pile of miscellaneous cutlery fills me with anxiety as I think of the 45 to 90 seconds it will take to identify and place each piece. I would definitely find a lifetime of flimsy self-excuses until my wife has just gone ahead and emptied the dishwasher.

But why does that task fill me with such dread? I think we can have as many as 50 pieces of silverware in our basket. Maybe more. Filtering on the way out requires 50 little, annoying, pointless decisions. Yes, I have to make those 50 decisions when I sort on the way in but there are two advantages to my new methodology.

First, it’s easier to sort a pile that is spread out in time or in space than one that’s tightly clustered, because each discrimination is easier: I can instantly tell which is which when there’s only one meal’s worth in the sink. When they’re packed together, it’s harder.

Second, I almost always want to get the bad part over first. That’s a basic life principle for me. The pleasures of the moment are spoiled by the thought of the dismal experiences they are postponing. “How can I Be In The Moment when I know there’s Kale in the Next Moment?”How can I Be In The Moment when I know there’s Kale in the Next Moment?

And I don’t mean to get all morbid on you, but when taken at the macro level, this is all a way of avoiding death. When you’re 69, what isn’t? I may not be able to get the dying part over now so I can go on living with only good stuff ahead, but I can get the goddamn silverware sorted ahead of time!

I do not, however, plan on issuing an erratum to Everything Is Miscellaneous. If you and I ever Zoom and you see my office in the background, you’ll be heartened that I have continued to embrace messiness as a richer form of order.

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Circulating on the Internemets is some timely Passover pandemic humor. It will just be mysterious unless you’re familiar with the part of the Haggadah (the book read during the seder) that talks about the four children. (Hat tip to my sister-in-law, Maria Benet for passing it along.)

The Torah Speaks of Four Kinds of People Who Use Zoom:

• The Wise
• The Wicked
• The Simple
• The One Who Does Not Know How to “Mute”

The Wise Person says: “I’ll handle the Admin Feature Controls and Chat Rooms, and forward the Cloud Recording Transcript after the call.”

The Wicked Person says: “Since I have unlimited duration, I scheduled the meeting for six hours—as it says in the Haggadah, whoever prolongs the telling of the story, harei zeh ‘shubach, is praiseworthy.”

The Simple Person says: “Hello? Am I on? I can hear you but I can’t see you.”or: “I can see you, but I can’t hear you.”

The One Who Does Not Know How to Mute says: “How should I know where you put the keys? I’m stuck on this stupid Zoom call with these idiots.”

* * * * *

To the Wise Person you should offer all of the Zoom Pro Optional Add-On Plans.

To the Wicked Person you should say: “Had you been in charge, we would still be in Egypt.”

To the Simple Person you should say: “Try the call-in number instead.”

To the One Who Does Not Know How to Mute you should say: “Why should this night be different from all other nights?”

                                                — Rabbi Richard Hirsch, Pesach 2020

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Of the 4.67 gazillion pages on the Web, exactly 1.87 nano-bazillion are understandable by children. Suppose there were a convention and a service for making child-friendly versions of any site that wanted to increase its presence and value?

That was the basic idea behind our project at the MindCET Hackathon in the Desert a couple of weeks ago.

MindCET is an ed tech incubator created by the Center for Educational Technology (CET) in Israel. “Automatically generates grade-specific versions? Hahaha.”Its founder and leader is Avi Warshavsky, a brilliant technologist and a person of great warmth and character, devoted to improving education for all the world’s children. Over the ten years that I’ve been on the CET tech advisory board, Avi has become a treasured personal friend.

In Yeruham on the edge of the Negev, 14 teams of 6-8 people did the hackathon thing. Our team — to my shame, I don’t have a list of them — pretty quickly settled on thinking about what it would take to create a world-wide expectation that sites that explain things would have versions suitable for children at various grade levels.

So, here’s our plan for Onderstand.com.

Let’s say you have a site that provides information about some topic; our example was a page about how planes fly. It’s written at a normal adult level, or perhaps it assumes even more expertise about the topic. You would like the page to be accessible to kids in grade school.

No problem! Just go to Onderstand.com and enter the page’s URL. Up pops a form that lets you press a button to automatically generate versions for your choice of grade levels. Or you can create your own versions manually. The form also lets you enter useful metadata, including what school kid questions you think your site addresses, such as “How do planes fly?”, “What keeps planes up?”, and “Why don’t planes crash?” (And because everything is miscellaneous, you also enter tags, of course.)

Before I go any further, let me address your question: “It automatically generates grade-specific versions? Hahaha.” Yes, it’s true that in the 36 hours of the hackathon, we did not fully train the requisite machine learning model, in the sense that we didn’t even try. But let’s come back to that…

Ok, so imagine that you now have three grade-specific versions of your page about how planes fly. You put them on your site and give Onderstand their Web addresses as well as the metadata you’ve filled in. (Perhaps Onderstand.com would also host or archive the pages. We did not work out all these details.)

Onderstand generates a button you can place on your site that lets the visitor know that there are kid-ready versions.

The fact that there are those versions available is also recorded by Onderstand.com so that kids know that if they have a question, they can search Onderstand for appropriate versions.

Our business model is the classic “We’re doing something of value so someone will pay for it somehow.” Of course, we guarantee that we will never sell, rent, publish, share or monetize user information. But one positive thing about this approach: The service does not become valuable only once there’s lots of content. “Because sites get the kid-ready button, they get value from it”Because sites get the kid-ready button, they get value from it even if the Onderstand.com site attracts no visitors.

If the idea were to take off, then a convention that it establishes would be useful even if Onderstand were to fold up like a cheap table. The convention would be something like Wikipedia’s prepending “simple” before an article address. For example, the Wikipedia article “Airplane” is a great example of the problem: It is full of details but light on generalizations, uses hyperlinks as an excuse for lazily relying on jargon rather than readable text, and never actually explains how a plane flies. But if you prepend “simple” to that page’s URL — https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-wing_aircraft — you get taken to a much shorter page with far fewer details (but also still no explanation of how planes fly).

Now, our hackathon group did not actually come up with what those prepensions should be. Maybe “grade3”, “grade9”, etc. But we wouldn’t want kids to have to guess which grade levels the site has available. So maybe just “school” or some such which would then pop up a list of the available versions. What I’m trying to say is that that’s the only detail left before we transform the Web.

The machine learning miracle

Machine learning might be able to provide a fairly straightforward, and often unsatisfactory, way of generating grade-specific versions.

“The ML could be trained on a corpus of text that has human-generated versions for kids.”The ML could be trained on a corpus of text that has human-generated versions for kids. The “simple” Wikipedia pages and their adult equivalents could be one source. Textbooks on the same subjects designed for different class levels might be another, even though — unlike the Wikipedia “simple” pages — they are not more or less translations of the same text. There are several experimental simplification applications discussed on the Web already.

Even if this worked, it’s likely to be sub-par because it would just be simplifying language, not generating explanations that creatively think in kids’ terms. For example, to explain flight to a high schooler, you would probably want to explain the Bernoulli effect and the four forces that act on a wing, but for a middle schooler you might start with the experiment in which they blow across a strip of paper, and for a grade schooler you might want to ask if they’ve ever blown on the bottom of a bubble.

So, even if the ML works, the site owner might want to do something more creative and effective. But still, simply having reduced-vocabulary versions could be helpful, and might set an expectation that a site isn’t truly accessible if it isn’t understandable.

Ok, so who’s in on the angel funding round?

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Back when I was a lad, we experienced the absurdity of life by watching as ordinary things in the world shed their meanings the way the Nazi who opens the chest in Raiders of the Lost Ark loses his skin: it just melts away.

In this experience of meaninglessness, though, what’s revealed is not some other layer beneath the surface, but the fact that all meaning is just something we make up and project over things that are indifferent to whatever we care to drape over them.

If you don’t happen to have a holy ark handy, you can experience this meaninglessness writ small by saying the word “ketchup” over and over until it becomes not a word but a sound. The magazine “Forbes” also works well for this exercise. Or, if you are a Nobel Prize winning writer and surprisingly consistently wrong philosopher like Jean Paul Sartre, perhaps a chestnut tree will reveal itself to you as utterly alien and resistant to the meaning we keep trying to throw on to it.

That was meaninglessness in the 1950s and on. Today we still manage to find our everyday world meaningless, but now we don’t see ourselves projecting meanings outwards but instead imagine ourselves to be in a computer simulation. Why? Because we pretty consistently understand ourselves in terms of our dominant tech, and these days the video cards owned by gamers are close to photo realistic, virtual reality is creating vivid spatial illusions for us, and AI is demonstrating the capacity of computers to simulate the hidden logic of real domains.

So now the source of the illusory meaning that we had taken for granted reveals itself not to be us projecting the world out from our skull holes but to be super-programmers who have created our experience of the world without bothering to create an actual world.

That’s a big difference. Projecting meaning only makes sense when there’s a world to project onto. The experience of meaninglessness as simulation takes that world away.

The meaninglessness we experience assigns the absurdity not to the arbitrariness that has led us to see the world one way instead of another, but to an Other whom we cannot see, imagine, or guess at. We envision, perhaps, children outside of our time and space playing a video game (“Sims Cosmos”), or alien computer scientists running a test to see what happens using the rules they’ve specified this time. For a moment we perhaps marvel at how life-like are the images we see as we walk down a street or along a forest path, how completely the programmers have captured the feeling of a spring rain on our head and shoulders but cleverly wasted no cycles simulating any special feeling on the soles of our feet. The whole enterprise – life, the universe, and everything – is wiped out the way a computer screen goes blank when the power is turned off.

In the spirit of the age, the sense of meaninglessness that comes from the sense we’re in a simulation is not despair, for it makes no difference. Everything is different but nothing has changed. The tree still rustles. The spring rain still smells of new earth. It is the essence of the simulation that it is full of meaning. That’s what’s being simulated. It’s all mind without any matter, unlike the old revelation that the world is all matter without meaning. The new meaninglessness is absurd absurdity, not tragic absurdity. We speculate about The Simulation without it costing a thing. The new absurdity is a toy of thought, not a problem for life.

I am not pining for my years suffering from attacks of Old School Anxiety. It was depressing and paralyzing. Our new way of finding the world meaningless is playful and does not turn every joy to ashes. It has its own dangers: it can release one from any sense of responsibility – “Dude, sorry to have killed your cat, but it was just a simulation” – and it can sap some of the sense of genuineness out of one’s emotions. But not for long because, hey, it’s a heck of a realistic simulation.

But to be clear, I reject both attempts to undermine the meaningfulness of our experience. I was drawn to philosophical phenomenology precisely because it was a way to pay attention to the world and our experience, rather than finding ways to diminish them both.

Both types of meaninglessness, however, think they are opening our eyes to the hollowness of life, when in fact they are privileging a moment of deprivation as a revelation of truth, as if the uncertainty and situatedness of meaning is a sign that it is illusory rather than it being the ground of every truth and illusion itself.

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