Jukkasoft

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Operationalisointi tarkoittaa teoreettisen käsitteen yhdistämistä kohteessa havaittaviin mitattaviin ominaisuuksiin. Olennaista siis määrittää ilmaisulle “lihaa ja nahkaa” ympärille, jotta asiasta keskustelu ei jäisi pelkäksi verbaaliakrobatiaksi.

2019-2020 näin Twitterissä pyörivän keskustelua valoisasta tulevaisuudesta. Kielikuva on ymmärtääkseni sen verran lavea, että keskustelua voisi auttaa tämän käsitteen operationalisointi.

Erikseen voitaisiin ottaa myös äärimmäinen kirkas tulevaisuus. Tämäkin on käsitteenä pyörinyt itse asiassa varmasti vuosikymmeniä, ennen sosiaalisen median aikakautta, suomalaisessa kulttuurissa ja kielessä.

Eli keskustelu (tämä blogiteksti), pyrkii valottamaan valoisaa tulevaisuutta.

Valoisan tulevaisuuden vastakohta lienee jokin näistä:

• dystooppinen (/ “synkkä”) tulevaisuus)
• pimeä tulevaisuus
• hämärä tulevaisuus

Mitä ovat teoreettiset käsitteet?

Kompastumme hieman aivan alussa, ellemme ymmärrä sananpartta “teoreettinen käsite“. En osannut avata tätä ilman hieman lisätutkimuksia.

Apriorisesti voisin ajatella että

• mikäli erikseen puhutaan “teoreettisesta käsitteestä”, on siis olemassa myös ei-teoreettisia käsitteitä
• “käytännöllinen käsite” voisi olla luonnollinen eräs ei-teoreettinen käsite
• onko käsitteiden avaruus riittävä, mikäli jaamme käsitteet binäärisesti näin; eli että on (vain) kahdenlaisia käsitteitä?

Teoreettisen käsitteen tarkentuminen; eli “mitä tapahtui kun olin tehnyt hieman lisätutkimuksia”:

Teoreettinen käsite mahdollisesti pitää erotella käytännöllisestä käsitteestä, ensin. Onko oikea vastakohta?

Kaksi kysymystä siis; 1) onko “käytännöllisiä käsitteitä” olemassa (jotka eroavat siis vain yksinkertaisista konseptiennimistä, kuten vaikkapa “juustohöylä”). 2) Onko teoreettisen käsitteen vastakohta käytännöllinen käsite?

• käy läpi kirjallisuutta ja tutki mitkä ovat jo etabloituja konstrukteja käsitteiden ontologiassa ja sen vierialueille
• pidä ajatus koossa! ei välttämättä maailman helpoin alue
• ja kolmaskin havainto. pälä pälä. Tänne jadaa. Eli tässä on tarkoitus olla ohjeistusta kirjoittamiseen, ikäänkuin oma väliaikainen muistio.
• pidä käytännöllisenä – jos mahdollista ylipäätään tällä aiheella
• pidä asiaan johdattavana, hyödyllisenä -> aina hyöty, vaikka hyödyn utiliteetti ei olisi universaali (ei olekaan!)

Tavoitteena käsitteiden operationalisoinnissa on yleisesti:

• pystyä mittaamaan ja
• havainnoimaan totuudenmukaisesti operationalisoitavan käsitteen piirteitä

jatkuu!

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In the year 2039, we (humans) are partly scanners. People walk with 3d scanning beams coming
out of their eyes or other parts. https://jukkasoft.com/2009/05/29/future-part-xxiii/

Steps to between now (2020) and 2039?

• mobile phones have a camera (y 2003) Ericsson Z1010
• mobile phones start shifting into “permanent” wearable device, like Google Glass
• other wearable devices emerge alongside mobile/Glass hybrids (health, fitness products)
• no camera needs in fitness gear, though? except… X, Y and selfies!
• embedded cameras improve in quality
• RAM (storage) improves in capacity and density, enabling smaller and more fashionable devices
• digital signal processors improve for making better vision systems
• ergonomics
• product design
• privacy laws in various countries
• society’s trends
• general attitude towards being filmed, and/or carrying a camera
• lead users – “advocates”
• anti-lead users – “nay-sayers”
• use cases? what real benefit would those “scanning eyes” have?
• do they outweight the costs and hindrances
• evolutionary game theory simulation

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Essentials of the CCPA (California) 2020

The California CCPA will be effective on 1.1.2020 in United States, in state of California. Practical implications to Independent software vendors (ISVs) and web service providers will be similar to, but not identical to European GDPR.

CCPA is a similar data protection act as the European -wide GDPR. GDPR was enacted on 2018.

Good video on the CCPA here:

How the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will affect you and your business | TECH(talk)

CCPA key ingredients:

• class action lawsuit is possible
• up to 750 US Dollars per infringement

California rolls out its CCPA effective 1.1.2020

CCPA is a bill formally known as AB375. Wikipedia tells the details.

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1.2 million christmas trees, per year, for Finnish households. That’s in 2019. We celebrate Christmas with real trees in our living rooms. When I first saw the actualy figure, and did quick back-of-the-envelope calculations, it was a striking experience: mere Christmas tree business would account for some 40-60 million euros yearly as sales. First ingredient.

Ephemeralization?

With technology, we (consumers) are more potent, with less tools, but ever more incapable of actually doing the things first-hand. In other words: we rely on technology. Something along those lines. Ephemeralization is the concept that was the second ingredient in lighting this very article you’re reading.

We typically have thought of “large business sectors” like:

• banking
• communications
• manufacture
• hotels
• restaurants
• education
• transportation

But think of all the new ones that could be major segments in the future:

• dishes
• household cleaning
• whole clothes lifecycle management (outsourcing)
• household turn-key waste management (outsourced)
• household security (already is a big business in 2020)
• groceries (100% delivered as a service, to the millimeter – in your fridge)

Typical household of 2070s

We’re thus hopping 50 years to the future, which is often radical enough leap to afford radical change in society (I’ve personally already seen the Amara’s Law in action; for example only now in 2020 the mobile digital ecosystem can start to offer things that I saw coming – and in fact, “necessary” – already in beginning of the 2000s).

There’s a saying that an innovation takes about 10-12 years from a laboratory to the field.

Naturally we can’t be sure of the direction of future, but I have a strong gut feeling:

• homes will be more automated
• people want to more clearly be spending their time on specific niche skill areas, professionally
• the prevalence of household tinkering (DIY – do it yourself attitude) doesn’t grow dramatically – on the contrary, it is more likely to diminish, as things get more technical and services are more widely available for a spectrum of problem areas
• services are clearly “packetized”
• whether service sales comes directly as a result of product bundling or separately – my looking glass doesn’t tell 🙂
• services will be abundantly used, anyway, by consumers
• service delivery happens with help of digital technology and AI
• AI is used especially in coordinating and scheduling the tasks into a sensible personal “smörgåsbord” (collection)
• smaller niche tasks are outsourced in a wider range of households

Back to the 2020s – we are witnessing…

• Uber (a company) which spearheaded…
• Mobility as a Service (MaaS) concept
• Food delivery companies flourishing (Wolt, GrubHub, DoorDash, UberEats, and others)
• Retail revolution – slowly but surely
• Groceries in a tumultuous change phase, with rising consumer consciousness and issues regarding environment and ethics of the whole production chain
• Virtualization of fitting room (in clothes)

In the future, services aimed at households (consumers) will be more fine-tuned, constrained, and the service delivery is much better than today – especially what comes to seamless integration time-wise (scheduling). Utilization of digital service delivery platforms is probably close to 100% penetration; everyone assumes there’s no point relying solely on pen and paper.

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JIF 1

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I started reading some quantum physics as a hobby. I’m scanning through, very cursorily absorbing the ideas. And thinking.

I was immediately somehow caught by the Yang-Mills challenge. It’s something that I do not understand basically at all. I wanted to know more, at least so much that I could understand what the challenge wants a person to solve.

Yang-Mills is about finding a kind of uniting beauty, the “next level”, if you wish, in quantum fields theories. It seems that during the last 50 years there’s something that has bugged theorists: fermions.

Fermions are massless particles. Pauli who was a famous nuclear physicist, invented a 6-dimensional theory but refrained from publicizing it since (perhaps) his intuition was, that the massless particles were aberrant and indicative of possibly an erroneous theory?

Fermions, I originally thought, were purely an ‘odd class’ of elementary particles. I read again the parts of Wikipedia, which tell about fermions. When coming to contact with quantum physics, my background is that I excelled in high school physics, but ever since (that’s 20+ years ago), well.. Haven’t much used any of the stuff actively.

Mechanics, kinematics, thermodynamics were all very interesting areas of high school physics. I didn’t especially like optics, because I found optics to be reliant on mostly trigonometric functions; and trigonometry was to me combining two things I absolutely detest: approximate values, given by a calculator or a table of mathematics; and having to rotely memoize “which is which” – I never seemed to remember was it sin() or cos() to be used in certain situations. So to me the use of sine or cosine was kind of this black box mentality. And I always mixed them up! 🙂

Other pieces, perhaps, than the massless particles, somehow fit the spirit of our (possibly “innate”) newtonian thinking, where there shouldn’t be oddities. Newtonian means the classical functions describing things like:

• a falling object (under gravity)
• bouncing (elastic) objects – momentum
• acceleration due to a force other than gravity
• the “conservative” friction (which is also a force), whose energy is always wasted effect

But on the other hand quantum physics does lead to some counterintuitive thinking.

I’m mesmerized by the [the margin is way too erratically set in order for me to continue writing here, right now]

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Jos käytät Googlea tiedon hakuun sisäänkirjautuneena, eli “omalla tunnuksellasi”, näet eri asiat kuin mitä tuttavasi näkee. Näet myös eri asiat kuin mitä näkisi anonyymi robotti tai ihmiskäyttäjä – anonyymi, eli sellainen joka ei ole kirjautuneena, tai jolle ei ole vielä kertynyt profiilia.

Sisäänkirjautuessa googlen hakukoneen serverin ohjelmisto saa profiilisi; tämän jälkeen Googlen analytiikkakoodi tuntee sinut paremmin kuin naapurisi, puolisosi – tai jopa sinä itse. Profiili on erittäin tarkka. Tietokone ei myöskään unohda, jollei sitä käsketä unohtamaan.

Profiilin tarkkuus ja sen sisältämän tiedon syvyys perustuu siihen, että käytämme valtavan usein google-hakua. Se on hyvin huomaamatonta. Tee testi! Paina Ctrl+H näppäimistöltä, kun olet seuraavan kerran Chrome-selaimessa. Näet hakuhistoriasi. Kirjoita historian paikalliseen filtteriin ‘Google’, ja näet nyt pelkät haut. Jokaisen haun vieressä on ajankohta, jolloin hakua on käytetty. Laskin viikonlopun aikana tapahtuneet omat haut – olin tehnyt parisataa google-hakua, kuin huomaamatta. Luku yllätti suuruudellaan.

Kun ensimmäisen kerran törmää oikeasti filtterikupla-ilmiöön, se hämmentää. Asiaa ei vielä ymmärrä, mutta huomaa, että “jokin bugittaa”; miksi tutulla näkyy eri jutut kuin itsellä? Tuttu on saattanut antaa linkin, jotta näkisit nimenomaan tietynlaisen Googlen antaman hakutuloslistauksen, mutta sitä ei odotuksista riippumatta tulekaan.

Ilmiön taustalla on Googlen noin vuodesta 2004 alkaen kehittämä personointi hakualgoritmiin. Haut pyritään tekemään älykkäämmäksi, hyödyntämällä erittäin suurten massojen louhintaa. Louhinta tarkoittaa, että tekoäly voidaan opettaa todellisten tallennettujen tulosten perusteella, ilman että ohjelmoijan täytyy lainkaan miettiä toteutusta. Periaatteessa siis koodi on suhteellisen lyhyt ja helppo, mutta sen perusteella muodostuu älykästä toimintaa, kun algoritmille syötetään miljoonien ihmisten hakuhistoria ja niiden perusteella tapahtuneet “toiminnat” eli käytännössä valinnat.

Personoinnilla pyritään nostamaan Googlen käyttökelpoisuutta ja hyödyllisyyttä käyttäjälle, meille. Sen sivuvaikutuksena syntyy tietynlaisia lieveilmiöitä, kuten filtterikupla.

Tunsitko filtterikuplan?

Mistä muista verkossa tapahtuvaan profilointiin liittyvistä asioista haluaisit kuulla?

Kerro kokemuksesi ja paranna blogia tulevaisuudessa. Iso kiitos!

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I haven’t much done games – as in programming them! During 1990s I did one, called ‘Space Shrapnel’ (finnish Avaruusromua), where a spacecraft has to be navigated through a random asteroid field – a side scrolling action game. Although a very simple game, it was quite much fun doing it!

I wrote the game in Commodore 64 BASIC. Designed a sprite, bound the keyboard controls to the spacecraft; added a scrolling background with character-mapped graphics. That was it. Some 200-300 lines of Commodore BASIC language. There was naturally also a “epic” (hmrhmhm….) background tune – but I refuse to talk about the merits there.

Thus this was my thinking one day: let’s grab some Python and do a proper game!

I think part of the reason that I’m really bad at implementing games, is due to the fact that I tend to over-engineer plans, while leaving the rote coding astray in hobby projects. Coding is hard, you know! It’s time to change that.

Python is one of the programming languages I have had a keen interest on learning. I’d done some “mainly read, some writing” of 3D scene importing scripts (for Blender 3D software).

Yet Python remained a bit distant as a casual language for making any standalone project – things that could really stand on their own, and be executed independently.

Battle sim in Python, day 1 (17.8.2019)

I wrote a piece of program to represent “armies”. I want to push armies against each other, one on one. The armies are represented as stats, a bunch of numeric data, and then the battle algorithm – along with a bit of chance – determines outcomes of individual clashes.

At first they only had:

• person count (soldiers)
• offensive strength score 0-100
• defensive strength score 0-100

Naturally that wouldn’t suffice. If actual battles were to be simulated, the armies would have casualties! So maybe it would be proper to record number of soldiers who went KIA, killed-in-action.

At this point my code was around 100 lines of Python. Some structures, initializing routines (“constructors”) for the armies; a bit of boilerplate, and whimsical plans for development, thrown in as inline comments within the code. The typical startup.

I couldn’t yet run the code. In a way the ability to run code would give something to grab: when you can get into that legendary “loop”, things usually look much brighter. Getting to the loop as soon as possible can be considered a modern cornerstone of agile development.

It was time to amend this and make a version that would run, print out at least some signs of life; and then terminate. I’d be quite happy with that as the first day tour of duty.

Language details: Python 3 and data structures

• arrays
• dict
• what’s missing?
• what are the batteries-included in Python 3, without using ‘import’ statements?
• everything is now a properly formatted function
• Python 2 was a bit ‘scriptish’, Python 3 is more formal

I split the initialization of the Battle Sim to constructor functions. They set data in the “army” variables. Python has a dict which suits well representing a record like an army: you have key-value pairs in the dict. By making a contract with yourself, that for example

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