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I was walking into my building as a woman, man, and two kids were leaving. I stepped aside to let them pass and smiled to be polite.

The woman was a short one, and as we passed she looked up at me-

I have never met this woman in my life. We’ve never said hi. I’ve never seen her before.

-She looked up at me and asked, “What does the top of a refridgerator look like?”

“It’s kinda bumpy and there’s all that stuff you’ve been looking for for six months,” I said.

She asked, “Like those socks I’m missing?”

“Exactly. They’re up there.”

“I knew it!” She walked past.

The guy just looks at the two of us like we’re insane.

But she was pretty short. She’s probably never seen the top of a refridgerator in the wild. I understood.

If I’m not going to do something about politics, I won’t talk about it.

My internet was down for a while. I got some work done, but not much.

I’ve heard it said that to understand all is to forgive all. I don’t think so. Understanding makes forgiveness easier, but they aren’t the same thing. People make decisions.

It’s hard to focus on dry math and abstract wiring with everything going on in the world. This is why humans send thoughts and prayers to each other. There is little I can do, but the urge to do something never rests.

But little actions add up, and there are many of us.

Still, I have to get through tomorrow, the day after, and the day after. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time.

Blogs are weird. They’re diaries for the world.

I’m not really sure what to say here.

And he was what the intelligence community said he was all along. Welcome back to the days of empire building.

I’m training some models for sequence processing deep learning. Right now I’m narrowing down the hyperparameters, and I do that by running a few dozen short training models with different, randomly chosen parameters. I just ran a batch of 20. I truncate at a validation patience of 30, so when the best run of the model is more than 30 validations ago, training stops.

Around 2200, the loss function (loss bad) was at 0.800 on model 20. All losses for the next set of rounds were above 0.800, and it takes about a minute per round. I can wait a few minutes to see the end of it. I started poking at some fanfiction.

At 2230, it hit 0.792. It has to be almost done, right?

2300, 0.745.

2330, 0.715.

At 0100 I gave up and left. It was still going.

I think Putin’s gains in Russia from taking center stage in Ukraine are underestimated. He’s in the world news, the non-Russian world news, and world leaders are jumping for a chance to talk to him. Every day he’s in the news, he raises his profile in Russia. This is sort of like winning games of chicken. I don’t think Ukraine wants to play this game of chicken, but in the question, ‘Should Russia and Ukraine play chicken?’ Russia has the biggest vote.

As such, Putin gains the longer this conflict goes on. Belarus and Russia just extended their wargames, extending Putin’s PR wins.

The Russians are notoriously skeptical of Russian news, but Putin is dominating the BBC, Reuters, and CNN. Right now Russians who don’t get their news from RT and Pravda are inundated with Putin. If the standoff continues, Putin’s airtime on non-Russian media continues. If Russia invades Ukraine more openly, Putin’s airtime on non-Russian media continues in a bigger way, albeit with higher risk. Putin has demonstrated an incredible tolerance for risk. If Putin stands down, he will lose some of that media play, and perhaps more importantly, what remains will be ‘West defeats Putin’ or ‘Putin bows to Western pressure’ etc. This is the risk of playing chicken.

Navalny has largely dropped out of the news, even as his next kangaroo court trial for another decade or so come up. Points to Putin here. I don’t know how long that trial is going to go, but the longer the Ukraine crisis extends, the more that trial gets hidden.

The real trick here is to try to empathize with Putin. He doesn’t see the world from my perspective; he sees it from his. So to predict what he’s going to do, I need to at least understand his perspective. And North Korea’s Kim has taught me that autocrats tend to play to their base, not the outside.

Hell, American politics teaches me that. However our elections, while not perfect, are pretty good at reminding our politicians other people exist.

Thacay. Mabatha. Whisky.

Biden stating Putin is going to invade Ukraine oddly offered Putin an offramp from invading Ukraine.

For several months, Putin has been saying he wasn’t going to invade Ukraine. Meanwhile, his forces prepped to be in position to invade Ukraine. This has done good things for Putin.

+ He dominated international politics, made himself a big player, and received meetings with Scholz, Biden, and Macron. He raised his profile at home quite significantly.
+ He flexed military muscles by showing capability on the world stage.
+ He upstaged his frenemies in China during the Olympics.
+ His current military adventurism is roughly unchanged from before, save increased artillery attacks.
+ Ukraine was destabilized slightly more. The Ukrainian people are a little more scared. Putin the judoka has put his adversaries off balance.
+ NATO and the EU were partially destabilized. Fissures and weaknesses were exposed.
+ Military unit training has been accomplished with forces at or nearly 200k strong.

And he hasn’t actually invaded Ukraine any more.

On the negative side:

– It has driven the Baltics, Poland, and Finland closer to NATO. Joining NATO is now an open discussion in Finland, a subjection previously rarely brought up.
– It exposed fissures within the EU regarding military action, however those fissures are being addressed. Conversations long delayed are now being held.
– Scholz sort of affirmed shutting down the Nordstream 2 pipeline, albeit in no strong language (or even in direct language at all).
– Biden’s diplomacy first policy actually worked.
– The demand for NATO to forever foreswear expanding east was roundly rejected.
– The EU is replacing a lot of Russian natural gas with American.

And on the neutral side:
o The Nordstream 2 isn’t sanctioned yet.
o Uniformed troops on the Ukrainian border haven’t invaded Ukraine.

If Russia deescalated right now, he notch a few more wins. All along he’s said he would not invade, Biden and Johnson have said or implied he would, and if he doesn’t, he’s right and they’re wrong. Biden finally stuck his neck out and said Putin is going to invade. If Putin backs out, Biden will eat crow.

Putin has also pushed his boundaries. He can now develop more troop deployments to his western border with even less risk of receiving sanctions.

Putin can claim he’s no warmonger, that it’s the US and the west, etc. That plays well in Russia.

He’s still actively in Ukraine, albeit with unmarked troops instead of main military units. He’s still actually invading Ukraine and fighting a war of separatism. He’s moved the goalposts from, ‘Russia! Stop invading Ukraine!’ to ‘Russia, don’t invade Ukraine any more.’

He’s gained military intelligence and basically sand-mapped invading a near-west ally.

I don’t know if Biden making this statement was intentional, a probe to deflate the balloon, or a serious statement. A strong judo response is to roll with your opponent’s energy. An successful geopolitical implementation of that would be to now deescalate the situation in eastern Europe. This is largely the theory Germany has held, and they might be right. Furthermore, not-invading now would add frission to the Germany-US detente, which serves Russia’s purposes well. If Putin’s motivation to come to this point, he would have succeeded. He would have played matters to come to this point quite well. While he would not have come away with a pure win, he’s certainly not coming away with nothing. He scored a waza-ari.

But of course, Putin could just invade Ukraine openly. It’s not like anything stopped him before.

An engineer gets up and says, ‘2+2=4.’ This is information.

A student says, ‘2+2=6.’ They earnestly believe that. This is misinformation.

Another student says, ‘I don’t know what 2+2 is because bears ate my homework.’ This is disinformation. There never were any bears or homework.

A mathematician says, ‘2+2=6 for certain vector systems.’ They publish. Other mathematicians postulate their vector system is wrong. They fight. This is mathematics.

My students say, ‘2.’ Partial credit.

The Law Dept. trains their students to say, ‘2 is a number.’ They write a fifty page brief and bill for 20 hours.

In my lab, I put a 2 Ω resistor in series with a 2 Ω resistor, attempt to measure total resistance, the resistors and multimeter catch fire, and we have a meeting with building maintenance. Matlab runs out of memory and crashes.

The biologists have two puppies. A student brings in two more. They play with all eight puppies, because the puppies are super-cute and deserve to be counted twice. That one has a floppy ear! They publish. Conclusion: puppies!

The physicists argue whether the information can be read faster than the speed of light or if uncertain information is really information at all.

The chemists add 2 mols of something to 2 mols of something else, and the solution also catches fire. But they did it intentionally.