Category: Geen categorie

[Repost, edited]
Maybe the relevance of Michelin stars, and accompanying guide, would increase if,
Apart from losing the numbing down, bland-isation of any food innovation by chefs to a style that is either Boring in itself already or a quick to wear off gimmick, that obtaining or even striving for a star(s) often turns into, just to please the judges and don’t forget a bucket of salt (yes, don’t lie to me)
The wine list was innovative, too. By which I don’t mean that the wine list couldn’t have some classics but where the all but most insanely priced items (all tend to sit at some 4-8 times cost anyway, extortionistly – bring that down to 2-3x and your profits go through the roof all the same) have something new. Fresh, beyond the well-trodden paths. The latter, being the average+ quality (if one’s lucky) of the go-with-the-flow (of up to and including last year’s fashion) appellations – with too many New World ones that are so cheap to get. Or from secondary regions of the Old World where the top can still be had at below-top priced – but still with according interestingness of taste. All from the mid-size to big merchants that don’t care anymore about their products and just want to shove as many boxes as they can at incumbent-tied-in margins. Their tell: Aggression towards any that want to offer something off the wine menu for connoisseurs.
As if the chef’s innovation that once was, is enough to stay at the level that once was, qua quality and freshness one wants from top rated places. News flash: The wines can add to the experience. Big time. If one doesn’t see that, well, off you go.
And it also goes for the wine pairing / selection by the glass; how better to showcase one’s innovative wine choices in perfect matches per course ..?
Why not feel free to ask customers for their wine sophistication and preferences? Only a handful of sommeliers seem to understand. Almost all, at the true top places, without food stars.
[One notable exception encountered, in a long life of many attempts… And this one. This one, nearly there; (somewhat) interesting wines but then, with that tad too little wine knowledge transferred and suffering from the above Salt issue plus some very minor other things (though this is a showcase of Don’t Believe the Reviews, peasants flaunting their … lack of knowledge and understanding. Maybe this one may join this class if it’s not my browser through which the link is down…]
[Elsewhere: this place. A drain on your balance, but then …! What great (9) dishes, what excellent wine choices and pairing, even in the ‘simple’ recommended wine pairing.]

And don’t come telling that when the food has to shine, the wines shouldn’t need to shine, too; it would be either-or not AND. That’s just nonsense for n00bs with underdeveloped taste.

So that in the end we may see the return of the true relevance of stars, and see less overhyped craze over joints that suddenly get overbooked way too long in advance and start to double their prices – for nothing of the new but only the already mundane that satisfies only those running after Keeping Up With The Jones’ (“Do you know this-and-that [ill-pronounced] winemaker? Isn’t he great oh we once tasted his [name a random year], I’m on a personal basis with him because I was at the camping on the mudfield next to his’.” – no joke, heard too often in literal or similar ways…) places. Ruining it for true believers from the humble beginnings.

The latter Dutch link brings me to another point by the way (as mentioned in the Salt posts I believe – haven’t read back my own posts ;-/ ): [wow so many in a row] Where are the veggies …!?!? The top of the top does cook with lots of those (take this one, and this one even almost more), and create a feeling of correlation between (being able to) top cooking with vegetables and completely outflanking the stars.

Oh well, and:
[If you know where, you know what I mean. Wink wink and all. Bourgogne yes but which Clos’ ?]

Just a note; every now and then some temporary (…) tiny bits of good news come through: This, on FaceID being insufficient for banking sign-on in Europe.

That may lighten up your day; not all is lost immediately. And:

[There is hope. Cork-plopping hope.]

The as ever poignant Seth Godin (@thisissethsblog) pointed to a problem in browsing; not knowing how to make a system not reductionist/analytical but synthesist/creative.

Would blurring give suitable results ..? As in: Not overly perfect fitting in ML, not going for the one outcome with the highest confidence level in AI. Applying trained AI systems outside their (known?) boundaries which may be equivalent to using ‘wrong’ (imperfect domain overlapping) or ‘weak’ (high noise ratio) training sets. Possibly building hybrid systems, not only with straightforward ML but also applying some form of fuzzy logic and expert systems as tool to manage a tool, to put some randomisation onto the rote learning.

Unsure what measure one would use to determine a system is effective; how to determine the degree of randomness of the system changes randomly over time (2^nd – 5^th++ derivatives still random etc., I’d prefer to see some ‘Chaotic’/fractal behaviour there).

The trade-off then of course being that to train a system that advanced will for the time being take so much effort it might be better to train a bunch of humans, of moderate intelligence but aren’t they all, to do the same fuzzification for you. A sort of Mechanical Turk job. Might be cheaper. By being so cheap, it may prevent a ‘disruption’ (meh) that costs too much to develop into something even ‘minimally’ viable. But man(ual work) will never get as widely copyable as some ‘software’ app on my mobile.

That is, IF by next year we’re still using ‘mobile’s and not call them completely different names because they have changed usage considerably. ‘Smart device’ is gaining a foothold, now that the ‘phone’ part is dropping from the smartphone (qua use, relatively) or is it ..?

So Seth is stuck. Can try to not be too scientific about it, and just be creative. When you realise you’re in a filter bubble, that is because you ran into its wall and you’ve already cracked it to get out, like an operational equivalent of Plato’s cave now I think of it. [Yes, the latter being much more abstract and much^x harder to truly understand]
Maybe its the direction that counts. Either let your own fear of the unknown, irregular make you pull your straighjacket ever tighter (and making you look and behave ever more like a fool), or realise you still control whether you’re pulling and let go.

Oh and then there’s the pretty picture for your viewing pleasure:

[Ah, ha, no that’s not transparency or so; Barcelona]

To all project management related types: Did you do your Lessons learned session at the end of your last project? In earnest? Extensively and deep enough to be potentially useful in future projects? Seriously? In all your previous projects?
I just don’t believe you.

And, where did the lessons learned show up in the projects you did later?

Nowhere, I guess. Only where project set-up standards require the most excruciating detail in planning and activities – the kind that no-one will follow in practice since they’re such an overload of bôle-S yes that’s where the word BS derives from (2nd sentence of this follow the link and now you have already learned something). There, we sometimes (not even always) encounter some vague reference to do include past projects’ learnings (bit like this).
But that’s the exception. In the full-detail standards. Qua guideline at the outset.

Common practice (be honest) … not so much. Pino or NePino. Well, …

Lessons will be repeated until they are learned.

Yes, even if (sic) auditors check on your project management at the start, to see that the project is well set up to achieve the objectives – and auditors stick along with project execution to track proper risk control in the project re project governance, progress, and the other half of audit work the deliverables – hardly ever does that cover checking that all the right and applicable (…) lessons learned from past projects (both the preventable errors/slip-ups and the successful risk mitigation actions) are in fact included in this new project under study.

Simple conclusion: To greatly enhance your future projects’ chance of success, include past learnings in earnests.
And require auditors to do the same when they audit projects, e.g., by putting the blame on auditors when projects fail at known, mitigatable risks, for their lack of due advice.

Now, to cheer up:

[Use your Vision; Porto]

Just for the record; you noticed how things are heating up regarding the ePrivacy Directive forthcoming ..?

No wonder. Where GDPR was just a consolidation of existing rules and regulations and shouldn’t have had too much impact anywhere apart from the SOx-style totalitarian bureaucratic paperwork requirements (or you had a backlog on perfectly reasonable information security already, the resolution of which may have been pushed by GDPR but wasn’t anything new due to it) OR, if you have been made to believe otherwise, you can get your money back from your ‘consultants’ due to wrong advice and yes this sentence is getting quite long.
This ePrivacy thing however will cost some businesses (certainly not all) some of their business. By clipping the morally unjust parts of data usage; long overdue anyway.

My only surprise is that the current protests by parti pris lobbyists (for the wrong cause) took so long after 25 May 2018 to pick up steam.
We’ll see.

And, of course, ..:

[For no apparent reason whatsoever; Ronchamps]

OK, that title may have been a rather cheap bait, but you took it.
As is now discussed, it seems that the morale of accountants (here in NL – one can guess that elsewhere the same goes to varying degrees) is under scrutiny, after time and time again non-performance of proper straight back / spineless financial audit work, leads to upheaval over, among others, partner fees – with underling fees in tow, too – versus morality.

The comparison with daycare timeliness morality, so elegantly explained here, is obvious – if you want to see it.
Like, when the decision was: ‘I work for the general public, so I make sure to serve their best interest. I will be impartial to “client’s” (quod non) pressures – do I sign or not’, the outcome was as intended by societal structures. Just have a look back at agency theories.
When now the decision is: ‘The ‘client’ is the one who pays me. I decide in their favour of course. The golden rule: Whoever has the gold, makes the rules’, the outcome is as intended by the principals. Only the role of the principal has factually gone over to what were the agents to be checked upon, to be kept at a leash.

And when the money is that good, very much literally like the title of this yes feel the empowerment of the opening part, there indeed is no return to anything like moral value and being a firm pillar of the establishment through one’s qualities not one’s wallet. Worth oppressing the underlings for, right?

Should be locked up, that lot. And:

[If only they’d go to the opera more, they’d learn about morality. Valencia]

From the scares of ‘AI’ HR algorithms that result in biased outcomes … some musings; your (constructive ..!) comments appreciated:

Biases (i.e., errors!) in input of course will result in biases in outcomes. Overstretched classification statistics (what the ‘algorithms’ mainly do, all too often) of course will lead to improper (biased) outcomes.
Those can be solved. With some difficulty, as here.
But, apart from the obvious misses (link: et al., more have been known in particular in the field of credit scoring), what if the algorithm is 100,0% unbiased and it finds socially-unwanted outcomes ..?

To use the above miss as an example (not because I believe this might be the case but only as an example that mysogenists might use …): What if it turns out there’s hidden traits in some gender’s workers that results in their eventual performance lacking compared to other candidates’ ..? E.g., possibly becoming pregnant may be picked up as an indicator of future maternity leave, leading to productivity losses and possible costs of hiring temp replacements, flatter experience growth curves etc. No this shouldn’t be allowed to be let factored in – although the company that prunes their system to not let this count, will not get any return for their consideration which makes the co less financially competitive than their cheating competitors that are still out there quite a lot and in the end, only the financials count. Don’t cheat yourself in believing otherwise.
But when one starts tweaking away the unwanted outcomes, where does one end? And who checks that the tweaking is correct and unbiased, and with continued-learning systems does not creep back in (and at what levels of deviation will one re-balance)? Who checks that the inputs are correct anyway, both for training and in future use? Because, on hard requirements the biases can be implicit but hard, like age biases. Any system will pick up that ‘3 to 5 years experience’ will mean all seriously-experienced, extremely fast and efficient and probably highly motivated, loyal and non-career-chasing workers over 40 will not be considered. As is done by human selectors now (as is outright illegal but what do you do), often working in a much more inflexible-algorithmic fashion than the better AI systems.

Tweaking the inputs, will result in ineffective systems and the whole exercise was to find ‘rules’ that were not easily derterminable, right? When you start on this road, your system will deliver whatever you want it to, not necessarily unbiased. And probably very intransparent.
Tweaking the system or the outputs is introducing biases of your own, badly controllable. Hence probably, very intransparent.

Tweaking doesn’t seem like a path to follow. Strange. (..?)

And how does one get societally-wanted biases in, like quota? They are unfair against others – how can I help that by accident, I was born a white male!? Should I be punished for that by being considered less than others? Because that is what happens, for a fact and if you deny that you’re just incompetent to discuss the whole subject. That I am over 50 and a white male should not be allowed to be Bad Luck or you’re much, very very much worse than your average mysogenist, you ageist sexist racist ..!

Now, can we first changes cultures, one person at a time, and then train systems to mimick/outdo humans ..? That’d be great.

Edited to add: Marc Teerlink’s view on things (in Dutch no less – how much Intelligence is needed to understand that? Give Google Translate a spin and … not much I fear).

And so is:

[For 10 points, comment on the femininity of the curves but also the masculinity of the intended imposing posture; Amsterdam – yes I mean the building or are you actively searching for the wrong details?]

No-one was really surprised about this one, eh?

And no-one was or is surprised when nothing happened, or will happen, right? ‘Class break’ will be a potential total outage of armed forces. Since it’s only potential, who cares? As long as one can play with the cool toys until they break.

Well, indeed, when one can stare at this picture:

[Westpuntbaai]

So… What if fake news is a new genus / family / order / class / phylum of hyperfast mutating and spreading virus-like sound (?) bites/bytes or more accurately the same of memes..?

Like in: Globally hyperconnected socmed environments, intermeshed. If that is a word.
This would open up a better understanding of how they operate, and how they can be countered. E.g., quarantaine doesn’t work as they are out there spreading before being detected (anywhere), and remedies will not work since any cure may come too late – victims have become immune to the antidote, and mutations will have overcome the cure before it’s spread wide enough. Immunisation e.g. by inoculation may also not work, as one is unsure what would actually make immune, with the high speed of mutations. One cannot block (all) the benign that could become virulent and unbenign, as that would shut down the whole ecosystem.

Now what ..?

And, for the time being, as long as you’re not zombified yet:

[Yeah, man! Unedited pic from Toronto, where apparently the good stuff is to be found at a random street corner …?]

Since all the big data tools have delivered, is, mostly, visualisation tool’lets, and superfluous commas, though, truth to be told, I am an Oxfordian+ comma fan, …
Wouldn’t it be nice if accountants (of the ‘external’, certifying type and stripe) were able and allowed to not just give one vague, all too vague, ill-understood indicator of reliability..? Like, not just ‘reasonable’ [for those needing clarification, I suggest this] or or not. With all the caveats swept under the rug.
Wouldn’t it be possible to deliver a graph, with x being the error margin still ‘possible’ (either absolute, or qua significance/materiality threshold) and y being the chance of such an error still being in the accounts, somewhere. Delivering, hopefully, some form of sigmoid picture. Wouldn’t that be much more informing than just the near-always Pass verdict?

Just musing. Plus:

[Downtown Waiblingen – varied, fun. The Optik being Binder, not blind(er); no accountancy there…]