People often complain that narcissists are crazy-making. They are unpredictable and Because they are unpredictable, they are unreliable partners, they are irresponsible, they cannot be held to account and so on and so forth. There's a lot of complaint about what we call in psychology behavioral variability when the behavior is not consistent across domains and across the lifespan. So are narcissists as crazy-making as they are made out to be? First of all, there's a lot of confusion between narcissists and borderlines. Borderlines are crazy. Narcissists are actually quite predictable if you become aware of a few ground rules and this is the topic of today's video. I will attempt to provide you with a vadimekum with a kind of guide as to how to decipher and then how to predict narcissistic behavior. My name is Samvaknin. I'm the author of Malignance of Love, Narcissism Visited, a former visiting professor of psychology and currently of the faculty of SEAPS. Here are the rules. The variable behavior of the narcissist is only superficial, only apparent. Actually, the narcissist's behaviors multiple are very consistent and very predictable. Rule number one. Optimized allocation of resources. The narcissist regards himself as a treasure, as a cosmic gift. His time is invaluable. His resources, scarce as they are, should be cherished and allocated with perspicacity and ultimate considerateness. So optimized allocation of the narcissist's resources.  If he suspects that you are being disrespectful of his contributions and of course, he always overvalues his contributions. And if he suspects that you're being wasteful of them, spendthrift, then he becomes very angry, rageful, even violent, definitely aggressive. Rule number two. The narcissist resents resents it when you force him to act, act in any way, but he is especially resentful and rageful when you force him to act in ways which he perceives as disrespectful of his resources and wasteful, then he again becomes aggressive, rejecting, frustrating and even sadistic. Two simple rules. Everything the narcissist brings to the table is a divine endowment. And you should treat it as such. Number two. Do not force the narcissist to do anything, let alone do not force the narcissist act in ways which he deems to be less suboptimal, less than optimal. Now, if you put these two rules together, these two heuristic behavioral rules that the narcissist abides by, that drives the narcissist and motivates him, if you put them together, this could help you to disentangle and decode many of the narcissist's apparent, mutually exclusive, contradictory, crazy-making behaviors. So imagine a miracle. Imagine a piece of science fiction come alive. Imagine, in short, an honest narcissist. An oxymoron, I know. Okay. Imagine an honest narcissist who is also willing to talk, also willing to confess and confide and admit self-analyze and has a modicum of self-awareness and so on and so forth. There are a few of these, of those online, but I am extremely doubtful about their claims. They, in my view, are all mass manipulators. Okay.  So imagine that you ask the narcissist, do you care about me? And this is an honest narcissist, one in one. So the narcissist says, I do care about you. You're useful to me. And this is a shocking answer, as far as you're concerned, you say, indignantly. But don't you have emotions for me? And the narcissist, the honest narcissist, reflects on this and says, I don't do emotions. I do relationship maintenance. I'm going to invest in our relationship as long as you're useful to me. As long as you have some utility, as long as we can work together and so on, I'm going to maintain the relationship and I'm going to commit to it, I'm going to contribute to it and invest in it. I don't do emotions, says the honest narcissist. I do business. It's a give and take world. Now it's your turn to be indignant. So why do you want to stay in touch with me? You ask. And the narcissist says, well, you could still be useful to me and I can be useful to you. Again, it's a give and take. Plus, I always repay my debts and in some respects, I owe you. So as you see, the picture is transactional. The narcissist regards all human interpersonal or interpersonal relationships, all human interactions as basically some kind of deal, the art of the deal, some kind of transaction, some kind of business. Ask me. Let's take an example, which is really outlandish, but absolutely true. One of the major motivating forces in the human psyche, in human psychology, is the sex, is sex. Freud actually believed that everything is an emanation or manifestation or transmutation of the sex drive. He later gave up on this notion, but it imbued most of his work.  It drives us to do things. It alters our behaviors. They become more galleriant, etc. So imagine the narcissist and he wants to have sex. It's autoerotic sex. It's kind of deformed sex. It's kinky sex. It's not, it's not, it's not anything you would recognize by the word sex, but okay, that's his version of sex and that's how he perceives his innate drive. He wants to have sex. So what the narcissist would do, especially if it's a psychopathic narcissist, he would turn on the superficial charm. He would flirt. He would love bomb you. He would idealize you. All this in order to get in your pants. So this is typical behavior.  And in this sense, the narcissist is indistinguishable from healthy, normal people. But where there's a variation which sets the narcissist apart from the rest of humanity is the goal, it's the goal orientation.  That second, the flip of a coin, the narcissist becomes indifferent, dismissive, bored and impatient with you. You could be the most drop-dead, gorgeous man or woman, depending on the sexual orientation.  And fully interested in the narcissist, into the narcissist, you want to have sex with the narcissist.  There's mutual attraction, irresistibility, even.  I can think of 100 situations where you cannot have sex.    All his cravings and desires and passion will vanish, will evaporate in a split second. The minute he reaches a conclusion that nothing is going to come out of it, there's no deal to be made, there's no transaction to be had. All his behaviors, his state of mind, his urges, his drives, his motivations, his passions, his intentionality, the total internal landscape and behavioral outward public-facing behaviors, all of them would change super dramatically, radically, as if it were not the same person. And this is unique to narcissists and to psychopaths, by the way, narcissists and psychopaths. It's unique. This ability to transition from state A to state minus A, the exact opposite, the diametrical opposite, is unique to narcissists and psychopaths. That's because they are not emotionally invested in any of this. It's goal-oriented, it's transaction-based, and if a transaction cannot be had and the deal cannot be concluded and the goal cannot be accomplished, why continue? Why waste scares valuable resources on something that cannot yield any outcome? As far as a narcissist is concerned, flirting with you is hard labor, is work, is investment. It's not something he enjoys. Love-bombing, idealizing, flirting, they're all means to an end. And the end is a shared fantasy, not even the sex, by the way, the shared fantasy that is attendant upon the sex, that is connected to the sex. The sex is just an instrument to kind of affirm and patress the shared fantasy. But if a narcissist, when the narcissist or the psychopath reach a conclusion that nothing to be done with you, they lose all interest in you. All interest in you. It's as if you don't exist, transparent, they see through you. It's a very disconcerting experience, very shocking, because you're being negated. You're being eliminated, cognitively at least.  As if your existence is a kind of self-deception or delusion. And the alacrity and the abruptness of the transition are very destabilizing because you begin to doubt your judgment of people, your perception of reality. It's a form of behavioral gaslighting, in a fair. So this is an example, based on sex. But the same applies to everything else. The narcissist could be someone's best friend and they could work together and they could have a great time together. They could help each other. They could be best friends. But the narcissist is best friends in order to accomplish something which is ulterior, which is external to the friendship. It's a transaction. And the minute the narcissist reaches a conclusion that you are of no further use, there's no utility in you or in the very core or even worse.  You're damaging. The narcissist drops you like a hot potato. Simply you don't exist anymore. You're gone. You're deleted. Even your memories deleted. And this is like from one minute to the next. I'm kidding you not. This is not a hyperbole. It's not an exaggeration. One minute you are his best friend, most intimate, most is invested in you, is focused on you, is idealizing you, is love bombing you, everything. And the next, you're gone. You're very ancient, boring, wasteful history. You're consuming his scarce resources. You're wasting his time. You're imposing on him. You're annoying.    You've never been in his life, actually. He raises your memory, your common history, everything.  It applies in friendships. It applies with the narcissist's own children. If they defy him, criticize him, disagree with him, disobey him, the gun, the history, they've never existed. Same with his so-called intimate partners. So-called wife, was powers and so on. I call them insignificant others. And all this is ruled, all this is governed, all this is directed and guided. By the two principles. Optimize a location of resources. Invest them where they provide yield, preferably maximal yield. And number two, do not allow yourself, says the narcissist.  So, the narcissist says, I'm optimizing my resources and investing in you would be a waste, so I'm no longer interested. I'm no longer investing in you. And you can't force me to act in a way that is wasteful. And if you do, if you have demands, if you have complaints, if you have grievances, if you mourn and grieve what we had together, if you keep consuming my time and attention, without giving anything in return, the transaction is dead, the deal is broken, then you are being, you're in position, you're being aggressive and I am going to become rejecting, cold, distant, absent, frustrating, sadistic and aggressive in return. These are the two governing principles. So, if you want the narcissist to remain in your life, you need to keep giving. You need to convince the narcissist time and again, minute by minute, day by day, that it's still a good business. That the deal is still there. That the transaction still pays. That the relationship should go on. The maintenance fees and the contributions of the narcissist to maintain the relationship should proceed at a pace because the relationship is a net yielder. There's the reward exceeds the cost. It's very businesslike, like in business school. So, because this is the case, because there's no commitment or investment or attachment or bonding or any of this, love, I mean, forget all this. None of this applies to the narcissist. It's a calculus. It's a ledger. It's financial statements. It's a bottom line. Think business. Because this is the case, the narcissist and the psychopath are motivated strictly and only and exclusively. You hear me? Only as in exclusively, as in strictly, as in no other way, they're motivated by opportunities. They are opportunists. They have no loyalty, no fidelity, no commitment. They're perfidious in this sense. They're disloyal. They betray easily.  They want to eliminate you. They become super violent, super malicious. There's no hint of recollection of the past. There's no kind of credit. You don't get credit for for having been nice to them, for having been helpful and supportive and for having worked with them for years, for having none of these matters.  He's going to come after you. And narcissists have very, very, very long memories. They hold grudges for years and decades, sooner or later, you're going to pay the price. So it's not a good idea to insist, to stalk, to plead, to bargain, to offer to nothing. Narcissists gave up on you, walk away. No contact. It's the only solution. So the narcissists and the psychopath are opportunists. They're motivated by opportunity. They don't care. They don't even notice people. They don't care about people. Narcissists don't do external objects. You're just a figment in the narcissist's mind. You're an internal object. You're toying. They don't do emotions. They don't even do cognitions. The cognition is distorted. They have no social mores, no morality, no nothing, no guiding principles, no religion, no belief, no faith, not nothing. Narcissists and the psychopath have an inner, optimizing, maximizing compass. More, more, more narcissistic supply in the case of the narcissist, more attention, more money, more sex, more access, more power in the case of the psychopath. More. It's a principle of growth which characterizes modern economies and modern civilization, which is why modern civilization is essentially narcissistic. It's transaction-oriented and it is founded on the principle that we should grow all the time, growth. So narcissists and psychopaths are growth-oriented. They lose all interest when there's no opportunity. When no opportunity presents itself, the gun, the history, they vanish in a whiff of sulfur as someone has written to me the other day. Okay. Okay. Similarly, narcissists and psychopaths will disengage physically and mentally and move on once a task has been accomplished. Like, okay, mission accomplished. Why should we linger here? Why should we engage in social niceties? Why should we have small talk? Why should we display fake interest in other people? Why should the whole human dimension is missing? There's something to do, even maybe something to do with other people together in a collaboration. We do it, we're a gun. When it's accomplished, when it's in the bag, when it's in the bank, narcissists and psychopaths are gun. In so-called romantic and intimate relationships, this is the kind of transactionalism that goes on day in and day out.  With a woman I supposedly love, with a man I'm supposedly committed to. What is my bottom line? Do they begin to bore me? Do they criticize me? Do they disagree with me? Do they not obey me? Disobey me? Do they gun? They're gun. They're going to find someone else who's going to do all this. The minute the cost of having a relationship with you exceeds the yield, the outcome of the relationship, the narcissist is out of your life. It's one way to get rid of narcissists, by the way, to force them, to force the maintenance fee up so dramatically that the narcissist will disengage on his own accord. Narcissists utterly, and psychopaths, are utterly uninterested in other people.  It's like, what's in it for me? When narcissists or psychopaths come across another person, first question is, what's in it for me? Who cares about that person's background and that person's predilections and proclivities and preferences and hopes and dreams? Who gives a, you know, you know what, about any of this? Unless, of course, it's relevant to manipulating that person, unless it affords and asks is a psychopath some kind of leverage to accomplish the goal. Otherwise, it's boring. Boring like in dull.  So they avoid people as much as they can, the minima's, minima's interactions and interpersonal relationships to that transactional part. They're interested in other people, as I said, only if the information that could be gleaned could be then used or leveraged to manipulate the other person and accomplish outcomes. The functions, the functionality of people, the possible contribution of people, matter a lot. That's why I keep telling you, narcissists don't choose their victims because of who they are. They choose their victims because of what they can extract from the victim, what they can get from the victim. Sex, supply, sadistic or narcissistic services and safety. Same with the psychopath.  Who you are is irrelevant and not even noticed. Psychopath chooses you because what you can provide. Can you provide him with money? Can he steal your money? Great. Can you sleep with him? Excellent. Sex. Can you provide him with access to other people? Connections. Superb. Do you represent power if he takes over you? Does it make him more powerful? This is what drives these people. Narcissists and psychopaths, they're machines. They're devices, optimizing devices. They're programmed in a way. In this, even limited interest in other people's functions and contributions, even this, ceases to exist. Evaporates. Once the utility of these people is over, when these people are no longer useful, they are dropped abruptly. Everyone without exception in the narcissist world is instrumentalized and objectified. And that, of course, includes all of you.


Alright guys, don't mind the glasses, but well as you can tell by the title, here we are. The season's over, the comeback season, 17 years, 17 long years man, it took me to get back down here and play some Littleton rugby and we did it man, we did it. I had a challenge, I set to myself at the start of this year, especially once arriving back here in Christchurch and well that was to get back involved with the boys, with the Littleton boys and god I'm so glad I did, hold up, take those glasses off, they're a bit much. Alright guys, here we are, look at this man, beautiful, fucking beautiful, the green grass, the blue sky, if you look about 100 meters that way we've got the ocean, honestly man, Littleton is my place, this is my home, I lived up on that hill for 19 years guys before I left for Australia, you know you've met me, my YouTube channel, my YouTube audience has met me whilst I've been living in Australia, now I'm living back home, even just looking at, this is, what a place man, what a place, if you do come to New Zealand, if you ever come to Christchurch, if you ever come to the South Island, definitely check out Littleton and you know it's got its own little vibe, it's its own basically enclosed sort of community, you know what I mean and what a place to grow up and whilst being around this rugby team this year once again I've definitely bumped into a few familiar faces and I've gone to a few familiar venues and it's all just come back to me man, it's been amazing, I'm struggling to put it into words actually, how I'm feeling, as you can tell and I really don't know if I can put it into words, so I tried to put it into words after that first game, you know, that vlog's had about 9 or 10 thousand views now and I feel like the emotion came through and that emotion I've felt through this whole entire season, but I didn't play the whole season and I guess that's what we're gonna discuss, we're gonna discuss, you know, how it played out, I mean the team, at the end of the day guys we made it, we made it into the final, Littleton made it into the Canterbury Metro Division 2 Rugby final which was played last week, unfortunately we didn't get the job done but we were close, you know, to be honest this is like the fifth video I've made today, I've gone around a few different locations in Christchurch and talked about a few different things that I've been doing in my life recently, this is one of the last videos I'm gonna make for the day, I'm feeling a little bit mentally fatigued right now but we're gonna do it, you know, I knew there was a reason why I prepared myself for this talk and I wrote down a few different things and I'm just gonna run through them, okay, these are some thoughts about the season, about my performance, my participation in the season and what's what's next, so basically the season as a whole was affected by COVID right, the thing that got me back on board was a week before the season was meant to start, I saw an advertisement on the Facebook page saying there was free subs, this was the only club in Christchurch that had free subs, which meant you know you don't have to pay registration fees, so I saw that and I thought well look is that God reaching out to me or what? I don't even have to pay to play, I'm definitely going down and that's what I did, so I went down the next week, got involved with the team and found out that the season starts that weekend, so I joined the team literally the week before the season started, you know I came down to the training on Tuesday, Thursday and lo and behold I managed to get a starting spot that week, I didn't know at the time but that's because probably three or four backs that played every single week were actually injured at that point so they started the season with a few numbers down and you know lo and behold I came into the team at the right time, managed to get my starting spot and I actually started for the first four games against Belfast, Shirley, High Skull Old Boys who we played in the final and Linwood, so I started the first four games of the season, I was fucking right into it right, then I realised that you know I was probably gonna have to call it quits for a period of time around my bodybuilding show because you know the demands of that physically and mentally were just too much, I could not focus enough on Rugby and be enough of a part of the team to make it worthwhile, it was you know Rugby, Rugby is a commitment man, it's it's a it's not a hugely long season as far as the games played but as far as the pre-season you know leading up to the season and throughout the season you've got three days of the week that you are committed to the team, you've got Tuesday, Thursday training and Saturday game and for a period of four or five weeks there that was just way too much so I had to call it quits so unfortunately you know I played the first four games, the next game was against Sydenham, I was named on the bench but I didn't make it on and the next game after that was against Lincoln and I was named on the bench for that game and I didn't make it on so those two games I was named on the bench, I suited up, I trained you know had all the anxiety, the game day anxiety that comes with it yet I didn't play and I thought you know what man I can't let this happen again because it's really affecting my life it's taking a lot of energy away from me and away from other things that I've got going on in my life right now so after that game where I didn't make it on for the second time I finally pulled the pin, I talked to the coach, I said look you know with everything else that got going on it's just too much and you know I'm gonna I'm gonna give my position up for the next four or five weeks so basically I said look I'm not gonna be able to play anymore I said good luck for the season I'll make it down when I can but that's it and that was it and to be honest ever since I made that decision for the next four or five weeks I was happy because my mindset was freed up I had time to think about things and you know everything improved my life so I forgot about rugby for four weeks right in the middle of the season and then I completed my my bodybuilding show and that was at the end of August and I thought you know what man I think it might be about time to head back down to rugby training and that's exactly what I did so I didn't actually realize but that week I went down to the Tuesday Thursday training that week we'd made it into the semi-finals and it seemed as if you know gobs on my side once again I'd come back right at the right time there's a couple of injuries they needed some numbers I managed to get my name back on the team sheet for the semi-final cheeky as fuck cheeky as fuck coming right at the last second and get on the team for the semi low and behold you know I'm coming to terms of the fact that that backline is solid man that is a solid back the forward the forward packs fucking solid the backline is solid as a pack and you know at the end of the day if something's not broke why would you try and fix it and that's exactly what happened again in this game so I didn't get on I was named on the bench utility bat could have gone on anywhere they even said look if I need you go on the forwards would you do it I said yes of course I'm just happy to be here at the end of the day I didn't actually get on but that game was played right here against Burnside we had a good win great turnout semi final played at home fantastic moment to be involved in even though didn't play it's fine then we move on to last week which was the final we played at high school old boys which is at Hagley Park through the tunnel and well this week I went to the trainings Tuesday Thursday all good to go amped for the game unfortunately on the Thursday I got told that there's a fella who plays on the wing he dislocated his shoulder three weeks ago thought he was gonna be out for six weeks low and behold feels fine wants to play in the final he's gonna take your spot Jacob I said all good what else you're gonna say I'm just thankful to be here honestly honestly I am I'm thankful to be here throughout the year that we've had I played those first four games I've been involved in the team we're in a final I'm just like man you know what at the end of the day anything can happen there might be another injury I'm here if you need me I wasn't called up but I did go and watch and I did take some footage of the final on my camera following this video I'm actually gonna put those a couple of videos up most of it is ruined because of the wind but there are two moments in that game in the final the thrill and the agony of sport that I've captured and I'm gonna put up on this channel following this video the first is the try that we scored in the first half to go up the second is right at the death in overtime at the end of the match we had an opportunity we stole a line out we had an opportunity to have a to score the match winning try in the final the same guy who scored that first try dropped the ball cold in the second moment of the match and you know for him specifically that is the thrill and the agony of sport the thrill of scoring that try the agony of being so close yet so far and those are moments I'll never forget and I'm glad I took my camera down so at the end of the day you get a positive out of a negative I didn't play but I was able to capture some moments and enjoy the game as a fan and as a supporter so well you know overall overall thoughts my performances no good I didn't show 10% of what I'm capable of on attack but you know what this was always gonna be interesting it was always gonna be you know my first season back finding my feet within a new team environment and I feel like I've done that pretty well so I guess following following on from here it's my mission to stay fit definitely stay active work on my speed work on my agility work on my skills throughout the throughout the offseason and if I'm still here at the start of next year well I'll be cracking into the preseason for 2021 and hopefully you know these restrictions will be relaxed a little bit more we can have a full season and all the best all the best to all the little some boys I will be seeing the boys again in three weeks time we're going down to Queenstown on a boys trip this is what they do every year this is gonna be my first trip my first trip with these boys I've been on rug I've been on rugby trips before I've been a rugby piss-ups before but I've never been on a three-day bender in Queenstown with the Littleton dolphins so it should be fun yeah that's what it's all about man that's what rugby is about it's about the team it's about it's about camaraderie it's about working together as a team because there are no there are no eyes and team I'm telling you that and if you're an eye in a rugby team that works together as a team you're definitely gonna be found out and you know it's it's it's not the vibe that's not it's not a vibe man it's not the vibe used to be my vibe trying to be the best trying to do everything trying to be first at everything but it's not anymore they don't know that that ain't no way to live that ain't no way to live man quietly confident that's what I like to call it quietly confident not cocky confident but quietly knowing that at any moment you're ready to take an opportunity and to prove yourself and at the moment I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about I'm gonna let you guys go welcome once again to Littleton this is my hometown this is where I was born and bred I'm so happy to be back here so happy to have played a season of Div2 Rugby with the Littleton dolphins and all the best for next year boys hard luck we lost 14-10 in the final and well that's rugby so have a great day everybody I'll see you on the flip side okay peace out


This is George Gilbert. I'm with Matei Zaharia, creator of Spark and co-founder of Databricks. We're talking all things Spark and the roadmap, looking further out. Matei, now an academic at Stanford University, has a unique perspective that someone working at a tech company might not be able to look out quite as far, it's pulled more into day-to-day sorts of concerns. So as an academic now, tell us some of the paths of inquiry and problems that you get to focus on. Yeah, great. Yeah. So I think the really cool thing about the academic sort of research job is you can look at problems that are sort of farther out and you can take large risks essentially, try something that is not guaranteed to work, but if it does work it can result in a large shift in something. So I'm looking at a couple of different things actually. The most relevant ones to Apache Spark are first and foremost the evolution of basically computer hardware as Moore's law sort of slows down and we actually get this proliferation of new types of hardware like GPUs, multi-core processors and so on. And that's kind of really affect data analytics systems. And the second project I'm looking at this is actually a new project we're starting at Stanford is how to bring advanced analytics to everyone. So there's been really great successes in isolated cases with things like machine learning or deep learning or things like that, but each of those acquired companies of literally sort of thousands of people working on that application. So how can you repeat that success but make it so a group of five people can get the same sort of result? Actually, going to save those questions for Joseph in the machine learning section, but let's actually drill down on both of those. So the first one about the new types of hardware is a project in progress already with Databricks with the tungsten, GPUs, multi-cores, storage class memory. Tell us some of the things that that might enable. Just as an example, data management, when we go through such changes in relative price performance of the hardware, maybe we can do a proxy query process. Maybe we can rethink the structure of the database. What are some of the things you're looking at? Yeah, exactly. So basically, in short, this is primarily about performance. I think that a lot of big data applications can be far more interactive, essentially, and that translates directly into productivity of the users of the application. So if you work with data, for example, about every human being on the planet, there are only seven billion of those with some of the new storage class memories and some of the new highly parallel processors and so on, you should be able to answer a question about all of those in half a second. And it's hard to do it with many current systems because getting low latency and high performance requires optimizations throughout the whole system. And if you combine together three different, four different things, and one of them is not highly optimized for this hardware, then, you know, your whole thing will be slow. But this is kind of what we're getting to. We're making data analytics more interactive with these new types of hardware. So some of the specific things we're looking at, so Project Dunxton is the effort in Apache Spark to do this, which has already made some pretty big strides in bringing a large class of workloads, actually, not just SQL, but many of the other things people do with Spark. Anything based on data frames? So also a lot of... Yeah, exactly, a lot of ETL, data transformation, some bits of machine learning as well. So that's made a bunch of efforts. Something else I'm looking at is how do you bring... How do you integrate this with other libraries that people use for data analysis? So if you use, you know, the Python data stack, such as Scikit-learn, or if you use TensorFlow for deep learning, how do you optimize across these libraries when you use them in a Spark application so that the whole thing, end-to-end, gets very good performance? And the things we've seen is, you know, in Apache Spark itself, we actually saw, in many cases, sort of a 10x improvement already in performance. And we think there's more you can get for these kind of data frame applications. But also across these things like, if you look at machine learning libraries, TensorFlow, things like that, a lot of them could also have kind of a 10x improvement in performance on modern hardware. And we want to make that easier to get to. Right now it's, you know, you need to do a lot of work by hand to get it to happen. We want to make that easier. Okay, so that actually sounds like it's a good segue into the making analytics more accessible. So on the one hand, it's like blow up the, you know, price performance by orders of magnitude. Then one of the, for lack of a better word, abstractions or constructs, or maybe even, you know, interactive workspaces, that would make it more accessible. Yeah, so yeah, so this is kind of the second project I mentioned is focusing on advanced analytics. And here the observation is there are, so there are actually a lot of, say, machine learning algorithms you can use. And if you put your data into the right format and view it in the right way mathematically, you can get, you know, interesting sort of predictions or models out of it. But the bottleneck to many organizations really using these in sort of real business practices is often not those algorithms. It's all kinds of stuff around them. So there's, in particular, there are two parts of it. The first is preparing data. It's called featureization, preparing it to be processed by these algorithms. That's often, for many organizations, they say, oh, that's like 80% of what data scientists do. And it's not very carefully studied. It's just done by hand by people all the time.  How do you actually put that in production as part of a business process? For example, what do you do if you deploy it and then some customers complain that, you know, that car is not starting anymore? How do you fix that? How do you monitor it, evaluate it and actually reason about it, explain what it's doing? So maybe in conjunction with the huge performance boost and maybe using that performance budget, you could apply machine learning to the process of featureization and model evaluation. Yeah, that is an option, yeah? And then there are also other things that are kind of more, they even outside the scope of machine learning, they're more, I would say, kind of engineering or kind of management like data management style problems of just tracking what you're doing, tracking what's out there, being able to explain things, telling you, like, oh, you know, if you're surprised that, say, this customer's credit card application was denied, well, maybe you should look at these other customers that were similar and that will give you more insight into why it was denied, these kind of things. So there's a lot, a lot of this is the interaction between people and the system, like how much, what do people need to do manually to make that work? How do you get that box almost like explain the SQL query plan? Yeah, exactly, yeah. There's very little of that if you think about productionizing a machine learning thing like when you get to it, you know, it's really hard to just get it to work, but then when you're about to launch it and then you ask, like, oh shoot, you know, what happens if someone complains or how do I know that the one I pushed out today is better than the one yesterday? It's, there aren't very standard tools to do that. So, let's also talk about, this may have been covered in what we were just talking about in performance and in accessibility, but over time you've talked and others at Databricks about inspiration for extending Spark, like with Microsoft's link or Dryad or the pandas, which for native frames and scikit-learn for machine learning. Are there other sort of constructs or ideas out in the ecosystem that you're looking at? Yeah, so that's a good question. I think, so in general, we try to design you know, the APIs in Spark to make them you know, as familiar as possible to users, but still make them you know, sort of solid APIs that I think, you know, that we believe are a good long term. So the data frames and machine learning pipelines, these were like what we thought were some of the best APIs for working with data, you know, on a single machine, like the idea of cooking up steps to build a machine learning pipeline, you know, for example, made a lot of sense. I think the main areas we're looking at now with these continuous applications is how do you also serve results out of your application or support interactive queries on its state? So often, you know, as I said, kind of before on that topic, people build part of the application in Spark and then they have to do a lot of glue work that's often very complicated to actually connect it to like a real user facing thing. So it would be very neat if, for example, you could have the end to end thing like your whole kind of web server that's going to serve predictions or serve queries or whatever, be part of that same Spark application and then Spark would guarantee that, you know, that it produces good results all the time and that everything is consistent across them. So a better integration between design time and runtime or model serving? Yeah, serving, serving in general not just model serving, that's a big part but also serving interactive queries. For example, I talked about like using streaming to do reporting and like what if, you know, you're using streaming to count number of visits on your web page and then you're trying to expose that to customers as a dashboard. How do you make sure those two systems stock in the right way and give consistent results? How do you let the customers like throw in a new query and push it all the way back to the streaming layer? These are a lot of things that people kind of have to build by hand now and basically we want to look at how they're working at NCR, they're good abstractions or APIs that we can make first class basically in Spark. Okay, so it's almost like you have to do in a distributed fashion maybe what some of the interpreted languages do for make it easy to author and run, you know, in the same context. Yeah, you have to do it in a distributed environment. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, and in many cases like people have kind of thought ahead and tried to solve a particular problem on, say, in a kind of a smaller data environment or single machine environment, so we want to see, first of all we need to see what did they do, maybe it's a good idea we should do stuff the same way and second it's always good to be familiar with, you know, to be familiar to new users so that their path to going distributed is easier. Okay, so one last question, well two last questions. If you look out over five plus year horizon what would you like to see Spark, what would you like to see its role? Yeah, so I think Spark is in a pretty unique position because basically computing, at least data and computing is becoming highly parallel and distributed and the previous set of tools for it don't work in that setting and it's very hard you can't automatically parallelize quotes, so basically everything kind of needs to be rethought and in many cases rewritten to work in this distributed setting. So to make basically all users of these parallel data processing system successful it would be very nice to have a common sort of interface that all the parallel applications can use to talk to each other and to be combined, same way that in a single machine you can just pull in libraries and tools written by different people and they all work well together. So I hope that Spark becomes that, that kind of common interface for writing parallel data analysis code and then there can be thousands of people writing libraries on top of it and users can combine them in an efficient manner and really build the thing that they want to get out of it. And I think we're in a good spot in that, if you look at the number of libraries on Spark both that come with it and the third party ones, it's I think it's the largest one of any kind of distributed computing system, so it's very valuable to continue that. What libraries might we expect to see in the future? Yeah, yeah, so we're looking, we're continuing to look a lot at machine learning and advanced analytics, in particular some things we put out recently are graph frames, which is a data frame like API for working with graphs and doing pattern search, finding complex patterns of nodes interacting or users interacting in a graph and then something called tensor frames, which is integration with Google's tensor flow for deep learning, which is a very good set of algorithms for some machine learning applications. I think other things I mentioned are the continuous applications and real-time sort of serving and streaming. So we expect to have many more integrations with these type of systems to make it very easy to build these. And we have a few already in structured streaming that came out in 2.0. So last question, that we've talked about continuous apps and we've talked about the APIs. We've talked about the sort of simplicity and unification of the APIs say around data frames. We were talking earlier is it is it valid to talk about the APIs in terms of their latency, where you have a range, in earlier releases, you couldn't really do SQL near real-time. Certainly not machine learning. Is that an ongoing effort to make sure they all sort of span the same range? Yeah, exactly. One way to view it is that they all work at all the ranges and furthermore they produce consistent results at all ranges. So if you understand how they work in the batch setting you're going to understand how they work in the streaming setting. The other thing I'll add here is it's not just ranges of latency, it's also operational environments like the other assumptions about the environment. For example streaming or like a continuous app the way we've defined it needs to stay up 24-7 for a long period of time. It needs to recover from faults in the middle of the application, from parts of the system slowing down and so on. That's a little different from doing an interactive query where the query is going to take 5 seconds and like if it crashes we're going to do it again and it's going to take 10 seconds. So it's not just latency and it's also other characteristics of the system and often there's also a bit of a trade-off between these. So sometimes we will prioritize reliability and sort of debugability ease of understanding over just like latency or just throughput. Okay, and with that I can with great confidence say we've heard more about the future of Spark and Databricks from its creator than we have I think from any of the other interviews we've done with Matei and his colleagues over the month that we followed them. So stay tuned we'll be back with more interviews.


I think Dallas has a statement game here right off the bat playing the Super Bowl champs coming out and proving that they're a much better team this year than they were last year. They can score. They're going to put up points on Tampa. If Tampa Bay somehow ends up beating them 45-37, more power to them. But Dallas is going to get their points here and I think they're going to cover. Dallas will be lethal offensively, but it's going to take a little bit of time.  We saw what they did in the Super Bowl against basketball. And late in the year though, right? Late in the year. And now they're going to carry it over to the start of next year. It's kind of how this works. Buccaneers were fifth offensively in EPA per play just a season ago and they got better over time. And pretty much everybody's coming back. Jack Prescott, when he was behind center for the Cowboys, they were 21st in that same metric. And so I have some real concerns about if the Cowboys can just keep up with Tom Brady and company. I think the Cowboys will get better as the season goes along, but for this first game, I think Tampa Bay wins big.


For 27 years, the Paul Bunyan chapter of Fishing Has No Boundaries has provided anglers of all ages and disabilities a chance to go fishing. Event organizers were busy unloading equipment, organizing fishing tackle and preparing the grounds at Paul Bunyan Park for this year's big event. Over 80 participants will head out on Lake Bemidji Saturday for a full day of fishing. For many who attend the event each year, Fishing Has No Boundaries is like a family reunion. When everybody comes in that opening morning and there's a lot of give and take, where you've been, house things, and there's always a lot of hugs. It's like a family reunion for us, I guess. For more information about Fishing Has No Boundaries, you can visit the website you see right there on the screen. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


So we're here at U-Green and who are you? I'm Anina from U-Green. And what is this product here? This is a USB thread of his station. How does it work? Where do you connect? Yeah, you can use a USB cable to connect here to your macbook. Only one USB? Yeah, only one USB cable. And then you add... What is this? This is a USB 5.5. This is a DVI with an HDMI player. And this is a GGBT. And a microphone and earphone for your to use. And here you can have a color reader. Nice, because Apple, they don't have all these ports. Yeah, it's short. Apple doesn't have very little ports. Yeah, it's short of this kind of ports. So we produce this kind of products. Does it work on mac, Windows? It's compatible with Windows 10, 8, 8, 7, apps, PC systems. Yeah, you can use it. And mac, every mac? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You do a lot of these, what is that? This is a 10 ports charging station. You can charge it at the simultaneous need for your 8 tablets and 2 smartphones. How much power comes through? It's 2A, 2A, 2A? 8 ports for 2.1 mAh and 2.4 mAh. Alright, you have a lot of connectors and adapters and chargers. Yeah. Which one is the most popular? This one. And this one. It's very useful. Is that a price for this? This one is about 7.9. 7.9, how about this? This one. This one is a little expensive. How expensive? $85. Because is the CPU inside something special? Yeah, because you have the chip side inside. To make the video outputs through USB? Yeah. It's not so easy. It's the same with VJ or HDMI with DVI. And the resolution is very high? Yeah, 4K to 3K. 4K for each of them? Yeah, right. Let's go over here. You have more stuff here. This one is popular? This one is our new product. It's a safe charging box. It's very useful for the home. When you have children at home, they have the finger to touch here. It's very dangerous. So we designed this box to keep safe. To hide all this in there? Yeah. How much is that one cost? This one is $25. $25? Alright, cool. Do you have a big factory? Yeah, we have our own factory. In Shenzhen? Shenzhen. We also have sold it. It's amazing. You can also find us on Facebook. So people can scan here? This is our Facebook page. You can find here. Do you have many fans? No, currently we are looking for many fans too. Find us at Ugreen on Facebook.


Caution, so be sure to report all of your self-employment income. By not reporting all of it, you could cause your social security benefits to be lower when you retire. That's gonna be the point. So as we're putting money in, we wanna try to maximize our social security benefits now, which is a difficult thing to do because it's a moving target and the laws could change at any given time going in. But the more money we put into the social security, the more we should get out in the terms of benefits. So how to become insured under social security. So you must be insured under social security system before you begin receiving social security benefits. You are insured if you have the required number of credits, also called quarters of coverage discussed next. So earning credits in 2022 and 2023. For 2022, you receive one credit up to the maximum of four credits for each $1,510, $1,640 for 2023 of income subject to social security tax. Therefore, for 2022, if you had income, self-employment, and wages of $6,040 that was subject to social security tax, you receive four credits. That's $6,040 divided by $1,510 for an explanation of the number of credits you must have to be insured and the benefits available to you and your family under the social security program, consult your nearest SSA office. So you can really dive into the research on that and dive into the weeds if you want. There's a lot of information. And a lot of information. Caution, making false statements to get or to increase social security benefits may subject you to penalties. So that could be bad, that might be fraud if you're intentionally falsifying documents. The SSA time limit for posting self-employment income. Generally the SSA will give you credit only for self-employment income reported on tax return filed within three years, three months and 15 days after the tax year you earned the income. So there's like a statute of limitations on when to file that should be well within the timeframe that you would file, normal conditions. So if you file your tax return or report a change in your self-employment income after this time limit, the SSA may change its records but only to remove or reduce the amount. The SSA will not change its records to increase your self-employment income. So who must pay self-employment tax? You must pay SE self-employment tax and file schedule SE self-employment schedule form 1040 if either of the following applies. One, your net earnings from self-employment excluding church employee income were $400 or more. So that's a substantially low limit. So most people that have a schedule SE are gonna have to file self-employment tax. So two, you had church employee income of $108.28. That's one of those ridiculously low numbers that never increased with inflation. So now it just looks funny. So we look at these numbers now and like, where did they come up with those numbers? You just laugh at it because it got stuck in the code and they never increased it with inflation. So now those numbers at one time were significant but now they look funny. Caution, the SE tax rules apply no matter how old you are and even if you are already receiving social security or Medicare benefits. So if you're subject to self-employment tax, you have to pay the self-employment tax even if you're past the age of where you should be getting benefits from the self-employment tax. If you didn't have that, you can imagine people running scenarios where they're gonna have all these old people running the shell leader of the business just like that, what was that mob movie where they had the old guy pretending he was the boss but he wasn't the boss because they wanted to, because they wanted to get a tax benefit or something. Caution, SE tax rate. The SE tax rate on net earnings is 15.3%, 12.4%, social security tax plus 2.9% Medicare tax.  And the employee IRR pays the same plus 0.062 which is the 12.4, see? So you're paying the employee and the employee IRR portion and then if you look at your Medicare that got withheld from your paycheck, then it would be 0.0145 or 1.45% times two. And that's where you get the 2.9.  So maximum earnings subject to self-employment tax, only the first 147,000 of your combined wages, tips and net earnings in 2022 is subject to any combination of the 12.4 social security part of the SAE tax, social security tax, self-employment tax, social security tax or the tier one part of railroad retirement. So you might ask, why is that the case if your schedule see income, then is that 147,000 or more? Let's see your net income was 200,000. You're only gonna be paying that portion of the 12.4 not including the Medicare part, the social security only part up to the 147,000 even though you made 200,000. Why? You might say that's a benefit to rich people in that case. They're benefiting rich people because they stop having the pain of the social security tax. Well, the idea would be, well, if when it was a social security, when it was a safety net program, then that would kind of, then it wouldn't make so much sense. You would say, okay, if it's a safety net program, you wouldn't have that cap just as they don't have the cap with the Medicare. It goes on forever because it's a low tax. But now that we treat social security more as a retirement program that everybody's gonna benefit from, then you would think that the more that you pay into the retirement program, the more you should get in benefit. A benefit concert. And after you get to some threshold of income, the benefits that are gonna be paid out are no longer being increased by added increases to your income. And the amount of the tax rate, 12.4% is significant. And so that's why it kinda caps out there. So people will always argue about that cap. That's always a question. If the government needs to be funded, just raise that to infinity, right? But I mean, obviously the issue here is that that 12.4% isn't a safety net level rate. That's like a, because it's being treated kind of like it's a retirement program for everybody. And that's where it gets a little funny. So people argue over that rate. So, but in any case, that's where the cap is. So it gets a little funny when you deal with higher income individuals to try to figure this out because if it's below that rate, it's more of a flat tax. And then it hits that cap, which kinda makes things messed up a bit. So all your combined wages, tips and net earnings in 2022 are subject to any combination of the 2.9 Medicare part of the SE tax that there is no cap here because Medicare is more of like a safety net program system, Medicare tax and Medicare part of the railroad retirement. So if wages and tips you receive as an employee are subject to either social security tax or the tier one part of railroad retirement tax or both and total at least 147,000, do not pay the 12.4% social security part of the SE tax on any part of your net earnings. However, you must pay the 2.9 Medicare tax part of the SE tax on all your net earnings. So in other words, you can imagine this gets even messier when you have self-employment tax that you're paying and you're working as a W2 employee, which normally withholds half of the social security. So now you've got a situation because you shouldn't be paying any more no matter where the self-employment income came from of this 147,000. And now there's actually a difference in terms of the amount of tax you would pay to get to that 147,000 because if you were a W2 employee, you would only be paying half of this but when you're self-employed, you've got to pay like twice of it. And so what if you were self-employed and a W2 employee? And so then again, so tip deduct one half of your SE tax as an adjustment to income online 15 of schedule one. So here's where it gets messy again because now like they're trying to make the self-employment tax as if you were the employee employer portion of yourself for the net income on your schedule C and they're trying to mirror that to what happens on an employee employer situation and like a C corporation. But in a C corporation, they deduct the total expenses of the earnings including the withholdings that they paid to the employee plus they get to deduct their half of the social security and Medicare tax as payroll taxes. So if you're gonna tax us as a sole proprietor both the social security and Medicare employee employer tax portion on the net income I should get to deduct at least the half of the tax that was like the equivalent of the self-employment half of the tax if I was a schedule C. And so you can, but you would then think, well, then I get to deduct that on the schedule C but you can't deduct it on the schedule C because then you'd end up with a loop reference a circle reference, right? Because you use the schedule C to figure out the tax in the first place. So they gotta deduct it somewhere else. So then you get to deduct half of the self-employment tax on the schedule one above the line deduction.