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Posts published in “Real Life”

It’s what happens when we’re not working or playing or thinking or doing. That thing we do that doesn’t fit into all the other categories.

Sometimes we call it living.

[sixty-two] minus thirty-four: some sacrifices must be made

Published April 8, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0
that's a hummus appetizer

Lent teaches us to learn to sacrifice. We're asked to give something up. We're asked to abstain from meat (well, land animals) on Fridays. And we're asked to fast on Good Friday ... which is today.

I'm not too happy that Clockwork Alchemy is Easter Weekend, but I understand that it's not everyone's holiday (and that this may have been the best weekend we could get). But I get it.

That doesn't absolve me of my responsibilities, though. I don't fully fast as a matter of policy - I don't think it's healthy to go starving your body - but I eat light on fasting days, just enough that my body gets food.

i can make a mean cauliflower steak if i have to

The choice tonight was particularly hard, though: the restaurant had cauliflower steak, one of my favorite meals. It would have been so easy to order that as being somehow "healthier" than other options.

But it wouldn't have been fasting. And, as a favorite, it would have been a gluttonous choice, so, reluctantly, I got the rather smaller hummus plate and had that as my meal.

Christians do these things to remind us of Jesus's suffering, but the Church doesn't want to remind us of Jesus for Jesus's sake - he doesn't need it. No, they want to remind us of Jesus's sacrifice for our own good.

Learning to sacrifice during Lent is like cross-training your moral muscles: it helps you exercise your decision making on small things, so that muscle can be used properly when we face larger things.

Tonight, for example, I was able to call upon that muscle to help me make the right choices. After dining with my friends, I reluctantly bid them adieu, and went to go deal with my missing costume.

I'd forgotten part of it, recall, and had to drive 45 minute to get it. But when I did so ... remember what I said about knowing you're doing the right thing when you end up being where you need to be?

the trellis, not yet unloaded

A package had arrived - a trellis, purchased to help save the branches of a beloved tree. A package far too large for our house sitter, who has hurt her back. A package that almost certainly would have been stolen.

So, doing what I needed to do that evening may have helped me be where I needed to be to save the package from the neighborhood's package thieves, for starters, but there was much more.

These are little things, but every time I do the right thing and am rewarded for it, it seems to become just a little bit easier to do the right thing again the next time.

-the Centaur

Pictured: tonight's hummus, my cauliflower steak, and the late-arriving trellis package.

[sixty] minus thirty-five: sacrifices

Published April 6, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0
coffee at cafe venetia

Yeah, I know, that doesn't look like much of a sacrifice. But I needed to focus on getting a scientific paper edited, and posting about Clockwork Alchemy, and so I put aside blogging and even Camp Nano to make sure that those things got done. And the consequence? Why, I was right where I needed to be to meet some friends who just happened to show up at Cafe Venetia the same time I did, and we had a long and productive conversation about large language models, the nature of intelligence, and the human condition.

And color blindness. Did you know you can use perceptual tricks to fool the human brain into briefly perceiving colors that are visually impossible to see with the human (or any) eye, like stygian blue, a pure black that is also somehow blue at the same time? Neat. The Colour out of Space, here we come.

-the Centaur

[fifty-nine] minus thirty-four: being where you need to be

Published April 4, 2023 by taidoka
taidoka 2
fish and shrimp tacos at bj's brewery

Now, I don't think we live in a simulation (except I have strong evidence that we do - ask me know I know) but I do believe in providence, that idea that God is trying to arrange things in the world in a way that works out for us. And I think we can see providence (or the simulation, or synchronicity, or simple pareidolia) most clearly when we are where we need to be, for then things somehow all just work out.

Like, how, day before yesterday I decided to drop by a nearby coffeehouse after brunch, and stayed there until I finished beta reading a book; that put me at the right place to give some spare cash to an apparently homeless man, who looked like he needed it and promised he'd go buy food. Then I decided to grab a soda on the way out of town, which put me in just the right place to see the same homeless man try to buy alcohol. I need that reminder - that most of the time helping the beggar isn't actually helping - but still, Jesus says to give to all those who beg from you, and another errand placed me right where I needed to be to help another person. I hope they did something good for themselves with it, whatever it was.

Later that night I worked through another problem, planning to eat a light midnight snack instead of dinner, until, frustrated, I threw up my hands and went to grab dinner at BJ's brewery. That cleared my head, gave me the opportunity to run a few more errands, and I even got some writing done.

Seeking the good can help you find more of it. So I try to pay attention to what I was doing when things just seem to work out, so I can hopefully make more of the same choices in the future. Which, coincidentally, is what I was reading about over brunch today: a book on the Thomistic philosophy of free will, which has nothing to do with woo-hoo non-causal "free choices" and everything to do about building up the right resources within ourselves to make the right decision when the time comes.

So pay attention to providence: it may be trying to tell you something about how aligned you are with what you should have been doing in the first place.

-the Centaur

Pictured: fish and shrimp tacos at BJ's, and another chapter read of a deep RL book.

[fifty-eight] minus thirty-five: yardwork

Published April 4, 2023 by taidoka
taidoka 0
that's one small area of uprooted grass, one giant leap towards saving the succulents

Even though it can be backbreaking, there's something strangely satisfying about getting out of your conditioned environment and into "nature", just kneeling there listening to the winds blowing, the birds chirping, and dogs barking as you pull weedgrass out of your yard before it kills all your succulents. Because the succulents will survive and look nice come the next drought, but this kind of hill grass will turn to dead but pointy weeds with barbed seeds so sharp they actually gave one of our cats a bloody nose.

weeds in a wheelbarrow

A lot of work left to do, but it was a productive day.

-the Centaur

Pictured: One of the areas I cleared today trying to rescue our succulents, and the integrated sum of all of today's work, prior to being dumped on the compost pile.

[fifty-six] minus thirty-five: four hundred and twenty words

Published April 1, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0
downtown morgan hill

Alright! +400 words added to THE PLAGUE OF GEARS, and I have a next step in mind. Enough work for the day; after coding, two meetings, yardwork, debugging, dinner with friends, and blogging, and writing, it's now Miller Time. Or, since I gave up alcohol for Lent and they gave us free dessert for dinner because a salt shaker exploded into almost everyone's food, it's time for a Diet Coke and some Dungeons and Dragons.

Moral of the story, if your salt shaker explodes, tell your server, because they may take the shaker out of service before it kills again, and they may even give you a free donut.

-the Centaur

Pictured: My picture of downtown Mountain View came out blurry, so you get last night at Morgan Hill, plus a picture of the churro donuts, dusted with cinnamon, which I loved and my buddy almost gagged out because he hates cinnamon so much (no worries, his wife and daughter finished his donut).

[fifty-five] minus thirty-six: back to work

Published April 1, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0
break that fast

No, I'm not giving up on blogging at a rate of once per day this year, even if I am already roughly forty percent behind. But my top focus now that I'm outside the Google firewall is to get back to work: after two and a half months of uncertainty following my layoff from Google, the paperwork is now done: the End Date has passed, the Severance is signed, the laptops have been shipped back to the office, and, excepting a bit of COBRA / IRA business, I be done with all that.

sending back the laptops in their special return box

But my research isn't done. Coincidentally, I had a few scientific papers-in-flight going when the layoffs happened; not coincidentally, I dove in to making sure those went out. One is under review, with a possibility that we may need to open-source the code, but another has already been published, at the Workshop on Human-Robot Interaction in Academia and Industry. This is a "splinter paper," a small topical paper we forked out of a larger journal article in preparation, and that journal paper needs to go out.

Nor is my work done. Today is Camp Nano, the start of yet another 50,000 word challenge, and I hope to finish the novel-in-progress, JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE PLAGUE OF GEARS, which my friend Tony Sarrecchia is helping me adapt into a series of audio dramas. And I need to finish editing Dakota Frost #4, SPECTRAL IRON, at which I recently made a lot of progress solving plot problems - and for which I recently conducted a research trip to Jack Kerouac Avenue to scope out the site of a battle.

jack kerouac attack

That doesn't even count the game artificial intelligence work I want to do, or the games I want to write, or the drawing I want to do, or my new interest in music, or the regular robotics research I want to get started under the Logical Robotics banner.

My point is, "work" for "the man" should not define you. At least, it doesn't define me: it inspired me, definitely, in many ways, but as for now ... I'm tanked up with my own projects, thanks.

Back to work.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Breakfast of the First Day of the New Era, sending back the laptops, Jack Kerouac Alley.

Free at Last

Published April 1, 2023 by centaur
centaur 1

SO! After 17 years at the Google, my last day - finally, my actual last day - was yesterday, March 31st, 2023. They cut off my access January 20th, but out of respect for their employees (and the media, and the law) they gave us a generous +60 day notice period, which ran out yesterday.

I don't regret the time I spent at Google - well, at least not most of it. I learned so much and made so many friends and did so many things - and, frankly speaking, the pay, food and healthcare were quite good. On the one hand, I do think I probably should have taken that job as director of search at a startup back in ~2010; it would have forced me to grow and challenged my assumptions and given me a lot of leadership experience which would have helped my career. But, if I'd done that, I wouldn't have transitioned over to robotics, which is now my principal career; so perhaps it's good I didn't pull on the thread of that tapestry.

But I do regret not being able to code on my own. Virtually everything I could have worked on was technically owned by Google, and if I wanted to open source it, I would need to submit it for invention review - with the chance that they would say no. For a while, you couldn't even work on a game at all if you worked at Google, as Google saw this as a threat to their business model of, ya know, not making games; eventually they realized that was silly, but still, I couldn't take the risk of pouring my heart into something that then Google would claim ownership of.

So no code for you. Or me either.

I know people who built successful businesses as side hustles. While that's efficient, it isn't effective: it leaves you vulnerable to being sued by your employer, or fired by your employer, or both. You can do it, of course, but you're reducing your chance of success in exchange for speed; whereas I like to maximize the chance of success - which requires speed, of course, but not so much you're taking on unnecessary risk. So, for maximum cleanliness, it's best to do things fresh from first principles after you leave.

Which is what I'm going to do now. I don't precisely know what I am going to do, but I do think one useful exercise would be to download all the social navigation benchmarks I've been researching for the Principles and Guidelines benchmark paper, and see how they work and what they can do. Some of the software has ... ahem ... gone stale, but this will be a good exercise for me to test my debugging chops, honed at Google, on external software outside of the "Google3" environment.

Wish me luck!

-the Centaur

Pictured: Fulfilling a missing install for the package gym-collision-avoidance; given that I'd done a lot of command line development recently for a Stanford class, I think the issue here might have been some missing setup step when I moved to my new laptop, as I'm sure this would have come up before.

[fifty-one] minus twenty-eight: how can you make time if you do not take time?

Published March 20, 2023 by centaur
centaur 1

"How can we make time if we do not ever take time?" I love that quote. It's a riff on a line from one of my favorite movies, The Matrix Reloaded, in which a minor baddie, the suave Merovingian, mocks our hero's Neo's polite refusal to dine - and calls him out on his dogged insistence on getting to the point. "Yes of course. Who has time? Who has time. But if we never *take* time, how can we have time?"

The Merovingian is just mocking Neo. But he has a real point: All too often in our fast-paced modern lives, we say to others - or to ourselves - that we don't have time to do something. Or, at least, I do - your mileage may vary, as may the bricks in the wall of your calendar and your number of irons in the fire. But often what we really mean is not that we don't have the time, but that we don't want to take the time to do it.

Sometimes this is option cost. Sometimes, we really need to give up something better to make time for something. Right now, I'm out at GDC, the Game Developer's Conference, and I've already let some of my peeps know that I can't do dinner Wednesday night, because I'm planning to attend the Game Developer's Awards. It's a great show and comes around just once a year, so if I want to do it, I have to make time for it. That means taking time from something else, in this case, taking that off the calendar for meeting friends.

So, too, it is with blogging.

I've been trying to blog every day this year, and have already fallen almost a month behind, even though I've been posting two and three times a day - when I post. But the problem, I realized, is that I had been fitting blogging in as an optional task at the end of the day. If you stay up late because you've been flying, or working on your taxes, or attending a programmer's get together, then blogging likely gets the shaft - doubly so if you have to get up early to attend a conference. Stake that vampire! Or, blogpost. As the case may.

SO, I've decided to try to be more like the Merovingian, at least, in his philosophy of time. If you don't take time, then you can never make time for anything; so I've decided to try taking out some time during the day to blog, rather than making it an end-of-the-day task. Like so many things, it's hard to say how long this will last, but at least for today, it produced one more blogpost than I would have otherwise.

-the Centaur

Pictured: My favorite table at one of my favorite breakfast joints, Mo'Z Cafe in San Francisco, where this blogpost was authored between sessions at GDC.

[fifty] minus twenty-five: no blog for you

Published March 16, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

So, I just finished a three-leg plane flight, the longest leg of which was five and a half hours. Whas that twelve hours of travel time? I think it was twelve hours of travel time. I know that's nothing compared to people who fly to Australia or Singapore, but I feel like having a nap. So no blog for you.

-the Centaur

Pictured: A temporary fix which, yeah, didn't do so well in the rains.

[forty-eight] minus twenty-one: oh that’s right, daylight savings time

Published March 11, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

Ok, I'll rise, but I do not promise to shine. Why are we still doing this again anyway? Oh, that's right ... it's complicated, but as usual, our politicians want to do what feels good but is the exact opposite of the science. Daylight savings time (shifting ahead of the sun) has negative effects, and doing it year round seems like it will make it worse; but instead of banning it, our politicians want to make it permanent. It's a feel-good measure which will do the opposite and make lots of us feel bad (and become more sick).

Figures.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Coffee, somewhere (Victory Point Cafe), which, given how perpetually caffeinated I am, will do nothing at all to wake me up.

[forty-two!] minus nineteen: well, at least i have a system now

Published March 2, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

Recently, when digging through old posts, I was reminded that Classic Editor posts are broken in WordPress - all the paragraph breaks are gone, and the content is mashed up into one grey wall of text. Thanks, WordPress, for forcing everyone to switch to a worse editing experience AND breaking all our old content.

[hang on a second, i have to start clicking around at random places on the page to try to find the widget or control that will let me start typing again after inserting an image, because software USABILITY has been replaced by "user experience" folks from a graphic design background who have mistaken making things LOOK GOOD IF THEY HAD BEEN PRINTED for the very different ACTUALLY WORKING WELL AS A TOOL - I'm looking at you, WordPress Gutenberg, Dropbox Paper, and everything like you where you have to hover or click or click and select and hover random parts of the page to make it work. Okay, I can start typing again.]

[[ and yeah it just did it again while i was just fricking typing ]]

Ok we're back.

Ok?

Ok.

Anyhoo, I have like a thousand old posts (1371 published, according to the dashboard), but the block converter for fixing these no longer works. I wish I had discovered this problem earlier, but I just didn't expect to have to do blog archaeology when I moved to Gutenberg.

Regardless, however, I now have a system. I open the All Posts page on the WordPress dashboard, and scroll backwards in time until Classic Editor posts start showing up - nice that they provide that nudge to get us to use the new editor, isn't it. Once I find some Classic Editor posts, if you hover - AAAAARRRRRGH, don't mind me - I say, if you hover, you get the option to open with the Block Editor. FORTUNATELY, this is ACTUALLY a link and not a bizarre Javascript pseudo-button - Good WordPress, Good WordPress, have a cookie - and a right click will allow you to open this in a NEW WINDOW.

SO! I go down one entire page of results, opening them in a new window, until I've hit all the Classic Editor posts on that page. This creates a gazillion tabs, true, but then you can click on each tab in turn, and there's a simple three-click process which will activate the block editor, convert the old text, and - BAM! - update. Optionally, one more click will bring up the updated post so you can doublecheck it before closing the tab.

The process is laborious - but it's easy to get a whole page full of results at a time, and you can't easily lose your place, as you close your tabs as you go. I've gotten through 3 pages of results so far, each with 50 posts, so I've updated probably something north of 150 pages.

There are 25 more pages of posts to go, but it doesn't take more than 30 minutes, so I can do one a day for about a month and rescue all the old pages.

A lot of work ... but at least I now have a system.

-the Centaur

Pictured: The House With The Impressive Tree In The Front Yard, found in a nearby neighborhood, as photographed in Night Mode on my Android phone during a walk with my wife.

[thirty-seven] minus nineteen: lose yourself in a good bookstore

Published February 25, 2023 by centaur
centaur 1

Even though building up a great library is an important part of my process, getting out of the office is just as important. There's little better in my mind than getting out to some other space where you can't do laundry, pay your bills, or even get distracted by some book you were reading. Out in a coffeehouse or cafe, you can sit, read, and write, disappearing into that state of "flow" you get from engagement with your own process.

But it's just as important to expose yourself to new, unchosen information - not your news feed or blogroll, but a set of information spread out across all possible topics, like reading a great encyclopedia, visiting a library ... or browsing a bookstore. While a bookstore's topics are limited, and even the nicest ones are trying to sell you things, they're not just trying to sell them to you: they're trying to create an information space, one of a completely different kind than I talked about when discussing my library.

In a bookstore or library, it's possible to get lost in chains of thought that you never would have otherwise had, because you're prompted by information that you never would have chosen to see, if it all came from your feed or your previous collection of chosen books and media.

Get out sometime, and lose yourself in a good bookstore. If you can walk there from where you are, so much the better; then you can combine the experience of life with the expansion of your mind.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Moe's Bookstore in Berkeley. Does ... that seem right to you, or am I still woozy from food poisoning? :-D

[thirty-six] minus twenty: on reflection, food poisoning sucks

Published February 25, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

I got food poisoning Monday night. Admittedly, this was pretty serious (in the top five, or even top three of food poisoning incidents in my life) and it was on a red-eye flight (definitely in the top three most miserable experiences of my life) with serious turbulence (also in the top five or so as turbulence goes) but, even so, DAYS later, I'm still running on backup systems and batteries. I typically can't sleep until 5am, no matter when I go to bed, and then can't seem to wake up until 2 to 4 pm, well more than a solid 8 hours later. And I can't seem to concentrate, reading the same paragraphs over and over again until finally the lawnmower motor baarrrrumphs to life and I start to be able to move through the paper again.

So, in sum, what I'm saying is, try not to get food poisoning on a redeye.

At least I can keep food down now (so far).

Cross yo fingies.

-the Centaur

Pictured: A sunset in Berkeley.

[thirty-five] minus nineteen: listen, you might learn something

Published February 23, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

Recently, collaborating on a paper, I was convinced that there was a problem in the algorithm we were presenting, and got together with a colleague to discuss it. He saw some of the problems, but had a different take on others, and kept coming back to a minor point about our use of a method in one step.

As we talked, we slowly realized the problem I was raising and the comment he was making, while seemingly unrelated, were actually two sides of the same coin. A minor tweak in the use of a published algorithm, seemingly made just out of necessity to make a demo work, was actually a key, load-bearing innovation that made everything downstream in the algorithm work.

We made the change, and suddenly everything in the paper started to fall into place.

But we'd never have gotten there if we hadn't taken the time to listen to each other.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Nola, the night of another great conversation with a friend.

[thirty-four] minus twenty: the exhilarating sense of freedom

Published February 23, 2023 by centaur
centaur 1

SO! I'm back at the ranch after my business trip, back home after being laid off while traveling for work, back in my office slash library where I worked remotely for much of the past two and a half years.

BUT I was surprised at the exhilarating sense of freedom when I stepped back into my library. I spent fifty years collecting these books and a decade of that organizing them into a kind of external brain, a structuring which only really worked once we had this much larger space on the East Coast, but I never fully had time to take advantage of all of this ... this INFORMATION SPACE, because of the pressures of work.

Well, work hasn't come to an end, even though I've been laid off, because as a researcher it's in my best interest to continue the collaborations I had on papers in flight. But now it's just focused on the important stuff, and the rest of my time is focused on much needed improvements. And as I stood in the library, the outcome of years of work organizing - prompted by my wife, who long since adopted "everything has a place" in her studio, and knew the effect it would have - I felt like, "I can DO this now."

Already today, I read up on probability theory, practiced piano, debugged problems with my bass guitar, and, yes, collaborated on an ongoing paper. (I also continued to recuperate from food poisoning, worked on taxes, let the plumber in to fix the plumbing, picked the brain of the landscaper, and took care of house and cat things for my wife, who's having migraines). And I still have hours left in my day.

Who knew getting laid off could be so liberating?

Maybe it was time.

Back to work!

-the Centaur

Pictured: My "work" workstation, and the "information space" behind it.

[thirty-three] minus twenty-one: thirty hours

Published February 22, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

SO, I was so sick after the food poisoning (and soreness from retching, and the general lack of sleep on the red-eye) that I slept for over thirty hours. I think I may have gotten up in the middle of that for an hour and blogged or something, but I basically crashed from ~10am Tuesday to ~5pm Wednesday. By the evening I was well enough to do a grocery store run and have a light dinner, but I am still wiped out, and I canceled all my meetings and am going back to bed. Here's hoping rest does the trick.

-the Centaur

Pictured: This just popped up "From Three Years Ago" in my photos app. Thank you, Google Photos, for this truly bizarre picture, which I cannot even find again due to the way they clear the recommendations once you look at them (again, thanks, Google Photos, for this truly bizarre anti-user feature). I present to you ... a robot alligator, atop a Coke Zero, with ... a pen for scale? Perhaps this was nine years ago, from the Google Objects project? I really don't recall. Enjoy.