Restarting the numbering a little bit so we're capturing 'blog per day' (day of year: 44 - blog series: 23 = 21 behind). Up late doing various stuff, so here's a neat shot from a parking garage in downtown Berkeley, after I did my traditional artist date "visit a couple of cool bookstores, get some nice food, find a coffeehouse to work on my book." The road in question is just chock full of theaters and other artistic venues, so there's often quite the interesting crowd milling about when I'm heading from the garage to grab some food.
SO! I just turned *AHEM* a year older and decided to go to my favorite restaurant, Nola, in Palo Alto. Nola and I go way back - logically speaking, I must have first gone there in something like summer of 1997, near the end of my internship at SRI (formerly, the Stanford Research Institute) on hierarchical planning. Nola was the first place I ever got "drunk", or more honestly, slightly buzzed from a very powerful margarita, the first on-the-rocks margarita I had ever had. I had even ordered it by accident; normally, at the time, I was drinking the equivalent of watered-down alcohol slushies, and ordered on-the-rocks on accident. My tastes in drink have ... considerably evolved ... since then, though I still stick to the one-drink-per-day limit.
Nola's a truly magical place. I'd put it in a novel ... if I hadn't already. (LIQUID FIRE, as the vampire-friendly restaurant our heroes retreat to after a nasty dustup with some evil firespinners). Look at their decorations for Mardi Gras! Beautiful.
Welp! One more spin around the sun. Plan to keep doing those as long as I am able ...
Another neat little place in downtown Palo Alto. It's amazing how special a place downtown Palo Alto is; for being a part of a vast megalopolis, it's a charming downtown with a small-town feel and a surprisingly connected place. I ran into at least six people I knew in the short time I was down there tonight, and got an introduction to a robotics group at MIT just by sitting in a chair and talking to some friends.
This is kind of the experience I had when I first came out to the Bay as an intern, 25 years ago (more or less); I had just arrived, was hungry, but restaurants were busy, so I took a seat at a restaurant bar, the only space available ... but no sooner had I sat down than I got offered a job.
Well, technically, I sat down and cracked open a very technical book, and the person sitting next to me didn't offer me a job, but did give me their card and let me know their startup was hiring.
A colorful auto-generated effect from Google Photos showing the profusion of succulents in our xeriscaped yard. They've really taken off in the past couple of years, and are quite beautiful even when not blooming.
So, I'm proud to announce my next venture: Logical Robotics, a robot intelligence firm focused on making learning robots work better for people. My research agenda is to combine the latest advances of deep learning with the rich history of classical artificial intelligence, using human-robot interaction research and my years of experience working on products and benchmarking to help robots make a positive impact.
Recent advances in large language model planning, combined with deep learning of robotic skills, have enabled almost magical developments in explainable artificial intelligence, where it is now possible to ask robots to do things in plain language and for the robots to write their own programs to accomplish those goals, building on deep learned skills but reporting results back in plain language. But applying these technologies to real problems will require a deep understanding of both robot performance benchmarks to refine those skills and human psychological studies to evaluate how these systems benefit human users, particularly in the areas of social robotics where robots work in crowds of people.
Logical Robotics will begin accepting new clients in May, after my obligations to my previous employer have come to a close (and I have taken a break after 17 years of work at the Search Engine That Starts With a G). In the meantime, I am available to answer general questions about what we'll be doing; if you're interested, please feel free to drop me a line at via centaur at logicalrobotics.com or take a look at our website.
After almost seventeen years at Google, I've made the difficult decision to get laid off with no warning. :-) Working with Google was an amazing experience, from search to robotics to 3D objects and back to robotics again. We did amazing things and I am proud of all my great colleagues and what we accomplished together.
However, my work in robotics is not done, and I will still be pushing for better robot navigation, large language model planning, and especially social robot navigation and embodied AI. I'm spinning up an independent consulting business and will announce more details on this as it evolves - feel free to reach out directly though!
-the Centaur
P.S. Sorry for the delay - this has been up on my Linkedin forever. But for some reason I just wasn't ready to post this here. Avoidance behavior, however, has gone on long enough. Time to move on.
Pictured: me and Ryan at Sports Page, the traditional hangout you go to on your last day at Google. It was a blast seeing all the friends, thank you for coming!
Image apropos of nothing. Nevertheless, avoidance behavior has gone on long enough ... soon it comes ...
-the Centaur
Pictured: Another shot of the real place in Palo Alto which must have subconsciously inspired the Librarian's Favorite Ramen noodle shop, from an unpublished story.
It's been a difficult few weeks due to "the Kerfluffle" which I hope to blog about shortly (those on my LinkedIn have seen it already) but equally as much from a Stanford extension class I was taking on Deep Reinforcement Learning (XCS234 - speaking as an expert in this area seeking to keep my skills sharp, I can highly recommend it: I definitely learned some things, and according to the graphs, so did my programs).
Finally, that's over, and I have a moment to breathe.
And maybe start blogging again.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A mocha from Red Rock Cafe, excellent as always, and a learning curve from one of my programs from class (details suppressed since we're not supposed to share the assignments).
Been up super late chasing a paper deadline for the past few nights, so no real post for you; instead, enjoy this picture of a photogenic cat.
I do have to say, these past few nights pulling this paper together have proved over and over again that my ethic of "work just a little harder than you have to" pays off, as each night I wanted to quit, and each night I got a major chunk of forward progress done by working just a bit harder.
Now, sometimes that was 4 am, but still ... after spending a great deal of time with what felt like a giant incoherent mess of a paper (17 pages at last count), the exercise of pushing to submit a 6-page excerpt to this conference really crystallized the notion that, yes, we have done something good here, and, yes, if we take the time out to summarize it, it really does add something to our understanding of the problem.
Oh wait. This isn't an inside-the-firewall production. So, AHEM, "... it really does add something to our understanding of SOCIAL ROBOT NAVIGATION." Just to be clear on what we are doing.
... a computer with a fast fricking hard drive. I use a backup scheme in which one older computer has all my file mirroring services on it (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc) and then backs that data up to a local Time Machine backup. But the old iMac I had had long ago reached the point where it couldn't back up to local network storage and needed a directly connected USB drive, and eventually that, too, gave up the ghost, with Google Drive and Dropbox essentially strangling each other to death if you tried to load them simultaneously. In other news, unrelated except for the inexorable passage of time, my personal daily driver laptop had reached the point where half the keys skip and the battery life was down to roughly 1 minute.
SO! I bought a refurbished Apple Silicon MacBook Pro. Even though it is a gently used machine, way cheaper than the most recent models, this M1 Max screamer has downloaded most of Dropbox and a large chunk of Drive without breaking a sweat. Apparently, the larger, faster SSD of a 2022 MacBook Pro beats the heck out of the old spinny hard drive of a 2015 (or is it 2013?) iMac. Who knew? And it can serve as a daily driver until such time as I can afford a top of the line machine, if I even need one if Apple Silicon is as fast as they say.
... still falling behind. But I'm not giving up on getting back on track. The key problem is making sure that time is carved out in the day for blogging, taking walks, taking care of yourself; once you start to let that slip, six months have gone by and you haven't posted. And when you have a TODO list two inches thick, it really is hard to make sure you carve out that time ... it's easy to trick yourself that it's much more important to get the "important" stuff done ... even though, sooner or later, you must do "unimportant" things like laundry. Building new habits is like doing the laundry ... the world turns, and so must the dryer, and if you don't make time for it to get done, you'll be sad when it doesn't.
Call your wife, take a walk, post on your blog. The "important" stuff can wait.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A nice meal, somewhere (Iron Hill Brewery?) featuring fish and chips, a Moscow mule, and a book.
... still behind, but, whatever. Pictured: Left Bank in Menlo Park. Hadn't been there in years, but it was wonderful. Unexpectedly I turned out the other way from the bathroom and discovered a second stair with beautiful mosaic tile, sparkling in the late morning daylight in a way I never recalled seeing before.
Still pictures really can't do it justice, but it still is beautiful.
... still a little behind. Pictured: the "back entrance" to Morgan Hill's very nice downtown; this little pathway from one of the parking garages always reminds me of coming down a gangplank onto a pier leading to a little sea town, even though in reality the sea is nowhere to be found.
One reason blogging suffers for me is that I always prioritize doing over blogging. That sounds cool and all, but it's actually just another excuse. There's always something more important than doing your laundry ... until you run out of underwear. Blogging has no such hard failure mode, so it's even easier to fall out of the habit. But the reality is, just like laundry, if you set aside a little time for it, you can stay ahead - and you'll feel much healthier and more comfortable if you do.
Yeah. The microblogging will continue until the posting rate reaches 1/day.
I feel that one problem I have with "daily blogging" is that quick posts are no problem. But if I have a longer idea - but can't finish it in time - I then forget to do a shorter post to make up for it.
And missing a post itself is a problem. What I find when trying to build a regular practice (daily blogging, taking karate twice a week, whatever) is that if you skip one time, even for a "really good reason", then mysteriously the next two or three times you'll HAVE to skip for "unavoidable" reasons.
In this, case in point, I started writing a longer article on debugging software. There was more to it than I expected - I had wanted to make an off-the-cuff comment, and found my thoughts rapidly expanding - and then the next day I was flying, and the next day catching up on work, and the next day owed my part of the annual report to the church board, and so on. And then its DAYS later and boom no posts. I think at this point I am 8 behind in numbered posts, though there were a few un-numbered ones which I would count, except, if I don't, it makes the problem harder, which helps build the discipline I'm trying to build.
SO! Let's get back on that horse then. Update metadata, hit publish.
-the Centaur
Pictured: my evening work ritual, 2-3 times a week when I'm not having dinner with my wife, is to go to some place to eat (preferably one with a bar or high top tables, so I can stretch out my bum knee), crack open a book, and read a chunk of a chapter while having a nice meal. Most of my books get read this way.
... the block editor of Wordpress seems to be making my old non-block-editor posts turn into solid walls of text. See the post "Pascal's Wager and Purchasing Parsley":
Yeah, it's not supposed to be looking like that. Gotta track those down and fix them.
In other news, my Half-Cheetah policy is successfully training to "expected" levels of performance. Yay! I guess that means my code for the assignment is ... sorta correct? Time to clean it up and submit it.
