Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis
Yeah, you're gonna just have to put me down in the left column there. No offense to Doc Brown's DeLorean, but The Doctor's TARDIS could BE a DeLorean, if it wanted to. If there was a write-in, of course, I'd pick the Clockwork Time Machine, but the Machine is basically a TARDIS with the serial numbers filed off anyway.
Very tired, working on the social navigation benchmarks paper, no more post for you.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Poll seen at a Starbucks while I was waiting on my car to be serviced.
So, day 3 begins! The con is going swimmingly: there are lots of people, everyone seems happy, the organizers feel it's going well, and I sold all my number ones! Even on Easter Sunday, people are still showing up!
Yesterday evening after panels were done, I chilled at the bar, worked on SPECTRAL IRON, struck up a conversation with a writer who saw me writing and had a lot of questions about getting back into the game. (Talk about doing the right thing putting you into the right places!), and still had time to catch the end of the Lee Presson and the Nails concert!
All in all Clockwork Alchemy appears to be a success. Here's hoping we do it again!
-the Centaur
P.S. Almost forgot: at 2pm I will be on the panel for "Getting Past Chapter One" to help writers overcome their creative barriers!
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.
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?
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.
SO! I survived the first day of Clockwork Alchemy, and only had to make one trek back to the house from the hotel to pick up something I forgot (something important - my frigging costume, not pictured because I wasn't wearing it). But the convention was great, and we had great talks on Worldbuilding with Madeline Holly-Rosing and Villains and Heroes with Sumiko Saulson and more, and the Author's Alley was delightful.
Most people seemed to think there were more people this year than last, possibly because (a) the hotel is cheaper and easier to stay in and (b) we continue our long slow slide back out of the pandemic. Certainly there were a good number of people at the morning panel, and even more for the afternoon panel.
And the hotel restaurant wasn't bad either! I got to spend some time with some friends in the evening nibbling away at some noshies before driving down to get my costume and some extra books. Oh, that's right - books ...I sold some! But don't worry, I have plenty more ...
Tomorrow I'll be at the following panels:
Hope to see you all there!
-the Centaur
Pictured: Various panels and events from Clockwork Alchemy
You know, I don't comment on politics on this blog nearly enough, and I plan on changing that. But I just found out that the statute of limitations may have passed on the crimes Trump is accused of in New York.
Regardless of the merits of the case, we shouldn't be doing things like that. All too often we let things go that we should drop, or press things that we shouldn't, because of political appearances.
Hm. What does OpenAI"s ChatGPT language model have to say about this?
Has the statute of limitations passed on Donald Trump's indictment?
the Centaur in dialog with ChatGPT.; emphasis mine.
As an AI language model, I cannot provide legal advice or make a definitive statement about a specific legal case. However, to provide some general information, the statute of limitations varies depending on the type of offense and the jurisdiction. In the United States, federal offenses typically have a five-year statute of limitations, but this can vary depending on the offense. State laws also have their own statutes of limitations for criminal offenses.
Regarding any potential indictment of Donald Trump, it would depend on the specific charges and the applicable statute of limitations. It is also important to note that the decision to indict someone is made by prosecutors based on the evidence and legal standards, and is not determined by whether the statute of limitations has expired or not.
Gee, thanks, AI overlord! Seems like the prosecutor's job here may have been to bring the indictment if they believed a crime was committed, even if the statute of limitations had passed. Let's get more specific:
What is the statute of limitations in New York?
the Centaur in dialog with ChatGPT; emphasis mine.
In New York State, the statute of limitations for criminal offenses varies depending on the severity of the crime. Here are some examples:
- For most felony offenses, the statute of limitations is five years. However, for certain serious offenses such as homicide or terrorism, there is no statute of limitations.
- For misdemeanor offenses, the statute of limitations is typically two years.
- For certain sexual offenses committed against minors, the statute of limitations has been extended in recent years. For example, the statute of limitations for second-degree rape of a minor is now 20 years from the victim's 18th birthday, or within 10 years of the offense, whichever is later.
It's worth noting that the statute of limitations can be tolled, or paused, under certain circumstances, such as when the defendant is out of state or in hiding. In some cases, the statute of limitations may also be extended if new evidence is discovered.
According to Wikipedia, what Trump is accused of - falsifying business records - is normally a misdemeanor, but can become a felony if used to further another crime. From what I've read, the prosecution has withheld a lot of facts from the indictment to improve the surprise of their case at trial, so they may have more evidence forthcoming; but "The indictment raises novel and complex legal issues." Sheesh.
This isn't the way to do this.
I understand the desire to speak truth to power, and the importance of holding the powerful to account; but the way to uphold the rule of law is NOT to ignore the rule of law so we can bring a case. There's a word for that: a kangaroo court, "a court that ignores recognized standards of law or justice," leading to show trials.
Donald Trump certainly isn't my favorite politician, and perhaps he needs to be brought to justice; but we should also presume innocence until proven guilty. Here's hoping that either the District Attorney coughs up some very good evidence that justifies his actions, or that the case gets swiftly thrown out if his actions weren't justified. I just can't see any good coming from anything between those two extremes.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Sunset in San Francisco.
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
Hey folks, the Clockwork Alchemy steampunk convention is back, and in a new location, the San Mateo Marriott San Francisco Airport! I’ll have an author table there with all my Jeremiah Willstone books - the CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE and the Thinking Ink Press anthologies TWELVE HOURS LATER, THIRTY DAYS LATER and SOME TIME LATER, and much more, including the Dakota Frost urban fantasy series and my science fiction writing!
I will be at two author signings and four - count them, FOUR panels, including World Building, Who’s the Villain, Science of Airships, Secret Hideout or Secret Lair, and Getting Past Page One - hey, wait a minute, that is five, I counted them, FIVE panels! I may need a nap after all that. But not before I’ve signed a book or given a talk for you!
Time and Location:
Clockwork Alchemy 2023
Friday April 7 - Sunday April 9
San Mateo Marriott San Francisco Airport
1770 South Amphlett Blvd San Mateo, California 94402
And here's where you can find me:
Looking forward to seeing you all!
-the Centaur
Pictured: A sampler from Clockwork Alchemy 2022.
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.
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.
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.
That is all.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Gordon Ramsay's "Finally, some good fucking food," adapted for the Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves movie, which was, at last, a good fucking D&D movie, and which had, at last, a good fucking gelatinous cube. It also apparently had cameos of the kids from the 80's cartoons, though for my money my favorite D&D adaptation is the late-80's-early-90's comic Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, because it has a centaur and it's set in Forgotten Realms. Anyway, this most recent movie was awesome, go see it, so it will make a lot of money, and we get sequels with more of Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith and especially Sophia Lillis doing their adventuring thing.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I love San Francisco. In many ways, the city has become a mess since I first started visiting it twenty-five years ago, but in others it has not changed: you can go around the corner and find a quirky bit of history, like a restaurant mentioned in a Sam Spade novel that has the actual Maltese Falcon on display.
And, allegedly, that's what Sam Spade ate - lamb chops with baked potato and sliced tomatoes. I'll pass on the coffee and cigarettes, thanks, but it was a perfectly nice little meal. John's Grill is a tight space as viewed from above, but it uses every ounce of available floorspace quite efficiently:
The Falcon itself is on the second floor. Forgive me for not coming up with some pun about "The Last Millenium's Falcon" or some such, it's late and I have a presentation to work on for the AAAI Spring Symposium next week. But just so you don't miss it ... well, you can't miss it:
Ah, San Francisco, and John's Grill. I won't say never change, but some things should stay the same.
Since 1908, indeed.
-the Centaur
The above is a screenshot of my Google Research profile, which presumably one day (perhaps March 31st, my "official" last day) will become a dead link. After that, you may take a look at the Historical Documents in the form of a cached PDF of a printout of the page.
Ah, memories. :-D
-the Centaur
Pictured: Oh, come on, guys, it's on the tin.
Now, see, this is what I was talking about last time. At the Game Developer's Conference today, after a long and informative series of talks, I ended up having an impromptu roundtable about language model planning, followed by a dinner with a friend talking about the history of the conference from a behind-the-scenes perspective.
The discussions were fascinating, and there are potentials for integrating these new language model technologies with older techniques like logic programming to very good results.
But, by the time the dinner was done, I was exhausted, and crashed back at my room, trying to sleep off some of the effects of two nights of rich dinners, no sleep, and hard-core information overload.
But I still had more work to do, creating my slides for the upcoming HRI in Academia and Industry Workshop at the AAAI Spring Symposium Series, not to mention my document updates on the main social navigation benchmarking paper itself. And, of course, all of that could not get finished in one night, not if I want to get up early enough to attend what are sure to be packed talks tomorrow morning.
But my point, and I did have one, is that if I had relied on myself to blog at the end of the day "when everything was done", I wouldn't have blogged at all, because everything is NOT done. But, since I had momentum from earlier in the day, it was easy to pull up the window and put together a quick post.
This post.
So, momentum is real. Once you start doing something, it's easier to keep doing it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Various lines and slides from today's GDC, and a nice dessert from Amber India.
Oh yeah, I only offhandedly mentioned - back at the Game Developer's Conference!
Hi Mom! Oh wait, she's gone. That ... went dark fast, Francis. Well, hopefully she's watching up there and is not too mad that I'm still wasting my time on such frivolous things. But, I got my job at Google through the AI Programmers' Roundtable in ... 2005, I think it would have been, so this is not frivolous to me. And it's a great place to find out what's going on in the field ...
... and I must say, the first talk out of the gate got dense, fast!
Just how I like it.
Back into the fray!
-the Centaur
"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.
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.
Hey folks, I am proud to announce the 4th annual Embodied AI Workshop, held once again at CVPR 2023! EAI is a multidisciplinary workshop bringing computer vision researchers, machine learning researchers and roboticists to study the problem of creating intelligent systems that interact with their worlds.
For a highlight of previous workshops, see our Retrospectives paper. This year, EAI #4 will feature dozens of researchers, over twenty participating institutions, and ten distinct embodied AI challenges. Our three main themes for this year's workshop are:
We will have presentations from all the challenges discussing their tasks, progress in the community, and winning approaches. We will also have six speakers on a variety of topics, and at the end of the workshop I'll be moderating a panel discussion among them.
I hope you can join us, in the real or virtually, at EAI #4 at CVPR 2023 in Vancouver!
-the Centaur
