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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
"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.
SO, one of my favorite characters is Porsche, a centauress warrior from the thirty-first century who populated many of my first tranche of as-yet-unpublished science fiction stories. (I think she only appears in one published story, "Stranded" in the anthology of the same name, and even that, just as a cameo). And while I have worked a lot to improve my art, I wondered what Midjourney could do. And I got the above result from the following prompt:
a centauress with long, rich curly purple hair, very beautiful, with half-asian, half-english appearance, and pointed ears, wearing an armored space costume like a combination of ghost in the shell and star trek, and bearing a double-bladed scythe with black glowing blades
- the Centaur
Wow. This is really spot on. Her hair is right, her face is right, her skin tone is right, her armor is right ... heck, even her slightly haunted look is right, and to go beyond even that, one of the variants looks like a slightly older, more grizzled variant, which completely checks out with her storyline:
Kudos to you, Midjourney, except ... she's not a centauress. She's just a person, a fetching one, I admit, but not a half-woman, half-horse creature with the pointed ears and black twin-bladed scythe of the prompt.
Well, shoot. What if we look at some of the other variants?
This one is creepily good in a sense ... it's got her forehead dot (she's a First Contact Engineer, and wears a pheromone bead she used to communicate with a scent-based alien hive species) and even hints of her mechanical arm and possibly ear. But this is just coincidence. Look at this other variant:
What appears is just chance. Here, her ears are rounded, the dot's gone, and the weapon looks even less on point. A lot of what looked right to me is just random features onto which I was projecting, like cloudbusting.
Well, double shoot. What if we refine the prompt? What do we get?
a centauress (a creature with the upper body of a woman and a lower body of a horse) with long, rich curly purple hair, very beautiful, with half-asian, half-english appearance, and pointed ears, wearing an armored space costume like a combination of ghost in the shell and star trek, and wielding a scythe with black glowing blades
- the Centaur
Yerk. That's ... just jumbled nonsense. Tweaks to the prompt to make it simpler just produced women on horses. Midjourney does not apparently understand the concept 'centaur' in any meaningful sense. I tried just the prompt "centaur", and ... um ... yeah ... no, I'm not going to show you those. They're just a guy with a horse, or sort of on a horse, or ... sort of ... in a horse? A centaur as envisioned by The Thing.
Okay, one last try. What if I give it one of my pieces of art, and then ask it to render it anime style? Let's hold that piece of imagery till the last, but the prompt is:
an anime style centauress with purple hair and a double-bladed scythe jumping in front of a waterfall
--the Centaur
Oh, lordy. And I'm not going to show you the one it tried to generate from the prompt "anime style".
Oh wait, I am!
Wow. Evocative - the top left reminds me of Cinnamon Frost - but it has little to do with the image I put in, and the attempt in the top right especially is nonsensical.
I am inspired by Midjourney. It's definitely a better renderer than me, and has good ideas about composition which I have already used in my artwork.
But I stick by my comment that it is an amateur which has taught itself to render very well, and cannot take meaningful art direction. As limited as I am, I'll stick with my own drawing, thank you!
Like this one, the image I gave to Midjourney above. It's not perfect, it's not well rendered ... but it is mine:
And she has four legs, a scythe, and pointy ears, dag nabit.
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.
SO automatic image generation is a controversial thing I think about a lot. Perhaps I should comment on it sometime. Regardless, I thought I'd show off the challenges that come from using this technology using a simple example. If you recall, I did a recent post with a warped bookstore picture, and attempted to regenerate it using generative AI with Midjourney. Unfortunately, the prompt
a magical three-dimensional impossible bookstore in the style of M.C. Escher
me
failed to pick up the image for some reason. After a few iterations with the Midjourney Discord interface, I got the very nice, but nonsensical and generic, AI generated image you see up top. After playing around with the API, I realized that I likely had formulated my prompt wrong, and tried again to include this image:
On the second pass, I got another, more on-point, yet still nonsensical image as you see below:
These systems do LOOK impressive. But they work like ... amateurs who've learned to render well. They can produce things that are cool, but it's very hard to make them produce something on point.
And this is above and beyond the massive copyright issues that arise from a system that regurgitates other people's copyrighted art, much less the impact on jobs, much less the impact on the human soul.
What, you think you can just look at me, sitting here on this weird funny pile of leaves on top of these strangely fallen logs, minding my own business like a normal cat, and I'll look back? At YOU?
Recently I went to do something in Mathematica - a program I've used hundreds if not thousands of times - and found myself stumped on a simple issue related to defining functions. I've written large, complicated Mathematica notebooks, yet this thing I done hundreds of times was stymieing me.
But - yes - I'd done it hundreds of times; but not regularly in the past year or so.
My knowledge had gone stale.
Programming, it appears, is not like riding a bike.
What about other languages? I can remember LISP defun's, mostly, but would I get a C++ class definition right? I used to do that professionally, eight years ago, and have published articles on programming C++ ... but I've been writing almost exclusively Python and related scripting languages for the past 7 years.
Surprisingly, my wife and I had this happen in real life. We went to cook dinner, and surprisingly found some of the stuff in the pantry had gone stale. During the pandemic, you see, we bought ahead, since you couldn't always find things, but we consumed enough of our staples that they didn't go stale.
Not so once the rate of consumption dropped just slightly - eating out 2-3 times a week, eating out for lunch 2-3 times a week - with a slight drop in variety. Which meant the very most common staples were consumed, but some of the harder-to-find, less-frequently-used stuff went bad.
We suspect some of it may have had near-expired dates we hadn't paid attention to, but now that we're looking, we're carefully looking everywhere to make sure our staples are fresh.
Maybe, if there are skills we want to rely on, we should work to keep those skills fresh too.
Maybe we need to do more than just "sharpen the saw" (the old adage that work goes faster if you take the time to maintain your tools). Perhaps the saw needs to be pulled out once a while and honed even if you aren't sawing things regularly, or you might find that it's gone rusty while it's been stored away.
-the Centaur
Pictured: The bottom layers of detritus of the Languages Nook of the Library of Dresan, with an ancient cast-off office chair brought home from the family business by my father, over 30 years ago.
Somehow, inadvertently, I caused the previous picture's post to get blurred in transport. Below is a better version, which seems to have come through much clearer:
This is from my blogpost "All the Transitions of Tic Tac Toe, Redux" . Apparently the full-size image is no longer available (probably because it's close to 80 megabytes in size, and whatever file hosting I was using to put it up is broken) but a "smaller" version is below, only 12 megabytes in size (or here):
All the transitions from the first state of tic-tac-toe (at the bottom) to to win for X (left), win for O (right), or draw (top).
Funny ... I long remembered this as being the topic of "Don't Fall Into Rabbit Holes" but that turns out to have been a completely different project.
Wow. We're done with the paper. And what a team effort! So many people came together on this one - research, infra, operations, human-robot interaction folks, the whole nine yards. It's amazing to me how interdisciplinary robotics is becoming. A few years ago 7 authors on a paper was unusual. But out of the last 5 papers I helped submit, the two shortest papers had 8 authors, and all the others were 15 or more.
And it's not citation inflation. True, this most recent paper had a smaller set of authors actively working on the draft, collating contributions from a larger group running the experiments ... but the previous paper had more than 25 authors, all of whom materially contributed content directly to the draft.
What a wonderful time to be alive.
And to recover from food poisoning.
-the Centaur
Pictured: this afternoon's draft of the paper, just prior to a video conference to hammer out some details.
