Posts tagged as “Blogging Every Day”

[twenty twenty-five day sixty-eight]: step by step

Published March 9, 2025 by centaur

So I habitually bite off more than I can chew: at any given time I have 200 to 250 projects running, and no reasonable human being can keep on top of more than seven plus or minus two things at once.

Now, I know, I know, I know, I'm likely autistic, and am prompted to be WAY more explicit than most people about the projects that I'm ACTUALLY doing, whereas most people just fool themselves into thinking they're doing a few things when in reality they're relying on their well-trained autonomic adulting skills to keep on top of the dozens upon dozens of things they need to do to keep on top of just living. But, beyond, that, I have hundreds of creative projects that I want to tackle, so many that I often feel like I'm thrashing.

But if you focus - again, I know, I know, I know, I say I hate focus, and that focus is the enemy, but bear with me for a bit - I say, if you allow yourself to be creative, and imagine ALL the things you might be doing ... BUT then focus on a few of them at once, trying to make sure you make progress on just those, you can, step by step, move your way through those projects, get them done, and move on to the next ones.

I've been "reading and eating" for decades now as my way of consuming material, but only recently have I started using the "ten page rule," in which I break each chapter into ten page sections, and try to make sure I get through at least 5 pages of a section in each reading session (the whole ten, or to end of chapter, if the material is easy, or the book's pages are small, or the chapters are short; the five page grace period if it's a big fat textbook filled with details with which I am unfamiliar). But I've augmented that now - by focusing on the most important books first, promising myself I can read the others if I get through them. I'm almost done with Large Language Models: A Deep Dive, which has been very illuminating.

And now I've built on that, so at the end of the day, after reading my "chunk of the hard book at night with milk and pound cake" - which is usually a big fat textbook that requires reading and re-reading of sections over and over again until I get it - I say, after that, I pick up a by-the-bedstand novel and read a chapter. Just one chapter (again, less if it is big long fat chapters or something esoteric). I've gotten through The Cthulhu Casebook: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows and Cthulhu Passant that way and am now digging deeper into my novel backlog, promising myself I can by more books as I finish them.

The same thing has been going on with various of my research projects: I have been building out various pieces of software, sometimes with a lot of thrashing. But I stuck with a project I had been tempted to abandon, and today got it mostly working, all unit tests passing, all code checked in and pushed to Github. I still have more features I want to add before release ... but it felt good.

While I don't believe in "focus" for focus's sake, I do believe focus is a tool you can use effectively. And if you prioritize your highest-value, lowest-remaining-work projects, and focus on getting done the next thing you have to do, you can, over time, walk that path that starts with a single step, and find yourself a thousand miles later standing atop your mountain.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Eating, and reading, at Panera.

[twenty twenty-four day sixty-seven]: a month, week, and day ahead

Published March 8, 2025 by centaur

So! Earlier I said I wanted to build up a buffer for "Drawing Every Day", but that complicated formula "30(m + 1) + d + 2" - a month and a couple of days ahead, computed by adding 1 to the month, multiplying by 30, adding the days, and adding 2 - neither "felt right" nor left me feeling secure in my "aheadness".

I had planned to work on my backlog from 2024 when additional 2025 drawings would have taken me over the magic number "30(m + 1) + d + 2", but it didn't feel right, and the work I had to do to catch up when I missed a day bothered me.

Then I realized I shouldn't be shooting for a month and a couple days ahead ... it should be more like a week. "30(m +1) + d + 7" (or "+ w") would give me a whole week to catch up. In fact, if I pushed it a bit further - getting a month, a week, and a day ahead - then even if I missed a day, I'd be a week ahead. Even if I missed a WEEK, I'd be a MONTH ahead. And if I missed a month ... I'd still have a week and a day.

If you get behind with that much buffer, it's all on you, baby.

I like this. A month, a week, and a day is easy to remember - and easy to compute, even though "30(m +1) + d + 7 +1" looks just as complicated as it was before, it's cognitively easier to process because it's all broken up into a sequence of simple operations that are easy to remember.

Now, next up ... blogging ahead! Let's start with just +1 ... this one.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Welp, I wanted a picture of my drawing context, but, hey, here's me reading at the great Green Lettuce restaurant, which has a nice high-topped counter and awesome decor, food and staff.

[twenty twenty-five day sixty-six]: now this is real progress

Published March 7, 2025 by centaur

Normally Loki hates eating around the kittens, or they're so interested in his food that they ignore their own and cause him to stalk off in a huff - "Ruuude, duuude!"

But they're getting over it - I had to move a kitten, but after I did, the system remained stable for the remainder of the meal.

Baby steps are short, but they can carry you down a long road, if you just keep going.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-five day sixty-five]:i think they’re acclimating

Published March 7, 2025 by centaur

So our older cat and our younger cats seem to be tolerating each other more. Actually, the kittens have loved Loki from the start, but he had been solitary for so long that he didn't want any new cats in his home, thank you very much. Now he willingly goes into areas which have kittens, which is a big improvement.

As I keep saying, sooner or later he's going to learn that nothing bad happens when he hangs out with kittens.

-Anthony

P.S. A blogpost a day late, but, eh, we'll get there.

[twenty twenty-five day sixty-four]: echoes

Published March 5, 2025 by centaur

SO! I went "outside my circle" today and did something different, and was about to blog about "if you do what you always do, you'll get what you've always gotten" ... but as I started to write, I had this funny feeling that I'd written about that before, and sure enough, I'd blogged about it almost exactly a year ago.

Now, I was outside of my circle today because of Lent - it's Ash Wednesday, and I decided to drag myself out to an Ash Wednesday service at the church I got married at, Saint Peter's Episcopal (the "rapture-ready" church on Hudson Road, complete with to-go box handle on top). That put me in a different physical location than normal, but it took God sending me a firetruck parked in front of one of the restaurants I would have normally fallen back to before I tried a new place - the Lost Cajun, itself part of a chain I'd been to before, but for some reason I ordered something different than normal, and got the amazing blackened catfish dish above which was far better than the things I'd previously tried there.

And, weirdly, my previous "if you do what you always do" post was also right around the start of Lent. So I wonder if there's something about the spiritual earthquake that Lent is supposed to inspire that also had sent me climbing out of ruts and seeking new experiences a year ago - or, whether that experience left echoes of memory that prompted me to try the same thing again this year.

Who knows? It was a good dish of fish.

-the Centaur

Pictured: um, I said it already.

[twenty twenty five day sixty-two]: Seventy-Five Percent of a Project is Worth Less Than Nothing

Published March 3, 2025 by centaur

Recently Internet guru Seth Godin blogged about “Halfway Projects”: you can get value from eating half of a pear, but half a canoe is worth less than no canoe at all. I like that. It’s a great metaphor for project management, where quitting a project just before the finish line doesn’t deliver any of its value—but leaves you with all of the costs.

Now, I misremembered Godin’s example a bit - what he actually said was “half a pear might deliver 85% of its value”. But the principle is sound: half a battery charge might let you do 85% of your work … but half a parachute is definitely worth less than no parachute at all, because it might encourage you to take risks that you shouldn’t.

For project management, though, the idea helps explain my long-running idea “work just a little bit harder than you want to.” Often, when working on a project, we get exhausted, and decide to give up - but working just a little bit harder can take us over the finish line. Our instinct to save us effort can actually thwart the work we need to do to achieve success.

For example, recently I was working on a machine learning project that just wasn’t working. We’d spent enormous effort on getting the learning system up and running, without good learning results to show for it, and the arbitrarily imposed deadline was coming up to show something impressive, or the project would be axed.

But, if you know anything about machine learning, you know most of the effort goes into data preparation. We had to modify the system to log its data, massage it into a format that was useful for learning, and spend further coding effort to speed it up so it was useful for development (taking the data load from 36 hours to 36 seconds!).

The point is, we only got the data running in mid-February, and were trying to compress months of experimentation into just ten days. Finally, as the deadline approached, I got philosophical: we’d done all the work we needed to do to start learning, and my recommendation was that the team keep working on it, with or without me.

But … I didn’t stop there.

Before the final presentation, I spent time cleaning up the code, checking things in, and getting a few of the most promising programs ready to collect “baselines” - long runs of the system set up for comparisons. And the next morning, I reviewed those baselines to present a report to the team about which one was most promising.

Long story short, one of the simplest models that we tried was actually sort of kinda working. Once I realized we had a scaling issue in the output, a simple tweak made the system get even better. I spent another hour tweaking the graphs to put the human input and the system results onto the same graph, and the good results leapt out into sharp relief.

I could have just decided that the system was a failure - but then I wouldn’t have done that extra work, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. I call this the “Sunken Cost Fallacy Fallacy”. For those not familiar, the “Sunken Cost Fallacy” kicks in when you keep doing something that isn’t working because of the effort you’ve spent, even though you have a better option.

But you can’t “decide” that something is a better option because you’re a Decisive Decider™. It actually has to be a better option, or what you’re doing is simply throwing away the effort that you’ve spent to date because you want to throw your weight around. No, if you suspect a cost is sunken, there’s no substitute for doing your due diligence - is the project working?

If it isn’t, sure, then quit. But often, that little bit of extra work can unlock the solution to the problem. During my presentation, the team asked natural about the simple model that turned out to be the most successful - and those questions made me realize it could be improved. Over the weekend, I applied those fixes - taking merely good to excellent.

Last week, as of Thursday night, I was pretty down on the possibility of success for our project. But I did my due diligence anyway, and by Friday morning, I had a working solution. By Friday afternoon, all the team knew it – and by Sunday evening, I was composing an email outlining our machine learning “recipe” that we can build on going forward.

Quitting just before the finish line wastes all the effort you spent on the project. Before you quit, work a little bit harder than you want to and do your due diligence to check whether it is working. If it isn’t, you can stop with no regrets; if it is, you will have not just saved the value of your project - you will have saved yourself from shooting yourself in the foot.

-The Centaur

Pictured: The project team. Three-quarters of them want to try a new direction, but the old seasoned hand isn't quite so sure.

[retro 2025 day one]: a new year’s mushroom farming adventure

Published March 1, 2025 by centaur

So! After that damn climate-change-induced hurricane, we had roughly fifty trees down on our property (though it may have been much more, if you count smaller trees). But this disaster is an opportunity, as newly fallen logs still have a functional immune system for a short period of time ... making it a great time to use those logs for mushroom farming!

My wife and I have been interested in mushroom farming for a while, and our friend Brandon at I See Fungi hooked us up with what we needed to get started. One of those things was a drill bit that helps drill holes to hold mushroom spawn, as well as an applicator that helps put the spawn in the holes:

After that, you can optionally use wax to seal the holes to prevent other organisms from digging the spawn out or getting into it. The messy wax, which can be heated up on your stove, or, better, a cookplate, gives the mycelium the best chance of getting established as the dominant organism within the wood.

After getting this round of mushrooms going, my wife and I had a lovely evening at Chef 21 Sushi Burger ...

... then walked around downtown Greenville, which still had its Christmas decorations up..

A lovely start to a New Year!

-the Centaur

Pictured: Um, well, I said it already.

[twenty twenty five day sixty]: 30 (m + 1) + d + 2

Published March 1, 2025 by centaur

SO! If I got my blog running back in January, and planned to blog every day, why haven’t I been posting?

Because I also wanted to draw every day … and wanted to build a buffer.

Why? Well, let’s break it down.

First, I want to draw comic books. Yes, yes, yes, I have a webcomic called f@nu fiku, but after I broke my arm, and got my laptop stolen, and found my hand-crafted blog software stopped working, and got swarmed trying to crank out my first four novels … well, after all that, I found my confidence in my drawing had collapsed.

I never was that great at drawing, frankly, but when I was working on f@nu fiku with the goal of cranking out a page a week, I never let my drawing limitations stop me. If I wanted to have an image in my comic, I had to figure out how to draw it, no matter what. But even though I wasn’t that great, I had a level of self-confidence that let me tackle whatever I had to.

But I never gave up on comics. Not only do I want to finish f@nu fiku, I have other comics I want to draw, from Cinnamon Frost and Serendipity the Centaur stories up to and including becoming the writer-artist for Green Lantern. Obviously that last one is aspirational, but I can’t frigging aspire to become the writer-artist of anything if I am not creating comics at all.

But, I not only love comics, and want to work on comics, I study comics. I know, for example, that Jim Lee spent a solid year teaching himself to draw after college in an attempt to break into the comics industry. Now, I can’t yet put in 8-10 hours a day drawing like Lee did, but I decided I could at least draw every day.

But it’s hard to draw every day if real life intervenes (like Dragon Con, for example). According to my records, I’ve tried the “Drawing Every Day” project 3 times in the past, and never made it through the full year once - I lasted 215 days in 2021 (through Dragon Con), just one day in 2023 (the layoffs), and 135 days in 2024 (through the Embodied AI Workshop).

I find it really disheartening to hit the end of the year and to be that far behind. But I also know that professional comic book artists who do daily strips build up a buffer to keep themselves ahead - Bill Holbrook, the author of Kevin and Kell, built up 30 strips before launching what is now one of the longest running webcomics in history.

So, I decided to do a buffer for Drawing Every Day 2025.

So, for the first part of this year, I leaned into drawing, trying to get ahead. I decided that I wouldn’t start blogging every day until I built up a buffer of drawing every day, and in an act of quixotic hubris, I also decided to start retro-drawing the missing drawings from 2024 so that I would finish those drawings as well.

But, I wondered, how far ahead should I try to get in my drawings? Following Bill Holbrook, I guessed a month, but once you’re out of January, you need a tool to keep track of what day of the year it is. I wanted something simpler … so I started to think in terms of a simple formula I could keep in my head.

Fortunately (thanks, passage of time!) months are ordered, thus can be numbered. Call the number of the month in the year “m”. Months have a notch over 30 days on average, but for a mental formula, you want to round to even numbers to keep the math simple. So 30m is a good quick overestimate of what day it is in the year.

But 30m is a variable, vulnerable overestimate, as it is more ahead at the start of the month almost 30 days less at the end of the month. You could add 30 days, but even 30(m+1) still has this variable property. So, call the day “d” and add that to the formula: 30(m + 1) + d. And that sounds great. 30(m + 1) is guaranteed to always be more than 30 days ahead.

And … 30(m+1)+d is a treadmill. Every day, you’re just at your buffer, and every day, you can’t fail to lose focus, or you eat into your buffer. That’s no good: the point of the buffer is to get your back when major life events (like Dragon Con) happen, not to put you constantly on edge that you’re about to lose your buffer.

So I decided to add a few more days to the formula. I know I typically draw two to four drawings in a session (sometime as few as one if I am busy or have chosen something complicated, sometimes as many as five if I am sketching). So adding two more to the formula gets us to 30(m + 1) + d + 2 … a number I can easily calculate in my head, and, what’s more, add to my drawings, even if I don’t have internet where I am.

It’s not perfect - when transitioning from a short month, you can find yourself a few days behind - but it’s a number so far ahead that I can skip a day whenever I have to, confident that I will be able to get back on track with the typical number of drawings I do per day. And if I am at my buffer, I can do a “retro 2024” drawing or sketch some idea not on my drawing plan (which is a whole nother topic for a whole nother post).

So. Anyway. My point, and I did have one.

Today, I reached 30(m + 1) + d + 2 in my drawing buffer.

And so today is the day I resume Blogging Every Day, with this post.

It’s good to be back.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Where I am, drawing, and writing, and one of the drawings. And unfortunately, it's too dim to do my normal photo of my drawing for today, so I'll have to scan that when I get home.

comfort … and challenge

Published January 31, 2025 by centaur

Long day. But I had yet another victory with "push it just a little bit farther" combined with "nailing down the carpet", applying them together to successfully complete a data loader for my latest machine learning project. It was quite the mess at first, with loose wires and dangling bits all over the place, and while the high level concept of what I wanted to do was clear, some of the next steps were elusive.

But "nailing down the carpet" means methodically going through a project and eliminating everything that can trip you up - formatting files, turning on the linter, resolving lint issues, refactoring code, and, sometimes, just moving code to its proper place. And when I was done with that, my data loader class was practically empty, just waiting for a suggestion from ChatGPT to flesh it out.

I had to adapt that code to my use case, of course, but I successfully loaded my data (into a Colab which was now a third of its former size thanks to my aggressive moves of code into reusable libraries) and managed even to cut the proposed loader to half its size, again due to the reusable libraries I had just built. The code worked in Colab. And I wanted to check it all in - but the unit tests suggested by ChatGPT no longer passed after all my code changes. It was late and I was tired, so I decided, yeah, time to hang it up.

But I was so close. And so, I decided to "work a little bit harder," and fix the unit test. Once I dug into it, I realized the problem was the synthetic data that the generative AI had proposed in the unit test, so I replaced that with real data, using the librarized code I'd just refactored. And then I realized the data was too big, so I used ChatGPT to write, on the fly, some code to squeeze the data down to size as test data.

That extra work took less than an hour - maybe less than thirty minutes. But it meant I was able to package up a report to my team and toss it over the virtual cube wall, confident that I had a clear picture of the data they were sending me and a clear set of tools to deal with it. And my next step, after a couple of minor refactors, is to finish the data loader so it can look at sequences of frames - something that we strongly suspect is needed to solve this machine learning problem.

So, once that's done tomorrow ... it's on to learning.

Don't jinx it, Francis.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Loki, being very comfortable in the Captain's chair. And so my point, and I guess I had one, is that by pushing it a little bit farther, almost past my comfort zone, I in turn made things so much more stable that I am actually more relaxed and calm than I was when I was planning to turn in early. So I find the tools that I'm developing - "nail down the carpet", "sharpen your saw", "work a little bit harder", "clear the decks", "find the price and pay it", and "be gentle with yourself" - continue to reap greater and greater rewards.

not quite blogging every day … yet

Published January 25, 2025 by centaur

So ... what the heck happened to this website for almost six straight months?

The TL;DR (too long; didn't read summary) is that moving the Library of Dresan to a new provider was a huge endeavor, so I prioritized clearing everything else going on in my life until I could focus on the move.

I had lost faith in my old web service provider. Emails delivered to centaur at dresan dot com were randomly dropped to the point I had to stop using it, and image posting was no longer possible because the provider was only giving me 25 gigabytes out of my 35 gigabytes of allotted storage. The Library had to go elsewhere.

But that involved finding a new domain provider, setting up hosting, transferring all the files, transferring the database, getting the Library's WordPress installation running on a new site with new rules and a new version of PHP, and, as a bonus, transferring all the email addresses and lists to the new domain.

And, if you've never tried to transfer 25 gigabytes of files off a remote website, you can't just "do" that. A copy of that size off a consumer-grade website will just randomly fail at arbitrary points during the transfer. I had to write an entire program to help me track this (which I plan to clean up and release on Github).

But while all that was going on, I had to replace my laptop, volunteer at the Unsolved Problems in Social Navigation Workshop, launch The Neurodiversiverse, attend Dragon Con, attend the Milford Writing Workshop, clean up after a hurricane, start mushroom farming with the logs fallen from the hurricane (which had a clock attached to it), quixotically try to get some stuff prepared for GDC 2025, prep for EAI #6, handle submitting a +66 page paper with +30 authors, and prepare for the largest Christmas ever (where we hosted two parties with almost 20 people each, and had three separate groups of houseguests).

When Christmas was finally in the rear-view mirror, I then turned my attention to webworks - first fixing the Logical Robotics website, then fixing my wife's website, and finally fixing the Library itself. It was ... exactly the ordeal that I feared it would be. Actually the WordPress part, that part, it worked fine - I had already copied the files, and had frozen the database as of my July 26, 2024 post, and ... miraculously, the website was working to serve the pages with very little issue. But posting did not work (a permissions issue). And then logging into the website quit working (an SSL issue). And then posting images quit working (which turned out to be, indirectly, an SSL issue, due to the firewall bundled with the SSL).

And so on. And so on.

Yes, yes, yes, bla bla bla, you've heard all this from website developers before. But there's a very important insight I have to share with you. Yes, we are finite creatures with limited powers, and yes, sometimes we run into problems, and yes, sometimes, we run into problems that seem beyond our abilities to solve.

But, just as we are finite, so our problems are finite. Yes, yes, yes, it's important to understand the difference between a solvable problem (cleaning out your storage unit) and an unsolvable one (as when the legendary King Canute apocryphally tried to back the tide, which is actually a dirty lie given that he knew better and was just trying to stick it to his flatterers in his court, but, whatever). But as long as you are not actually trying to turn back the tides, your problems can be solved by focusing on them, one by one.

And so that's what I've been doing for the past several months since I came back from the Milford Writing Workshop. My 2024 was hectic - because we wanted to launch The Neurodiversiverse in time for Dragon Con 2024, and because I chose to do a lot of publicity for it at the Nebulas, Con Carolinas, and Dragon Con itself, but because I chose to not cancel many other events, like the Fifth Annual Embodied AI Workshop, or the Workshop on Unsolved Problems on Social Robot Navigation, or my attendance at the Milford Writing Workshop itself - requiring me to plan it down practically to the week.

After Milford, however, I had a few months until Christmas ... and I vowed to start "clearing the decks" of my massive todo lists. So I've spent the past three or four months methodically identifying things, working to eliminate them, and moving on with my life.

It has been refreshing and freeing. I have far to go - my todo list needs a fricking one inch binder clip, and I am not exaggering one bit - but, already, many things that have been bugging me are gone, just gone, leaving me with ... that ... much ... more ... free time and ... that ... much ... less ... mental load to carry.

So, this is a very long-winded way of saying, soon, I'm going to resume blogging every day.

But ... I wanted to clear the decks, and get off my chest why I haven't been.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Snow, in the "French Quarter," our tiny little courtyard.

[twenty twenty-four day one seven two]: i prioritize my marriage

Published July 12, 2024 by centaur

SO! I am behind on blogging. But my wife and I have been traveling so much this year (near constantly for five months between the two of us) that, frankly speaking, we need to focus on us time more than I need to focus on the blog. So it's going to take a little longer to get things rolling ... because other things come first.

-the Centaur

Pictured: an anniversary picture, from years ago (since the blog image uploading is still borken).

[twenty twenty-four day one seven one]: better late than never

Published July 3, 2024 by centaur

Welp, by my calendar, I'm about two weeks behind on blogging every day posts, but better late than never, eh? The Embodied AI Workshop went off quite well - we had standing room only three deep by the end - even though I was frazzled from 7am to 10pm trying to make sure things went off as planned.

And the next day, we had CVPR, which was quite the fun adventure! But, then, that evening, I spilled water onto my laptop. It promptly rebooted, then shut down, never to turn on again. Not only did that make me feel like an idiot, it put a serious crimp in the work I was planning to do during the conference.

Including blogging! Not only was it difficult to post on my phone, it was also practically impossible to start down the path of upgrading the dresan.com backend to deal with the file storage issue - and what computing time I had needed to be spent on The Neurodiversiverse. So everything ground to a halt.

So I'm not dead. But it is taking a bit of time to get things back on track. By my count I'm about two weeks behind on blogging and a week behind on art, and it looks like it will take several weeks to get caught up, back up to speed and on a regular posting schedule.

Stay tuned.

-the Centaur

Pictured: The backdrop for Embodied AI #4's scheduling poster, produced with several layers of generative AI combined in Photoshop and extended with Photoshop's own generative fill tools into the poster size. While I'm convinced we don't want to use generative AI for regular art, for this client, which was a workshop on AI featuring generative AI, we wanted the generative AI look.

[twenty twenty-four day one seven oh]: embodied ai #5

Published June 18, 2024 by centaur

Today is Embodied AI #5, running Tuesday, June 18 from 8:50am to 5:30pm Pacific in conjunction with CVPR 2024's workshop track on Egocentric & Embodied AI.

Here's how you can attend if you're part of the CVPR conference:

The physical workshop will be held in meeting room Summit 428.
The physical poster session will be held in room Arch 4E posters 50-81.
The workshop will also be on Zoom for CVPR virtual attendees.

Remote and in-person attendees are welcome to ask questions via Slack:

Ask questions on Slack

Please join us at Embodied AI #5!

-the Centaur

Pictured: Our logo for the conference.

[twenty twenty-four day one six nine]: t minus one

Published June 17, 2024 by centaur

The Fifth Annual Embodied AI Workshop is tomorrow, from 8:50 to 5:30 in room Summit 428 in the Seattle Convention Center as part of the CVPR conference!

You can see our whole schedule at https://embodied-ai.org/, but, in brief, we'll have six invited speakers, two panel discussions, two sessions on embodied AI challenges, and a poster session!

Going to crash early now so I can tackle the day tomorrow!

-the Centaur

Pictured: More from the archives, as I ain't crackin' the hood open on this website until EAI#5 is over.

[twenty twenty-four day one six eight]: what ISN’T embodied AI?

Published June 16, 2024 by centaur

The Embodied AI Workshop is coming up this Tuesday, starting at 8:50am, and I am busy procrastinating on my presentation(s) by trying to finish all the OTHER things which need to be done prior to the workshop.

One of the questions my talk raises is what ISN'T embodied AI. And the simplest way I can describe it is that if you don't have to interact with an environment, it isn't embodied.

Figuring out that the golden object on the left and the void on the right is a tremendously complex problem, solved by techniques like CNNs and their variants Inception and ResNet.

But it's a static problem. Recognizing things in the image doesn't change things in the image. But in the real world, you cannot observe things without affecting them.

This is a fundamental principle that goes all the way down to quantum mechanics. Functionally, we can ignore it for certain problems, but we can never make it go away.

So, classical non-interactive learning is an abstraction. If you have a function which goes from image to cat, and the cat can't whap you back for getting up in its bidnes, it isn't embodied.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Gabby, God rest his fuzzy little soul, and Loki, his grumpier cousin.

[twenty twenty-four day one six seven]: a zooma zoom zoom

Published June 15, 2024 by centaur

Flying to CVPR for Embodied AI. More when I land.

Zoom zoom.

-the Centaur

Pictured: my neck pillow, drawn from the archives since new image posts are down.

[twenty twenty-four post one six six]: what is embodied AI?

Published June 15, 2024 by centaur

big red stop button for a robot, i think from bosch

So, as I've said, Embodied AI is just around the corner. But what is this workshop about? Embodied AI, of course! It says so on the tin.

But the key thing that makes "embodied AI" different from computer vision is that you must interact with an environment; the key thing that makes "embodied AI" different from robotics is that technically it doesn't need to be a real physical environment, as long as the environment is dynamic and there are consequences for actions.

SO, we will have speakers talking about embodied navigation, manipulation, and vision; generative AI to create environments for embodied agents; augmented reality; humanoid robots; and more.

Okay, now I really am going to crash because I have to fly tomorrow.

Onward!

-the Centaur

Pictured: An e-stop (emergency stop) button from a robot. Looks a little jury-rigged there, Chester.

[twenty twenty-four post one six five]: embodied ai is almost here

Published June 15, 2024 by centaur

Ok, the image is from ICRA, but I am still traveling, and have not fixed the problem on the website backend. BUT, Embodied AI is this coming Tuesday, so please drop in if you are at CVPR!

More later, I had several long days at the customer site and I am going to go crash now.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four post one six three]: paranoia will ensure ya

Published June 13, 2024 by centaur

Okay, I was flying Tuesday, so I'm just going to pretend this was an abbreviated post, something something busy busy something something flying to Vancouver something something robot consulting.

At least I didn't try to fly on an expired passport ... this time. Strange how paranoid a mistake can make you! Like how I missed a flight - two days in a row - trying to leave London, ~30 years ago, the first time due to my mistake, the second due to a train stoppage, so I now try to go to airports ~2 hours early ... and missing my flight to Comic-Con due to traffic made me paranoid enough to leave ~3 hours early in LA's rush hour traffic so I'd have time to make it through any unexpected snafus with my international flight.

But that paranoia got me there safely and on time ... this time.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Me, at some event in 2015 ... wait, I owned this scarf in 2015???

[twenty twenty-four post one six two]: behindiness

Published June 12, 2024 by centaur

Super far behind, because we're in "the stretch" leading up to Embodied AI Five - which also happens to be the week of a site visit at one of my consulting clients. So, this past Monday, I met with them online, took care of some Neurodiversiverse stuff, met friends for dinner, then started packing to fly.

And, while I did draw, I forgot to blog. Mucha-girl disapproves.

Still, blogging every day, even if I have to backfill.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Detail of Alphonse Mucha's poster for Princess Hyacinth, incorporating, when you look more closely, a disturbingly strong right arm on the princess there - in my mind, probably symbolizing both her father, the blacksmith, and probably echoing Mucha's pro-Slavic symbolic interest in the goddess Slavia.