Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis
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
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.
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.
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.
Our big butch cat - Loki is 16+ pounds of fur and muscle, with relatively little flab - is actually a little scaredy guy. I mean, I might be a scaredy guy too if the situation was reversed: I'm approximately 6 times taller and 11 times heaver than Loki, and I'd be freaked to live in a world where 35-foot-tall, one-ton creatures felt like picking me up at random times for no discernible reason.
But he's scared of other things too, like his shadow. And I think that happened because once, when he tried to go outside, a baby rat snake was coiling by the door. He ran to the nearby French doors to be let out, but the rat snake had also fled - to the same doors! And then, both of them again fled to the next door down. He was pretty freaked, and a little more cautious going over thresholds since then. Not this guy, though:
Regardless, Loki frequently gets animated, starts looking outside or in the yard to see what's going on, and stares at it for a long time, before settling down and chilling out. Even when something is really there, though, it doesn't mean that the cause is always actionable. Sometimes things are just passing through, and worrying about them or doing something about them can only lead to more disruption.
I'm not saying to ignore real problems, of course; seeing the fox requires different reactions than the deer.
But how often do we stress out about things which will ultimately pass us by?
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, the snek, and the deer. Fox was not available for comment.
It's good to be home, but Loki sure doesn't make it convenient. Cat, I have work to do.
Still, I guess you're going to do you.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, in my lap as I type this (likely because, right now, I'm not letting him sit on my recently-filled-in whiteboard desk) and Loki, eating with his feet in his food bowl, because ... ?????
Brief placeholder I'm scheduling for tomorrow, in case we get caught up with Silicon Valley Open Studios stuff. But what it strikes me is how animals behave differently when we're not around. Case in point, Loki is pictured here, sitting in my rocking chair - which he rarely does if I'm present, either sitting on my lap, or sitting on the table. But never in the other rocking chair. I wonder why that is.
Or maybe it's Heisenberg's Cat Principle: if you observe a cat, you have disturbed it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, on MY rocking chair, disputing that "MY" part.
There's an ongoing debate over whether human emotions are universal: I, like many researchers, think that there was solid work done by Ekman back in the day that demonstrated this pretty conclusively with tribes with little Western contact, but some people seem determined to try to pretend that evidence can be made not to exist once it's been collected, if you just argue loudly enough about how you think it's wrong.
(The evidence is wrong?)
Yet my cat can look surprised, or scared, or angry, or alarmed, or content, or curious. It's fairly well established that some emotions, like the self-conscious ones of shame or pride, have highly variable, culturally-determined expressions (if they have consistent expressions at all). But when animals very different from us can still communicate emotions, it's hard to believe none of it is universal.
(The evidence is wrong? What's wrong with you people?)
-the Centaur
P.S. If you subscribe to the anthropic fallacy fallacy, please do not bother to tell me that I'm falling into the anthropic fallacy, because you're the one trapped in a fallacy - sometimes surprise is just surprise, just like a heart is still a heart when that heart is found an animal, and not a "deceptively heart-like blood pump."
Pictured: Loki, saying, "What, you expect me to do something? I'm a cat. I was busy, sleeping!"
It's been a long day dealing with a whole sequence of guff, so here I present to you Loki, taking a nap after his hard work on reconciling large language models with classical symbolic artificial intelligence.
-the Centaur
P.S. The Kickstarter is almost there! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thinkinginkpress/the-neurodiversiverse-alien-encounters-a-sci-fi-anthology ... 94%, with ~3 days to go! Like, back and share!
Okay, it wasn't a fluke: Loki sought me out, meowed for attention, climbed up into my lap ... then moved to the nearby table and deliberately turned his back to me.
Now, it is true that he wanted more scritches, but just a little, and it was just as clear that he wanted his large primate to be near enough to protect him, but without a lot of interaction.
He is a weird little cat. He often meows that he wants something, but can't seem to walk in the direction of what he wants, and you need to trial-guess it by walking in several different directions until he follows.
He clearly wants something though ... he just can't make it clear.
What, you expected my behavior to make sense?
-the Centaur
Pictured: that guy, yes, that guy, rocking the golden hour.
Loki has asked me to pass on this public service announcement for cat partners everywhere: "Please, sit close enough that we may ignore you. We can't very well ignore you if you aren't there, now can we?" I suppose this is a security blanket thing, though later in the day he changed tactics on maintaining proximity of his human and went for "doing cute things, please pay attention to me."
I picked him up recently for one of the back-stretches he enjoys, and I swear he yawned when he did it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, trying to ignore me, but from a comfortably close distance, then attracting attention.
Technically, everything is everywhere, but, nevertheless, cats can turn their backs on anything, even existence.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, pretending to ignore the universe he came outside to see.
So! You take one of those double-row brushes (see detail below) ...
... and apply it to one of these fuzzy creatures in shedding season (see detail below) ...
... and, violin, you get a tribble:
As far as I can tell, these artisan, hand-crafted tribbles are, unlike Dr. McCoy's version, not born pregnant.
If only most problems we face in this world could be solved as easily as "stop feeding the invasive species without natural predators." And, in fact, like not feeding the trolls, many of them can.
However, cat fuzz is not one of those problems. For decades, I put up with my pets getting horrible tangles and mats during shedding season, great lumpy wads which had to be cut or picked off - almost like tribbles.
But, when my wife and I got those double-pronged brushes and began brushing the cat every day, the mats went away. Though we do have now a tribble proliferation problem, we don't have unhappy cats.
Solving some problems requires disengaging the behavior that creates it (like passing on chips, margaritas and dessert for your problem waistline); others require active maintenance to prevent them from happening (like brushing for the problem of keeping your teeth).
What problem are you facing that would go away if you stop feeding it - or start brushing it?
-the Centaur
... your contributions to my productivity are invaluable.
I do not know how I could remember to get everything done without you.
-the Centaur
Pictured: my whiteboard desk, after Loki sat on it; and while I didn't catch him in the act this time, I have caught him doing it previously, and there we are.
... he's just going to survey it from the safety of the inside.
Lots of work on Embodied AI #5 and Clockwork Alchemy and the Neurodiversiverse, more tomorrow. Until then, please enjoy the above pictures of a cat.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, who for some reason wants to look out the window on the opposite side of the room - perhaps because there's more activity out in the trees than in the little courtyard behind him. Also behind him, a sofa modified by my wife Sandi, and one of her paintings.
Apparently this wonderful phenomenon springs upon us, then is gone, almost entirely in the period when I am normally at GDC ... a transient frosting of beauty, dispersed by the wind almost as soon as it falls, like snow dissolved by rain ... but, for whatever reason, this year I got to see it. Cherry blossoms, I presume?
Even the cat stares in wonder.
-the Centaur
Cats supposedly have brains the size of a large walnut, and are not supposed to be intelligent according to traditional anthropofallicists. But there's something weird about how Loki remains perfectly still ... right up until the point where you want to take a picture, at which point he'll roll over. Or how he'll pester you, right until you're done with a task, but when you are done and can attend to him, he'll walk away.
Almost like there's something devious going on in that aloof,yet needy little brain, some thought process like, I want you to pay attention to me, but I don't want you to think that I need it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, who looked just like a sphinx, until I pulled out my camera and he immediately rolled over.
Damn you, Google Spotlight: it's a nice-sounding feature to pop up images from the past, but there's always the chance that the person or thing you pop up will be gone, and you didn't think of that, did you?
I miss you, little guy.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Gabby. No offense to any other animal I've ever owned, but Gabby was my favorite pet.
When we finally get superintelligence, I want it to explain to me what cats are thinking. Loki clearly wants something, but it isn't clear what it is. He wants your attention, he wants to go outside, he wants to go somewhere not too far from the house, but he doesn't seem satisfied with you just standing there, nor with you bending down to scratch him, nor with you going anywhere else.
What do you want, for me to just stand here, so you feel safe rolling in the dirt?
There's no pleasing some people.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, in the external cat condo which we got as part of our successful "cat sitting solution".
You're staring. Were you working here? I feel like you were working here.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, being very helpful, as usual.
