Posts tagged as “We Call It Living”

[fifty-nine] minus thirty-four: being where you need to be

Published April 4, 2023 by taidoka

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.

[fifty-eight] minus thirty-five: yardwork

Published April 4, 2023 by taidoka

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.

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.

[fifty-five] minus thirty-six: back to work

Published April 1, 2023 by centaur

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.

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.

Free at Last

Published April 1, 2023 by centaur

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.

[fifty] minus twenty-five: no blog for you

Published March 16, 2023 by centaur

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.

[forty-two!] minus nineteen: well, at least i have a system now

Published March 2, 2023 by centaur

Recently, when digging through old posts, I was reminded that Classic Editor posts are broken in WordPress - all the paragraph breaks are gone, and the content is mashed up into one grey wall of text. Thanks, WordPress, for forcing everyone to switch to a worse editing experience AND breaking all our old content.

[hang on a second, i have to start clicking around at random places on the page to try to find the widget or control that will let me start typing again after inserting an image, because software USABILITY has been replaced by "user experience" folks from a graphic design background who have mistaken making things LOOK GOOD IF THEY HAD BEEN PRINTED for the very different ACTUALLY WORKING WELL AS A TOOL - I'm looking at you, WordPress Gutenberg, Dropbox Paper, and everything like you where you have to hover or click or click and select and hover random parts of the page to make it work. Okay, I can start typing again.]

[[ and yeah it just did it again while i was just fricking typing ]]

Ok we're back.

Ok?

Ok.

Anyhoo, I have like a thousand old posts (1371 published, according to the dashboard), but the block converter for fixing these no longer works. I wish I had discovered this problem earlier, but I just didn't expect to have to do blog archaeology when I moved to Gutenberg.

Regardless, however, I now have a system. I open the All Posts page on the WordPress dashboard, and scroll backwards in time until Classic Editor posts start showing up - nice that they provide that nudge to get us to use the new editor, isn't it. Once I find some Classic Editor posts, if you hover - AAAAARRRRRGH, don't mind me - I say, if you hover, you get the option to open with the Block Editor. FORTUNATELY, this is ACTUALLY a link and not a bizarre Javascript pseudo-button - Good WordPress, Good WordPress, have a cookie - and a right click will allow you to open this in a NEW WINDOW.

SO! I go down one entire page of results, opening them in a new window, until I've hit all the Classic Editor posts on that page. This creates a gazillion tabs, true, but then you can click on each tab in turn, and there's a simple three-click process which will activate the block editor, convert the old text, and - BAM! - update. Optionally, one more click will bring up the updated post so you can doublecheck it before closing the tab.

The process is laborious - but it's easy to get a whole page full of results at a time, and you can't easily lose your place, as you close your tabs as you go. I've gotten through 3 pages of results so far, each with 50 posts, so I've updated probably something north of 150 pages.

There are 25 more pages of posts to go, but it doesn't take more than 30 minutes, so I can do one a day for about a month and rescue all the old pages.

A lot of work ... but at least I now have a system.

-the Centaur

Pictured: The House With The Impressive Tree In The Front Yard, found in a nearby neighborhood, as photographed in Night Mode on my Android phone during a walk with my wife.

[thirty-eight] minus twenty-one: i have a paper due, so no blogpost for you

Published February 28, 2023 by centaur

Instead, please enjoy this picture of a cat.

-the Centaur

[thirty-six] minus twenty: on reflection, food poisoning sucks

Published February 25, 2023 by centaur

I got food poisoning Monday night. Admittedly, this was pretty serious (in the top five, or even top three of food poisoning incidents in my life) and it was on a red-eye flight (definitely in the top three most miserable experiences of my life) with serious turbulence (also in the top five or so as turbulence goes) but, even so, DAYS later, I'm still running on backup systems and batteries. I typically can't sleep until 5am, no matter when I go to bed, and then can't seem to wake up until 2 to 4 pm, well more than a solid 8 hours later. And I can't seem to concentrate, reading the same paragraphs over and over again until finally the lawnmower motor baarrrrumphs to life and I start to be able to move through the paper again.

So, in sum, what I'm saying is, try not to get food poisoning on a redeye.

At least I can keep food down now (so far).

Cross yo fingies.

-the Centaur

Pictured: A sunset in Berkeley.

[twenty-six] minus twenty-two: found it

Published February 19, 2023 by centaur

In the "beyond the last place you'd look for it" department, I found my wife's laptop. It disappeared during her last trip to renovate the old house, and she could not find it, any place she looked. I couldn't find it either, until we had to re-do the floors and I had to move everything out of all the side rooms. Before I put everything back, I staged it into another room and started methodically going through every box. No dice. But then, while moving some of the spare suitcases we'd left here, I noticed one of them was strangely heavy. Huh. What's this I feel in here? Could it be ... a laptop?

So it turns out my wife apparently had used the above small suitcase to transport her laptop and all of its accoutrements (charger, case, etc) but ... perhaps forgot that's where she put it, in all the chaos of moving things from room A to B to paint stuff, only to move it from B to C to fix things, then from C back to A again. Regardless, it was in the wrong room, with the empty suitcases, so it doesn't surprise me that it was hard to find. But I found it ... by methodically searching every place, whether it made sense or not.

Blogging every day.

-the Centaur

[twenty-four] minus twenty-one: renovations in progress

Published February 15, 2023 by centaur

Busy working on a revision of a paper for the HRI Workshop in Academia and Industry, so enjoy this picture of our renovations instead. My other task for the day was working on our house out here in California, which we have to fix up if we wish to sell, rent, or even just really live in it. Not much going on in this picture, but earlier today I was crawling all over the floors with waterborne Color Putty, filling gaps in the slightly dodgy wood flooring. The installers left some, um, pretty substantial gaps ...

... but were nice enough to come back for free and spend several hours fixing most of it, leaving me with jars of the product to fill in any gaps we found later. As they explained, the gaps we were seeing were natural to this product and we can only see down to the tongues of the material, but, still, there's a pretty marked difference between the gaps we see on this new flooring and the tightly joined hardwood floors in our new house, or even the damn near hermetic pergo floors in the rest of the original California house, and we don't think "Oh, just don't ever spill anything, ever" is a reasonable answer. So I'm going to go over them carefully before putting our boxed belongings back into the rooms ... one crack at a time.

Oh, joy. Don't get me started on the work I had to do to try to rescue the path beside the house, which nature firmly decided it wants to reclaim ...

-the Centaur

P. S. I promise all this work is necessary, and is not elaborate avoidance behavior of the manuscript, as my subconscious hunts for other things to work on in an attempt to hide my writer's block from myself.

Announcing Logical Robotics

Published February 10, 2023 by centaur

So, I'm proud to announce my next venture: Logical Robotics, a robot intelligence firm focused on making learning robots work better for people. My research agenda is to combine the latest advances of deep learning with the rich history of classical artificial intelligence, using human-robot interaction research and my years of experience working on products and benchmarking to help robots make a positive impact.

Recent advances in large language model planning, combined with deep learning of robotic skills, have enabled almost magical developments in explainable artificial intelligence, where it is now possible to ask robots to do things in plain language and for the robots to write their own programs to accomplish those goals, building on deep learned skills but reporting results back in plain language. But applying these technologies to real problems will require a deep understanding of both robot performance benchmarks to refine those skills and human psychological studies to evaluate how these systems benefit human users, particularly in the areas of social robotics where robots work in crowds of people.

Logical Robotics will begin accepting new clients in May, after my obligations to my previous employer have come to a close (and I have taken a break after 17 years of work at the Search Engine That Starts With a G). In the meantime, I am available to answer general questions about what we'll be doing; if you're interested, please feel free to drop me a line at via centaur at logicalrobotics.com or take a look at our website.

-the Centaur

Ripping Off the Bandaid

Published February 10, 2023 by centaur

After almost seventeen years at Google, I've made the difficult decision to get laid off with no warning. :-) Working with Google was an amazing experience, from search to robotics to 3D objects and back to robotics again. We did amazing things and I am proud of all my great colleagues and what we accomplished together.

However, my work in robotics is not done, and I will still be pushing for better robot navigation, large language model planning, and especially social robot navigation and embodied AI. I'm spinning up an independent consulting business and will announce more details on this as it evolves - feel free to reach out directly though!

-the Centaur

P.S. Sorry for the delay - this has been up on my Linkedin forever. But for some reason I just wasn't ready to post this here. Avoidance behavior, however, has gone on long enough. Time to move on.

Pictured: me and Ryan at Sports Page, the traditional hangout you go to on your last day at Google. It was a blast seeing all the friends, thank you for coming!

[twenty] plus eighteen: time to rip off the bandaid

Published February 10, 2023 by centaur

Image apropos of nothing. Nevertheless, avoidance behavior has gone on long enough ... soon it comes ...

-the Centaur

Pictured: Another shot of the real place in Palo Alto which must have subconsciously inspired the Librarian's Favorite Ramen noodle shop, from an unpublished story.

phewww ….

Published February 8, 2023 by centaur

... finally, a chance to catch a break.

It's been a difficult few weeks due to "the Kerfluffle" which I hope to blog about shortly (those on my LinkedIn have seen it already) but equally as much from a Stanford extension class I was taking on Deep Reinforcement Learning (XCS234 - speaking as an expert in this area seeking to keep my skills sharp, I can highly recommend it: I definitely learned some things, and according to the graphs, so did my programs).

Finally, that's over, and I have a moment to breathe.

And maybe start blogging again.

-the Centaur

Pictured: A mocha from Red Rock Cafe, excellent as always, and a learning curve from one of my programs from class (details suppressed since we're not supposed to share the assignments).

[sixteen] plus fifteen

Published February 1, 2023 by centaur

Been up super late chasing a paper deadline for the past few nights, so no real post for you; instead, enjoy this picture of a photogenic cat.

I do have to say, these past few nights pulling this paper together have proved over and over again that my ethic of "work just a little harder than you have to" pays off, as each night I wanted to quit, and each night I got a major chunk of forward progress done by working just a bit harder.

Now, sometimes that was 4 am, but still ... after spending a great deal of time with what felt like a giant incoherent mess of a paper (17 pages at last count), the exercise of pushing to submit a 6-page excerpt to this conference really crystallized the notion that, yes, we have done something good here, and, yes, if we take the time out to summarize it, it really does add something to our understanding of the problem.

Oh wait. This isn't an inside-the-firewall production. So, AHEM, "... it really does add something to our understanding of SOCIAL ROBOT NAVIGATION." Just to be clear on what we are doing.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Loki, snapped between toe cleanings.

finally ….

Published January 28, 2023 by centaur

... a computer with a fast fricking hard drive. I use a backup scheme in which one older computer has all my file mirroring services on it (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc) and then backs that data up to a local Time Machine backup. But the old iMac I had had long ago reached the point where it couldn't back up to local network storage and needed a directly connected USB drive, and eventually that, too, gave up the ghost, with Google Drive and Dropbox essentially strangling each other to death if you tried to load them simultaneously. In other news, unrelated except for the inexorable passage of time, my personal daily driver laptop had reached the point where half the keys skip and the battery life was down to roughly 1 minute.

SO! I bought a refurbished Apple Silicon MacBook Pro. Even though it is a gently used machine, way cheaper than the most recent models, this M1 Max screamer has downloaded most of Dropbox and a large chunk of Drive without breaking a sweat. Apparently, the larger, faster SSD of a 2022 MacBook Pro beats the heck out of the old spinny hard drive of a 2015 (or is it 2013?) iMac. Who knew? And it can serve as a daily driver until such time as I can afford a top of the line machine, if I even need one if Apple Silicon is as fast as they say.

Cross you fingies ...

-the Centaur

[fourteen] plus ten …

Published January 25, 2023 by centaur

... still behind, but, whatever. Pictured: Left Bank in Menlo Park. Hadn't been there in years, but it was wonderful. Unexpectedly I turned out the other way from the bathroom and discovered a second stair with beautiful mosaic tile, sparkling in the late morning daylight in a way I never recalled seeing before.

Still pictures really can't do it justice, but it still is beautiful.

-the Centaur

if I had a quarter for every quarter i could wedge into my flooring …

Published January 25, 2023 by centaur

... I wouldn't have that many quarters, but there'd still be way more quarters than they ought to be.

Fortunately the installer agreed that, um, no, it shouldn't look like that.

One more thing to fix ...

-the Centaur

do, or do not. there is no blog

Published January 23, 2023 by centaur

One reason blogging suffers for me is that I always prioritize doing over blogging. That sounds cool and all, but it's actually just another excuse. There's always something more important than doing your laundry ... until you run out of underwear. Blogging has no such hard failure mode, so it's even easier to fall out of the habit. But the reality is, just like laundry, if you set aside a little time for it, you can stay ahead - and you'll feel much healthier and more comfortable if you do.

-the Centaur

Pictured: "Now That's A Steak Burger", a 1-pound monster from Willard Hicks, where I took a break from my million other tasks to catch up on Plans and the Structure of Behavior, the book that introduced idea of the test-operate-test-exit (TOTE) loop as a means for organizing behavior, a device I'm finding useful as I delve into the new field of large language model planning.

[twelve] plus eight, OR: don’t skip a day, or you’ll be sorry

Published January 20, 2023 by centaur

Yeah. The microblogging will continue until the posting rate reaches 1/day.

I feel that one problem I have with "daily blogging" is that quick posts are no problem. But if I have a longer idea - but can't finish it in time - I then forget to do a shorter post to make up for it.

And missing a post itself is a problem. What I find when trying to build a regular practice (daily blogging, taking karate twice a week, whatever) is that if you skip one time, even for a "really good reason", then mysteriously the next two or three times you'll HAVE to skip for "unavoidable" reasons.

In this, case in point, I started writing a longer article on debugging software. There was more to it than I expected - I had wanted to make an off-the-cuff comment, and found my thoughts rapidly expanding - and then the next day I was flying, and the next day catching up on work, and the next day owed my part of the annual report to the church board, and so on. And then its DAYS later and boom no posts. I think at this point I am 8 behind in numbered posts, though there were a few un-numbered ones which I would count, except, if I don't, it makes the problem harder, which helps build the discipline I'm trying to build.

SO! Let's get back on that horse then. Update metadata, hit publish.

-the Centaur

Pictured: my evening work ritual, 2-3 times a week when I'm not having dinner with my wife, is to go to some place to eat (preferably one with a bar or high top tables, so I can stretch out my bum knee), crack open a book, and read a chunk of a chapter while having a nice meal. Most of my books get read this way.