Still working on the social navigation paper. Here's a cat.
-the Centaur
Posts tagged as “We Call It Living”
Have been prioritizing the Social Navigation Principles & Guidelines paper (and helping my wife get ready for her business trip) so no detailed posts for you. Enjoy a sunset and a margarita.
-the Centaur
After truly terrific hailstorms, we were treated to a truly awesome sunset.
And, got some work done on editing SPECTRAL IRON: Dakota Frost #4. FINALLY, getting the rewrite of the slow section rolling with some good Dakota Frost action segueing right into an ambulance ride.
That's more like it.
-the Centaur
Yeah, *that* house. The one that doesn't take down its "Christmas" lights. Ever.
Really, they're lights for the paths around our house, lights which would be WAY more expensive if we put them in as permanent fixtures. After all the (unexpected) expenses it took to renovate the place and all the manual work left to do, I think we're going to just have to wait a while before we get around to that bit.
And, unfortunately, the lights we had up got discontinued, so when we had to replace some strings after wear and damage (and re-replace them after we had to take out a tree on the neighbor's property line and a branch cut the strand) we're currently mis-matched. :-(
But it sure does make the front paths and porch nice and cozy at night.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Our old house in California, which we're still slowly fixing up after the move East. It turns out we're not the only one in the neighborhood who's done this, but their setup looks way more organized than ours:
We'll get there. One day.
Yeah, you're gonna just have to put me down in the left column there. No offense to Doc Brown's DeLorean, but The Doctor's TARDIS could BE a DeLorean, if it wanted to. If there was a write-in, of course, I'd pick the Clockwork Time Machine, but the Machine is basically a TARDIS with the serial numbers filed off anyway.
Very tired, working on the social navigation benchmarks paper, no more post for you.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Poll seen at a Starbucks while I was waiting on my car to be serviced.
Lent teaches us to learn to sacrifice. We're asked to give something up. We're asked to abstain from meat (well, land animals) on Fridays. And we're asked to fast on Good Friday ... which is today.
I'm not too happy that Clockwork Alchemy is Easter Weekend, but I understand that it's not everyone's holiday (and that this may have been the best weekend we could get). But I get it.
That doesn't absolve me of my responsibilities, though. I don't fully fast as a matter of policy - I don't think it's healthy to go starving your body - but I eat light on fasting days, just enough that my body gets food.
The choice tonight was particularly hard, though: the restaurant had cauliflower steak, one of my favorite meals. It would have been so easy to order that as being somehow "healthier" than other options.
But it wouldn't have been fasting. And, as a favorite, it would have been a gluttonous choice, so, reluctantly, I got the rather smaller hummus plate and had that as my meal.
Christians do these things to remind us of Jesus's suffering, but the Church doesn't want to remind us of Jesus for Jesus's sake - he doesn't need it. No, they want to remind us of Jesus's sacrifice for our own good.
Learning to sacrifice during Lent is like cross-training your moral muscles: it helps you exercise your decision making on small things, so that muscle can be used properly when we face larger things.
Tonight, for example, I was able to call upon that muscle to help me make the right choices. After dining with my friends, I reluctantly bid them adieu, and went to go deal with my missing costume.
I'd forgotten part of it, recall, and had to drive 45 minute to get it. But when I did so ... remember what I said about knowing you're doing the right thing when you end up being where you need to be?
A package had arrived - a trellis, purchased to help save the branches of a beloved tree. A package far too large for our house sitter, who has hurt her back. A package that almost certainly would have been stolen.
So, doing what I needed to do that evening may have helped me be where I needed to be to save the package from the neighborhood's package thieves, for starters, but there was much more.
These are little things, but every time I do the right thing and am rewarded for it, it seems to become just a little bit easier to do the right thing again the next time.
-the Centaur
Pictured: tonight's hummus, my cauliflower steak, and the late-arriving trellis package.
Hey folks, the Clockwork Alchemy steampunk convention is back, and in a new location, the San Mateo Marriott San Francisco Airport! I’ll have an author table there with all my Jeremiah Willstone books - the CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE and the Thinking Ink Press anthologies TWELVE HOURS LATER, THIRTY DAYS LATER and SOME TIME LATER, and much more, including the Dakota Frost urban fantasy series and my science fiction writing!
I will be at two author signings and four - count them, FOUR panels, including World Building, Who’s the Villain, Science of Airships, Secret Hideout or Secret Lair, and Getting Past Page One - hey, wait a minute, that is five, I counted them, FIVE panels! I may need a nap after all that. But not before I’ve signed a book or given a talk for you!
Time and Location:
Clockwork Alchemy 2023
Friday April 7 - Sunday April 9
San Mateo Marriott San Francisco Airport
1770 South Amphlett Blvd San Mateo, California 94402
And here's where you can find me:
- World Building
Friday 1pm - Synergy 5 (2nd floor)
Anthony Francis, Madeleine Holly-Rosing
Come and find out what's necessary to create a living, breathing world for your characters, whether you're writing a book or running an RPG.
- From the Darkly Ironic to the Moody Byronic: Who’s the Villain Here?
Friday 4pm - Synergy 5(2nd floor)
Sumiko Saulson, Anthony Francis
From the ghosts haunting Ebenezer Scrooge to Dr. Frankenstein’s childlike creature, Victorian horror embraced a new class of complicated, morally ambivalent heroes and villains such as Prince Prospero, Carmilla, and Dorian Gray. If Mr. Hyde is a part of Dr. Jekyll, who is really the villain here?
- Science of Airships
Saturday 11am - Synergy 5(2nd floor)
Anthony Francis
Steampunk is more than brown, boots, and buttons: our adventurers must travel the world in style! Learn about the science behind the leviathans of the skies. From how they stay up to how they crash down, explore how the physics of flight gives distinctive shapes to airships past, present and future!
- Author Signings: Anthony Francis
Saturday 4pm - Convene Lobby(2nd floor)
Get your books signed by Anthony Francis.
- Secret Hideout or Secret Lair? It's All What You Do With It.
Saturday 5pm - Synergy 5(2nd floor)
Stephanie Clemens, Anthony Francis, Michael Tierney
Sometimes it's not obvious who is the hero and who is the villain. We have the traditional heroes, anti-heroes, villains we love to root for, and villains we love to hate. Then there are the redeemed villains and fallen heroes! It’s a slippery slope and a lot of fun to play with as an author and a reader.
- Getting Past Chapter One
Sunday 2pm - Synergy 5(2nd floor)
Stephanie Clemens, Anthony Francis, Michael Tierney
Why being perfect keeps you away from finishing your book.
- Author Signings
Sunday 3pm - Convene Lobby(2nd floor)
Shelley Adina, Madeleine Holly-Rosing, David L. Drake, Katherine L. Morse, Michael Tierney, Belinda Sikes, Dover Whitecliff, Stephanie Clemens, Anthony Francis, Thena MacArthur, Sumiko Saulson
Last call! Get your books signed by any of our authors at Clockwork Alchemy 2023.
Looking forward to seeing you all!
-the Centaur
Pictured: A sampler from Clockwork Alchemy 2022.
Now, I don't think we live in a simulation (except I have strong evidence that we do - ask me know I know) but I do believe in providence, that idea that God is trying to arrange things in the world in a way that works out for us. And I think we can see providence (or the simulation, or synchronicity, or simple pareidolia) most clearly when we are where we need to be, for then things somehow all just work out.
Like, how, day before yesterday I decided to drop by a nearby coffeehouse after brunch, and stayed there until I finished beta reading a book; that put me at the right place to give some spare cash to an apparently homeless man, who looked like he needed it and promised he'd go buy food. Then I decided to grab a soda on the way out of town, which put me in just the right place to see the same homeless man try to buy alcohol. I need that reminder - that most of the time helping the beggar isn't actually helping - but still, Jesus says to give to all those who beg from you, and another errand placed me right where I needed to be to help another person. I hope they did something good for themselves with it, whatever it was.
Later that night I worked through another problem, planning to eat a light midnight snack instead of dinner, until, frustrated, I threw up my hands and went to grab dinner at BJ's brewery. That cleared my head, gave me the opportunity to run a few more errands, and I even got some writing done.
Seeking the good can help you find more of it. So I try to pay attention to what I was doing when things just seem to work out, so I can hopefully make more of the same choices in the future. Which, coincidentally, is what I was reading about over brunch today: a book on the Thomistic philosophy of free will, which has nothing to do with woo-hoo non-causal "free choices" and everything to do about building up the right resources within ourselves to make the right decision when the time comes.
So pay attention to providence: it may be trying to tell you something about how aligned you are with what you should have been doing in the first place.
-the Centaur
Pictured: fish and shrimp tacos at BJ's, and another chapter read of a deep RL book.
Even though it can be backbreaking, there's something strangely satisfying about getting out of your conditioned environment and into "nature", just kneeling there listening to the winds blowing, the birds chirping, and dogs barking as you pull weedgrass out of your yard before it kills all your succulents. Because the succulents will survive and look nice come the next drought, but this kind of hill grass will turn to dead but pointy weeds with barbed seeds so sharp they actually gave one of our cats a bloody nose.
A lot of work left to do, but it was a productive day.
-the Centaur
Pictured: One of the areas I cleared today trying to rescue our succulents, and the integrated sum of all of today's work, prior to being dumped on the compost pile.
No, I'm not giving up on blogging at a rate of once per day this year, even if I am already roughly forty percent behind. But my top focus now that I'm outside the Google firewall is to get back to work: after two and a half months of uncertainty following my layoff from Google, the paperwork is now done: the End Date has passed, the Severance is signed, the laptops have been shipped back to the office, and, excepting a bit of COBRA / IRA business, I be done with all that.
But my research isn't done. Coincidentally, I had a few scientific papers-in-flight going when the layoffs happened; not coincidentally, I dove in to making sure those went out. One is under review, with a possibility that we may need to open-source the code, but another has already been published, at the Workshop on Human-Robot Interaction in Academia and Industry. This is a "splinter paper," a small topical paper we forked out of a larger journal article in preparation, and that journal paper needs to go out.
Nor is my work done. Today is Camp Nano, the start of yet another 50,000 word challenge, and I hope to finish the novel-in-progress, JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE PLAGUE OF GEARS, which my friend Tony Sarrecchia is helping me adapt into a series of audio dramas. And I need to finish editing Dakota Frost #4, SPECTRAL IRON, at which I recently made a lot of progress solving plot problems - and for which I recently conducted a research trip to Jack Kerouac Avenue to scope out the site of a battle.
That doesn't even count the game artificial intelligence work I want to do, or the games I want to write, or the drawing I want to do, or my new interest in music, or the regular robotics research I want to get started under the Logical Robotics banner.
My point is, "work" for "the man" should not define you. At least, it doesn't define me: it inspired me, definitely, in many ways, but as for now ... I'm tanked up with my own projects, thanks.
Back to work.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Breakfast of the First Day of the New Era, sending back the laptops, Jack Kerouac Alley.
SO! After 17 years at the Google, my last day - finally, my actual last day - was yesterday, March 31st, 2023. They cut off my access January 20th, but out of respect for their employees (and the media, and the law) they gave us a generous +60 day notice period, which ran out yesterday.
I don't regret the time I spent at Google - well, at least not most of it. I learned so much and made so many friends and did so many things - and, frankly speaking, the pay, food and healthcare were quite good. On the one hand, I do think I probably should have taken that job as director of search at a startup back in ~2010; it would have forced me to grow and challenged my assumptions and given me a lot of leadership experience which would have helped my career. But, if I'd done that, I wouldn't have transitioned over to robotics, which is now my principal career; so perhaps it's good I didn't pull on the thread of that tapestry.
But I do regret not being able to code on my own. Virtually everything I could have worked on was technically owned by Google, and if I wanted to open source it, I would need to submit it for invention review - with the chance that they would say no. For a while, you couldn't even work on a game at all if you worked at Google, as Google saw this as a threat to their business model of, ya know, not making games; eventually they realized that was silly, but still, I couldn't take the risk of pouring my heart into something that then Google would claim ownership of.
So no code for you. Or me either.
I know people who built successful businesses as side hustles. While that's efficient, it isn't effective: it leaves you vulnerable to being sued by your employer, or fired by your employer, or both. You can do it, of course, but you're reducing your chance of success in exchange for speed; whereas I like to maximize the chance of success - which requires speed, of course, but not so much you're taking on unnecessary risk. So, for maximum cleanliness, it's best to do things fresh from first principles after you leave.
Which is what I'm going to do now. I don't precisely know what I am going to do, but I do think one useful exercise would be to download all the social navigation benchmarks I've been researching for the Principles and Guidelines benchmark paper, and see how they work and what they can do. Some of the software has ... ahem ... gone stale, but this will be a good exercise for me to test my debugging chops, honed at Google, on external software outside of the "Google3" environment.
Wish me luck!
-the Centaur
Pictured: Fulfilling a missing install for the package gym-collision-avoidance; given that I'd done a lot of command line development recently for a Stanford class, I think the issue here might have been some missing setup step when I moved to my new laptop, as I'm sure this would have come up before.
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.
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.
Instead, please enjoy this picture of a cat.
-the 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.
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
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.
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
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!
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.