❮❮prevnext❯❯

One of the better videos I've seen for explaining modern image generation:

A couple thoughts: I can really see the parallels between the "similar image morphing" of the Activation Atlases and what happens in my head in terms of dreams (or on certain drugs) - that feeling that semi-random noise is being fed through a system that looks for interpretations and meaning, and that meaning layer pushes back down into the visual.

I'm still astonished that it works so well. I mean it's just jaw dropping. Yes, it's not clear when or if it can truly figure out something new - in some ways all it's novelty is the "art of the remix" but what it uses to make new things is absolutely a form of embedded intelligence, albeit one that might not be modeling the world in the way it would need to take the next steps of "true" intelligence.

The video argues that it's the orders-of-magnitude increase in compute (ugh I hate that term as a noun) that unlocked the potential of an already known AI technique; that runs against some idea I've heard that we didn't need as much computation as we have on hand in order to apply these techniques... it would be interesting to see, knowing what we know now, what's the best the old hardware could have done? (Similar to people who make homebrew for old video game systems, pushing boundaries now that optimizations and tricks are more widely known)

Also I played with ChatGPT's "conversation" mode. Good lord is that uncanny.

---

There's an old saying AI, that compression is intelligence.

---

---

Super random (probably means I'm procrastinating)...do you ever feel weirdly empowered by your use of a technology? Like a combination of the "coolness" of what you're using and your proficiency in using it, just a weird bit of only semi-justifiable frisson. Like way back in the day I would get that with my Palm Pilot, it just seemed like such a cool compact way of getting my schedule and then todos and misc. notes in order. or sometimes I get the same thing doing random hacking or even just get correspondence on my laptop... like somehow the act of briskly typing itself feels like a harbinger of great potential. Anyway, I know "motivation" is a fickle thing, and it's hard to tell a framing that provides a temporary structural boost from an actual epiphany that might have legs, but right now reminding myself that eating in a more disciplined way is something I "want" is useful.
Currently a lot of my pondering on life philosophy is the conflict between personal preferences and preferences as filtered into and back down from group, which tend to have more "shoulds". And dieting tends to live in that realm of shoulds. But if I can reframe it as something my Self WANTS... not just a conflict between my inner self that loves tasty treats and the feeling of consumption against the schoolmarmish "should" self that clucks its tongue and tells me know, maybe that can help.
And it's entangled enough with my applied philosophy way of life that I think there's a chance it might be a long term improvement, though I won't be shocked if the old systems (evolution-wise-speaking) have their say and persuade me to let my weight up so as to better handle the next famine. But we'll see how it goes.

---

In New Hampshire I saw road signs for State Representative Jerry Knirk. Knirk was knew to me.

---

---

But to be fair, at this point if you're not afraid of the computers than you're not paying attention...

Again, it's like the limbo. The stick always wins.

---

On the drive down to NJ with Melissa at the wheel, I remembered It had been a minute since I did any doodling outside of online Pictionary like games....






Sort of on a gaming kick, like playing through this one really fun little game called "What The Golf?" - a bunch of physics puzzle-y microgames, pushing the boundaries of what qualifies as a golf game, lots of neat mechanics and smart little parodies of games like Portal and Superhot.

But mostly, games have become a less taxing way of spending parts of big 4 hour stretches of facetime on a semi-weekly basis with my 6 year old super niece Cora. The majority has been Zelda: Breath of the Wild, because it has detailed horses in and she digs those. We've also dabbled in Mario Odyssey, which has a lot of fun things I can show her.

I picked up Animal Crossing at her prompting (someday we might visit each other's islands, or something?) but man, that just isn't my kind of game. There's no sense of motion, and while I can sort of see the Sims-like build your space charm, I don't dig the tamagotchi chore slash roulette wheel reward aspect of it.

In general I'm up for suggestions for remote fun games. She has access to a Switch and her own iPad (definitely routing for the whole Phonics game thing) but she's pretty content playing witness and telling me what to do while watching.

(I'm half tempted to try Red Dead Redemption 2, and see if you can get to a place where you're just doing horse stuff... though the game itself would be a huge time sink, and I think the ratio of horse fun to cowboy violence might be a bit out of wack for a 6 year old.)

Getting back to the games... it's funny how Animal Crossing has some of the same weirdnesses of Zelda: like crafting, and how stuff wears out and breaks. I'm still knocked over with what a richly developed land Zelda creates in, so much detail it makes Animal Cross look really primitive, but of course it's a very different energy.

Once I finish What The Golf?, I'm trying to figure out if I want to slip into game sessions as a nice way of unwinding in quarantine freetime or if I should stick with coding projects, reading, and a bit of band stuff. I get bummed that I feel more distant from games in general...

---

Alligators don't even alligate.

---

Anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture.
Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts. We are at our best when we serve others. Be civilized.

It's a cool thought but the podcast I heard it on pointed out that the attribution is suspicious - and also we need to be careful by what we mean by "civilization" - groups considered "wild" or "savages" by "the civilized" were certainly capable of this level of empathetic care and treatment.

---

Humans just can't fathom a billion dollars. Casually we mix 'billion' and 'million' in the same sentence, but they're apples and Death Stars. And until we get our arms around that, some fundamental stuff about the American economy will elude us.

Re: Epstein.... I uh, guess, suicide watch means you have someone to watch while someone "suicides" you? Of course so many pervs in that kitchen that both the left and right can have their own theories about who did it. Welcome to Eyes-Wide-Shut-istan. Happy Palindrome Day to my American friends. Which is most of them. Oh and me.

---

I'd be willing to put this song on a playlist just for the title ("nobody loves a computer because a computer does not dance") but not for 15 minutes worth...

---

Rachel Platten's "Fight Song"... it seems oddly unenergetic...

boy,
the claims you've made on love-
i think it must be sin.
(as if the deepest
part of me
was found six inches in!)

(an unearthed poem I made way back when, experimenting with PoV....)

---

I think there's an awful long way for adventure games, interactive fiction, whatever you want to call it, to go. And I hope that more people will come into that field from outside the computer field. Up until now, it's been rather like, well, imagine if everything ever written on a typewriter had been written by the guys who invented the typewriter.

(I kept a more detailed photolog for Alaska and later for the UK stuff)

---

Poop is the cause, diapers are the effect.

Explaining how good comics stories tend to have strong senses of cause and effect... Why Are Cats Attracted to People Who Don't Like Them. I hadn't really thought about the feline "long blink" as a symbol of affection, though I guess I've imitated it in the past.

---

It's kind of cool how Boston locals can look for 128 and then 495 (the two roads that encircle Boston except for the Atlantic side) when they zoom out on a map -- pretty easily we can get a rough idea of angle and distance as soon as we see one bit of either road. (Kind of like Polar Coordinates...) "Love a friend, love a wife, something, whatever you like, but one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more."
--Vincent van Gogh

---

blender of love

Wow. See also:

---

Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.

--via 22 words So I'm at the family vacation homestead in Ocean Grove New Jersey, "God's Square Mile" just down the street from Springsteen's Asbury Park.

---

http://arst.ch/lyv How Star Trek artists imagined the iPad... 23 years ago

---

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

---

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/dont-be-ugly-by-accident/ - this was twittered as "iPhone users are whores" but I dig the camera/photo details comparative analysis.

---

Cracked.com's Real Life Death Stars and their Fatal Flaws - interesting historical superweapons and their fatal flaws...
--Man, sometimes I miss playing Tuba. I was kind of known for the beatbox, and knew about the two-tone thing he does here, but never quite mastered it enough to get a decent version of chopsticks going, which was my goal.

But truth be told, the music I miss most isn't the church stuff or the orchestra stuff or the jazz band stuff or the wind ensemble stuff... it's the fun, dumb stuff of marching band. Actually, more precisely pep band, where you didn't have to memorize everything. That disinterest in semi-classical music and the fact I never owned my own horn are the main reasons I don't play today.

Amber and I went to a closed-circuit Drum Corps International semifinals thing at Fenway 13 Theaters... we didn't realize ahead of time that it was like a 5 or 6 hour event, so we bugged out arond halfway through, which is too bad because the groups play in order of their seeding from previous rounds, and since each group is doing the same show it did earlier, that usually means the good stuff is coming later in the evening.

---

The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

---

Public radio's top-of-the-hour news brief tends to have two parts: main stories, than either local coverage, or secondary national. It seems weird to me that there's a class of national news I miss... important, but not THAT important, I guess. It's hard to admit how much of the universe we don't have time and attention for. Spent most of the weekend helping out with EB, either in the "just hang out and relax" mode, or the "lets get stuff moved around and unpacked and try to get something resembling a house in order."

Like I twitter'd, EB recently had all the nice wood floors polyurethane'd and now is, for my money, a bit uptight about them. Yeah you don't want to make big gouges in 'em, but you don't want to be like your Great Aunt who puts all the furniture in plastic sheeting and making life miserable for your cousins.

There is a bit of family lore where my folks decided to let me skate in the apartment (which had broad-ish wood floors... this was in Salamanca, and I was so bummed to find out the place was torn down, I had dreams of seeing how the inside of it jived with my 27-years-ago memories of it) 'cause life and experience was more important than pristine floors. Conversely, maybe they were being a bit cavalier with a place that wasn't technically theirs, but still.

I figure you need to watch for the real trouble spots, I've learned that office chairs at work desks can wreak havoc on an otherwise nice floor, along with the wicker bottoms of papasan chairs, but if you do that, don't sweat it. (I don't want to sound like I'm picking on EB too much, after we were moving some heavy furniture around that could potentially leave some serious bites...)

I also helped him hose down some tarps that had been sitting outside for way too long, from when were scraping the shed in fact. Which led to this:

---

Exchange of the Moment

"Hey, what was that term for 'outside faucet' you used before? Hoistcock? Cockstopper?"
"...it was 'sillcock'."
"<giggling>"
"You know, like a house has a sill? It..."
"<still giggling>"
"Never mind."

---

Years ago my folks said giving their kid a place to rollerskate was worth scuffed floors-now it's tough to deeply share EB's floor concerns.

---

If you can't find the toe-line, the bar ain't that serious about its dart board. Random observation: the crew at the Dunkin at Alewife are probably the most efficient I've seen.

Also: for a while it seemed like the ride home was more crowded than the ride to work, but then I realized that's because boarding at Alewife in the morning means I always have a seat and can than lose myself in a book, blissfully unaware of the crowds hunting for standing room.

---

Cyborg of the Moment

--Cyborg Moth, from the first day of Slate's enjoyable coverage of DARPA's "mad-scientist" conference. Maybe those Iranian tales of spying squirrels weren't so far off!

---

Exchange of the Moment

"He was in a small band, that was kind of like the Beatles."
"Kind of like? How are you kind of like the Beatles? Do you sing songs like 'I Want To Grab Your Elbow'? Instead of 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' it's 'Bobby on the Floor with Some Empty Beer Cans'?"

---

Article of Yesterday's Moment

Bush and Giuliani, and advocates of their plans, want to change the dynamic. They want to turn what has been a wholesale, buy-in-bulk business into a retail business. They want to replace a bunch of giant, sophisticated consumers possessing limited bargaining power with a mass of unsophisticated consumers possessing no bargaining power. For some reason, they think you and I can do a better job negotiating with Oxford and Aetna than Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola can.

I think it's an interesting example of one of the over-riding issues of free economies, especially ones that have these potentially immortal and immensely virtual people known as corporations... Getting to California was a bit of a fiasco. A three hour delay pushed me from making a connection to Oakland that night to a 6am flight to San Francisco the next morning.

UPDATE: wow, I wrote this (and in fact was safely home) well before all the Heathrow Bruhaha... I'm glad to be home before the security got cranked up another notch. I did have my shoes selected off of the conveyer belt for what seemed like some sort of chemical test, and my sympathies are with the security personnel who had to run that.)

On the flight over, I thought I'd forego the inflight entertainment "Mission Impossible 3" (worried that the sheer charisma of Tom Cruise might turn me into a scientologist, and besides, being an airplane screening, they'd cut out any interesting naughty bits) and carefully perched my oversized work laptop to watch that utterly bizarre David Lynch (if you'll pardon the redundancy) film "Eraserhead". Ksenia and I had started watching it, but it was starting to freak her out, understandably so.

So watching that movie was either a huge mistake or a huge...err, whatever the opposite of a mistake is, (Sorry I'm typing this bleary-eyed on a jostling bouncing hotel shuttle bus, though the transferal to kisrael might end up delayed)

Anyway, the synchronicity between "Eraserhead" and "my flight" was impressive and threefold, to whit:

• ambient noise -- vaguely electric or mechanical humming at various volumes permeates the movie and, lo and behold, an aircraft in flight.
• the theme of insomnia -- the central character of Eraserhead was restless and bleary eyed through pretty much the whole film, as was the central character of this very website. Partially because of...
• crying inconsolable babies! Oh yes. Some darling too-young-for-this-flight child was bawling pretty much the whole way, and was in the seats directly across the aisle from my own. To be fair the child was more attractive than the alien-looking-head-sticking-out-of-a-bundle-of-bandages baby mutant in Eraserhead, but I swear there were times I wasn't sure if the crying was live or coming over my headphones. (I think I noticed this more after reading the Wikipedia article mentioning the Dead Kennedys line "But in my room/ Wish you were dead/ You bawl like the baby/ In Eraserhead.")

There were some other minor passing similarities too, like the hair of Mr. "Eraserhead" and mine after trying to sleep a bit by resting my head on the seatback in front of me, but those were really the big three.

---

Art of the Moment

click for fullsize "October", by Timna Woollard from Where The Heart Is.

You know, these days my brain feels...stickier than I remember it feeling in the past. The "context switches" feel less clean, when I spend some time in an immersive activity it can taint what I do next. Last night I read some Usenet...haven't done that in a while. (Though I still giggle at it being "like Tetris for people who still know how to read.") I read soc.history.what-if last night, some neat "alternate history" stuff. And then I hop over to the Patriots newsgroup, and...I dunno. This anecdote doesn't have a clever point, it's just suddenly reading about Ty Law's motivations in signing with the Jets feels kind of the same as reading about all those old WW2 generals, and it takes me a moment to shake that off.

A new phenomenon, the sign of premature senility brought on by too many diet cokes? Or maybe I'm just more aware of it...or maybe it's a weird positive...it can lead to the surprising insights and newly revealed insights that tend to seperate human creativity from mere machine-like calculation.

---

Link of the Moment

Are you ready to get pumped?

Click Here to find out about ninjas, REAL NINJAS.

Facts:
1. Ninjas are mammals.
2. Ninjas fight ALL the time.
3. The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.

So, like I said....today I need to consider strategies in the harsh world of dating, Internet and otherwise.

I think that the problem with "otherwise" is...well, it sounds really cool to meet people "out in the wild", and it can get urge you to get involved in some cool activities, but unless that future-beloved is willing to smack you in the face with a clue-by-four, you're going to miss them unless you're awfully alert. And if you're that alert, you're goint to seem annoying and needy and desperate, and that's a bad thing. The thing is, in the real world of interesting people, Murphy's Law of Dating ("she already has a boyfriend") holds sway.

So like I've been saying, it seems that rather than going and meeting interesting people and hoping they're single (and interested in not staying that way), it makes more sense to go where people already admit they're single, and looking, and then hope that they're interesting. It just seems like the odds are better. And I don't think Internet personals have the stigma they once might've at, say, the turn of the millennium or so.

So that means...I have to get good at the art of the Internet personal. And navigating the whole space. (And maybe try speed dating; when you're attached, it sounds like the coolest thing to be able to do, a neat competition, but when you have more of an active interest in the result, it's a bit more anxiety producing. (Anecdotally, one friend says that with speed dating for straight folk they have to balance the number of men and women and, unusual for most dating type services, the men are the limiting factor. I've gotten the impression that most other services, there are more men with their ears to the ground than women.))

So besides honing up my prose to make a good profile, and also whatever kind of initial contact notes people write, I need some good photos of me. Ideally, of course, the post makeover me. And there are dang few of those around.

So I had a coworker friend try taking some, but I wasn't really ecstatic about the results. It's all a bit of a forced setting. The first batch looked like mugshots or passport photos or something: (Click for larger)

I'm trying to decide if I look too...I dunno, broad across in that second photo. And then we had the "at the cubicle" series which was too backlit, and the middle one was a a bit-- shall we say, "foppish" looking

Of course, if I'm willing to throw in a pre-makeover picture, I have some "hey, I'm a fun geek!" options:

Part of the solution might be to go out with some friends to an interesting locale, just for the sake of making some better pictures of me. I dunno. Thoughts on which of these to use if it came to that? Thoughts on where to go to make entertaining photos? (Hell, I wonder what the hourly rate for that photojournalist-style wedding photographer we used is...or is that just way too much trying too hard?)

And any thoughts on what Internet place is best? Match.com seems to be a bit of a standard. Eharmony and that new "true" one (with those kinda creepy "we check to make sure they're not married or a felon so you can be safe!" popup ads) might be appealing to a certain kind of women at least.) Nerve/Onion/Salon personals (all interconnected I think) seem kind of hip. I've also heard of some successful matchups with Yahoo! personals...huh. And is it better to go with one, or a more scattershot approach? That seems exhausting, but heh...in the search for something like "the one", you worry about all the possibilities you're closing out by trying to stick with only a single site.

And real world options...I know one guy who met the love of his life at the MFA singles night. That's kind of cool in a way. And like I said, speed dating sounds like it would be entertaining to try once. Any other ideas? (I know, I know. "Take a class". "Join some groups". Etc etc...)

So let me know what you think. And don't worry, I don't think I'm going to have any more days of this kind of ramble any time soon...

---

Quote of the Moment

Love is like eating mushrooms--You never know if it's the right thing until it's too late.

---

Toy of the Moment
Imagination is one of the prettiest interactive toys I've seen in a while.

---

Article of the Moment
Slate on "The Magic Shirt That Makes You Stronger" and weightlifters who are approaching the 1,000lb barrier for the Bench Press...without these new "Bench Shirts", they max out at about 713. But when you read what the shirt is, basically they're giving themselves a temporary exoskeleton. Seems like cheating to me! (But I wouldn't tell them that to their faces...)

Link of the Moment
Miles Hochstein's Documented Life is a pretty amazing autobiographical page. I've always wanted to do something like this for my self, mostly as a long term memory aid, but I don't think it would come out quite as well.

---

Introversion of the Moment
So I finally got around to making a public version of the "view all kisrael.com titles, sorted alphabetically" tool I used to make sure I don't duplicate titles. Of course, there were a few dups in 2001: I used "boom baby boom" in February and July, "to sleep perchance" in May and December, and "pop pop pop" in June and November. (I know you all care a lot.) I also do a lot of plays on "snow", probably because I like griping about it so much: snow problem, snow-oh, snowblow, snowjob, snowtime at the apollo, snowverwhelming, and my personal favorite pun on the subject, the snow blows.

---

Quote of the Moment

What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things.

He's one of the premier figures in videogames, bringing to life Donkey Kong, all the Mario games, Legend of Zelda, etc. I've heard him express similar sentiments before, it's what he'd really like videogames to be about. So the other day I was watching a baseball game (well, it was on in the background...) and a hit ball popped up way behind the catcher and umpire. The announcer described it as "popping up near here". It took me a second to realize why that seemed so weird to me...mentally, I'm mapping the announcer with the camera, I don't really picture them as sitting in a booth in an actual location around the field. So if a ball flies away from the camera it's hard to think of it flying towards the announcers...

Similarly, I had to figure out what was so distracting about a change making machine that had the dollar inserted below, and the change come out above (beyond a possible design flaw of having less room for gravity-fed change)--it made me realize that I have this sub-conscious image of a dollar somehow physically turning into the change, which then comes cascading now.

---

History Lesson of the Moment

Bush I was a star baseball player at Andover.
Bush II didn't even make the varsity team.

Bush I got straight A's at Yale.
Bush II got D's and C's.

Bush I was a heroic WWII fighter pilot.
Bush II patrolled the coast of Texas during Vietnam and quit flying when the National Guard began drug testing.

Bush I went to Texas and built a successful oil business.
Bush II's oil business failed almost immediately.

Bush I fought a short war with Iraq that achieved its objectives with relatively few U.S. causalities.
Bush II....?

Jeez, sounds like an episode of Goofus and Gallant. Bill also posted a kind of interesting story of a real life mad scientist You know, I have to admit I'm almost impressed with Bush's Stem Cell decision. On this issue I'm extremely in favor of unfettered research, so I don't think he made the right decision and probably kissed too much pro-life butt, but I admire his trying to find a middle ground. (What with me being an extreme moderate and all.) (And what is this that it's good he was making a moral decision rather than a political one? Isn't this a democracy?)

Comic Book Guy

CBG walks along the road reading a comic book
CBG: But Aquaman, you cannot marry a woman without gills, you're from two different worlds.
(CBG sees missile approaching)
CBG: Oh, I've wasted my life.

---

Mean Link of the Moment
Hopefully, this will be the meanest link of your day. But funny. (If you don't get it, it's what happens when this previous 'Net fad (which has since been heavily commercialized) meets this one poster currently making the rounds. Though I liked this parody even better...)