Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in “Startuppery”

[twenty twenty-four day thirty-nine]: space cadet crashes to earth

centaur 0

When you've got a lot to do, sometimes it's tempting to just "power through it" - for example, by extending a meeting time until all the agenda items are handled. But this is just another instance of what's called "hero programming" in the software world, and while sometimes it's necessary (say, the day of a launch) it isn't a sustainable long-term strategy, and will incur debts that you can't easily repay.

Case in point, for the Neurodiversiverse Anthology, my coeditor and I burned up our normally scheduled meeting discussing, um, scheduling with the broader Thinking Ink team, so we added a spot meeting to catch up. We finalized the author and artist contracts, we developed guidance for the acceptance and rejection letters, and did a whole bunch of other things. It felt very productive.

But, all in all, a one hour meeting became three and a half, and I ended up missing two scheduled meetings because of that. The meetings hadn't yet landed on the calendar - one because we were still discussing it via email, and the other because it was a standing meeting out of my control. But because our three and a half hour meeting extended over the time we were supposed to follow up and set the actual meeting time, we never set that time, and when I was playing catch up later that evening, I literally spaced on what day of the week it was, and didn't notice the other meeting had started until it was over.

All that's on me, of course - it's important to put stuff on the calendar as soon as possible, including standing meetings, even if the invite is only for you, and I have no-one else to blame for that broken link in the chain. And both I and my co-editor agreed to (and wanted to) keep "powering through it" so we didn't have to schedule a Saturday meeting. But, I wonder: did my co-editor also have cascading side effects due to this longer meeting? How was her schedule impacted by this?

Overall, this is an anthology, and book publishing has long and unexpectedly complex and tight schedules: if we don't push to get the editing done ASAP, we'll miss our August publishing window. But it's worth remembering that we need to be kind to ourselves and realistic about our capabilities, or we'll burn out and still miss our window.

That happened to me once in grad school - on what I recall was my first trip to the Bay Area, in fact. I hadn't gotten as much done on my previous internship, and started trying to "power through it" to get a lot done from the very first week, putting in super long hours. I started to burn out the very first weekend - I couldn't keep the pace. Nevertheless, I kept trying to push, and even took on new projects, like the first draft of the proposal for the Personal Pet (PEPE) robotic assistant project.

In one sense, that all worked out: my internship turned into a love of the Bay Area, where I lived for ~16 years of my life; the PEPE project led to another internship in Japan, to co-founding Enkia, to a job at Google, and ultimately to my new career in robotics.

But, in another sense, it didn't: I got RSI from a combination of typing every day for work, typing every night for the proposal, and blowing off steam from playing video games when done. I couldn't type for almost nine months, during the writing of my PhD thesis, which I could not stop at, and had to learn to write with my left hand. I was VERY lucky: I know some other people in grad school with permanent wrist damage.

"Powering through it" isn't sustainable, and while it can lead to short-term gains and open long-term doors, can lead to short-term gaffes and long-term (or even permanent) injuries. That's why it's super important to figure out how to succeed at what you're doing by working at a sustainable pace, so you can conserve your "powering through it" resources for the times when you're really in the clinch.

Because if you don't save your resources for when you need them, you can burn yourself out along the way, and still fail despite your hard work - perhaps walking away with a disability as a consolation prize.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Powering through taking a photograph doesn't work that well, does it?

Free at Last

centaur 1

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.

[thirty-five] minus nineteen: listen, you might learn something

centaur 0

Recently, collaborating on a paper, I was convinced that there was a problem in the algorithm we were presenting, and got together with a colleague to discuss it. He saw some of the problems, but had a different take on others, and kept coming back to a minor point about our use of a method in one step.

As we talked, we slowly realized the problem I was raising and the comment he was making, while seemingly unrelated, were actually two sides of the same coin. A minor tweak in the use of a published algorithm, seemingly made just out of necessity to make a demo work, was actually a key, load-bearing innovation that made everything downstream in the algorithm work.

We made the change, and suddenly everything in the paper started to fall into place.

But we'd never have gotten there if we hadn't taken the time to listen to each other.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Nola, the night of another great conversation with a friend.

[twenty-two] minus seventeen …

centaur 0

Another neat little place in downtown Palo Alto. It's amazing how special a place downtown Palo Alto is; for being a part of a vast megalopolis, it's a charming downtown with a small-town feel and a surprisingly connected place. I ran into at least six people I knew in the short time I was down there tonight, and got an introduction to a robotics group at MIT just by sitting in a chair and talking to some friends.

This is kind of the experience I had when I first came out to the Bay as an intern, 25 years ago (more or less); I had just arrived, was hungry, but restaurants were busy, so I took a seat at a restaurant bar, the only space available ... but no sooner had I sat down than I got offered a job.

Well, technically, I sat down and cracked open a very technical book, and the person sitting next to me didn't offer me a job, but did give me their card and let me know their startup was hiring.

But you get the picture ...

-the Centaur

Announcing Logical Robotics

centaur 0

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

centaur 1

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

centaur 0

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.

Congratulations Richard Branson (and/or Jeff Bezos)

centaur 0
branson in spaaace

Congratulations, Sir Richard Branson, on your successful space flight! (Yes, yes, I *know* it's technically just upper atmosphere, I *know* there's no path to orbit (yet) but can we give the man some credit for an awesome achievement?) And I look forward to Jeff Bezos making a similar flight later this month.

Now, I stand by my earlier statement: the way you guys are doing this, a race, is going to get someone killed, perhaps one of you guys. A rocketship is not a racecar, and moves into realms of physics where we do not have good human intuition. Please, all y'all, take it easy, and get it right.

That being said, congratulations on being the first human being to put themselves into space as part of a rocket program that they themselves set in motion. That's an amazing achievement, no-one can ever take that away from you, and maybe that's why you look so damn happy. Enjoy it!

-the Centaur

P.S. And day 198, though I'll do an analysis of the drawing at a later time.

RIP Jeff Bezos (and/or Richard Branson)

centaur 0
rip jeff bezos

You know, Jeff Bezos isn’t likely to die when he flies July 20th. And Richard Branson isn’t likely to die when he takes off at 9am July 11th (tomorrow morning, as I write this). But the irresponsible race these fools have placed them in will eventually get somebody killed, as surely as Elon Musk’s attempt to build self-driving cars with cameras rather than lidar was doomed to (a) kill someone and (b) fail. It’s just, this time, I want to be caught on record saying I think this is hugely dangerous, rather than grumbling about it to my machine learning brethren.

Whether or not a spacecraft is ready to launch is not a matter of will; it’s a matter of natural fact. This is actually the same as many other business ventures: whether we’re deciding to create a multibillion-dollar battery factory or simply open a Starbucks, our determination to make it succeed has far less to do with its success than the realities of the market—and its physical situation. Either the market is there to support it, and the machinery will work, or it won’t.

But with normal business ventures, we’ve got a lot of intuition, and a lot of cushion. Even if you aren’t Elon Musk, you kind of instinctively know that you can’t build a battery factory before your engineering team has decided what kind of battery you need to build, and even if your factory goes bust, you can re-sell the land or the building. Even if you aren't Howard Schultz, you instinctively know it's smarter to build a Starbucks on a busy corner rather than the middle of nowhere, and even if your Starbucks goes under, it won't explode and take you out with it.

But if your rocket explodes, you can't re-sell the broken parts, and it might very well take you out with it. Our intuitions do not serve us well when building rockets or airships, because they're not simple things operating in human-scaled regions of physics, and we don't have a lot of cushion with rockets or self-driving cars, because they're machinery that can kill you, even if you've convinced yourself otherwise.

The reasons behind the likelihood of failure are manyfold here, and worth digging into in greater depth; but briefly, they include:

  • The Paradox of the Director's Foot, where a leader's authority over safety personnel - and their personal willingness to take on risk - ends up short-circuiting safety protocols and causing accidents. This actually happened to me personally when two directors in a row had a robot run over their foot at a demonstration, and my eagle-eyed manager recognized that both of them had stepped into the safety enclosure to question the demonstrating engineer, forcing the safety engineer to take over audience questions - and all three took their eyes off the robot. Shoe leather degradation then ensued, for both directors. (And for me too, as I recall).
  • The Inexpensive Magnesium Coffin, where a leader's aesthetic desire to have a feature - like Steve Job's desire for a magnesium case on the NeXT machines - led them to ignore feedback from engineers that the case would be much more expensive. Steve overrode his engineers ... and made the NeXT more expensive, just like they said it would, because wanting the case didn't make it cheaper. That extra cost led to the product's demise - that's why I call it a coffin. Elon Musk's insistence on using cameras rather than lidar on his self-driving cars is another Magnesium Coffin - an instance of ego and aesthetics overcoming engineering and common sense, which has already led to real deaths. I work in this precise area - teaching robots to navigate with lidar and vision - and vision-only navigation is just not going to work in the near term. (Deploy lidar and vision, and you can drop lidar within the decade with the ground-truth data you gather; try going vision alone, and you're adding another decade).
  • Egotistical Idiot's Relay Race (AKA Lord Thomson's Suicide by Airship). Finally, the biggest reason for failure is the egotistical idiot's relay race. I wanted to come up with some nice, catchy parable name to describe why the Challenger astronauts died, or why the USS Macon crashed, but the best example is a slightly older one, the R101 disaster, which is notable because the man who started the R101 airship program - Lord Thomson - also rushed the program so he could make a PR trip to India, with the consequence that the airship was certified for flight without completing its endurance and speed trials. As a result, on that trip to India - its first long distance flight - the R101 crashed, killing 48 of the 54 passengers - Lord Thomson included. Just to be crystal clear here, it's Richard Branson who moved up his schedule to beat Jeff Bezos' announced flight, so it's Sir Richard Branson who is most likely up for a Lord Thomson's Suicide Award.

I don't know if Richard Branson is going to die on his planned spaceflight tomorrow, and I don't know that Jeff Bezos is going to die on his planned flight on the 20th. I do know that both are in an Egotistical Idiot's Relay Race for even trying, and the fact that they're willing to go up themselves, rather than sending test pilots, safety engineers or paying customers, makes the problem worse, as they're vulnerable to the Paradox of the Director's Foot; and with all due respect to my entire dot-com tech-bro industry, I'd be willing to bet the way they're trying to go to space is an oversized Inexpensive Magnesium Coffin.

-the Centaur

P.S. On the other hand, when Space X opens for consumer flights, I'll happily step into one, as Musk and his team seem to be doing everything more or less right there, as opposed to Branson and Bezos.

P.P.S. Pictured: Allegedly, Jeff Bezos, quick Sharpie sketch with a little Photoshop post-processing.

Never Give Up

centaur 0

So, 2019. What a mess. More on that later; as for me, I've had neither the time nor even the capability to blog for a while. But one thing I've noticed is, at least for me, the point at which I want to give up is usually just prior to the point where I could have my big breakthrough.

For example: Scrivener.

I had just about given up on Scrivener, an otherwise great program for writers that helps with organizing notes, writing screenplays, and even for comic book scripts. But I'd become used to Google Docs and its keyboard shortcuts for hierarchical bulleted lists, not entirely different from my prior life using hierarchical notebook programs like GoldenSection Notes. But Scrivener's keyboard shortcuts were all different, and the menus didn't seem to support what I needed, so I had started trying alternatives. Then I gave on more shot at going through the manual, which had earlier got me nothing.At first this looked like a lost cause: Scrivener depended on Mac OS X's text widgets, which themselves implement a nonstandard text interface (fanboys, shut up, sit down: you're overruled. case in point: Home and End. I rest my case), and worse, depend on the OS even for the keyboard shortcuts, which require the exact menu item. But the menu item for list bullets actually was literally a bullet, which normally isn't a text character in most programs; you can't access it. But as it turns out, in Scrivener, you can. I was able to insert a bullet, find the bullet character, and even create a keyboard shortcut for it. And it did what it was supposed to!

Soon I found the other items I needed to fill out the interface that I'd come to know and love in Google Docs for increasing/decreasing the list bullet indention on the fly while organizing a list:

Eventually I was able to recreate the whole interface and was so happy I wrote a list describing it in the middle of the deep learning Scrivener notebook that I had been working on when I hit the snag that made me go down this rabbit hole (namely, wanting to create a bullet list):

Writing this paragraph itself required figuring out how to insert symbols for control characters in Mac OS X, but whatever: a solution was possible, even ready to be found, just when I was ready to give up.

I found the same thing with so many things recently: stuck photo uploads on Google Photos, configuration problems on various publishing programs, even solving an issue with the math for a paper submission at work.

I suspect this is everywhere. It's a known thing in mathematics that when you feel close to a solution you may be far from it; I often find myself that the solution is to be found just after the point you want to give up.

I've written about a related phenomenon called this "working a little bit harder than you want to" but this is slightly different: it's the idea that your judgment that you've exhausted your options is just that, a judgment.

It may be true.

Try looking just a bit harder for that answer.

-the Centaur

Pictured: a photo of the Greenville airport over Christmas, which finally uploaded today when I went back through the archives of Google Photos on my phone and manually stopped a stuck upload from December 19th.

Learning to Drive … by Learning Where You Can Drive

centaur 1
I often say "I teach robots to learn," but what does that mean, exactly? Well, now that one of the projects that I've worked on has been announced - and I mean, not just on arXiv, the public access scientific repository where all the hottest reinforcement learning papers are shared, but actually, accepted into the ICRA 2018 conference - I  can tell you all about it! When I'm not roaming the corridors hammering infrastructure bugs, I'm trying to teach robots to roam those corridors - a problem we call robot navigation. Our team's latest idea combines "traditional planning," where the robot tries to navigate based on an explicit model of its surroundings, with "reinforcement learning," where the robot learns from feedback on its performance. For those not in the know, "traditional" robotic planners use structures like graphs to plan routes, much in the same way that a GPS uses a roadmap. One of the more popular methods for long-range planning are probabilistic roadmaps, which build a long-range graph by picking random points and attempting to connect them by a simpler "local planner" that knows how to navigate shorter distances. It's a little like how you learn to drive in your neighborhood - starting from landmarks you know, you navigate to nearby points, gradually building up a map in your head of what connects to what. But for that to work, you have to know how to drive, and that's where the local planner comes in. Building a local planner is simple in theory - you can write one for a toy world in a few dozen lines of code - but difficult in practice, and making one that works on a real robot is quite the challenge. These software systems are called "navigation stacks" and can contain dozens of components - and in my experience they're hard to get working and even when you do, they're often brittle, requiring many engineer-months to transfer to new domains or even just to new buildings. People are much more flexible, learning from their mistakes, and the science of making robots learn from their mistakes is reinforcement learning, in which an agent learns a policy for choosing actions by simply trying them, favoring actions that lead to success and suppressing ones that lead to failure. Our team built a deep reinforcement learning approach to local planning, using a state-of-the art algorithm called DDPG (Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients) pioneered by DeepMind to learn a navigation system that could successfully travel several meters in office-like environments. But there's a further wrinkle: the so-called "reality gap". By necessity, the local planner used by a probablistic roadmap is simulated - attempting to connect points on a map. That simulated local planner isn't identical to the real-world navigation stack running on the robot, so sometimes the robot thinks it can go somewhere on a map which it can't navigate safely in the real world. This can have disastrous consequences - causing robots to tumble down stairs, or, worse, when people follow their GPSes too closely without looking where they're going, causing cars to tumble off the end of a bridge. Our approach, PRM-RL, directly combats the reality gap by combining probabilistic roadmaps with deep reinforcement learning. By necessity, reinforcement learning navigation systems are trained in simulation and tested in the real world. PRM-RL uses a deep reinforcement learning system as both the probabilistic roadmap's local planner and the robot's navigation system. Because links are added to the roadmap only if the reinforcement learning local controller can traverse them, the agent has a better chance of attempting to execute its plans in the real world. In simulation, our agent could traverse hundreds of meters using the PRM-RL approach, doing much better than a "straight-line" local planner which was our default alternative. While I didn't happen to have in my back pocket a hundred-meter-wide building instrumented with a mocap rig for our experiments, we were able to test a real robot on a smaller rig and showed that it worked well (no pictures, but you can see the map and the actual trajectories below; while the robot's behavior wasn't as good as we hoped, we debugged that to a networking issue that was adding a delay to commands sent to the robot, and not in our code itself; we'll fix this in a subsequent round). This work includes both our group working on office robot navigation - including Alexandra Faust, Oscar Ramirez, Marek Fiser, Kenneth Oslund, me, and James Davidson - and Alexandra's collaborator Lydia Tapia, with whom she worked on the aerial navigation also reported in the paper.  Until the ICRA version comes out, you can find the preliminary version on arXiv:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.03937 PRM-RL: Long-range Robotic Navigation Tasks by Combining Reinforcement Learning and Sampling-based Planning

We present PRM-RL, a hierarchical method for long-range navigation task completion that combines sampling-based path planning with reinforcement learning (RL) agents. The RL agents learn short-range, point-to-point navigation policies that capture robot dynamics and task constraints without knowledge of the large-scale topology, while the sampling-based planners provide an approximate map of the space of possible configurations of the robot from which collision-free trajectories feasible for the RL agents can be identified. The same RL agents are used to control the robot under the direction of the planning, enabling long-range navigation. We use the Probabilistic Roadmaps (PRMs) for the sampling-based planner. The RL agents are constructed using feature-based and deep neural net policies in continuous state and action spaces. We evaluate PRM-RL on two navigation tasks with non-trivial robot dynamics: end-to-end differential drive indoor navigation in office environments, and aerial cargo delivery in urban environments with load displacement constraints. These evaluations included both simulated environments and on-robot tests. Our results show improvement in navigation task completion over both RL agents on their own and traditional sampling-based planners. In the indoor navigation task, PRM-RL successfully completes up to 215 meters long trajectories under noisy sensor conditions, and the aerial cargo delivery completes flights over 1000 meters without violating the task constraints in an environment 63 million times larger than used in training.
  So, when I say "I teach robots to learn" ... that's what I do. -the Centaur

The Yearly Reboot

centaur 0
So one of the things I like to do each year, as part of my traditional visit to family over the holidays, is to drop in on a Panera Bread, pull out my notebook, review my plans for the previous year, and make plans for the new one. As of the 7th of January, I still haven't done this yet. Shit happened last year. Good shit, such as really getting serious about teaching robots to learn; bad shit, such as serious illnesses in the pets in our family; and ugly shit which I'm not going to talk about until the final contracts are signed and everyone agrees everything is hunky and dory. And much of this went down just before the holidays, and once the holidays started, I cared a lot more about spending time with family and friends than sitting by myself in a Panera. (In all fairness, the holidays were easier when I lived in Atlanta and came up to see family many times a year, as opposed to only occasionally). But I can recommend trying to do a yearly review. One year I decided to list what I wanted to do, both in the immediate future, in the coming year, in the coming 5 years, and in my life; and the next year, almost by chance, I sat down in the same Panera to review it. That served me well for more than a decade, and I find that even trying to do it helps me feel more focused and refreshed. And so that's precisely what I tried to do yesterday. I didn't accomplish it - I still haven't managed to "clear the thickets" of my TODO lists to get to the actual yearly plan, and I miss being able to take a whole afternoon at Panera doing this - but I did the next best thing, sitting myself down to a nice "reboot" dinner and treating myself to a showing of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. As someone said (a reference I read recently, but have been unable to find) the very act of doing something daily centers the mind. Here's to that. -Anthony

Everything was on fire until earlier today

centaur 0
Not literally; we were far south of the literal fires, which just barely missed the homes of our friends. But so many other things have been going wrong that it felt like things were on fire ... so no posts for a while, sorry. But tonight, I got to the last chapter of Dakota Frost #6, SPIRITUAL GOLD. I will likely finish this chapter Saturday. That makes today a good day. Time for some cake. -the Centaur Pictured: a cat break with Loki. Not how things look right now, but how I feel.