SO automatic image generation is a controversial thing I think about a lot. Perhaps I should comment on it sometime. Regardless, I thought I'd show off the challenges that come from using this technology using a simple example. If you recall, I did a recent post with a warped bookstore picture, and attempted to regenerate it using generative AI with Midjourney. Unfortunately, the prompt
a magical three-dimensional impossible bookstore in the style of M.C. Escher
me
failed to pick up the image for some reason. After a few iterations with the Midjourney Discord interface, I got the very nice, but nonsensical and generic, AI generated image you see up top. After playing around with the API, I realized that I likely had formulated my prompt wrong, and tried again to include this image:
On the second pass, I got another, more on-point, yet still nonsensical image as you see below:
These systems do LOOK impressive. But they work like ... amateurs who've learned to render well. They can produce things that are cool, but it's very hard to make them produce something on point.
And this is above and beyond the massive copyright issues that arise from a system that regurgitates other people's copyrighted art, much less the impact on jobs, much less the impact on the human soul.
What, you think you can just look at me, sitting here on this weird funny pile of leaves on top of these strangely fallen logs, minding my own business like a normal cat, and I'll look back? At YOU?
Recently I went to do something in Mathematica - a program I've used hundreds if not thousands of times - and found myself stumped on a simple issue related to defining functions. I've written large, complicated Mathematica notebooks, yet this thing I done hundreds of times was stymieing me.
But - yes - I'd done it hundreds of times; but not regularly in the past year or so.
My knowledge had gone stale.
Programming, it appears, is not like riding a bike.
What about other languages? I can remember LISP defun's, mostly, but would I get a C++ class definition right? I used to do that professionally, eight years ago, and have published articles on programming C++ ... but I've been writing almost exclusively Python and related scripting languages for the past 7 years.
Surprisingly, my wife and I had this happen in real life. We went to cook dinner, and surprisingly found some of the stuff in the pantry had gone stale. During the pandemic, you see, we bought ahead, since you couldn't always find things, but we consumed enough of our staples that they didn't go stale.
Not so once the rate of consumption dropped just slightly - eating out 2-3 times a week, eating out for lunch 2-3 times a week - with a slight drop in variety. Which meant the very most common staples were consumed, but some of the harder-to-find, less-frequently-used stuff went bad.
We suspect some of it may have had near-expired dates we hadn't paid attention to, but now that we're looking, we're carefully looking everywhere to make sure our staples are fresh.
Maybe, if there are skills we want to rely on, we should work to keep those skills fresh too.
Maybe we need to do more than just "sharpen the saw" (the old adage that work goes faster if you take the time to maintain your tools). Perhaps the saw needs to be pulled out once a while and honed even if you aren't sawing things regularly, or you might find that it's gone rusty while it's been stored away.
-the Centaur
Pictured: The bottom layers of detritus of the Languages Nook of the Library of Dresan, with an ancient cast-off office chair brought home from the family business by my father, over 30 years ago.
Somehow, inadvertently, I caused the previous picture's post to get blurred in transport. Below is a better version, which seems to have come through much clearer:
This is from my blogpost "All the Transitions of Tic Tac Toe, Redux" . Apparently the full-size image is no longer available (probably because it's close to 80 megabytes in size, and whatever file hosting I was using to put it up is broken) but a "smaller" version is below, only 12 megabytes in size (or here):
All the transitions from the first state of tic-tac-toe (at the bottom) to to win for X (left), win for O (right), or draw (top).
Funny ... I long remembered this as being the topic of "Don't Fall Into Rabbit Holes" but that turns out to have been a completely different project.
Wow. We're done with the paper. And what a team effort! So many people came together on this one - research, infra, operations, human-robot interaction folks, the whole nine yards. It's amazing to me how interdisciplinary robotics is becoming. A few years ago 7 authors on a paper was unusual. But out of the last 5 papers I helped submit, the two shortest papers had 8 authors, and all the others were 15 or more.
And it's not citation inflation. True, this most recent paper had a smaller set of authors actively working on the draft, collating contributions from a larger group running the experiments ... but the previous paper had more than 25 authors, all of whom materially contributed content directly to the draft.
What a wonderful time to be alive.
And to recover from food poisoning.
-the Centaur
Pictured: this afternoon's draft of the paper, just prior to a video conference to hammer out some details.
Even though building up a great library is an important part of my process, getting out of the office is just as important. There's little better in my mind than getting out to some other space where you can't do laundry, pay your bills, or even get distracted by some book you were reading. Out in a coffeehouse or cafe, you can sit, read, and write, disappearing into that state of "flow" you get from engagement with your own process.
But it's just as important to expose yourself to new, unchosen information - not your news feed or blogroll, but a set of information spread out across all possible topics, like reading a great encyclopedia, visiting a library ... or browsing a bookstore. While a bookstore's topics are limited, and even the nicest ones are trying to sell you things, they're not just trying to sell them to you: they're trying to create an information space, one of a completely different kind than I talked about when discussing my library.
In a bookstore or library, it's possible to get lost in chains of thought that you never would have otherwise had, because you're prompted by information that you never would have chosen to see, if it all came from your feed or your previous collection of chosen books and media.
Get out sometime, and lose yourself in a good bookstore. If you can walk there from where you are, so much the better; then you can combine the experience of life with the expansion of your mind.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Moe's Bookstore in Berkeley. Does ... that seem right to you, or am I still woozy from food poisoning? :-D
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.
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.
SO! I'm back at the ranch after my business trip, back home after being laid off while traveling for work, back in my office slash library where I worked remotely for much of the past two and a half years.
BUT I was surprised at the exhilarating sense of freedom when I stepped back into my library. I spent fifty years collecting these books and a decade of that organizing them into a kind of external brain, a structuring which only really worked once we had this much larger space on the East Coast, but I never fully had time to take advantage of all of this ... this INFORMATION SPACE, because of the pressures of work.
Well, work hasn't come to an end, even though I've been laid off, because as a researcher it's in my best interest to continue the collaborations I had on papers in flight. But now it's just focused on the important stuff, and the rest of my time is focused on much needed improvements. And as I stood in the library, the outcome of years of work organizing - prompted by my wife, who long since adopted "everything has a place" in her studio, and knew the effect it would have - I felt like, "I can DO this now."
Already today, I read up on probability theory, practiced piano, debugged problems with my bass guitar, and, yes, collaborated on an ongoing paper. (I also continued to recuperate from food poisoning, worked on taxes, let the plumber in to fix the plumbing, picked the brain of the landscaper, and took care of house and cat things for my wife, who's having migraines). And I still have hours left in my day.
Who knew getting laid off could be so liberating?
Maybe it was time.
Back to work!
-the Centaur
Pictured: My "work" workstation, and the "information space" behind it.
SO, I was so sick after the food poisoning (and soreness from retching, and the general lack of sleep on the red-eye) that I slept for over thirty hours. I think I may have gotten up in the middle of that for an hour and blogged or something, but I basically crashed from ~10am Tuesday to ~5pm Wednesday. By the evening I was well enough to do a grocery store run and have a light dinner, but I am still wiped out, and I canceled all my meetings and am going back to bed. Here's hoping rest does the trick.
-the Centaur
Pictured: This just popped up "From Three Years Ago" in my photos app. Thank you, Google Photos, for this truly bizarre picture, which I cannot even find again due to the way they clear the recommendations once you look at them (again, thanks, Google Photos, for this truly bizarre anti-user feature). I present to you ... a robot alligator, atop a Coke Zero, with ... a pen for scale? Perhaps this was nine years ago, from the Google Objects project? I really don't recall. Enjoy.
You know, I posted this a few days ago, but didn't post what I thought of it. I do think that it's pretty crummy that some people think that aid should be needs-tested. The rationale, mostly on the right, is that giving out assistance after someone misbehaves creates a "moral hazard", that is, a chance people will exploit the help in an attempt to behave without consequence. And this, of course, is absolutely true - there are some people who do exploit help to allow themselves to avoid taking consequences. Any system that is created can be exploited, and some people live by, literally have as the method of their living, exploiting others.
But someone who's starving and cold on the street is starving and cold on the street, and it's also true that we have an obligation to our fellow human beings to help those who need help. When someone collapses in front of you, you don't know whether that person was on drugs or just had a heart attack: you need to help them. Our human society works because we are social animals who factor the needs of others into our decision-making. (This is as useful for robots as it is for humans, so I suspect this is more than just a human-bleeding-heart thing, and is instead a universal property of successful intelligent civilizations).
And, not surprisingly, I know many rich people who understand this. It isn't a big issue; many members of my family are well off and they didn't need to be told to contribute to the needy or to step up providing food and water when there was a disaster, they just did it.
SO, back to the quote:
What is it about rich people that makes them think they can starve poor people into good behavior?
David Wong
I know the answer to this.
Because that kind of thinking works on them.
I know a lot of people who are affluent. Some from inheritance, some from hard work, some from a combination of the above. Not all of them managed to keep it. The ones that did were frugal - perhaps not all the time, not on everything, but when it came down to it, they were always worried about running out of money, even if they had a lot of it.
They knew if they behaved the way that "the money" wanted them to, they'd have none of it left.
Many rich people behave responsibly only because they fear the consequences of their own misbehavior. And, I think, that's why they're so concerned about "moral hazard:" they know if they didn't have a backstop, they would behave terribly irresponsibly.
Well, fine. Good for them, if that keeps them being responsible.
But that's no excuse to project their experience out to the whole world.
If someone is sick, homeless, or otherwise in need, we should help them. That's what humans do. That's how our civilization has become such an amazing success: we live in a world where life events can sweep away our entire foundation, and when those things happen, we all help each other stand back up.
Food poisoning and a red-eye flight: two great tastes that go great together. Or not. I will remember this one later, in, like, my life and stuff. No more blog for you today.
Because he took Twitter private. Look, I'm not against private companies per se: I'm part of one (Thinking Ink Press) and have started another (Logical Robotics). And I'm not against Elon Musk per se either: I have some criticisms of how he's running Twitter, but those criticisms are not material to my point, and, hey, he has made me a great deal of money over the years as a Tesla and Twitter shareholder, so, perhaps he knows what he's doing in this case (though, based on how it's going, I seriously doubt it.)
No, my issue is, it's not a public company anymore. I strongly believe most large companies should be public, and that I would not work for a large private corporation if I could possibly help it. Private corporations exist to serve their shareholders; public corporations exist to serve the public. We structure them for the benefit of shareholders to encourage people to create companies and improve the economy, but going public places the company under increased oversight to ensure it is serving the public interest.
Public corporations place structure between the shareholders and the business: shareholders elect a board, which selects a CEO, who selects the employees of the company and directs its business. So at a public corporation, both the lowliest employee and the CEO work for the company, not the shareholders.
This insulation creates a great equalizer. In the end, everyone at the company, from the CEO to the mail room temp, are all responsible for serving the company. At a public company, you don't work for your manager; you both work for the company, and you both should act in its best interests.
At a healthy company - a public company - you have the moral right to say, "No, sir, that doesn't work that way," or "No, ma'am, I won't do that; that's harmful to the company." Admittedly, this can get you fired, but you still have the moral right to do it.
At Twitter, however, it's Elon's show. And he has the right to run it the way that he wants - he certainly paid enough for it. So, if I worked at Twitter ... I think I would have to have taken the severance, if offered, because while I will work for a public company, I won't work in a feudal kingdom.
The King can boost his own tweets.
-the Centaur
Pictured: More graffiti, from an undisclosed location.
In case it isn't clear, when I took on the Blogging Every Day project, I hoped to get at least one post a day for the full year. Today, the 19th of February, is allegedly the 50th day of the year (according to On This Day in Math, this is the smallest number that can be written as the sum of two squares in two different ways, 1+49 and 25+25 ... who knew? Pat Ballew, apparently). But by my count this is only the twenty-ninth blogpost in this series (not counting blog posts done for other reasons), so it's twenty nine, minus twenty-one behind what the goal should be for the day. And I need to be doing at least two of these a day to get back on track.
Just so we're clear.
-the Centaur
Pictured: What was behind my head when I was taking that picture of King's Fish House.
Oh, look, it's a Dalek acting as a security guard! Nothing can go wrong with this trend. :-/
Though, as a roboticist seeing this gap between terminals, I can't help but wonder whether it just undocked from its charger, whether it is about to dock with its charger, whether it needs help from a human to dock with its charger, or whether it has failed to dock with its charger and is about to run out of power in the dark and the cold where all the wolves are.
