RoboTown

:: eerie dude ::

I think we're mostly in agreement that a driverless cab system such as Tesla's, would be a no brainer in a managed environment, say a theme park. We're in people mover territory, sans rails, because wireless provides the rails. We also potentially don't need all the redundantly duplicated lidar, because the system knows where all the cabs are. It's just a matter of that bouncing ball some tourist lost, or tossed.

Regarding the RoboVan or whatever we call it, and the fantasy of no windows: I'd say the fantasy there is to republish the outside windows vista via camera and adding layers of info ala tour guide in Rome. I don't know if this'd work nor to what extent it's lab tested. I'm not the geek in charge. I'm just speculating based on what comes my way from the demo shots.

The unveiling of Tesla RoboCab and RoboVan concept cars was in the context of a constructed studio environment, a made-for-TV town. That's what I'm thinking too: a TV town turned into a livable 24/7 town. But we'd have spectators from the beginning. You don't build an OMR "under cover". 

Any substantial construction needs breathing room, which means partial discovery. Hard secrecy is a strategic burden. When you make a film, the locals know. Later, when they see it on the big screen, they remember, with some locals maybe joining the cast (or comprising it).

When I say theme park, I mean highly managed and engineered, a planned community. Florida has a lot of those, consisting of boxy prototype units, replaceable in case of hurricane, each with an allotted slot in a grassy park, perhaps with golf links. 

Golf Lakes Estates is a good example, in Bradenton. I used to live there. No complaints. Not a bad lifestyle for this cohort of retirees. My grandparents invested money saved, by not buying a "real house" (hand-me-down monster), on trips to Europe, which, as a stylish trend, helped heal some of the war wounds and boosted the German car industry.

The challenge to the driverless car vision has always been: actual drivers. Positing autonomy to every vehicle, versus centrally routing, is the expensive step. Or am I wrong? The only way to conquer an existing city, a Cincinnati, in the hybrid model (driven and driverless), is to make the robotic system intelligently aware of what the "uncontrollables" are doing, and that's what you don't want.

Vehicles in a mobile home park are by definition slow moving. We don't need any robocab Ferraris unless we devote dedicated lanes, entire freeways, to automation. That could happen along some routes. The most common fallacy is either/or is it not? So often we're presented with the false dichotomy. It's either everywhere or nowhere. Really? Not always.

So why doesn't Florida already have robocab oases? Why is the future on that score always around the corner? Doesn't even a single golf course offer automated golf carts, just for grins? Perhaps golfers would feel insulted? Is there something about golfer culture that means you can't press a button for which hole you want, and the cart takes you there? 

How about a zoo then? How do we mix with pedestrians? How do we do that at airports, with their long concourses and beeping vehicles transporting the elderly and disabled, or tired kids?  They have human drivers. 

So how about we segregate the two streams?  Paths for humans and vehicles.  But isn't the whole point of a taxi that you can wave one down?  True, but we still have streets vs sidewalks.  We've already learned to segregate from traffic. The humans are already trained on that score.

Travelogue

:: Road Trip ::

I've been on the road again, enjoying my 1997 Nissan. Barry suggested we patch up the right exterior with some heavy cosmetics, and I'm open to it. In the meantime, she certainly doesn't look worth stealing, unless for a museum about the DSR ("Kirby's Maxi Taxi"), given the car's starring role in these journals of mine. She was also "Torture Taxi" in a couple chapters, having come from a Gulfstream heritage. I'm alluding to one of those books on my "spy books" shelf.

Back in Portland, I'm moving ahead on the hypothesis that I'll be strapped in and teaching Python from my PWS (that's GST talk) here in Slabtown, starting the day after IPD (Indigenous People's Day). I'm getting a new landing page ready. I've been using this for Monty Python named language since around version 1.3 and here we are up to 3.13 or whatever, with the big jump being from 2.x to 3.x, per the lore I'll be sharing.

Per my teacher workshop near O'Hare (airport, Chicago) years ago, my andragogical style involves oscillating twixt the technicalia of a shoptalk, and timeline context, i.e. history. As you dive into Python, start tuning in the key players (Tim Peters, Guido, Alex Martelli... Steve Holden) and their on-stage roles. Guido is the inventor, Tim a chief contributor and booster, Alex a genius teacher of, and Steve an instigator of the conference circuits latter formalized under the PSF banner.

I've met all of the above, both online and in person. Indeed, Steve lived here in Portland for several years and I played assistant and sidekick at numerous conferences. He liked my calming influence, kind of how Sydney (my dog) is a comfort to me I'm thinking. I took Syd on this recent 530 miles car journey, though I parked her with friends when changing cars to a Mustang Mach-E. One of my relatives shared his fantasy of having a vanity license plate "avelli" as in Mach-E-avelli. Syd stayed on the farm with other dogs for that part.

If you wanna be in my basic Python class it's probably not too late to enroll, although I'm pretty sure the recruiters are wanting you to join a cohort that doesn't stop with the basics. We climb "data science mountain" (easier than "calculus mountain" -- I've been a tour guide there too) to a fairly high base camp, were we look over the crater rim into the volcanic cauldron of Machine Learning. Another instructor takes over at that point, now well prepped and ready for the Pythonic approach (I believe using TensorFlow more than Pytorch -- I use scikit-learn during our preamble).

I've been batting AI-generated art back and forth with a toy company CEO who shares my interest in cartoon animation. I've been focused on the Burbank pipeline, but I understand his wish to avoid unnecessary entanglements, now that animation generation is a thing. We're talking kid characters doing team explorations in the geometry of thinking, our revectoring of American Transcendentalism into such as my School of Tomorrow curriculum. We're both into science fiction, and Cloud Nine or C9 has been a focus. That's the floating city meme, with a focus on everyday physics (relevant right now).

I've filed chronicles of this planning in the TrimTab archive, which is members only. A subset of the membership meets every two weeks to check in and talk about different "wings" of "the business" (let's call it the show and tell business) such as Zome and Zometool, vZome and so on. These toys are somewhat in the erector set tinkertoy lineage. I originally joined the thread on two fronts: through Design Science Toys (DST -- no longer in business) and through Koski's BASKET weaving (adding K to BEAST). Then came the Reed College gigs and I started sprinkling in Lux and C6XTY. You could call it product placement I suppose, but I didn't do any sales talks. C6XTY was never really for same and vZome is free online.

For all my talk at Multnomah Quakers about supporting NavAm casinos, such as by booking events if not playing the slots or tables, I didn't visit my old haunts or venture into the Tulalip facility, which I still haven't visited. I bought some cheaper gas at Angel of the Winds filling station is all, for the trek home. Anyone who follows my curriculum writing (this is some of it) eventually discovers my Casino Math meme and how I used that to carve up Silicon Forest digital maths: Casino, Supermarket, Martian and Neolithic. These are simply shorthand monikers, one might say for: risking and developing; harvesting and distributing; looking forward; looking back.

I'll have more stories to share from this road trip, but in other journal entries as this one is sufficiently lengthy. I haven't pumped out any new YouTubes lately. My attention has turned to stills, key frames, and upgrading my Python source base on Github.

Martians Landing

Prompt: 

A red haired boy with his dog sit by a telescope and watch the Martian spaceships land in the distance, on a peaceful night in the desert. He knew they were coming.

Joker 2 (movie review)

I'd been seeing the previews for a long time, and was intrigued. The first Joker of this series, with Joaquin Phoenix, had punched me hard with its Gotham. I knew that place. Indeed I did. They'd filmed it in my old haunts around JCNJ and EWR, I found out later.

My YouTube dashboard started flickering some negative thumbnails even as the Bagdad marquee rolled over from Beetlejuice 2, which I'd also seen. Without much hesitation, I made a beeline for the theater.

What I was thinking during the film a lot was (a) wow, I hadn't expected a musical, with dance numbers, but with Lady Gaga I should have and (b) wow, what a canvas, what a work of art, like the Dutch masters.

However, in being so arty, I think it went over the line into David Lynch territory, which gets me thinking art cinemas (Bagdad is first run mainstream) but then I think of how Lynch movies are far from obscure; they're on a spectrum.

These Joker movies have become intensely psychological. The depiction of prison life and archetypes is priceless. The court scene is likewise every court scene, every trial. In terms of drama, this movie strives towards perfection, overshoots, compensates, and so on, perfection itself never attainable, by definition. 

The musical numbers are clearly "in the Joker's head" but then the Joker has a lot of time to fantasize, and as the movie gets more and more unruly and surreal, one begins to wonder if "the Joker's head" is all there is. He's living the dream as they say, and a nightmare it is, but for the bright light of a fellow soul.

So yes, it's a love story on top of all that. I might delve into what the critics didn't like about it. It's not really an action thriller. Watching it takes actual patience, as the claustrophobia of the Gotham world is oppressive. I wouldn't call it a comfortable movie. But entertaining? Absolutely.

Put a Bird In It

Aside from the obvious allusion to buckminsterfullerene, this campaign keeps it localized, more Asylum District, as "put a bird on it" (on not in it) was a signature episode of the Portlandia series.

Given we're branding around the Silicon Forest, Pacific Rim, it stands to reason that Portlandia would be a source of memes for us. Too bad that Portorando video went away -- by some Japanese travel agency.

But more technically, what am I getting at here? The Active Inference allusion is also present, where the cage protects potentially delicate internals (say a living bird) from external exigencies, such as a cat. The interface system, twixt outside and inside, involves "sensing" (in) and "acting" (out).

The "active" in Active Inference means the agent or activist is intentionally probing and experimenting to falsify or reinforce the mental model, always working to bring the two (model and modeled) closer together, minimizing the chaos of misalignment with what's so. There's enough intrinsic chaos, in reality, as it is, so why add gratuitous, extraneous noise, right?

We may think of the gilded cage as a prison for the bird, but perhaps it's likewise a protective dwelling machine. Perhaps the bird gets time off when not in a cartoon. A lot depends on the Yoneda Lemma here (just kidding).

In our model of "inside-system-outside" we're alluding to the four-triangle topology of the 4-eyes-in-the-sky minimum cage-enclosure. That's a Platonic root for our Genesis story, about that set of five polys and their begats, those rhomboids. Know what I'm talking about?

Five Platonics: Tet, Cube, Octa, Icosa, Pentagonal Dodeca (PD). To each poly there corresponds a dual poly and these may be added once inter-sized such that edges criss-cross at right angles.

Poly + Dual Combos:  Tet + Tet = Cube (a rhomboid); Cube + Octa = RD (another rhomboid); Icosa + PD = RT (rhomboid again). Volumes: (Tet, 1), (Cube, 3), (Octa, 4), (RD, 6), (Icosa, 18.51), (PD, 15.35), (RT, 21.21).

I know, I know, not everyone has been to high school recently, and even then, not to one of my elite academies, asynchronous, free online. "So what's your excuse?"

hs us lit

PDX Python

 

Our first presentation, by Rey Abolofia, was on how to speed up Amazon Lambda processing by sending it compiled Python (pyc) instead of source (py). The time-to-load on a large package, such as numpy or matplotlib, may be drastically decreased (by some 45% in the demo data). 

The Lambda service only charges when a lambda is processing, based on memory and duration (size and time). 

Rob Bednark presented about CHOP, Chat Oriented Programming, which is what a lot of geeks are experimenting with this days, for a low entry cost of about $10 per month. CHOP only became a viable reality this year. 

Through a process of refining prompts, a generative LLM may be coaxed into doing a lot of the grunt work around programming. It's like having an apprentice, or, if you're new to the ecosystem, a mentor. I predict AI will free a lot of grad students from slaving for their supervising faculty quite as much.

During the discussion, I mentioned experiments with AI performed by Daniel vis-a-vis Quadrays and ivm-xyz conversion. Daniel fed my Python repo to Perplexity, asking for a clearer more documented version of the code. The results were not up to par, but helped motivate me to improve my original.

I came with Dr. DiNucci, a computer scientist who observes Python culture from a distance. His area of expertise is parallel and concurrent processing, around which he has been designing an orchestration language named Scalpel.

Fall Semester 2024

from my Martian Math stash on Flickr

I’m not averse to this term “pipeline” with respect to education, even if some of the pipelines I view with disfavor, such as the so-called “school to prison” pipeline, whereby “school” becomes little more than an encounter with authority and a first chance to taste the limiting of options that goes with becoming powerless, pretty much by definition. 

That’s not the pipeline I’m working on.

Having worked on this particular railroad a long time, you could say my “dark ride” is complete, or at least finished enough for one to avail oneself of. 

Find an entry point and hop on. Ride this love boat through a tunnel of love. 

By “dark ride” I don’t necessarily mean anything creepy; I’m using theme park jargon for the kind of ride that takes you through a sequence of experiences, usually indoors, usually riding in some kind of “gondola” or “car”, typically rail-guided. 

Disney’s Wild Ride of Mr. Toad, and Pirates of the Caribbean come to mind. 

Disney is famous for its highly engineered dark rides.

Treating a sequence of readings, YouTubes, web pages, hands on coding sessions, model making, maker spaces, 3D printing, playing with VR goggles, and so on, as a “ride” or even “work-study scenario” takes some ability to think metaphorically, and that we encourage. 

Use that imagination of yours and let freedom ring.

Cropping a Hilbert Space

I'm back to goofing off with DALL-E, what I believe to be the back end image generator. However, again my belief, there's a lot of "cropping" going on, whereby children, say, are not allowed to look truly terrified. 

My prompt uses "Frightened" as its first word, to characterize these would-be pilots trying to replace the more experienced ones, who've all died. That's all the context we get, this was one of four results, all of which showed children apparently enjoying themselves.

How I picture this working is some really long and detailed prompts on the back end, take in whatever an end user like me writes, and melds them into a single prompt. My prompt:  "Frightened child pilots in the cockpit are trying to steer Python Airlines to a safe landing in stormy weather, like in some horror movie by Stephen King. All the adults are dead."

Beyond that, maybe some directions and distances are strictly limited and by that I mean, in a Hilbert Space, one eigen-dimension might be "how scared". 

It'd be like an n-space vector, and the further long it, the more scared we'd be (we being whoever is in the picture). But in this sanitized public facing free tier API, the goal is not to produce offending output. No nudity, no lots of things. 

Embedded X tweet:

Alludes to inside baseball, Python Community politics, in passing, but really continuing my AI investigations (scroll in my timeline for more experiments, DreamTeam etc.):https://t.co/yOfMXE2NTG

— Kirby Urner (@thekirbster) September 19, 2024

One the other hand, "scary" in the conventional sense of Halloweeny is allowed, and somehow the machine knows how to tell them apart, praise Allah for so many axes.

For example, these below, related to GENI work (adding more of a Portland flavor, Voodoo Donuts an influence), popped out no problem. There's a difference between being scary (frightening) and being scared (frightened), a grammatical nuance the AI might have been trained to exploit.

By the way, regarding the political cartoonery involved, I don't play Discourse when it comes to flying Python Airlines, but I do follow from a distance, all the current chicanery. 

The PSF bylaws don't say anything about Discourse mattering, so I'm just thinking some people have a lot of time on their hands.

Debate Teams

Per Facebook, I’m collaborating on with other schools regarding how we might ramp up the debate team scene. If you’re not on Facebook, maybe Medium?

Excerpt:

Remember the rules of debate: as a team, you’ll be expected to be prepared to argue either side of the resolution. The US team could well get the job of trashing the resolution, vs upholding it.

So if you’re on the US team, my advice is you learn to think like a Russian and vice versa. People who only know how to think on one side are just morons when it comes to Lincoln-Douglas face-offs of this type.

Micro Economics

The workhorse Mac Pro likely bit it last weekend, halting mid-sentence, as I was crafting some nuclear energy policy (just kidding: I was yakking with an informed lobbyist on Facebook). Had to hard reboot, but she never came back.

Fortunately, I was surrounded by acres of wildflowers and getting tractor skills, plus had an iPad for telecoms, so no time for a self pity party. My plan is to take my time casting about for solutions, without feeling overly pressured. Laptops die. I have backups. Maybe I should write a grant proposal, and or try to get by on a Pi.

Regarding social media (telecoms), I’ve picked up the pace on X a bit, looking back on 2024 and imagining a DreamTeam. I parodied the Russiagate genre by having free tier AI do a wonderful Bernie and Tulsi meme, as Superman and Wonder Woman. As hackneyed as it gets, and also so nostalgic, as neither is even running for president this year.

I also mocked State dot gov for trying to make RT sound more sinister than it is. Unable to compete on a level playing field, Cowardly Capitalism (scan blogs) is trying to re-enact the Hua Wei model and simply ban the competition. Pretty wimpy, but that’s President Blinken for ya, now out of favor in Poland they tell me (the list keeps growing).

I cleaned out some of my old FSI posts, which I can always refresh when the time comes. FSI is one of the Mighty Networks (that’s the hosting platform — very iPhone compatible). Then I use Synergeo a lot, for promotional materials. Example 1. Example 2.

I alerted the FSI via forum posting (vs in a group) that the most up to date summary of my thinkings and doings, with respect to the Bucky stuff at least, was archived at TTBC. This is where I overlap with BFI members a lot (I was made a lifelong member with the Synergetics Explorer Award, amidst ceremony).

If you’re not familiar with all these acronyms, I suggest a blog search, from the box upper left. Use the right margin navigation widget to jump to my other blogs.  Field Structure Institute and TrimTab Book Club are both entangled with BFI, for which I was webmaster in the 1990s, in cahoots with Kiyoshi.

Having archived my thoughts on working with Disney / Pixar, and summarized the Lithuania chapter, I retired from TTBC as the protocol there is to keep it apolitical, and in this particular season that’s not in the cards for me. I’m called to grapple with various political powers that be, were, or are still in the pipeline. That means I’m back to small group comms. I use Telegram a lot.

Some might wonder if I stay in contact with Princeton alums and is there anything to the idea that Ivy Leaguers have a rule the world complex? Yes, I stay in touch with some classmates, including at a recent picnic in the park (local Princeton Club chapter). But I wouldn’t say there’s any world domination tone to it. We’re all over the map.

Where you might still encounter “world domination” talk is in the world of free and open source engineering, where copyleft commies still reign supreme. If you go back in time quite a ways you’ll find a bemused mass media discovering geekdom’s memes, “global dom” being one of them. 

The full meme comes with a lot of penguin pictures (March of the Penguins had been big) i.e. Linux iconography. That was the David and Goliath myth of the day: Linux and open source were gonna rule the world, displacing the slower, dumber giants, not agile enough to keep up.

So how did that go?

Well, it’s a long story. The short version is the giants swallowed a lot of the open source philosophy (PayPal: “InnerSource”), not to mention source code, making Big Tech more dot commie. But the language of capitalism is still what’s macho among tech bros. They see the business sense in copyleft, which is padding the bottom line. Imagine paying IBM prices for all that stuff.

The equilibrium we’ve achieved might be imagined as a skyscraper or any tall office tower. As you rise or descend in the elevator, you find some floors are public and open, whereas others are authorized personnel only, with not all personnel authorized on closed off floors. Developers tend to get authorized access to a smattering of proprietary floors, work there and in the public spaces, contributing to both.

Most economists speak of “the commons” thinking of an old fashioned grazing area near a town, where anyone could park their sheep or whatever. Not closed off, not like BLM land, not proprietary. In geekdom, the gold has a different character in being infinitely copiable so long as electricity and storage is made available. My School of Tomorrow repo goes out over the wire to any point on earth, firewalls notwithstanding.

That being said, my curriculum writing is needle in a haystack stuff, spread by word of mouth vs by high pressure advertising. Pressurizing the content is more a job for downline repackagers and resellers of our open source content, MIT license a lot of it. We use Python a lot and you know how liberal that license is. I’m a copyleft king in my kingdom, practicing Potlatch Economics (tagline: “there’s more where that came from”).

The copyleft movement is more an outgrowth of academic protocols than any flavor of Marxism. We already had those concepts of “fair use” and “public domain” whereby scholars are allowed to excerpt and cite X, without financially supporting X. Why would I want to pay a school to which I’m philosophically opposed? If they’re pumping out memes, affecting change in the public spaces, then as a member of the public, I have a right to investigate. Greg Palast is one of my heroes.