As most are probably aware and i hope that you are at this point COVID-19 appears to be a very serious worldwide concern. From a complexity systems relationship standpoint there are several interesting aspects here that for some might be self-evident and for others might not be so self-evident. First, let us start with some observations concerning health and wellness in general:
Your wellness and health are the most important aspect of your life:
by definition, it is distributed
by definition, it affects others – eg its networked
by definition, it involves proximity – human caring and empathy
Given that it is a networked system and can have very non-linear behaviors. i was just having a discussion of an issue that could have a great effect (and affect) upon seemingly unrelated entities. Paper money is a fragile medium and also can carry chemicals and pathogens. Of interest:
The World Health Organization (WHO) has advised people to wash their hands and stop using cash if possible as the paper bills may help spread coronavirus.
The other happening is large corporations are canceling travel and conferences.
This brings me to the non-linear relationships which are two-fold (for now) but there will be several others: (1) cryptocurrency usage will skyrocket (2) “De-Officing” will start a trend in remote telecommuting work which will cause teleconferencing companies stock to increase.
‘And they asked me how I did it, and I gave ’em the Scripture text, “You keep your light so shining a little in front o’ the next!” They copied all they could follow, but they couldn’t copy my mind, And I left ’em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind.‘
~ “The Mary Gloster”, Rudyard Kipling, 1896
My Badge – I exist.
Well, your humble narrator finally made it to NuerIPS2019. There were several starts and stops to my travel itinerary but I finally persevered!
Bienvenue – Vancouver, British Columbia
First and foremost while the location at least for me required multiple hops Vancouver, BC is a beautiful city. The Vancouver conference center is spacious and an exemplary venue. Also for those that have the time Whistler / Blackcomb is one of the best mountains in North America for snow sports this time of the year. While I didn’t get to go I am being hopeful that I will win the registration the lottery system next year for 2020 and will plan accordingly.
Vancouver Conference Center – Oh Canada!
This year the conference was veritable who’s who of information-theoretic companies. Most of the top market cap companies are now information theoretic-based technology companies and as such have representation here at the conference. To wit IBM Research AI was a diamond sponsor:
While it is nearly impossible to quantify the breadth and depth of the subject matter presented here at the conference I have attempted to classify some overall themes:
Agent-Based Modelling and Behaviors
Imitation, Meta, Transfer, Policy Learning and Behavioral Cloning
Morphological Systems based on Evolutionary Biology
Optimization methods for non-convex models
Hybrid Bayesian and MCMC methods
Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) direct Modelling and Systems
Neuroscience models that couple computational agents and hypotheses of consciousness
Side Note: I think it is amazing that 10 years ago you could not say “I’m using a Neural Network for …” without being laughed out the room. Now there is an entire set of tracks dedicated to said technology and algorithms.
The one major difference in this conference compared to what I have read and heard albeit second hand or through reports or blogs is the focus on ‘Where is your github?” and the question of how fast can we get to production? There was a very focused and volitional undertone to the questions
One aspect that has not changed and appears to have been amplified is the recruiter/job marketplace and (ahem) situation at the conference. To say that it was transparent and out in the open would be an understatement.
New To NeurIPS:
For those that have never been to neurips I’ll provide some recommendations:
Download the conference app and fill out your profile
Plan your agenda
Get to the poster sessions – early
Network as much as possible
Wear comfortable shoes – it is in the same venue next year, lots of walking.
Attempt to get a close hotel as possible due to
Trends and Catagories:
Agent-Based Modelling and Behaviors
This area is finally coming to fruition in the production market at scale. We are seeing both ABB (agent based modeling) and ABM (agent-based modeling aka self emergent / self organizing behaviors). There were many presentations on multi-agent behaviors in the context of both policy and environment responses using reinforcement learning and q-learning.
Imitation, Meta, Transfer, Policy Learning and Behavioral Cloning
I grouped all of these together while technically they are different in application and scope. However, they can and are mixed together for applied systems. For instance in imitation learning (IL). IL instead of trying to learn from the sparse rewards or manually specifying a reward function, an expert (typically a human) provides us with a set of demonstrations. The agent then tries to learn the optimal policy by following, imitating the expert’s decisions. Historically this was called Expert Systems Engineering. However, note the policy learning implicit in this area as well. Furthermore Behavioral cloning is a method by which human subcognitive skills can be captured and reproduced in a computer program. As the human subject performs the skill, his or her actions are recorded along with the situation that gave rise to the action. So as one can see all of these areas are closely related to a so-called expert reference. Algorithms of consensus among multi-agents will play a crucial role here.
Morphological Systems based on Evolutionary Biology
Morphology is a branch of biology dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features. Morphology is a branch of life science dealing with the study of a structure of an organism and its component parts. Turing wrote a paper on Morphology and S. Kaufman wrote “The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution” just to name a few. We are headed into areas where physics, chemistry, and biology are being brought into play with computing, once again at scale. This multi-modality computing will also benefit from access to the developments in accessible quantum computing.
Optimization methods for non-convex models
Gradient descent in all of its flavors has been our friend for decades. Are the local minima our friend or foe? The algorithms are now starting to ask “Where Am I”?
Hybrid Bayesian and MCMC methods
In 2007 I founded a machine learning and NLP as a service company called “BeliefNetworks”. This self-referencing name should illustrate where I stand on inference methods. Due to access to cycles and throughput, we are finally starting to see these methods integrated system-wide.
Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) direct Modelling and Systems
Having worked for years in the areas of numerical optimization this is another area that is near and dear. I saw several papers mapping ODE’s to geometric representations. Analog computing could very well be in our return to the future. Naiver-Stokes equation anyone? I see the industry moving into flow models with truly modeling foundational Cauchy momentum equations depending on the application area. We are going to see both software and hardware development in this area.
Neuroscience models that couple computational agents and hypotheses of consciousness
Given all of the above computer scientist are pulling in physicists, biologists, chemists and finally neuroscientists-finally. Possibly the “C” word is no longer anathema? I promise I will not insert a terminator picture here. However, given the developments in cognition and understanding quantum biology, we are now starting to be able to model at least initially what we “think” we are thinking about in some cases. Yoshua Bengio gave a great talk on volitional causal and “conscious” tasks easily accomplished by humans. We also see this with the developments in the areas of spiking algorithms.
Papers, Posters, Demos – Oh My!
As part of this blog, I wanted to review a couple of my favorite presentations, posters, and papers. While this is not a ranked list nor is it a temporal chronological review it is a list of papers that resonated with me for various reasons. While I will be listing papers I will also be posting pictures of poster papers and some meetups that I attended.
Blind Super-Resolution Kernel Estimation using an Internal-GAN
This paper was interesting to me on several fronts. The basic premise for super-resolution kernels are thus:
The paper introduced “KernelGAN” – an image-specific internal-GAN, which estimates the SR kernel that best preserves the distribution of patches across scales of the LR image. This is what I would consider significant progress over previous methods by estimating an image-specific SR-kernel based on the LR image alone. This allows a one-shot mode for training based on the LR image. Network training is done during test time. There is no actual inference step since the training implicitly contains the resulting SR-kernel. They give results in the paper as well a metrics of performance based on NTIRE 2018 dataset although given the first application of a deep linear network I would imagine this doesn’t really do it justice. Very impressive and I can see several applications of this method and algorithm.
q-means: A Quantum Algorithm for Unsupervised Machine Learning
The cogent aspect of this paper was the efficiency of storing the vectors in First, classical data expressed in the form of N-dimensional complex vectors can be mapped onto quantum states over : when the data is stored in a quantum random access memory (qRAM). Specifically, the distance estimation becomes very efficient when having quantum access to the vectors and the centroids via qRAM. The optimization yields a k-means optimization
further the paper showed that you can also query the norm of the vectors within the state preparation.
Making AI Forget You: Data Deletion in Machine Learning
One of the issues with GDPR legislation and the right to be forgotten comes up when you must re-train the entire data set. This paper addresses methodologies that enable partial re-training. The paper goes over past methods of cryptography and differential privacy of which do not delete data but attempt to make data private or non-identifiable. From the paper: “Algorithms that support efficient deletion do not have to be private, and algorithms that are private do not have to support efficient deletion. To see the difference between privacy and data deletion, note that every learning algorithm supports the naive data deletion operation of retraining from scratch. The algorithm is not required to satisfy any privacy guarantees. Even an operation that outputs the entire dataset in the clear could support data deletion, whereas such an operation is certainly not private.” The paper goes on to define four areas of metric performance for DDIML: Linearity, Laziness, Modularity, and Quantization. They do state that e also assumed that user-based deletion requests correspond to only a single datapoint and this needs to be extended. However, for the unsupervised k-means they describe they have deletion efficiency with substantial algorithm speedup.
From Wikipedia: “Behavioral cloning is a method by which human sub-cognitive skills can be captured and reproduced in a computer program. As the human subject performs the skill, his or her actions are recorded along with the situation that gave rise to the action.” The fundamental premise was comparing expert versus computational policy and minimizing a graph-based approach:
where is drawn uniformly at random overall graphs and optimize for the mean squared error loss for the continuous action environments and a cross-entropy loss for the discrete action environments. Something very interesting happens during this process of imitation learning with experts. In particular, it leads to a counter-intuitive “causal misidentification” phenomenon: access to more information can yield worse performance ergo more is not better! The paper discusses with demonstrations of an autonomous vehicle scenario of phases with targeted intervention to predict the graph behavior. They did state the solutions are not production-ready. I really appreciated the honesty.
Learning To Control Self Assembling Morphologies: A Study of Generalized via Modularity
The idea of modular and self-assembling agents goes back at least to Von Neumman’s Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata. In robotics, such systems have been termed “self-reconfiguring modular robots”. E. Schrödinger posed this same question in “What is Life?”. This was one of my favorite demonstrations and presentations. I have been extremely “pro” using agent base self-organizing algorithms for quite some time. This paper and presentation utilizes zero-shot generalization and trains policies and generalizes to changes in the number of limbs of the entity as well as the environment. They then pick the best model from training and evaluate it without any fine-tuning at test-time.
The poster and paper dealt with supposedly the first design of quantum Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks (WGANs), which has been shown to improve the robustness and the scalability of the adversarial training of quantum generative on noisy quantum hardware. Parameterized quantum circuits These circuits can be used as a parameterized representation of functions as called quantum neural networks, which can be applied to classical supervised learning models, or to construct generative models. The paper also showed how to turn the quantum Wasserstein semimetrics into a concrete design of quantum WGANs that can be efficiently implemented on quantum machines. FWIW in functional analysis, pseudometrics often come from seminorms on vector spaces, and so it is natural to call them “semimetrics”. The paper used WGANs to generate a 3-qubit quantum circuit of 50 gates that approximated a 3-qubit simulation circuit that requires over 10k gates using off the shelf standard techniques. The QWGAN then can was used to approximate complex quantum circuits with smaller circuits. A smaller circuit was then trained to approximate the Choi–Jamiolkowski isomorphism or Choi state which encodes the action of a quantum circuit.
Deep Signature Transforms
Signatures refer to a set of statistics given a stream of data. The other type of signature is for the transform. Sometimes this is also called the transform kernel. In the case of a signal kernel or transform to model a curve as a linear combination. Signatures provide a basis for functions on the space of curves. These functions can then be used as operative building blocks. The stream can then be defined as:
This also has interesting ramifications as a feature mapping/engineering processes as well as embedding the signatures within algorithms, in this case, a layer within a Neural Networks. This is akin to some fingerprinting techniques in the past for media and the paper does mention: “in order to preserve the stream-like nature is to sweep a one-dimensional convolution along the stream.” The embedding techniques as part of the path and preserving nature made this an extremely enjoyable discussion.
This paper was near and dear to me due to some of my past lives working in the areas of psychological and perceptual media models. Metamers are a psychophysical color match between two patches of light that have different sets of wavelengths. This means that metamers are two patches of color that look identical to us in color but are made up of different physical combinations of wavelengths. In the case of this paper for metamers they “model metamers” to test the similarity between human and artificial neural network representations. The group generated model metamers for natural stimuli by performing gradient descent on noise signal, matching the responses of individual layers of image and audio networks to a natural image or speech signal. The resulting signals reflect the invariances instantiated in the network up to the matched layer. As with most things in machine learning the team sought whether the nature of the invariances would be similar to those of humans, in which case the model metamers should remain human-recognizable regardless of the stage from which they are generated. In this case, the humans were divergent from the neural networks. We need more of this type of work and how perceptions affect machine learning outcomes or possibly priors?
I particularly enjoyed this poster and the commentary “Animals have innate abilities…” I also believe most of the animal kingdom is sentiment as well as operating on literally different wavelengths (spectrum etc). The paper was to demonstrate a method that can find minimal neural network architectures that can perform several reinforcement learning tasks without weight training. Ergo the title Weight Agnostic. In place of optimizing weights of a fixed network, they sought to optimize instead for architectures that perform well over a wide range of weights. When I walked up to the poster I immediately thought of Algorithmic Information Theory (AIT) and how soft weights have been used for neural networks. AIT which based using Kolmogorov complexity of a computable object is the minimum length of the program that can compute it. The paper goes into detail concerning The Minimal Description Length (MDL) of a program and the recent dusting off of these processes applied to larger deep learning nets. The poster did not reflect the transparency of the paper in that the research was very focused on creating generalized network architectures in which IMHO is a step toward AGI and stated the WANN is not approaching the performance of engineered CNNs. I also appreciated the overall frankness of the paper. Quote from the paper: “This paper is strongly motivated towards these goals of blending innate behavior and learning, and we believe it is a step towards addressing the challenge posed by Zador. We hope this work will help bring neuroscience and machine learning communities closer together to tackle these challenges.”
Inducing Brain Relevant Bias in Natural Language Processing Models
This poster was part of a general theme that I saw throughout the conference. Utilizing medical imaging devices to create better canonical models for machine learning. The paper shows the relationship between language and brain activity learned by BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) during fine-tuning transfers across multiple participants. The paper goes on to show that, for some participants, the fine-tuned representations learned from both magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI) are better for predicting fMRI than the representations learned from fMRI alone, indicating that the learned representations capture brain-activity-relevant information that is not simply an artifact of the modality. The model predicts the fMRI activity associated with reading arbitrary text passages, well enough to distinguish which of two-story segments is being read with 74% accuracy. That is impressive and I believe we need more multi-modality papers of this nature and research.
A Robust Non-Clairvoyant Dynamic Mechanism for Contextual Auctions
This paper caught my eye as I spend a great deal of time researching agents in game-theoretic of mechanism design based situations. What really caught my eye was the terminology non-clairvoyant. I suppose if there was a method that was truly calirvoynet we wouldn’t be concerned with the robustness of said algorithms. Actually, it is a real definition – a dynamic mechanism is non-clairvoyant if the allocation and pricing rule at each period does not depend on the type distributions in the future periods. In many types of auctions, especially ad networks the seller must rely on approximate or asymmetric models of the buyer’s preferences to effectively set auction parameters such as a reserve price. In mechanism design, you essentially have three vectors of input: [1] collective decision problem, [2] measure of quality to evaluate any candidate solution, [3] description of the resources – information – held by the participants. The paper presented a learned policy model and framework that could be applied in phases and possibly extrapolated to other types of applications. I personally think dynamic mechanism design has great applicability in the areas of distributed computing and distributed ledger platforms.
I also attended the NASA Frontier Design Labs that was sponsored by Google, Intel and Nvidia. I was part of the NASA FDL AI Astronaut Health research project over the summer of 2019. The efforts, technology and most importantly the people are astounding. The event was standing room only and several amazing conversations on the various projects with NASA FDL were had at the event.
Machine Learning For Space
I do hope you will continue to visit my site. If you continue to visit you will notice I have a type of “disease” called Biblomaniac-ism. As such I bought a book at the conference:
The future is distributed
So there you have it. While this probably was tl;dr I hope you gave it a good scan while you were doing a pull request or two. I hope this has at least provided some insight into the conference.
One of the things, Oh Dear Reader, you will come to find out about me is that I have a disease called biblomaniacism. I argue however as with most things indulgence, not compulsion is the order of the day. However, I also argue if you are going to have a vice or let us say an issue as it were, then obsessive reading or collecting of books is not such a bad thing to have unless they fall on you or if you have to move them. I wanted to give the reader a full context for future meanderings in the realm of book reviews and general book discussions.
As of late, I have been having discussions on several fronts concerning the sharing economy and how transients and complexity add to the perception of less time in our lives. Humans also ask me to recommend books. Given these discussions, I have been recommending a book entitled “Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler. Here are the particulars:
Book Title: Future Shock
Author: Alvin Toffler
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0-394-42586-3 (Original hardcover)
Copyright: 1970
I have the original hardback version. I love the black cloth cover with the red letter embossed writing. I also love the perforated edges on the pages. The dedicated page is classic:
Dedication Page
The book’s premise is the presupposes that we as humans are moving into an area of “information overload” as far as I know this is the first mention of the terminology. Once again this book was published in 1970. The book argues that we as a society are facing enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a “super-industrial society”. As such the underlying delta in our perceptual makeup from moving to “atoms to bits” is that our sense of ownership and therefore our sense of time is greatly affected. The sense of ownership is affected by moving from having and owning to renting and sharing. The tome goes into great detail we are ever more transient in our behavior much in the same aspect our ancestors where nomadic. However, the major differentiation is that the cultural break from the past now comes at a price.
An excerpt from page 11:
“Future Shock is a time phenomenon a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in our society. It arises from the superposition of a new culture on an old one. It is a culture shock in one’s own society. But its impact is far worse. For most Peace Corpsmen, in fact, most travelers, have the comforting knowledge that the culture they left behind will be there to return to. The victim of the future shock does not.”
The underlying thesis is that we as a society are processing more information in a shorter amount of time which results in all aspects of our being and relationships with life compressed and transient. For example, take an individual out of his/her own culture and set them down in an environment where there are different rules both written and unwritten which apply to conceptions of time, sex, religion, work, personal space and cut off from any hope of retreating back to a more familiar social landscape. This can be exacerbated if the culture has different value systems which it probably does then what is considered rational behavior under these circumstances for the individual? The book takes this view and applies it to entire societies and generations. Thus this incurs future shock on a massive scale.
One very cogent aspect that resonated with me is the concept of fetishizing anything and everything. The execution of this fetishization comes through the application of sub-cultures. Whereas any little modification results in a new genre of the individual with respect to the sub-culture. Maybe one reason this resonated with me was his illustration of surfers being a sub-culture. Toffler does an amazing job of mapping this sub-culture fetish to having styles automatically chosen for us whereas we thereby adopting the lifestyle without having to really perform the machinations associated with say paddling out in an ocean. If you adopt the style the percetion you are part of the culture is enough due to the transient nature of changing sub-cultures.
Toffler also goes into depth addressing the needs for our educational system especially k-12 needing to address thinking in the future instead of rank and file history which he does mention in most cases is variational and filtered as a function of the teacher’s belief system. He proposes a complete overhaul of the educational system on how we now have a static teaching agenda based on 17th-century rote memorization skills to a more adaptive system of learning. He also emphasizes how education will be more of a distributed individualized auto-didactic process. I consider myself to be an auto-didactic and relish the ability to sign up for Udemy or Coursera classes ergo I completely believe he nailed this assumption for the future classroom.
Oh, dear reader, if you made it this far fear not, this book is not a nihilistic or dystopian view of that which will inevitability come to pass. Toffler has a litany of suggestions for how we can overcome the future shock malaise or in fact he suggests it could be a new medical condition. I, however, will not list these in a cookbook fashion as I do not want to be a spoiler. Suffice to say we are seeing some people exercise their future thought to change future shock.
Caveat Emptor: This book will stretch and at the same time bind what you thought was good or bad for our western society. While you will probably pay a premium for the hardback original edition the paperback edition can easily be purchased for a very reasonable price. For those that work in the areas of dealing with humans or creating new technolgy I highly recommend adding this to your reading list. Your neurons will thank you for it.
If you happen to have read the book or are reading the book I would appreciate any comments you care to share.
Blogging Music: “Entre Dos Aquas” by Paco de Lucia, 1981.
14 years ago today I was surfing a hurricane swell. Sunny perfect head high waves were as good as it gets for this area. I caught a great wave rode it got a tube ride in fact then for some reason still beyond me I came in and said it was time to go home. Something didn’t feel right to me.
A couple of days earlier I was on a call from the United States to Costa Rica that went something like this at the tail end of the call:
T: “Hey man really how are you?” S: “I am happy. If I had known it was going to be like this I would have done this years ago.” T: “ That is great to hear. I’ll see you in a couple of days.” S: “Yea man.” T: “ This is going to be incredible.” S: “Yes it is.” T: “See ya!” S: “Later!”
Then a day later I received a call which caused everything to come to an abrupt end.
This process had started a long time ago (a decade?) in a land far away when I asked some men very close to me one thing:
Q: What object is it that you truly desire?
Not in an existential aspect but something that you really truly wanted from a material standpoint that you believe would otherwise be unobtainable?
This in an of itself is an interesting thought exercise as most are taught not to want or desire the carnal or material aspects of life.
This one man named Steven Swenson (aka Sven) responded, “ I want a custom made Beneteau 48 foot sloop to sail around the world with my family.
We all had an object of desire that we filed away in the area of what I call “The-Is-To-Be”.
I told Sven that one day he would have his boat and sail around the world. In addition to the boat purchase that was eventually named “Trinity” we were going write author book called “From The Valley To The Sea.” We promised each other that if anyone one of us walked in and said “hey its time to get that “Object Of Desire” he/they would push back from their computer(s) and go without hesitation. We also said that if this was too much to ask they could easily bow out of the tribe.
In the spirit of this pact I enacted the process one day. I will never forget as I prepared myself most of the day before going into Sven’s office. I walked into his office and said “Hey you ready for that boat?” He immediately shut down his silver G4, pushed back his chair and without hesitation or questioning gave an emphatic “ sure lets go!” If memory serves correct he was out of his office before I could get to the door or respond to this actions.
That type of dedication, loyalty and trust between men hardly exist in today’s society or we are told that it shouldn’t exist. I am reminded of the adage “Being a good man doesn’t always mean being good.” Respect at this level is earned and once it is earned it appears to last forever.
Our lives are becoming ever more transient, and these types of engagements are fleeting if they exist at all. Deep dedication to a higher calling is unheard of in today’s society. Even our relationships in all of thier aspects are becoming seemingly nothing more than pithy toilet paper page views.
This is especially in the area of relationships between men.
This event as are many with my comrade are crystallized in time. I refuse to let them go as Roy Batty says in Bladerunner “Lost in time like tears in the rain.” Nor am I being a martyr wallowing in self pity (in fact quite the opposite) nor am I creating a “better someone in death” scenario.
Indulge in the now, push back when the time comes, engage deeply in your relationships with those that truly matter and respond in like kind.
Sven had told me that its astounding, transcendent and humbling being at the helm of his boat in the middle of the night, in the middle of the pacific looking at the sea, sky and the stars.
I hope that he found his C-Beams glittering forever upon the sea.
Also remember it is an honor to say goodbye to someone. No matter how seemingly trite mean it when you say “Goodbye”.
As always with much Love to his wife, and two sons.
“Hark, now hear the sailors cry Smell the sea and feel the sky Let your soul and spirit fly Into the mystic”
I haven’t written anything personal in quite some time due to several factors. I was compelled due to recent events. As most know or should be aware if you are a fan of science fiction, artificial intelligence or biology then you know that Rutger Hauer left this place we call Earth. Rutger played Roy Batty, replicant,Nexus model number N6MAA10816, which was a combat model. He was also the leader of a renegade replicant group that hijacked a shuttle and traveled to Earth to demand a longer lifespan. I watched both BladeRunners in sequential format. Earlier this year I re-read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, !984 and Brave New World within a two week period. AFAIC, while 1984’s dystopian purview was enthralling and the terminology was spot on, the aspects of DADOES were and are so much more prescient and dealt more with within our psyche and of our so-called modern world. With the passing of Rutger Hauer, I was reminded of the immensity of the final death monologue that he authored and performed, supposedly in one take to the amazement of those in attendance, even bringing them to tears. Here is the scene:
Roy Talks About The Gate
I also believe the original soundtrack design by Vangelis‘ that Hans Zimmer in the 2049 remake essentially duplicated, in obvious deference, I would hope to due its perfection, adds to the immensity of the scene. What strikes me about this scene is the curios aspect the original Blade Runner was set in 2019 and Mr Hauer passed away in 2019. I call that #suspiciouscoincidence. What also struck me about watching this film for the (Nth) time was the sheer love of the experience of living that awe inspiriting retrospection of the beauty of the sheer joy of the experience itself that was being presented by an android who just saved the life of the human that was sent to exterminate him! The duality is astounding! Furthermore the android knew full well that he was being extinguished due to a timeout algorithm. Yet he still takes his time to emote on the carnality and the sheer magnitude for the love of existence. I spend an exorbitant amount of time nowadays thinking about machines that possibly can learn, think, reason and understand the world around them. Sentience is bandied about like useless tweets these days yet we are so far removed from the essence of existence. Sometimes I believe the real reason we are so enthralled about these types of endeavors is just to gain control. Control over everything even – death.
As an aside in complexity theory no one really knows why Fibonacci sequences and the Golden Ratio are so prevalent? That is but one example of how much we do not know. I digress.
Roy had an understanding of how short his existence was and how much time he had to experience the universe. Quality Over Quantity is a maxim that comes to mind. While it is not for me to say whether N6MAA10816 was “good” or “evil” – he did save Harrison Ford’s (aka The Blade Runner) life – I can assure you that he was envious of what we humans have here on this beautiful planet. We have C-Beams right in front of us everyday.
I’ll probably be retiring this blog and moving everything over to my official site in the future tedtanner.org
“With heart and hand I pledge you while I load my gun again, you will never be forgotten or the enemy forgiven, my good comrade.” ~ A.S.L.
“If my comrade doubts I laugh confidently If my comrade sleeps I keep the watch for him If my comrade falls I fight on for the both of us Because to every warrior the gods have given a comrade.” ~ Song Of The Comrade, Blood Axis
“And I held the breath inside my lungs for days
And I saw myself as one of many waves
And when I knew I’d become the ocean’s slave
I just stayed.” ~ Waves by the Bahamas
I’m sitting here watching scenes of IRMA basically destroy my beloved SouthLand. June 1st – December 1st is that time of the year on what I call The Hurricane Train. It is the tradeoff. With beauty there is always underlying horror. Steven and I used to talk all the time about the love of the ocean and this balance. It is not something that is contrived. Mother Ocean gives and takes as she sees fit.
On this day the ocean took my comrade.
Freediving.
I finally got around to becoming bonafide certified in the art of freediving. Something I promised I would do in discussions with him.
Everytime I see a huge set, a wisp of salt spray, or glint of light from the bottom of the ocean I think of his laugh.
“With heart and hand I pledge you while I load my gun again, you will never be forgotten or the enemy forgiven, my good comrade.” ~ A.S.L.
“If my comrade doubts I laugh confidently If my comrade sleeps I keep the watch for him If my comrade falls I fight on for the both of us Because to every warrior the gods have given a comrade.” ~ Song Of The Comrade, Blood Axis
Very late one night I was looking into some music and ran across a song entitled: “Waves” by the Bahamas. For some reason I thought of my comrade as soon as I heard this:
“And I held the breath inside my lungs for days
And I saw myself as one of many waves
And when I knew I’d become the ocean’s slave
I just stayed.”
I know that Sven died doing what he loved. Free-diving. I remember when he told me he wanted a boat to sail around the world. I said, “Well let us see if we can accelerate things so you can get down to doing just that and get out of here.”
About three years ago I was talking to someone during an initial interview who in many ways reminded me of the Sven – even only about a half hour on the phone. After about two hours talking (this guy wasn’t looking for a job and already had more than 20 job offers at scale.) I asked this person what he really wanted. Without hesitation he said “A boat to sail around the world”. In fact it turned out to be the same type the Sven wanted and earned. I grew deathly silent. He asked what was wrong and did he screw the “interview” up. I said no in fact quite the opposite and I asked if he had some time and I would tell him a story. Synchronistic events in action. There are no coincidences in life.
Due to all of our interests back in 1998 I promised Sven if anything ever happened to him I would watch over his lovely wife and two amazing sons who are now young men practicing in the footsteps of their old man. I can unequivocally say he would be very proud of both of them.
Last year I thought for some reason it was time to quit thinking about “all of this.” whatever thisis. Remembering those who lived loud and indulged in the greatest indulgence – life. The I realized that is not something to quit remembering.
To switch gears for something that will forever be recorded in the annals of hatred for certain technologies – even though he was one of the best programmers of all time. As you watch: you know you have always wanted to do that and he did it with a brand new system:
After that give this a listen. One breath. Take a deep breath today and hopefully go underwater and remember Sven. He would appreciate it.
I was recently reminded of the importance of shipping code. In the same night I watched the latest episode in the series Silicon Valley I also watched an episode of Shark Tank. In the tank Chris Sacca (Uber, Twitter etc) said “Ideas Are Cheap Execution is Everything.” Looking at the field and thinking about the myriad of things to plant is akin to all of the ideas that people generate and think hey that is easy. Just hit the easy button. Well there is a stratification that occurs in the industry. There are three tiers: (1) thinking or what I call though-ting – as in we have thought about that some time ago. (2) Executing on the idea with shipping code (3) and the ultimate example – shipping code that goes to production and does not fail that amazes the end user whether enterprise or consumer.
Most sit there and look at the field and think “golly jee I have an idea! I really have an idea!” Great. Good for you. So do millions of other people. However for those that can take an idea and execute it to shipping code from an idea that many if not most think is impossible and have it run day in and day out this is the stuff that ideas2bank are built upon. For those that have seen the latest episode I will just leave this here and for the few that truly and viscerally have experienced this at a worldwide level – I personally thank you. (Oh yea and that is a mean loop by San Holo – word on the lazy web says he is gonna drop the full version soon.) 5,4,3,2,1 – Ship It!
“With heart and hand I pledge you while I load my gun again, you will never be forgotten or the enemy forgiven, my good comrade.”
~ A.S.L.
As I just told the wife of Steven Swenson – this evening – I did not have the intention to write anything today. As I lifted weights this morning hoping they would lie to me concerning the poundage and watching the scenes of 9.11 – I remember 10 years ago – today – getting quite a different phone call four years after said terrorist tragedy based on some theistic apparition. I hadn’t intended to write anything however many times intent can vacillate. This vacillation was exacerbated by inquiry from a person who was wondering how a team came together eating steaks – so I answered him. Which in turn led him to comment “You should write a book.” Yes well 10 years ago it was to be called “From The Valley To The Sea.”
Its been a decade. Its time for some closure. However one last little tidbit.
Sven: “Hey man i’m gonna cast off, you wanna take it down from San Juan to San Fran?”
Me: “Nah i gotta hit the road get on the tin bird.”
Sven:” So I’m gonna tell them I am leaving.”
Me: “Nah man dont do that just keep checking in the code via the wireless McGiver Rig”
(Note: Way pre ubiquitous wi-fi days)
Sven: “Think it will work?”
Me: “Sure I’ll run interference.”
In the book I’ll come clean on how I accomplished this…
This lasted 3 months before they found out…
So I was told its time to start writing. One last thing before i sign off. Roma, Leif and Gage – Steven would be very proud of all of you.
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: when the data is stored in a quantum random access memory (qRAM). Specifically, the distance estimation becomes very efficient when having quantum access to the vectors and the centroids via qRAM. The optimization yields a k-means optimization ![\[T=O(log(d))\]](https://www.tedtanner.org/wp-content/ql-cache/quicklatex.com-8322b5b1996810c2de8d19ba2ac27c69_l3.png "Rendered by QuickLaTeX.com")
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is drawn uniformly at random overall 
graphs and optimize for the mean squared error loss for the continuous action environments and a cross-entropy loss for the discrete action environments. Something very interesting happens during this process of imitation learning with experts. In particular, it leads to a counter-intuitive “causal misidentification” phenomenon: access to more information can yield worse performance ergo more is not better! The paper discusses with demonstrations of an autonomous vehicle scenario of phases with targeted intervention to predict the graph behavior. They did state the solutions are not production-ready. I really appreciated the honesty.
![\[S(V) ={x= (x1,...,xn) :xi∈V,n∈N}\]](https://www.tedtanner.org/wp-content/ql-cache/quicklatex.com-6750b38e1bc905e1656c2f683410ecf2_l3.png "Rendered by QuickLaTeX.com")
papers: 
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