ferrouswheel

It's been a while since I've written anything in my journal. Public or otherwise. I guess life's been accelerating in it's own way. The more history I have, the more people and things that demand attention and less time for contemplating my navel or purely intellectual philosophy.

Anyhow. I'm feeling quite chuffed. Part of that is looking forward to heading back to New Zealand and moving in with tatjna, part of it is becoming CTO of Demand Analytics... and actually having enough reinforcement from my colleagues to be "holy shit, I actually know what I'm doing". I'm being paid reasonably well, and am not working on impossible projects that have decade-long time spans. The tangible success is nice. I'm still intrigued by the impossible problems, but I'm happy to earn money and work on tractable challenges in the mean time. This also lets me prove my ability in the commercial sector, rather than being merely an academic programmer.

Things that make me feel good include the fact that I consistently get job offers every few weeks. Generally from people I already know and have worked with. Many of these people now run science labs and businesses, and are generally are people I respect, so it in turn makes me feel respected when they offer me jobs out of the blue. I am grateful to be in this position of desirability when not everyone got to grow up surrounded with computers.

On the other side of the coin, we recently hired a New Zealander I have much respect for, and are looking to hire more people so that we can build a New Zealand branch of DA. This is daunting to me. I like programming and building things, but setting up offices and a business with employees is... well.. scary. Yet, I know this is a good thing. And it's a good thing for Wellington and New Zealand to bring in international money and contacts. Even if the National government makes me grit my teeth and want to hurt somebody.

This does all mean that my life has become very work focussed lately. I worked pretty solidly and was productive during my recent trip to New Zealand for mundens' 50th birthday party, but I also felt more chilled out and balanced. I look forward to that becoming the normal state. I also look forward to being inspired by my Wellington tribe being involved in creative projects.

Relatedly I miss music. I listen to it while coding, but my selection is limited... di.fm doesn't work without buffer under-runs at my office and my mp3 collection is a bit of a mess. I also feel this impatient desire to create something, whether it is a mix or an original track... but both require the right set up and tools, and I never want to waste my free time doing that setup process. So instead I do nothing or find another entertaining escape.

OpenCog and related businesses are growing well in Hong Kong/China. Finance projects and music recommendation systems for international businesses are being put together. Nothing I've been directly involved in, but those are among the potential jobs I could become involved with if I wanted to. Downfall of the United States as a innovation nation. Rise of the China sun. It's cool sitting at a Japanese restaurant in Hong Kong with a diversity of cultures: Americans, a Frenchman (I could be horribly wrong on this one, apologies if you are reading this!), Chinese, Australian... and earlier in the day I caught up with a Brazilian AI friend in a Dim Sum restaurant. International connections for the win!

This is a pretty erratic post, mostly because I'm trying to convey a number of thoughts while the impetus of writing a post is winning over all others. I've also realised that my posts are often somewhat THESE ARE ALL THE COOL WORK THINGS HAPPENING TO ME. That's mostly because I now try to keep the whining insecure posts to my own personal records rather than me actually thinking I'm the bee knees all the time.

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Oh, and I gave a talk at Humanity Plus HK last weekend. Disagreeing with a bunch of stuff the Friendly AI disciples believe (provable friendliness, CEV), but I reckon it went quite well and despite having not done any public presentations for a while.

- tatjna
- ... and my Wellington friends.
- clean air.
- the weather being cold enough that I can sleep with a sheet or duvet covering me.
- spacious kitchens where it's pleasant to cook in.
- relatedly, having access to an oven.
- really good coffee served by an alternative-looking barista.
- Les Mills and their multiple floors of spacious and well laid out gym equipment.
- knowing I can talk with most people without sticking to simplistic English - I like exercising my vocabulary.
- the tech scene in Wellington. We really have some awesomely talented people.
- not being surrounded by primarily by concrete and steel, but hills and bush.

On the other hand, there are interesting things in Hong Kong:

( photos )

My kiwi-ness is rearing it's ugly head. I'm having a severe tall-poppy syndrome reaction to all the Jobs worship clogging my news channels.

From a personal stance, I'm trying to work out why this is such a visceral reaction.

I think it's mostly to do with my experience of dealing with people who get in the way of those that ACTUALLY build things. Steve didn't invent all the things Apple produced. He had ideas, sure. But the ideas without implementation are meaningless. If you've been in a start-up you already know that. You know how valuable the people that have design sense and the ability to create technical things are. It urks me that the thousands of people within Apple who build the stuff you love are being ignored, attributing it all to Steve. Personally, I'm a much bigger fan of Wozniak. I'm also a fan of Jonathan Ive... the guy who is the actual product designer for Apple. A quote from Ive:

"[my goal] is not self-expression. It’s to make something that looks like it wasn’t really designed at all -- because it’s inevitable.”

And yet, this inevitability is patented to hell and back. It annoys me that creativity is associated with Apple, while their legal actions tries to disproportionately stifle the innovation of other companies and individuals. Despite Apple being built on a history of copying others that were ahead of their time. Did you know they approached TradeMe to get Android tablets removed from New Zealand's marketplace?

Steve Jobs was, from all accounts I've heard, simultaneously an asshole and charming. He was a great public speaker. He was in the right place at the right time.

"The truth is as Jobs' detractors said: he is a pretty selfish man. And amidst all this laudatory hagiography and Jobs worship, it is appropriate to recognise that no-one is perfect. I admire him deeply for his vision, creativity and intellectual brilliance. However, I'm not blinded by this bandwagon of hero worship.

This is a man who disowned his own illegitimate daughter."

RIP Steve. You are undoubtably brilliant. You've reached a pinnacle of capitalist culture with a company with more financial resources than the US government (while remaining a lot more popular). You've built legions of unwavering fans willing to unleash vitriol at anyone who questions the gospel. But you were a CEO and I will forever be a maker.

Why did I take the time to write this not entirely flattering piece? Because there are people out there that know him far less than I do, and the internet is being flooded with gushing compliments. I hope when I die, people will respect me enough to not follow the bandwagon and say what they truly think about me. Even... no, especially, if it's about my flaws or they don't agree. Don't follow the crowd, think for yourself, be critical.

It's because our culture celebrates this man over the people curing diseases, solving world hunger, or understanding the universe. The ultimate in capitalist success.

... but not for long!



Edit: this is higher than it looks (4-5 metres)

Last week, the New Zealand government passed a controversial copyright law related to file sharing. This was partly outrageous because of the use of urgency to pass these laws without due consultation. If you watch any of the videos from that particular debate, it will shine a light on just how clueless the majority of NZ’s politicians are. The notable exceptions are Clare Curran and Gareth Hughes. However, this isn’t a post about the politics! Instead I want to talk about the philosophy behind copyright and how as technology becomes an intrinsic part of our intelligence, the less sense it makes to challenge the personal dispersal or storage of information.

For a good introduction to the topic, read this post on the “colour of bits”. The post outlines the conflicting viewpoints on information: How computer scientists can’t academically differentiate between one copy of a copyrighted piece of data and another, but the pressure from law to try to make something up regardless (e.g. DRM). It also discusses how, if you perform a reversable mathematical transformation of the bits you are fundamentally changing the data but can restore it at any moment. If you can do that, is the transformed version copyrighted too? Given that with the right transformation you can turn any sequence of bytes into any other. That means there is only one copyright holder: the universe.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Originally published at ferrouswheel. You can comment here or there.

Recently, my long time friend and colleague Ben Goertzel came to Hong Kong to help advise on the AI project I’m working on. He also happened to bring a “Parrot” quadcopter (warning, this link autoplays a youtube video), which is an awesome wifi controlled toy that has quad rotors. Not much different to a radio-controlled helicopter except it’s much cheaper and also more stable.

There are some vague plans to do autonomous control of these devices using vision processing and voice recognition. Although the actual hardware used maybe different since quadcopter drones have gone hobbyist and you can build your own from scratch.

I will now leave you with two youtube videos of them in action…

Using the Kinect hacked onto a drone to allow it to build a 3d model of the environment and do it’s own path finding:

Other’s have used motion capture to allow tracking of a ball which is then juggled between two quadcopters with trampolines:

Originally published at ferrouswheel. You can comment here or there.

There's this thing that happens, which is simultaneously a good thing and something that I have to be careful of.

Occasionally I start thinking about a particularly gnarly problem in software engineering and OpenCog. I become obsessed about it, and find it hard to focus on anything else. I have to find the solution.

The point where I have to be careful is where that problem doesn't have a clear solution and is actually a research project in itself that is being tackled by teams of people better funded than solitary me.

Basically I'm trying to come up with a way of doing a distributed hypergraph database in a p2p manner. With local caching and rebalancing. NoSQL databases have it easy with their simplistic key-value systems that don't have the concept of distance between keys. So far I'm planning to use zeromq and google protocol buffers for communication.

When I start doing this my mind races and I don't get to sleep until 2am. This was less of a problem when I worked from home, but during the week when I have to get up for work the next day it leaves me exhausted.

It's a weird feeling, I like it but it's also slightly like a low-level anxiety as I absorb information from online and try to design something that will work. I think the anxiety comes from the buy-in of any solution. Once I start expending serious time implementing something, then I've committed to a design and it's hard to change. Better to get it right the first time... even though that's idealistic/unrealistic.

Today was the first morning that felt summer-like. I even bought an iced coffee on the way to work because if I got my regular coffee I'd overheat while walking in the sun.

I'm disappointed, but not really surprised, by China. They caused network issues with Google's Japan Earthquake people finder while they were causing sporadic attacks against Gmail. Trying to get the details of activists coordinating a Jasmine Revolution in China.

I'm quite glad I'm in Hong Kong and not on the mainland.

Also livejournal, why the hell don't you support https on posts?

I've been playing Red Dead Redemption. Aptly described as Grand Theft Auto with horses, but it is so much more. They've done great scene setting in the game and the horse movement is well done. I think tatjna would even be impressed by the horse animations. I also find it interesting just how much having a living mode of transport and the environment in general makes me want to avoid stealing horses. Compare that to GTA where it feels more like a sandbox to wreck havoc.

I also tell myself that it's for work, as now that I'm involved with trying to create AI middleware for games I find myself paying a lot more attention to this stuff. Unfortunately, after reading papers and watching presentations, it seems that AI in games still involves hacks and cheating... after all, it's often primarily about the user experience and users seem to equate AI with behaviours that have nothing to do with AI. Like a character in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 having many different death animations or being able to kick a door open (these were both used as examples of it's great AI in reviews or user comments). This makes it challenging to work out where an AI that can truly learn from it's embodied experience would fit in the industry.

I recently bought Consider Phlebas - enough people recommended the Culture series by Iain M. Banks for it's AI. After reading Neuromancer I thought I should try and catch up on some of these classics instead of reading Peter F. Hamilton... although for all it's faults, I still enjoy as something simple to read and tickles my male id.

I went out on Friday to Wan Chai, which seems like a less expensive version of Lan Kwai Fong, and with a little more space. Lots of bars and clubs. There's also large number of prostitutes and strip bars around that area, but it's easy enough to avoid (even if the ladies outside firmly grab your arm and try to pull you inside when you walk past). I had a number of beers, did a bunch of dancing to a DJ who had hair that looked like it was from the 50s but that was pretty talented and seamlessly turned up the energy from lounge music to pop dance music, and when I left it was house music I'd happily play when DJing myself. I seemed to be one of few guys who danced though, apart from another French guy who was very enthusiastic and salsa dancing with willing women. I'm not sure if guys are less willing to dance here than NZ, or if it was just that particular bar.

At the end of the evening I had a Kebab with the older Italian designer lady friend (apparently designing stuff for Ferrari) and her German boyfriend whose lived in Hong Kong for 20-25 years. The kebab was delicious. After that we took a taxi back to Kowloon and I realised that hey, it's actually super cheap to travel home by taxi ... about $HKD60, which is about $NZD10.

Work itself is going okay, but I've been having to get used to various negatives of working in an office. Dealing with loud people in the office that make focussing difficult or impossible, along with other distractions that make it hard to get things done. I felt so much more productive when I used to work from home, but then it was also a lot more difficult to share ideas and coordinate as a team. I really want to get back into coding mindspace... I miss the serene meditative state that accompanies it. Where nothing matters except the mental challenge I'm focussing on and building solutions. I believe they call this flow.

I've been meaning to post here for ages. I keep thinking of little curiosities I've experienced in Hong Kong that I want to share. I want to also do a little video of my apartment so people understand its smallness (even though it's not that small for HK) but also because I'm quite chuffed with how it's set up now. I finally feel established and have a ridiculously fancy platinum credit card which I think I probably only got sucked into applying for because of being an expat. The rest of this post will likely feel a little bitsy, as I write short snippets of stuff. I'd prefer to expand upon them in more detail but feel I'll forget them if I wait until I have time to go in to more detail.

I have a big TV again, a cheap Samsung model that was the end of the line... but that just means it doesn't have a billion to 1 contrast or do 3D. Also have an Xbox which I'm enjoying Fallout: New Vegas on. I feel as though I may have been converted to console gaming... even if consoles are pretty crappy with the graphics now (relative to where PCs are at) and will be for the next 5 years. Sony and MS have said they'll be keeping the current-gen consoles around till then. I'm also disappointed with Bethesda and Interplay for having a hissy fit over who gets to do Fallout Online... but not really, because if that gets released then I'll probably disappear and not get anything useful done in reality mk1.

My lounge is too small for Kinect. So instead I'll bring it to work and try to involve it in the project somehow.

To my shame/amusement, I've been enjoying Gossip Girl.

There is scaffolding all around my building. This means the workers can see inside my curtainless windows. Thankfully they are not around early in the morning or in the evenings. It's yet to be seen whether they'll be annoying while I'm sleeping in during the weekend. May spur me to finally install some blinds?

I have a review meeting with the funding agency in a couple of weeks. Eeek. Accountability.

Ben G. is coming to visit at the end of this month and will be the first guest to use my couch/bed.

I've been getting up early (for me) at 6:30-7am. Going to the gym before work and watching BBC World or Al Jazeera with breakfast. I'm in search of the perfect week, and unlike the character Barney from "How I met your mother", this doesn't mean sleeping with a different person every day, but instead involves going to the gym 3 times, no alcohol, and no smoking. I can often get two out of three of those, but all three seem to elude me. I have more habits I wish to establish but want to wait until this one is cemented.

One of those habits might be writing more frequently.