musesum

Yeah I wonder what will happen when robust chatbots based on real personas have a conversation [1]

[1] https://news.yahoo.com/news/viral-video-happens-two-chatbots...

Digital death cleaning.

I want create a digital clone of myself. Last month, I scanned decades of journals and recorded music. Next up: organize a personal corpora and apply some ML. Hopefully, the clone will be more interesting than the original.

This is inspired by a conversation I had with Rudy Rucker, who suggested a "headstone". More recently, I read a Wired article where someone used "pullstring" to create an interactive version of his Father, who passed [1]. And then there is Margareta Magnussen's concept of saving your loved ones the chore of slogging through your clutter [2].

I think that I have way too much digital content. Am not famous, so who cares? And yet, my life might make a good toy: worth a few minutes of entertainment. Pull string, indeed.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/a-sons-race-to-give-his-dying-fa... immortality/

[2] https://www.thespruce.com/swedish-death-cleaning-4801461

To be honest, I've spent many hours in PD and Max and didn't realize that Miller Puckette was behind both. Super cool!

Next week, I travel to Bali to focus on developing a data flow based visual music synth. I can't understate how big an influence that Puckette's work has been on my thinking.

Was thinking of Frances Haugen revealing her identity coinciding with the market drop [1]. I dunno; IANAB (Banker)

[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/facebook-stock-tech-apple-5....

I wonder if internal estoppel is a thing? Two options

Option A

  1) ethicist objects to something

  2) management declines the objection

  3) whistle blower reveals the declined objection

  4) public outcry ensues, stock price falls

  5) board members become agitated

  6) c-suite wakes up to another gut punch

Option B

  1) ethicist raises an objection

  2) management acts on the suggestion

  3) revenue misses target

  4) stock price falls

  5) board members become agitated

  6) C-Suite wakes up to another gut-punch

Choose.

It was somewhat of a 3-body problem: carriers, oems, and developers. Carriers wanted branding and bundling. OEMs wanted to market a distinction design. Developers wanted a platform. Three cooks with competing tastes.

For example: the Moto-Q ran Windows, shoe-horned in some AT&T UX junk, and a huge nubin that stuck out in the middle. It pioneered the ever present "pocket dial." Was thinking of developing for it, but after a few dozen pocket dials, I wanted to go full Frisbee mode.

Apple cut through the 3-body problem. They controlled the UX. Such as integrated voice-mail. The carrier didn't mess with the UX. After a few months, Apple provided a decent development environment -- maybe as a response to all the jailbreak apps that we were making.

Around that time I was in a focus group. What struck me was a horror story from a Symbian developer. Their toolchain broke after an incremental update. Lost a week dealing with it. That kind-of put me off of Symbian.

Maybe the real choice for Nokia was: either the burning platform or the sharks.

Soundshader is amazing! Am writing a visual music synth. Maybe I'll port to Metal.

I was working for a friend's company acquired by Salesforce. They didn't bring him on board. I left after one day. My buddy working next to me left after one month. Others after him. It was a small company. Maybe disrupting a culture isn't so great an idea.

If you can convert data into an API call, then it becomes an issue of steganography. The only way to trust a binary is through 100% code coverage through all possible inputs, which is intractable.

Code signing and a secure enclave may help protect against local use cases, like ransomware, but doesn't protect against hybrid attacks, like granting access to 3rd parties.

Maybe this means that all binaries in 2040 should be derived from open source with AI doing the threat detection.

For iOS, we used some runtime trickery to access private APIs. Was needed to access calendar invite details. Could see how a less benign developer could sneak malicious code past Apple's review process.

A famous example of self-modifying code was Microsoft's AARD code, which was decrypted on the fly to check if the user was running a competitor's OS. [1]

I always wondered if the perceived threat of runtime method constructors was an incentive for Apple to push for Swift.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

Ironically, I think Brad Cox had something like this in mind, after coming up with Objective C. Or at least, pluggable components [1]

I wonder what the threat model would be? Injectable binaries seem like a decent attack vector. But, if we're talking 2040, maybe a signable Merkle tree would do the trick.

Meanwhile, have been experimenting with recompiling Metal code at runtime. Was kinda fun with ObjC/C++/OpenGL, a few years ago.

[1] https://thenewstack.io/objective-cs-roots-in-the-life-of-bra...

South African YouTuber with Chinese wife, and thus knows the language, plays along: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ_flb9tGuc

> it can be a bevelled rounded rectangle

ok, yeah. Was thinking of the original Notepad, where the frayed yellow tear-off sheet border drove me nuts! Anything tied to the "desktop metaphor" - bits are not atoms

> when most websites started to switch to responsive designs where image heavy layouts and other fun animations kinda dropped off

Yep, things got harder with AutoRotate on the iPad.

It took a while to get used to SwiftUI. But the pay off is immediate when switching from Portrait to Landscape mode. Now, everything flows perfectly.

Imagine designing for every single kind of device: be it watch, phone, pad, desktop, and TV. It kinda forces you to think differently.

In the late '80s I created version of Augment [1]. Takeaway was a hierarchical menu that saved all of your places. So a menu of average of 7 choices, which went 7 layers deep, would address 7^7 end points, or about 823,543 items. The number of auto-bookmarks would be 7^6 (117,649). Because the bookmarks would save your place, the average number of gestures to reach any item is about half that, or 3.5 clicks.

Am now playing with that idea for a Heads up Display for AR glasses, using SwiftUI [2]

The first use case is to port a visual synth, I created in the early Naughts, which used a static template on a Wacom Tablet[3]. The interface controlled > 2000 parameters.

The question is: how to control thousands of real-time parameters with virtual touch?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31676445#31677125

[2] https://github.com/musesum/DeepMenu

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXlkzZubHnM

Yay; progress! My experience was from last year. Will stop whining, now.

Are there more recent papers? I see one from 2016 [1] But, then again my assumptions are a bit dated as well. Was thinking: could a different horizon on a CNN mid-layer trigger a false positive? Perhaps, classify a slight rise as a bumper or some other obstacle?

Maybe a simpler system, like Comma.ai's cameras has looser tolerances. Somewhat akin to the one or two eyes of a Human driver.

Maybe it is policy. I could imagine the brand hit to Tesla for every crash - even due to driver error. Maybe phantom breaking is an artifact of erring on the side of caution. Maybe lawyers got involved. (The horror!)

Anyway, idle speculation, this.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.01230.pdf

Problem is that, with no cars around for hundreds of feet, with dozens of seconds of reaction time, when you hit a low rise on the AZ Interstate, the Tesla Y will abruptly brake. This is with Autopilot OR with simple cruise control. Pretty stressful. Bonus impact on range prediction. So, I couldn't use either.

Hard to know without being on the team, hence my WAG modifier to the guess. My reasoning is that the Model Y is built on the same chassis as the Model 3. So, a quick and dirty solution is to use the same training set results. But, it most likely is something else.

This is a roundabout way of saying that maybe - just maybe - the problem is only for the model Y.

Am rooting for Tesla to fix it. Maybe a Tesla engineer looks at hacker news? Already filed a complaint with the Tesla Sales Manager. Or perhaps the log of my screaming in terror did the trick. Is prosody for QA sentiment a thing?

My use case was autopilot steering me off the left hand side of the road at 80 MPH during a sunset [1] My (WAG) guess is that the ML corpus was based on a model 3, while the model Y, I was driving, had placed the sensors slightly higher? I dunno; again, tis a WAG.

I am a huge fan of Tesla's permise. My Dad sold Vanguard Citicars [2], and I worked on GM's interactive ad for the EV-1. I put a down payment on Aptera's original EV and again on the resurrected version [3].

But, I backed out of buying a Tesla. Even though I disabled Autopilot and ran purely cruise control, the Model Y would brake for phantom obstacles. Such as: low rises in the road. Or: passing a 18-wheeler on the left. Driving from AZ to CA, the phantom braking was occuring every 5 miles or so. So, I had to drive 800 miles with a manual accelerator. Bummer!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31504583

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citicar

[3] https://aptera.us [edit]

Counter opinion was Nolan Bushnell, saying that the best way to test an idea was to put a coin slot on it. This was during the era of arcade machines.

But, then again, not sure how you put a coin slot on the Arpanet.

The most salient point was a hierarchy of discourse. I was working for a project management software company, at the time. So, it fit well within the mindset of a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) or Bill of Materials (BOM). Usually activities were organized around WBS and BOM with resource leveling of resources (people) and materials. So, Augment filled in the documentation side for highly structured projects.

Am still working with core concepts: using a namespace hierarchy (akin to a WBS) and a directed graph (akin to activities). Except now, the activities are code.

Ugh, am embarrassed by my coding style, from back then. The product still works on Windows XP, but is in storage in Iowa (am in California). Next time I visit family, will bring it out.

I met Doug Engelbart in the late 90's during his reboot sessions at Stanford. Lots of luminaries spoke, including Ted Nelson.

I was there because I read every one of his group's papers, in the mid 80's, and wrote a version of Augment in MS-DOS and Turbo Pascal. I think I showed him a demo.

He invited me to attend informal meetings at SRI. I left after a few weeks because I couldn't figure out how it would result in a product. Had already went into deep personal debt, once before (about $50K in 1990), trying to market something similar.

This! Was fiddling with a Tesla touch screen to do something basic. During those few seconds, autopilot decided to steer me off the road - with no shoulder - at 80 MPH (it was during a sunset). Fortunately, I caught it in time.

After the panic subsided, I decided to learn the voice commands. It seems that each device, now, has its own language, which we have to learn in order to function. A modern tower of Babel.

In 1975, my high school's "Independent Science Study" class took a field trip to the Crerar Library at the U of Chicago[1]. In the stacks was a paper on AI that changed my life[2].

It was a 3 hour drive, each way. Now it takes 3 seconds.

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/h3xCccBMQDBqQXhD7

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1460833.1460840

In March of 2000, I registered the domain "TheTulipFund.com" [1] with a manifest of goods used to pay for Tulip bulbs infected with the crazed virus, which was lifted Levine's book[2] on viruses. It started as a joke around a dinner party about buying up dead dot coms. At the time, my company was preparing to go public in April. The joke was on me.

Meanwhile, NFTs -- I have to wonder what's different.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020928142349/http://www.thetul...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Viruses-Scientific-American-Library-B...

Live music provided a sense of belonging.

Radio provided shared stories and feelings.

The Walkman provided a soundtrack for my life.

The iPod provided a full solo theater of emotions.

Smart playlists now provide a feeling of serendipity.

But, that personalized experience feels selfish and hollow.

Maybe I should get out more.

Much of conflict is avoided when switching from 2nd person to 1st person point of view:

1) you're not delivering on time

2) I see a delay in progress

for 1), the speaker interjects an implicit judgment which the receiver has to defend against or quietly accept under duress.

for 2), the topic shifts from the receiver to the work; both parties are on the same team working towards the same goal.

Yes. I played that game for a while: shifting value around. Making value is more satisfying. No judgement; merely personal preference.