I use coding agents daily. So far, they are good for first-order effects. Things like “Fast typewriter” (doing something I would do but without interface delays) or “super copy paste” (altering an example and applying it with nuance in several places) or “super tab complete” (suggesting large blocks of text/code vs just single symbols) or even “meta bash” (asking for scripts that do oneoff analysis or processing of a few data sets you have lying around).

I’ve been journalling for 10+ years. In addition to forcing me to actually write down what happened that day, reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich. I can review my now-wife’s rocky courtship and feel grateful we made it. I looked back 3 years ago and found the day our children were conceived :D (we have twins). I can review the anxieties of my PhD years, etc etc.

Why do GPA and ACT scores matter?

Recently, there’s been some pushback against standardized tests and college entrance exams. It begs the question: What is all this testing good for? After all, well-to-do families and students can spend more time preparing for these exams, making them an unfair indicator of wealth moreso than IQ.

I propose: They are not a measure of ability but of rule-following, self-regulation, and preparadness. If this is true, the fact that you can study for these tests isn’t a bug, but a feature. If we were measuring IQ or “raw” ability for some kind of meritocratic system, we’d want a test you could not study for.

I’m not an optimization guru by any means. It’s never been something I’ve been allowed to focus on at work, sadly. At some jobs, performance is secondary to correctness and robustness, and at others, it’s secondary to flashy features.

But, I’ve used the following tricks in hotloops

• Dimension reduction (esp via convolution)
• Branchless calculation
• SIMD

SIMD gets a lot of love, but it’s a constant-factor improvement and can be tough to coax out of the compiler (unless you use a library).

I’ve been tracking my OKR’s since 2014. Sometimes I accomplish what I set out for, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I accomplish what I put in OKRs but didn’t accomplish what I wanted.

Here’s what I’ve learned.

• There are usually four types of OKRs, and not differentiating types makes it really hard to get what you wanted
• Not only are there four, but they are roughly speaking prerequisites of each other.
• Not only that, but looking at all the self-help books I’ve read, it actually seems like most the books also fit into these four categories, and just reading them out of order makes no sense.

These categories are:

As I sit in a hotel lobby at 4:00 AM drinking awful coffee (story for another time), I’m reflecting on:

If happiness from a boon or gain or accomplishment is just the loss of the pain of not having that gain, then maybe we can just short circuit that process and stop wanting the thing in the first place

Of course, this is a well-studied idea¹. But what gets me is: Is that what happiness is? Can I really be happy by removing desire (which, presumptively, prevents happiness by showing me a future I don’t have). Certainly, some class of happiness can be “solved” by this anti-FOMO strategy. But it seems so zero-sum.

I own a 2022 Tesla Model Y. Or rather, my powerhouse wife does. Regardless, I’ve driven approximately 10,000 miles in one, and have formed a long list of opinions.

The Good

• The performance
• The cold / icy driving experience is fantastic. It’s the easiest to drive in slippery conditions that I’ve owned except my old toyota 4x4 SUV, but that’s a high bar.
• The adaptive cruise control eliminates 90% of the annoyances from highway driving (though the industry has caught up)
• The 360 cameras and 360 range sensors make driving in tight confines very easy.
• The incident reports. This is the video replay of any person or vehicle approaching or touching your car. I’ve already seen it save an insurance report and aid in accident reporting.
• The appearance
• The superchargers are awesome. It’s absolutely never been a problem to visit one the 3 to 6 times per year we have to use them. We charge at home overnight, and have not set foot in a gas station except to pick up Diet Coke since we bought the Tesla. It seems crazy we don’t all do this, honestly. I can’t wait for gasoline to be a speciality product.

The Bad

Entering the car

Someday there will be a zombie movie where a minor character is running from zombies, turns the corner to see their pristine Tesla, thank god, and will sadly be eaten while they fumble with the app, key cards, and door locking mechanisms (see next section).

Building things is our higher purpose

Ergo, the most shameful thing is not not finish a creation

I feel deep in my bones that making things is the higher purpose of humanity. It’s our secret weapon against devolving into tribes. The simplest creations improve ones life, and that’s what makes us human: Having agency to improve our lot. The true strength of our gift is making for others. Making something desireable from something less desireable underpins every part of cities, is the foundation of medicine, and a basic requirement of our economy. It will make us an interstellar species, because we can make it so if we want. We can make anything so, if we really want it. The wanting is the hardest part.

Oh sweet, coffee

One time, $employer was having an all-hands event. During these events, everyone is in town from all over. I walked in the first day and saw a table of treats and gourmet coffee, and was like “oh sweet, coffee”. I walked up and was intercepted by someone who told me “Those are for the investors”. Of course the first thing out of my mouth was “I’m investing my life” like that was supposed to mean anything to him.

This is the first in a series of posts describing how I’m keeping data about my self, environment, work, and goals. You can read the whole series here

As part of my journalling habit, I used to keep excellent metrics about myself. From the year 2014 to about 2019, I recorded almost everything that I felt was important. This included workouts, spending, and time spent in a variety of areas, such as grad study. I logged each “good” awake hour. This allowed me to generate reports like the following:

Half way through the year, time for a brief retrospective. Each of these could be a post on their own.

Job

It’s been a little over a year since I left JPL. After a brief hiatus at Amazon, I’m settling into my new job at Outrider.ai. Last year I was laid off from Amazon Robotics, AI, which I don’t think exists any more as an organization. They cited “Marcoeconomic factors” of course. So, the year started with me unemployed, but with some offers on the table. It came down to JPL and Outrider, and I wasn’t very pleased with how I managed that decision making process or juggled multiple interview tracks. I will have to write more about this, because I feel like I burned a few bridges along the way. However, those are two near-perfect options, and it came down to timing: Outrider could move faster with the offer, which helped shore up my dwindling cash reserves.

On the optimality of sawtooth careers

I was having lunch at JPL with their Chief Engineer, Rob Manning. Normally, you’d expect the Chief Eng. to reserve their time for more important people, but that’s not how JPL works.

I had posted in the New Researcher Support Group slack channel, asking for stories from folks who regret some part of their career. Gloomy, I know. He was curious, and so we we got lunch.

This post is a work in progress…

We have enough AI to explain conscioiusness now, and therefore to create an AI that feels “General”.

• AI can generate words from sounds
• GPT is well known to generate narratives and conversations given rough priors
• Something like Dall E to generate mental imagery around those narratives, when required
• Constantly retrained by feeding what we hear (verbally) and what we see (after “object detection”) in a feedback loop, with all of our “story” as well.

The complication is the starting conditions. We are meant to believe that we are magic “conscious” creatures, even though centuries of contemplatives dispute this.

I recently read a wonderful piece by the New York Times titled “What happened when 7 Trump voters and 6 Biden voters tried to find common ground”. What struck me was how quickly even the most middling of issues quickly diverged along party lines, often with classic party narratives appearing. It is absolutely worth a read.

These folks are living profoundly different American experiences, and yet both feel that the future is bleak. Today, one person can blithely say that an entire political party, or an entire race, or an entire economic group, or even the entire country is to blame for what they believe is the fundamental problem in the country. “Systemic racism”, “Illegal immegrants”, “White people”, “Corporations”, “Billionaires”, “Religion”. At least one participant all but admitted this, saying the country needs to be torn down and rebuilt.

Feel free to issue a pull request or file issues at github.com/jodavaho/conversational_rights

Preamble

The ability of humans to exchange information quickly and efficiently is our super power. Our other limited abilities and general fragility could not have made us the dominant species of the entire planet, and enabled us to do the things we do. More specifically, the written and verbal expression of culture has enabled the alignment of the individuals of our species toward long term goals of incredible complexity. So pervasive is our reliance on verbal and written communication that I believe it deserves to be considered a fundamental right. Moreover, it is imperative to establish norms in the kinds of exchanges and how they evolve, and what ideas are allowed or what cross examinations are considered polite and welcome, if only to increase the quality of discourse for exchangers and observers alike.

I recently found a list of old “prayers”, probably inspired by the “litanies” that are everpresent in the Warhammer 40k universe. I’ll keep a growing list here. These are free for your use, under the creative commons license.

Chapter one

1. In the beginning of any focused work, and to set intention for your building.

We dedicate these hours to the advancement of understanding. We thank humanity for this opportunity. May our children find use of our work.

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