More on machine intelligence

I have been playing around with OpenAI’s Dalle; really interesting execution. The world of AI (machine intelligence) intrigues me. But this is a very interesting use of technology.  Today’s image was generated from my natural language query (sunset near the edge of a pasture).

One of the interesting things about AI (again, I much prefer machine intelligence) is the security application. Where the MI knows you, knows multiple things about you, and can watch how you enter information. Captchas are about mouse movement; humans interact with the mouse differently than a computer. But the other side of what a captcha is, frankly, is determining if a human is viewing something. With an MI system that knows you, there is a much greater ability for that system to return random information in the questions it asks, knowing how you would react.

That would reduce the overall exposure to traditional scams.  But that would allow at least somewhat better security than we have now. We could go further, but that would deeply invade people’s privacy. You could allow the MI to turn on your camera and ask you to identify the closes red object in the space where you are. Or ask what the nearest blue light is attached to now. Those would, however, allow the MI to interact with you at a much less personal level. Ergo, it would endanger that concept of privacy overall.

Security and privacy are a very large line in our world today. We really need to protect the lines before they blur too much. Privacy, is a right sort of within the construct of the 14^th amendment (it is a stretch applying it to the modern world). The framers of the Constitution left some things vague on purpose. Sadly the Supreme Court has some ardent conservatives, which makes their interpretation not always what is best for the rest of us. But loosely, privacy is protected. However, we can choose to give up some of that privacy. (read Patriot Act, but we didn’t get to vote or choose that it was assumed that we would be willing to give up our rights.)

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Local weather

The James Webb Space Telescope images continue to be released; each is more amazing than the last. I remember when Hubble first started to share the overall pictures it was taking. Those were amazing, but the JWST goes so much further. Just amazing to see images that start to tell a story about the beginnings or early stages of our universe.

I spend a lot of time considering, playing, and improving my local weather. Local weather is different than what you see on TV or what is shared on the Radio. While those forecasts are done by professionals and are very good, they tend to be regional rather than local. The variations within a weather pattern can be huge in a very small footprint—for example, our end-of-day storm yesterday. There are roughly ten stations near me that I check. They are all from the same company, so they are reliable because they measure the same. The variance of rain was significant. Rain doesn’t just fall; it tends to fall in bands. We got hit with a 1-inch rainfall in 22 minutes. Just 20 miles north of us, they got a ½ inch rainfall from the same storm. They got their rain just 30 minutes before it hit us.

That is the value of local weather.  The other thing is lightning strikes. We had fewer than the folks north of us, by more than 20%. Another interest in watching the weather is what is happening in and around the storm. My highest wind gust was 22 mph. North of us, they got about 14 mph for their highest gust. It depends wholly on the terrain you are in and what is slowing the wind down (or letting it blow on)!

I’ll end with this. A question that popped up the other day. Is asking or saying they will have broad sweeping powers that break the separation within the government treason?

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Wandering technology memory lane

About 18 months ago, I refocused my creative writing and moved back to writing books. I just finished a novel, more of a science fiction piece, and I have decided to release it as an audiobook, one chapter per week, on my Patron site. It is something new I haven’t done before, and it is pretty exciting. I am moving into the new world of sharing! The other side of that is many people that have to listen to me drone on will probably not be interested in me reading a chapter at a time as, well, it is just another version of me droning on!

Many years ago, when I started my career as a helpdesk person, I met a kindred soul—one who understood the amazing potential of computers. But also one who shares my love of humor. I do miss him sometimes. He, Ned Criddle, passed away nearly 25 years ago. The potential he had was amazing. He was a great person and, honestly, a better friend. The reason for my waxing sad today is a memory I had. I looked at some old computer code I had written with Ned nearly 29 years ago. We were working on a helpdesk at the time.

Our leader was a good boss, but he managed the entire helpdesk. Our team leader was useless. He would spend hours perfecting the application he had built for us to use to track and manage helpdesk calls. Sometimes we would have calls 3 or 4 deep, and still, he would sit there developing that application. It never worked properly, and ultimately the company threw it away. I wonder if they would have had they know just how much revenue they lost because of the time spent building that application. Anyway, one day Ned and I started writing a new front end for the application. Our team lead killed it the minute he saw it. But it took Ned and me roughly 20 minutes at lunch to make something that worked better than the nearly 60 hours spent building the original interface. I miss Ned.

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It is a belief…

Five rules I learned in Kindergarten

1. It is a good thing to share (sharing is not mandatory, it is just a good thing to do)!
2. It is important to trust but verify
3. The truth is not relative
4. Facts are critical, nuisance is dangerous
5. Just because you believe doesn’t mean you aren’t wrong

Look, it is really important that, as human beings, we focus not only on what we see but also check what we know. There are things I was taught in school that are no longer true (say goodbye to Brontosaurus, we knew ye, but ye were never real)! You have to test and improve your information and your data bank as you move through life. 

It is time to undo the Electoral College and its impact on American Elections (we would not still be embroiled in this mess without the Electoral College. He lost both popular votes). We as a nation must consider the words that founded our nation (By, of, and for) to be by the people means we choose our nation and its direction. To be of the people means that both our government and the leaders of that government are just people. finally that our government is built and works for all the people.

We are the for; the for is us. Let’s reclaim our right to have a government and a political system for all of us. Not wealthy land owners (which is what the electoral college ultimately protected. A system for all of us.

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Return of the Wish List Challenge!

Continuing to clean up my Hubpages feed. This is an article that links to another article and podcasts.

Same wish list time. Same wish list channel. If you remember the old 1960 Batman television show, you’ll remember those old shoes. I want to follow up publication I made about three weeks ago, the Wishlist challenge. A friend of mine had her husband give her a blank piece of paper with the words wish list on it. She asked, how many wishes do you think I should make? And he said 1000 2000. So she started coming up with requests for the grandchildren with her husband, and they came up with the idea of making a wish list. She mentioned it to me, and I thought, well, that is interesting, so I took a blank piece of paper and handed it to my wife. I talked about all that in the blog shared here called the Wishlist challenge.

You’ll find a link to that at the end of the article. But I want to follow up with what happened next to the number of people who have emailed me and said, hey, how do I do the wish list challenge? Now there are many ways. The first way is the way my friend and her family did. You have a family meeting you get together to share ideas about 1000, thousand, or 2000 wish list items. That comprises the wish list. You then start crossing items off that list. The other way is the way my wife and I did, which is we turned our Saturday night date night into the wish list night. We sat down and had a nice dinner, relaxing, and took her to let us compare. What interested me was the number of items we had in common. We agreed that the items in common were just “accepted.” were accepted. The other items we had were not the same as we discussed. We took those and said all right. We want to make short-term and long-term goals. The short-term goals we want to start working on right away. Then while working on the short-term goals, we want to talk about how we will accomplish the long-term goal. Some of our long-term goals included a hot air balloon ride that was mine. I have wanted to do that since I was a little kid, and my wife said, ” Well if you’ve tried to do it that long, we should certainly do it now. My wife’s biggest dream is to go traveling internationally. I traveled for many years for work and many different countries, but life is only five countries, so she wants to see a few more.

In our initial conversation, we came up with some short-term and long-term goals. The intent was to work on the short-term goals all week and talk about the longer ones while working on the short-term ones.

Short Term and Long Term Goals

Short Term

• Do yoga together
• Cook more meals together
• Join the data challenge program

Long Term

• Travel Internationally
• Travel more around the US
• Ride in a hot air balloon

I shortened the two lists a little as some of the longer-term items take more explanation than I have space and time to cover. The first one, doing yoga together, is something we have talked about doing for years. As my father always used to say, we never got “a Round Tuit.” He had circular cardboard cutout that said Tuit in the middle. So he had a Round, Tuit!

The other two are ones that were new but old. We’ve done cooking together in the past, but never as a consistent part of our time. We made Hummus and Moussaka for date night a few nights ago. The last thing was something my wife found, a fun set of a couple of activities we could do together.

As we did our first yoga exercises, we discussed the longer-term goals. We agreed to talk about the long term while doing the short term. We also talked about longer-term goals while we were making dinner for date night.

My wife asked my daughter, interested in Calligraphy, if she would take our list and make a wish list book. (she did, see the picture). That way, you can always reference which wishes you have made and which ones you haven’t. Plus, it just looks cool!

To end today, I wanted to talk about time. It took us about 40 minutes to generate our lists and then sit down and combine them. So the investment in time was not a lot. My daughter and wife spent more time creating the pretty new Wish List Book than we did making our lists in the first place.

Remember, you don’t have to do this with your spouse. The challenge can work with sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, or friends. Anyone with whom you wish to spend quality time.

Plus, I call it a shampoo challenge; once you are done, just like shampoo, rinse and repeat!

Link to the two Wish List podcasts

https://docandersen.podbean.com/e/the-wish-list-challenge/

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-2bxa5-dc9292

Link to the original article

https://hubpages.com/relationships/Introducing-the-Wish-List-Challenge

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The Two Masters and the Storyteller.

Originally this was posted on Hubpages, but is now removed from the site. Please enjoy!

There were two Masters at the school. They were infrequent conflicts. Although not conflict in the way it is often portrayed in the world. Simply that their ideas were very different about the world, each of them respected the ideas of the listen to the other hand’s ideas on occasion disagreed with the ideas of the other. The two masters were opposed—each coming from a different worldview.

One of the Masters was young. He had risen quickly through the students to become a master himself. His thoughts and ideas were measured and cherished by others. His counsel was sought, for he was a master. His ideas were traditional. We believe the way things are is the way things always should be. And the way things were just the way things should be now. That change is a bad thing. The change has no value in and of itself except that it presents new and different. You would be different being something the young master did not like. For he had grown up in the school as an orphan. And the structure and rigor of how things were up to him and moving forward. He often told people that. That structure and order keep me going. His idea was to keep things the way they always have been.

The other end of the spectrum, at the school, was an old master. He had once taught the young master. It taught many of the students at the school. His way of doing things change. He is bald with the world. He embraced new. He embraced change. And he saw the path to a future where recent was part of what was done. But as I said, he was also the teacher of the young master. He had great pride in the young master’s grasp of what was presented to him. There was great power in seeing one that had listened and learned. But the old master felt a change was necessary and that the old ways were no longer valid. They were important. Tradition has a place in every heart, he would say. But tradition is not the heart. He would finish tradition because tomorrow is what is, and we must live on today, driving tomorrow.

Each of the two masters had a following, the old and the new. Many students came to both Masters for counsel seeking the latest and the old answer to their questions. One day a visiting storyteller wandered through the village. He had been to the village many times. As was his tradition, the storyteller came to the school, the storyteller. As the storyteller wanted, he stayed at the school for a few days. He had been many times and knew all the masters of the school. The storyteller had once been a student at the school. As was the tradition of a storyteller, payment for the room and board he received was to tell a story.

The fire was lit in the Great Hall, and the chair was placed at the head of the room. The storyteller sat down and began to speak. I will tell you the story of the two rabbits that live within each of us. One student raised his hand, and the storyteller said yes? The student said, isn’t it dogs that live within us? The storyteller smiled and said, that is a different story. Within each of us lies to rabbits, the storyteller continued. One rabbit that seeks the exotic can wander far away from home. The other rabbit stays close to home and does what has always been done. The winter that year was very harsh, and the rabbits had stored food in their borough. The rabbit that stayed close to home had brought much more food. But he gladly shared with the other rabbit. The other rabbit had ventured far and brought exotic foods they did not often get to eat. In the early part of the winter, they gathered the safe foods close to the borough until there was a ring. The rain soaked all of the safe food, and it spoiled. But the exotic food that was harder to find and further away from the borough did not support the rabbits happily ate the exotic food. Without the storyteller stopped for a moment. He looked around the audience. Then the storyteller smiled and said there are harmony and difference. There is harmony in doing things a different way. But there is harmony in doing things the same way. They are not discord. You see, both ways of doing it are correct. Both ways bring value. With that, the storyteller sipped his drink sat back in his chair and stopped speaking. The young master and the old master looked at each other’s audience for a moment, then smiling, they both rose and clapped the storyteller’s story.

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The no-cloning ‘Scott rule

The next to the last day of vacation – I learned years ago that ending vacation, like starting vacation, is a transition. You have to transition back to the work mode. I find it easier to do that on a shorter runway (or week). So I usually tack on one or two days at the end of the vacation. That is the period we are in now. Wednesday morning resumes the regularly scheduled work week! But a short week makes it easier for me to adjust. One of the things I find interesting is the concept of working 40 or so hours per week.

A person I know says they don’t think they can work 40 hours a week. I wonder about thant because I haven’t worked 40 hours a week in many years. I am closer, I suspect, over the last 20 to 25 years to 50 or 55 hours per week. But also, I wonder because that is something I don’t understand.  It doesn’t make either side right or wrong; I am just struggling to understand the position. When I moved out of my parent’s house, I never felt like 40 hours was optional or aspirational. I always thought it was required.

The path of understanding sometimes lies after crossing the field of confusion.

I am only about 40 minutes behind today, my first transition day. I will be caught up by tomorrow. Of course, I will end up behind at work, but that is sometimes a nice problem. I know that cloning is not an option if I get way behind. My wife has said one of me is more than she can handle. So, no cloning for me. Even if it would get my work done sooner!

I do have to wonder if adding a Machine Intelligence to work with me, is breaking that no cloning rule?

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i am still a crowdfunding fan

Several companies started crowdfunding that I am proud to be associated with. One of the companies is called JamStick; they make small electric practice guitars. I’ve had one since their original was released nearly five years ago. I moved to their new Electric and enjoyed the guitar. It is a company that has grown during the crowdfunding phase to become impressive now. There are several others that I associate with and find value in that relationship. Anker started with their Capsule projector and continues to make innovative home projectors.

Crowdfunding, though, is not for everyone. I got an item last week that was three years late from the promised shipping date. You see, Crowdfunding estimates are guesses, and if you embark on that journey, you have to be willing to wait.  Snpamkaer is another company in the space. Other than the fact that my printer isn’t working now, the company overall makes a good product. I printed several items with the last version of the Snapmaker! Transitioning from a great idea to crowdfunding to business can be painful.

What I wonder about now is what else could move into the crowdfunding world, and how could we better integrate that? For example, what if a play to be produced sold tickets before the play to people that would attend. You are investing in the play’s success and probably would have gone anyway. Crowdfunding might be a good fit there. At least for regional and local theaters. The concept of time-shares for boats, luxury cars, and apartments/houses has been around for a long time. But what about crowdfunding a meal? Where the chef works to create a new menu, and you pre-buy a dinner?

The reality is crowdfunding is a great place to move many different things we consume. I wonder when that will start?

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Using AR for city tours!

Yesterday we got a paper map to wander around downtown Frederick. In part that makes me laugh, my favorite moments in Bergen, Norway, and Amsterdam, Holland, were listening to my wife and daughter argue over maps. (you said I should read the map, but you are reading it wrong!) I am bringing this up with 5g because you have the capacity for Ultra-Precise locations. With GPS technology, you could easily build a point-to-point map in a city with much more information than you can put on a plaque on the side of the building.

Walking tours, or even Segway tours could be much more powerful with the use of technology. It is even conceivable to integrate AR into the walking tour. Then you can give everyone that uses that tour the best possible highest quality view of your city. Or, you can continue to print full-color maps and hope people know how to read them. Let’s talk about the power of AR maps for tours.

1. The person never gets lost
2. You can update the information the person gets as they are walking
3. You can sell ads for businesses that will allow them to target people RIGHT BY THEIR STORE
4. Your tour can be creative, fun, and flexible so people can wander off and still find interesting things

What are the three easy-button things that an AR tour gives a location? The other thing about the course is you can post that AR tour online to advertise your city. People will see the cool things they can see. You can expand your AR solutions with VR walk-arounds. Your city can gain fans without people knowing that as a fan, they will eventually make their way to your city!

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It is put up or shut up time

After more than 30 trials before judges appointed by the GOP and the Democrats, and not a single shred of evidence was produced, where are these credible witnesses? I mean, if you are suing and you save your credible witnesses for what? Thirty-plus cases were tried and lost. Most of them straight outright lack facts. Not procedural or biased, just that without facts, there was nothing to try. No credible witnesses have evidence of something that didn’t happen. I am sorry you lost; shake the winner’s hand and smile, then walk away like we were taught during our first team sporting event as children.

The ideals of our nation are not something we apply when it is easy for us. It is something we apply when it is hard. Ethics and the sheer reality of ethical behavior are stepping up and shaking the winner’s hand. It is unethical to pretend that something happened that no one can prove. I am sorry, but as we used to say years ago, when we learned sportspersonship, it is put up or shut up time. There is no credible proof of election fraud at any scale. Let alone the massive millions of voters scale required to steal a national election.

There is, however, evidence that the president of the United States was not involved or trying to stop what happened on January 6^th until after it was clear that the event failed. That says more about the person than anything else. I do not care if the former president is ever charged with anything. I don’t even care if he runs again. He has demonstrated to me that his interest lies not with the nation I love. Not with the country; he was pretending to make great (I cannot add again as I do not believe we were ever great. Perhaps on a path to greatness, but no, we had not gotten there). So, sadly it has come to put up or shut up time. The game is over, and the cards are dealt. There is no more bluffing. It is time to show these cards that reveal the massive fraud.

Even if the fraud is the former president.

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