derek kwan關志豪🦦🐈🍛🐧🍮 @mrufrufin@post.lurk.org

is boosting in ai/ml the algorithmic equivalent of "throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks" and then how come it works so well

just made a "can't see the (random) forest for the (decision) trees" joke in the forum for my ai class and umm mb should take a break for a bit

gave up linux/ble stuff for now and watching lecture vids on probability and bayes nets for ai class. probability was def one of my weaker subjects back in my math degree days (alongside group theory and multivar calc but i blame that on sleeping through 90% of the classes) but actually bayes nets seem pretty neat and mb i would've liked probability better had i been exposed to bayes nets earlier, they're like a structured way of figuring out chances of things given potentially really messy dependencies and relations.

seems to connect ok with my pixel 3a so maybe bluetooth is borked on my computer somehow? Or I can try reinstalling bluez for the 3rd time lol. hmm, mb will bust out the pi to see if it's just my compy

currently lamenting how all of the python libraries i've tried can detect my arduino nano ble sense but none of them can actually connect to it, despite blueZ upgrade attempts =(

quick link to model: https://derekxkwan.github.io/talea-vis/

#NIME website is updated so I guess I can share my work with Anne-Sophie Andersen that's part of this year's conference. http://nime2021.org/program/#/paper/76 It's a web-based 3D model based on analysis done on Gerard Grisey's composition for chamber ensemble Talea that you can explore, mouse-over for analysis details, and press P to play relevant snippets from a performance. I used #threejs for all the 3D bits of the model (generated on system load), #p5js and #processing to generate their textures, and #python for a bit of data conversion here and there.

and also the MC is basically playing a twin-stick shooter on their phablet for half the anime and when it comes to controlling a real robot, prefers to use the same interface? which makes me wonder how it that works if he isn't staring at the screen. do the twin sticks transpose on the screen to whether his fingers press? how error-tolerant is the device to him accidentally lifting his fingers off the screen then momentarily (distinguishing between transposing controls vs pushing a stick to the extremes of a range)? Or maybe it's just muscle memory or mb there's some sort of haptics involved? How does a touch-based interface manage to be expressive (capable of controlling various dimensions and triggering various techniques) yet error-tolerant?

also i find myself thinking about maybe what sorts of connections the phablet controller has with the physical robot (probably bluetooth? in that case, how does it manage 10+ feet ranges, does real bluetooth do that?)

also i should stop procrastinating and get back to class readings

i've been watching robotics;notes (which isn't about my ai for robotics notes from last semester thankfully) and everybody has weatherproof phablets with nifty AR features that they all keep side-holstered and maybe it's noteworthy how their digital existences seem tied to them but i'm more intrigued by how the batteries seem to last forever and how they seem to be a legit competitive gaming platform.

side-effects galore! very clean code 👍

it seems like throughout my life over and over again i end up having to do some sort of osc to web browser bridge via websockets and i used to do it in node but i'd figure i'd learn async programming a little more and try it in python where it isn't so automatic so here is my hacky, baby-deer-in-async-land, wip python version https://github.com/derekxkwan/osctowebskt-py

does anybody have a workflow for using (neo)vim and working in ipython notebooks? have a feeling coding in notebooks won't be much fun and i want to feed my obsession with doing everything remotely possible in vim.

sometimes when i want to laugh i think about how my silly #puredata abstractions are stored in the arctic code vault and then think about what other silly things might be stored there and also maybe i want to live in the arctic code vault too, do my pd abstractions count as rent

trying to record myself talking for NIME and I have never been great at speech things but trying to record myself talking makes it so much worse, i even forget how to make certain sounds with my mouth and the best of out millions of takes have weird pauses in them. i guess i will never become a va/seiyuu lol

i've been (slowly) teaching myself #rust and i stumbled across this (so not mine) https://github.com/x37v/puredata-rust and maybe it's recency bias but the whole #puredata external coding/building process feels quite a bit more pleasant here than the usual C way of doing things

first semester of online cs grad school done (hci and ai for robotics) 💪 next up in a week for the summer semester is ai and going through the norvig book (not sure what emoticon goes here)

weird music-oriented keyboard ebay listing somebody tweeted on the birdsite that i thought was worth sharing here

https://www.ebay.com/itm/124706901862?hash=item1d091c4f66:g:gfsAAOSwzf1gjxQ-

i remap my caps lock (and windows key) to L Ctrl (holdover from my emacs days) using setxkbmap and several times during the day, it seems like my external keyboard forgets it and it resets to a normal caps lock (it's probably when i slightly bump the usb hub or something) and atm i don't want to figure out running that command automatically when the keyboard connects so i will just complain about it on here for now

if there are any takeaways from this hci class for me, it's about the value of alternative representations (visual, aural, etc.), higher levels of manipulation and representation (because there's no sense in futzing with the lower level stuff if you don't have to), abstraction, the value of letting computers/programming languages (visual and textual, high and low level) do the work, the power of interaction and networks with both human and machine (and human mediated by machine)

and also that i am still so very bad and very slow at reading and so very easily distracted, i mean it's taken me hours to read 8 pages and i fell asleep twice in the middle of it and i still have so many more pages to go why why why