dxk志豪 @mrufrufin@post.lurk.org

#introduction #reintroduction

i'm derek, he/him. currently in central california and have lived in new york for a bit too

originally went through #music school up through #dma (lol i'd be surprised if that hashtag actually worked and referred to doctor of musical arts) studying #percussion with aspirations of being a "new music" percussionist but didn't stick the landing in music academia. i got a #math degree somewhere along the way and had been getting heavily into #computermusic and #creativecoding sorts of things working at a media lab during the dma so when covid, hit decided to go back to (online) grad school studying computer science. things i'm really into studying cs-wise are #ai/#ml things (more leaning on the ai-side but we'll see) and "soft-cs"/"extra-cs" sorta intersectional things like #hci and #education and starting to read about #computationalcreativity and other things. not sure where my cs studies will go yet but it'd be nice be able to research ai things more. also, i'm really into #foss / #linux sorta things.

other things i'm into are anime and manga (mostly iyashikei, mecha, and ikuhara things), video games, riichi mahjong, animals (mostly cats, sea otters and puffins), stars are cool, and also vast desolate expanses.

think my website better sums up things: https://derekxkwan.com/

also, it's #apihm (asian pacific islander heritage month) in the united states and i found pbs's "asian americans" a good solid overview of asian american history and some current issues (well, current as of 2020ish? i don't think it covers covid-related things and the latest waves of violence) and it looks like its free to stream at least here for now https://www.pbs.org/weta/asian-americans/

things i've been listening to this week:

boat - roro : prob one of my all-time favorite albums, i guess they're post-rocky/alt-rocky? esp the last track "circle sound" is fantastic and super catchy and energetic (there's a low-quality yt vid of the music vid for this song out there). guitarists later formed a band called natsumen which is also great (and the first song off of roro sounds like "cicada sing the galaxy" off of endless summer record).

sawako - madoromi : dreamy ambient electronic soundscapes. i wanted to sound like her for the longest time (and still do) but never quite figured out how. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JCR-wGM-ek

being subscribed to various programming language subreddits, it annoys me when people bring up issues of working with a language and having their hard drives slowly being eaten up my GBs and GBs of libraries and packages and they get responses like "data storage is dirt cheap nowadays, buy more storage", ugh

been trying to make use of my #ai schooling and do something with my week off from school so i made a little sudoku solver in #rust using constraint propagation and the most constrained variable heuristic: https://github.com/derekxkwan/sudokusolver-rs . was thinking of doing the wasm thing and making a webapp for it but eh, mb later.

my (online) grad program has an unofficial site for class reviews that pretty much everybody uses and the original creator tried to lock things behind a paywall for a brief bit this morning and now people on the unofficial slack are working together to scrape all the reviews off the website just in case they try again.

been toying around with #rust and its compile to #wasm abilities and was really struggling with return types and stumbled across this thing about using #serde which fixed things so putting this link here as a note-to-self and also in case anybody else is mildly curious about any of the aforementioned: https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-bindgen/reference/arbitrary-data-with-serde.html

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/22/1050394/artificial-intelligence-for-the-people/

interesting article on using speech recognition and nlp to preserve and teach the Maori language te reo and touches on #ai and colonialism

this semester was also the first semester i wrote all of my papers in latex which was great because i can spend even more time in vim but also bad because pdflatex and biber have some of the worst and indecipherable error messages that i've ever seen

finishing up my knowledge-based #ai class and up next is educational technology (or #edtech ) in two weeks, which i'm looking forward in that i've been wanting to learn about tech applications to education for awhile and also not looking forward to because i still don't have a solid project idea yet.

i liked kbai in ways over other ai classes i've taken in that it gives a theoretical context to everything and ties things to human cognition, it formalizes theories on how humans would solve problems and puts the focus on incremental learning, not having a whole bunch of data points at once but getting little bits of data one-at-a-time, and i kind of find this approach more interesting than the ml approach of lots and lots of data and finding best fits to that data but i'm sure i'll find ml interesting too.

the final project was centered around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices , which tests an aspect of "intelligence" (put in quotes here because of my wariness of intelligence tests) through figuring out relationships between sets of pictures and looking back, it's kinda neat how i could make an agent do not too bad on it and actually pick out these different kinds of relationships.

hah, speaking of breakbeaty stuff and jazz, makes me think about when the Pat Metheny Group channeled that aesthetic for exactly one tune in Roots of Coincidence off of Imaginary Day, also late 90s (1997). That aesthetic was everywhere, I'm betting there's at least a couple papers out there on exactly that...

two things I've been listening to this a lot this week whilst finals studying:

Boris - W: new Boris album. def on the poppier side of things like Attention Please but less upbeat and more shoegaze-y.

Toshinori Kondo, Eraldo Bernocchi, Bill Laswell - Charged: got into Toshinori Kondo recently, jazz trumpet with electronic stuff (delay/echo/reverb etc., reminds me of Cuong Vu but more melodic). Kinda reminds me a lot of Bill Frisell's Unspeakable in that it really feels like a "studio"-sorta album (vs people playing in a studio). In ways, the album feels kinda dated or at least, you can tell when it was made (late 90s), it's got that up-front sound stage wise crunchy breakbeat-y drum sample aesthetic that me think of like I dunno, Spybreak from the Propellerheads for example.

I was just thinking qr codes look kinda like autostereograms and lo and behold http://siqr.blogspot.com/2014/04/siqr-codes-steganographically.html and they mention steganography too and I've always liked the idea of things hiding in plain sight (and I guess in ways it's kind like an alt take of analyzing something that invokes symbolism to grasp the deeper meaning within) but anyways I had forgotten about Galois fields and mb it's not a great use of time trying to remember about them to roll my own qr implementation for the practice of it

it's kinda funny how the qr code tutorial is buried within a long list of walkthroughs for things like the viridian room (which i haven't thought about in ages) or terranigma (which i never finished). why couldn't they just blend the two and encode all the game guides in qr codes smh.

done with my planned studying for tonight and crunchyroll started charging for seasonals so i've been rewatching aria bc it's my favorite anime of all time but i'm trying to pace myself so i guess what i'm really trying to say is that i'm reading up about qr codes for a silly project idea and also error-correcting codes was one of my favorite things from undergrad decades ago (i guess i could've started with that huh) https://www.thonky.com/qr-code-tutorial/introduction

#introduction #reintroduction

i'm derek, he/him. currently in central california and have lived in new york for a bit too

originally went through #music school up through #dma (lol i'd be surprised if that hashtag actually worked and referred to doctor of musical arts) studying #percussion with aspirations of being a "new music" percussionist but didn't stick the landing in music academia. i got a #math degree somewhere along the way and had been getting heavily into #computermusic and #creativecoding sorts of things working at a media lab during the dma so when covid, hit decided to go back to (online) grad school studying computer science. things i'm really into studying cs-wise are #ai/#ml things (more leaning on the ai-side but we'll see) and "soft-cs"/"extra-cs" sorta intersectional things like #hci and #education and starting to read about #computationalcreativity and other things. not sure where my cs studies will go yet but it'd be nice be able to research ai things more. also, i'm really into #foss / #linux sorta things.

other things i'm into are anime and manga (mostly iyashikei, mecha, and ikuhara things), video games, riichi mahjong, animals (mostly cats, sea otters and puffins), stars are cool, and also vast desolate expanses.

think my website better sums up things: https://derekxkwan.com/

oh, i guess there's a class at my school called "mobile and ubiquitous computing" so there you go! i don't have room for it in my class schedule, but it is interesting to think about. too many things to learn...

i noticed flying to and from the art residency that even small hr flight planes now have slots in the backs of seats to put your mobile device in and watch their inflight entertainment (also plugs at every seat, kinda hilariously USB-A but also regular power outlet) and it's kinda striking how much these little devices are becoming our interfaces to a lot of the things out there and becoming so ubiquitous in our lives (not necessarily a bad thing but of course there's a whole boatload of issues to consider) and it's like almost an expected way to be able to deliver content to people. also how their ubiquity is shaping infrastructure and the way the world is being designed (and how it can't keep up ie the USB-A thing, I guess it's kinda like cars and gas pumps?). but i dunno, this is me and i still find it crazy to be able to watch video on these things (although I don't do it often, I think the last time I did was watching the fruits basket reboot series last summer when i was waiting in the portland airport?) as I grew up with desktop computers that couldn't even do that.

also, i'm finishing up this #ai class kbai (knowledge-based ai) and it's the third! class i've taken with ai in the name and one thing that i have learned about ai (and maybe life?!) in these three classes is that a lot of problems can be solved with the A* algorithm. so there you go, if you're having problems, any sort of problems, throw A* at it and see what happens.

melt banana came to my part of california in february and i didn't go because of covid concerns and also art residency coming up (where i had to covid test) but it would've been so cool to see melt banana. i like how the singer waves around this wireless controller to trigger drum samples (bc the drummer left the band) at live shows and i'm now i'm getting sent down a rabbit hole figuring out what it is instead of studying for my kbai final (found it: it's a numark orbit controller https://www.numark.com/product/orbit)

there are floating microphones that follow the singers in macross 7 and of course every time they show up i'm half sussing out how they would actually work. of course they'd be directional (prob cardiod if not supercardiod? or mb an electret condenser?) mics (or else what's the point of tracking so closely to the singer's mouth) and some sort of computer vision to do not only mouth detection but tracking (mb particle filter?)