Pirate Engineering Puzzle

Monday,  10/07/24  03:03 PM

Interesting little engineering puzzle.  What’s R?

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regarding Dwell Time

Monday,  09/30/24  11:29 AM

EOQ!  Wow, can't even believe we are at the end of another third quarter.  And you know what that means: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years', bam bam bam bam.  And poof another year in the books.  Happens faster and faster every year.

I've been ruminating on the "dwell time" of an online post.  When you post something to a blog, on X, on Facebook, wherever your friends / followers / whomever see it for as long as it is your "current" post.  As soon as you post something else, it gets pushed down the stack a bit, and people are less likely to see it.  This is independent of the relative value or importance or length of the post.  I could post a lengthy diatribe with incredible analysis, and then immediately post something trivial, and that diatribe will become history while the trivia might live on a long time.

Frequent readers will know, I like my blog's "flight" feature, in which it displays what I've posted on this day each year past.  If there's no post for this day, it backs up into recent days to show the most recently posted thing from that year.  So items that had a big time gap after they were posted "last longer" in the daily flights, a most evocative illustration of dwell time in action.

Some blogs (and some social media) have a "keep at top" feature, which artificially boosts dwell time.  I used to do this myself, every once in a while, but haven't for a while.  I have mentally played with the idea of recording inbound traffic (hits) for each post, and sorting archived posts by "max hits".  That would make reader interest a part of dwell time, which would be good.  Presumably if something was of interest to many or externally linked it likely would be of interest to the next reader.

Or I could just keep posting whatever whenever and let the chips fall where they may.  Heh.

{Update: added digression: whoever wanted Google's .webp images? Why do they exist? Someone spent all that time inventing a new image format just so we all have to convert them back to JPEGs. What an incredible waste of time.}

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Lighthouse Century, still

Sunday,  09/29/24  10:44 AM

I'm still riding Centuries, and yesterday rode a nice one: the Lighthouse Century from Morro Bay up PCH to the Piedras Blancas lighthouse, through San Simeon, and by the Elephant Seal overlook.  To get to 100 miles the organizers start with a nice little jaunt into the hills of Paso Robles; beautiful wine country, if you can take a minute from climbing to take in the views.

Yes, it was a great ride, and yes, I am quite proud of myself for being able to ride a Century in under six hours; "only" 5,200' of climbing... but still!

I've been playing with the various ways to record video of a ride from my GoPro, and this little clip contains several of them: straight video, speeded up, time lapse pictures, turned into a video, and "posterized" video to turn it into effectively a timelapse sequence.  Not sure yet of the best way.  I do like taking pictures during the ride and embedding them; for all that the GoPro is amazing, the iPhone pictures are better yet, and you can really see the difference on a cold and cloudy day.  And with my phone I can shoot "sideways", whereas the GoPro is always pointed "down the road".

 Onward!

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PerplexiHelp

Sunday,  09/29/24  10:15 AM

Among all the amazing capabilities of Perplexity* and honestly, c'mon, it is amazing, right? one of the biggest for me is that it has completely replaced online help.  For some time now we were sure that Google was always better than a product's own online help, but now Perplexity is amazingly better.

* if you're not using Perplexity instead of Google as your default search engine, you're missing out

I'm editing a video with Adobe Premiere - a timelapse of the Lighthouse Century I rode yesterday, since you ask :) - and wanted to know how to change a video segment from 29.97fps as recorded by my GoPro to 1fps as I want it added into my video.  So I asked Perplexity*: "Adobe Premier how do I change the frame rate of a segment" and it tells me to use "Interpret Footage".  Well that's a good answer but not the one I want, because it changes the segment's duration, so I next type** "without changing the duration" (leveraging context) and it tells me "use the Posterize Time Video Effect" which is exactly the right answer.  Saved me many many minutes, and essentially makes Premiere itself more powerful, since it opens up many more of its capabilities for me.

* by "ask" I mean, "typed into my browser's search line"

** by "next type" I mean, "typed into the Perplexity chat below the search result"

And you know what Perplexity costs? $0... What a time to be alive!

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never forget

Wednesday,  09/11/24  07:50 AM


Where were you?
23 years ago...

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Passing on passkeys

Tuesday,  09/10/24  07:42 AM


Today's rant: passkeys considered bad.  I knew this instinctively, based on their complexity, but David Hansson explains it in detail.  Whew.

Passwords are a problem, for sure, for me as a user as well as for me as an applications developer.  Good passwords are hard to remember, every site has different rules, sometimes you have to change them, sometimes you can't reuse them, and everybody writes them down insecurely.  (Yep, you do too, admit it.)

So when passkeys were invented, everyone said yay.  But they don't solve all the problems and create many new ones.  The difficulty of having them across multiple devices, the difficulty of creating them in the first place, and the difficulty of implementing them.  And the reliance on central authorities.

Whenever there's a new thing, I try to understand it.  (Blockchains!  LLMs!  Etc!)  If the thing escapes me, maybe that's on me - sometimes I'm slow and it has to soak before I get it.  But mostly if I don't get it, it's on the thing - it's too complicated to be good.  (W=UH!)  And so it seems with passkeys.

The best solution to passwords is not to have them at all.  Just send the user a limited time link in text or email.  This is simple to explain, simple to use, simple to implement.  And no less secure than passwords; most of the time you can change or recover a password with a link in text or email anyway.  Oh, and it supports multiple devices easily.

I get the appeal and value of two-factor authentication.  Simple and better.  After you remember your password and enter it, we'll send you a text or email too, just to make sure.  But maybe we skip the "remember your password and enter it" part?  Simpler and betterer.

So long passkeys, we hardly knew ya...

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Vuelta Stage 16: revisiting the Lagos da Covadonga

Tuesday,  09/03/24  11:16 PM

Tonight I watched stage 16 of La Vuelta (the Tour of Spain cycling race), which finished atop the legendary Lagos da Covadonga climb in Asturias, the Northernmost province of Spain.  It was a fantastic race on an amazing track.

I rode this very climb myself, way back in 2007; I was in Spain for business and detoured up to Asturias to ride the stage and then watch the pros do it too.  After an improbable series of barriers surmounted I made it, probably the hardest climb I've ever done then or since.  Watching the race today was doubly enjoyable remembering being there which seems like yesterday, 17 years ago...

Rereading my report on the day, I remember feeling a weird sense of inevitability; with each obstacle it felt like something good was going to happen, and then it did.  "How did I get here (!)" indeed ... Quite a day.

My report does not go on to mention the incredible spicy Spanish dinner I had that night in Cangas des Onis nor the Rioja wine which accompanied it, but I remember them too.  I do not remember finally sleeping but I'm sure I did so, like a stone.

Watching pro cycling in Europe is the best - in addition to another Vuelta stage I've been privileged to watch two stages of the Tour de France, and to ride and then watch the Ronde van Vlaanderen (Tour of Flanders).  I still have to see a Giro d'Italia stage (Tour of Italy), and would love to see the Strade Bianca (which tours Tuscany and finishes in La Plaza in Siena).  It's nice to have goals :)

Onward !

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perfect labor day

Tuesday,  09/03/24  09:01 AM

a Labor Day spent sailing w your granddaughter is pretty perfect

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Happy September!

Sunday,  09/01/24  08:56 AM


Hi all Happy September!  Wow how did that happen?  One minute it's winter, then suddenly it's Spring, Summer whips by, and now Sept - Fall - Halloween - Thanksgiving - Christmas - New Year.  The Earth's orbit around the Sun is definitely speeding up.

Yesterday I drove my bike up to Arroyo Grande and took a nice out-and-back ride to Avila Beach.  Here's a composite video from the ride:

This is a test, there are several things going on here.  First the video itself is a GoPro time-lapse combined with a Strava GPS flyby, with embedded iPhone pics. Experimental, and I like it.  Composed with Adobe Premier.  LMK what you think.

Next, this video is in my Dropbox, bypassing YouTube which I've historically used to host videos.  I don't like YouTube (don't like Google); they stick in ads and generally cruftify* everything, and who knows when they'll delete my videos forever.  Dropbox is more direct (but does it work?)

* yes of course cruftify is a word

And LBNL, this is my first time posting a video with my new spiffy (shaved-yak) email-to-blog mechanism.  I love it by the way; this is being composed on my iPad, sitting in my den, miles away from my laptop and office.  

{Update: it all worked, yay.  Only thing is it isn't obvious that the pic above is a link to a video.  I added "(click to watch)" but I need some kind of "video frame".  (Huh)}

{Another Update: modified the API to support embedding videos, as opposed to merely linking them. This takes advantage of modern browsers' support for video; in the bad old days I used to embed various video plugins, and in the worse older days used Flash. But now even mobile browsers can play video directly ...}

Well enough of the navel gazing; it was a fun ride watching the masses at the beach, and traversing through Shell Beach which is a beautiful little residential neighborhood tucked in between Pismo and Avila.

Pismo Beach is a real slice of Americana; except for the size of the people and their tattoos, could have been any time in the 1980s; the kids and dogs playing in the surf were just the same.

Speaking of dogs, this has to be the best way to tour around with them, and is my favorite pic from the trip.  Woof.

And onward...


 

AI and emergent properties

Thursday,  08/29/24  11:37 AM

I recently reread this post about AI and emergent properties, from May 2003, and was blown away by its prescience and relevance.  (In posting about old posts I seem to be following the New Yorker's example and reusing content in lieu of new thinking, but in this case it's delightfully "meta", as new observations have "emerged" over time).

Little did I know or could have known that 21 years later AI would be at the forefront of all tech, and that it would be a "brain dead" form of AI, without heuristics, happily using applied statistics to synthesize emergent properties.  We can now hypothesize that not only does this lead to "intelligence", but it might be all that ever does; there are no underlying heuristics at all.  In this, I find an analogy to Alpha Zero, which learned to play great chess (and famously, even greater Go) simply from the rules of the game, without any heuristics.

Heuristics are certainly useful as summarizing shortcuts, greatly reducing the computation necessary, but they emerge from patterns in the information, not vice versa.

In the post linked above AI pioneer Marvin Minsky was quoted as saying "AI can't deal with concepts like water is wet'".  That was true in the 1970s.  And it was thought that to deal with this, "wet" would have to be defined, and an association between "water" and "wet" would have to be made.  Now we can see that a concept like "wet" emerges from the presence of things like water, and so the association is causative, water "causes" wetness.  Such properties are a function of observation, they are not inherent nor are they explicit, and they are to some extent influenced by the observer as well as the thing itself.

Consider a more abstract property like "beauty".  Not only is it famously "in the eye of the beholder", but it is only such, it does not exist in and of itself.  (This point is made in another old post made only a week later, God and Beauty; I did not make the connection at the time!)  Labeling things as "beautiful" does not make them so, and a definition of beauty without examples doesn't get very far.  We can describe the effect of its perceived presence on an observer, and the commonality between things exhibiting "beauty" is mostly in these effects, not the described objects.  (What other commonality exists, for example, between a beautiful person and a beautiful algorithm ... or a beautiful philosophy?)

Comments? 


 

Remembering 1984, again

Tuesday,  08/27/24  10:03 AM

Way back in the dawn of time, 2009, now (checks sundial) 15 years ago, I posted about remembering 1984, about the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.  At the time I posted it was 25 years ago, so now (gasp) it's been 40 years.

All of those observations are still valid, more poignant for being so much older now; rowing on Lake Casitas, Peter Ueberroth, Ronald Reagan.  Time Magazine.  The first televised Olympics!  The Torch OJ Simpson, Rafer Johnson.  And LBNL the first Olympics (and still the only one) to be run as a business, at a profit for the host city.

(Just typing LA84 gives me chills how weird is that?  I was 25 at the time, must have made quite an impression on me :)

 And so with memories of Paris fading, we're getting ready to do it all again in 2028.  Hope we can show everyone how it should be done, again.  Should be amazing!...
YearHost CityNumber of Sports
1984Los Angeles23
1988Seoul23
1992Barcelona25
1996Atlanta26
2000Sydney28
2004Athens28
2008Beijing28
2012London26
2016Rio de Janeiro28
2020Tokyo (held in 2021)33
2024Paris32

Seems currently LA28 will feature 35 sports! (Will breakdancing be back?)

 

Comments? 


 

Why bookstores

Monday,  08/26/24  10:59 PM

Speaking of The New Yorker, (we were) I've made it to the bottom of my stack, the Aug 26 issue (with a "haha" cover featuring A roller coaster with Harris and Walz going up while Trump and Vance go down ... typical), and I encountered this thoughtful review by Louis Menand of two books about bookstores, subtitled "why do bookstores still exist?"

There's some good background and interesting thinking, but no clear answer.  I think it has to do with the same reason I prefer paper magazines to their digital counterparts:skimmability.  When you're seeking a specific book you go to Amazon and poof you buy it.  But when you're browsing for a book, how do you find one?

For that, nothing is better than a bookstore where you can easily scan the shelves, view covers, and if so minded, pick up and (gasp) sample the wares.  They’re “fun”.

Yeah, to some extent this contradicts The Long Tail (curiously, not mentioned in the review), but not really; the tail is there forfinding and ordering, at Amazon and elsewhere online, but browsing is still mostly done at the head, and the physical experience trumps virtual inventory.  In fact the curation - concentrating and filtering the vast space of all books to a much more manageable inventory - is part of the attraction.

Interestingly and as noted in the article, most independent bookstores call themselves  shops, and shopping is why they still exist. 

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Ole reads, part N

Monday,  08/26/24  03:16 PM

In my office I have a pile of magazines.  Real paper pick em up and read em magazines.  The stack is in FIFO order, and depending on how busy or bored I am, it gets deeper or shallower.

Regulars include the Economist - still enjoy it, although the increasingly left bent is tiresome - Fortune, Caltech, Traveler (always fun and getting better), Wired (kind of a legacy, rapidly fading into irrelevance), and of course The New Yorker - I parted from them politically long ago, but enjoy the feature writing and above all the cartoons.

One might ask why I read these as paper, and I'm not sure; I read most books on Kindle, and I have experimented with electronic versions of magazines, but somehow it just doesn't "work".  I think paper is more skimmable; I certainly don't ready any mag cover to cover, but rather just pick and chose and read and skip.  The heads and subheads are good guides, the callouts helpful, pictures and diagrams are interesting (and cartoons!), and even cool ads might get my attention.

Anyway.

To the top of the stack recently rose the Aug 12 issue of New Yorker, with the title Comedy, an archival issue.  They have been doing this a bit; cutting back on staff, they can run an issue with almost entirely recycled content, and readers like me find it interesting.  In fact, honestly, it was way more interesting than the "regular" issue from Aug 12.  Okay the focus was comedy, but also, there was a characteristic spirit of inquiry has been sadly lacking of late.

The New Yorker's general stance is that it is a giant world out there (including, albeit begrudgingly, the world outside of New York city) filled with people and stories, and it wants to tell you about them.  Lately it seems to have morphed into telling you how to think about them, and that doesn't go over as well nor foster that positive spirit.

And so in this issue there is a lot of awesomeness: Notes about Robin Williams and Joan Rivers, rabbi jokes, Girl Scouts, and Buster Keaton, and articles about laughter, Richard Pryor, and the birth of Saturday Night Live, among others.  The reviews were cherry picked as well, including Chelsea Handler on late night TV and Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl.  I almost did read it cover to cover, and might yet go back.

I guess it's inevitable that an old guy would look back and think "that was a better time", but ... it was :)

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Oversimplifying

Thursday,  08/22/24  08:24 AM


From xkcd, of course.  Hehe.

As usual Randall hit a nail on the head, and he comes at it in a way which makes a point... yes, this is a useful periodic table, but no, a little too dumb and not that useful.

This is how I feel about the current trend toward "simple" user interfaces.  They're dumbed down past the point of usefulness.  The other day I tried Microsoft's "new Outlook", and it's a joke; you can't find anything because all the controls are hidden.  Can we go back to good UI design now?

Anyway... 


 

there’s a boat in my boat!

Tuesday,  08/13/24  06:56 AM

Here’s a great shot of some unusual action at last weekend’s C-15 North Americans.  Wow.  That’s my crew Carly and I; we won that race but finished fourth overall in a great regatta at the Santa Barbara Yacht Club.  (Perhaps, more to follow.). And yes, we made the front page of Sailing Anarchy, not quite the Rolling Stone but for sailors, close.

Looking at history I see that this date Aug 13 has been a quiet one.  I guess on this day I’ve mostly been busy, sailing, traveling, working, or otherwise not blogging.  Sorry not sorry.  But maybe (?) this will unplug the pipe.

Hope y’all are having a nice summer and will check in again sooon…

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Fairly recent posts (well last handful, anyway):

10/07/24 03:03 PM -

Pirate Engineering Puzzle

09/30/24 11:29 AM -

regarding Dwell Time

09/29/24 10:44 AM -

Lighthouse Century, still

09/29/24 10:15 AM -

PerplexiHelp

09/11/24 07:50 AM -

never forget

09/10/24 07:42 AM -

Passing on passkeys

09/03/24 11:16 PM -

Vuelta Stage 16: revisiting the Lagos da Covadonga

09/03/24 09:01 AM -

perfect labor day

09/01/24 08:56 AM -

Happy September!

08/29/24 11:37 AM -

AI and emergent properties

08/27/24 10:03 AM -

Remembering 1984, again

08/26/24 10:59 PM -

Why bookstores

08/26/24 03:16 PM -

Ole reads, part N

08/22/24 08:24 AM -

Oversimplifying

08/13/24 06:56 AM -

there’s a boat in my boat!

07/07/24 09:43 AM -

Cycling through time

05/30/24 08:05 AM -

men at work

05/27/24 08:36 PM -

Waybacking Links

05/25/24 07:35 PM -

end-to-end splicing

05/14/24 05:58 PM -

yak, shaved

05/12/24 11:20 AM -

Mom's Day

05/11/24 10:13 AM -

Luna Rossa

05/11/24 10:09 AM -

xkcd: it has come to this

05/09/24 11:28 AM -

iPad ad

05/07/24 09:20 AM -

Slacking off

05/07/24 08:03 AM -

the inevitability factor

05/05/24 11:42 AM -

GEB day

05/04/24 09:47 PM -

Breathless Agony

05/03/24 09:03 PM -

Spot's new tail

05/02/24 10:54 PM -

Sunstroke Series begins - It's the Water!

For older posts please visit the archive.