What are you working on? December 2011

My wife and I are working on translating HPMoR into Polish. Tonight she'll finish the first draft of chapter 4, and I'm about to finish editing the final version of chapter 3. We plan to publish it when we have 5 chapters ready.

I was accepted to this developer bootcamp (Ruby on Rails + general lifestyle / job-finding bootcamp). (Here is part of my application, in response to a question about my experience tinkering.) So, I'm working on moving to the SF Bay area (program will be held somewhere in SoMa starting early Feb 2012) and general transition preparation (background knowledge + planning the move). Pointers for places to stay ("LW as craigslist") are welcome.

And before you ask, yes I can learn programming and software development on my own, but not nearly as fast as if I had someone side-by-side directing me, nor nearly as career-helping without someone to make connections. (Even with the recent "hack Less Wrong" guides, and other websites I found way too much inferential distance.) I believe that it will allow me significant professional and personal progress in being able to do what I've always wanted to

As usual, once I master it, I plan to use my explanatory skills to reduce the barriers to entry for others.

I will probably be taking an indefinite leave of absence from work.

Not too late to back out at minimal cost, so feel free to convince me not to go through with it.

(Thanks to Frank Adamek and Will Ryan for pointing me to the opportunity.)

In September I picked up programming. Following many people's recommendations I chose the Project Euler + Python combination. So far it seems to be quite addictive (and effective). I'm currently at 90 solved problems, although I'm starting to feel a bit out of my (rather non-deep) depth, and thus I consider temporarily switching to investigating PyGame for a while and coding remakes of simple old games, while getting ahold of several CS and coding textbooks.

I'm working on a game that will explain the concept of Truth to the player. (Similar to what Yudkowsky's "The Simple Truth" does.) It's going to be a 2D puzzle for PC/Mac/iOS/Android. I anticipate the development to take about 3 months, starting in January.

Furthermore, I will publish the game design process I used, thus starting a long series on how to become a better game designer. Some of the approaches I learned from lesswrong: six hats, do not start by proposing solutions, explore the problem space, experiment, etc...

Last week, I finished Why Everyone Else Is a Hypocrite, as recommended by Kaj. I then read Blindsight immediately afterwards and I swear I didn't know the plot going in and that it was a coincidence.

For the last couple of months, I've worked on a rationalist My Little Pony fanfic: Friendship is Optimal. I hope to complete it by April. This is mostly to help improve my writing.

Starting work on a recursively self-improving seed AI. Not going to worry about Friendliness for now. Also, just solved time travel, so we'll see how that turns out two months ago.

I am now reading ten different books. (I've also picked up 48 Laws of Power. My library card has been entrusted to a responsible party until I've finished all of these books.) I'm learning Python and Haskell via Learn Python the Hard Way and Learn You A Haskell, respectively.

A few months ago I did some transcripts for the Singularity Institute before suffering a huge bout of akrasia regarding such and stopping entirely, but I publicly commit to starting this again.

I'm currently working on several FAQs/overviews.

I'm reading Benatar's Better Never To Have Been and I noticed that the actual arguments for categorical antinatalism aren't as strong as I thought and seem to hinge on either a pessimistic view of technological progress (which might well be justified) or confusions about identity and personhood. But I'm currently confused about the relevant philosophy, so I'm collecting the arguments and justifications, and will turn this basically into an antinatalism FAQ and reference. A lot of people seem to dismiss Benatar without actually reading him, so writing a more accurate overview of his and related arguments might help.

Of more questionable importance, I'm also finally writing an Early Christianity FAQ. I'm working through Price's work on the New Testament and have a hard time keeping all the different characters and weird theories straight, so I'm writing an overview from a perspective of higher criticism. It seems to me that a lot of good insights in the field are too strongly compartmentalized, so just getting them all into one place should make things clearer. It's mostly for my own use, though, and intended as supplement material for my own crackpot theories, but it's a lot of fun.

I'm also writing/researching an introduction to Solomonoff Induction etc. and hope to get my first draft of a (German) student paper done by the end of the year. I'll probably write a less formal (English) version at the same time. I can't think without writing, so I basically get a rough draft for free and might as well clean it up a little. (However, I have abandoned overviews before once I understood everything and got bored, so yeah.)

(I'm also working on a student project about performance estimates of embedded systems, but I'm kinda tired of SystemC and wrestling with weird platforms. Should've stayed with that theology degree after all.)

I'm chasing money, power, and romance. I'm getting a little bit of the first two. The third one, not so much. Previous post here.

In the two months since I started my side business, I've been putting all the money I can spare into it, plus all debt I can comfortably take on. Right now I'm into it for about 30% of my annual take-home. We've processed a couple hundred orders and the business has made an 18% return on that money. Excited to keep growing it.

I went through a renegotiation with my boss. He offered me a 16% raise, I turned it down, a couple of days later we got back together and agreed to 20% plus a bonus equal to 5% of my old salary. Got a new title with the word "Lead" in it. The customer we pitched two months ago signed on. My project, my baby, and enough money to pay the salary of everyone at the company for two years. The boss was thrilled. We have a multi-year contract to go from prototype to finished product. Now I just have to build the damn thing.

I'm bumping up against a lot of difficulty as I try to date successfully. It feels like I've caught all the low-hanging fruit, and I go out and put forth my best effort, and it still isn't good enough. Then I watch my friends succeed with such little apparent effort, and I wonder, "what am I doing wrong?!" It's tough, emotionally, to deal with the rejection, but I've developed some mental exercises to stay positive and keep me from despairing. I do have a date tonight, probably my first "date," with an equally nervous girl who I think might actually like me. We'll see how it goes!

Now I want to return to my project just so I can post it on here. Was that the plan?

I've started building a diode laser cavity (a box you shine a laser into which makes it have a more precise color), which means that I've been buying parts and spending lots of time in a machine shop. Most of what I'll be doing in the coming months will be using a mill to cut out various sized chunks of aluminum.

I've also been helping organize a conference.

Personal wise, I've been trying to pay attention to my mood and emotions more by keeping records.

I'm working on a project involving computerized tomography, and I've made decent progress toward proving the first theorem that appears obvious from physical considerations. At this rate I expect the theorem to be done in four or five weeks; the machinery is all together, all that's left is to stitch the result.

However, those four to five weeks are going to be derailed for a moment. I'm also applying for funding next year, and writing my first research proposal is turning out to be harder than I expected. I'm also applying for summer funding to mentor at a Research Experience for Undergraduates that I participated in when I was an undergrad.

Lastly, I managed to set up the logistics to visit a conference in Boston in January. I'm typically bad at paperwork, so this was kind of an accomplishment.

Evangelizing calibrated-prediction tools to the Agile software community.

Why - I have several reasons for doing this. One is that some Agile discourse is tantalizingly close to (what looks to me like) Bayes-thinking, for instant frequent references to the "PDCA loop". On the other hand, there is (to my taste) little enthusiasm for actually putting some of the theses bandied about in the community to the test of experimental evidence.

So, having tried for myself the exercises of measuring my calibration on known but uncertain questions, of venturing predictions with attached probabilities about the real world and checking them against reality, and having found these exercises both unsettling and ultimately useful, I've now become interested in sharing with others the reasoning behind those conclusions.

Another reason is that this topic is quite close to another, that of task estimation, which has been a constant source of pain among software development professionals.

Finally, my earlier efforts at collecting empirical data on Agile projects were hampered by low participation. Trying to work my way around that, I reasoned that it was hard to get people to participate in something that gave them no discernible benefit. So I hit on the idea of something like a "prediction game" to give people actionable feedback on how accurately calibrated they were with respect to future evolution of their software projects; this would be a direct benefit, but also generate data (when arbitrating predictions) as a side-effect.

I now have a medium-priority project, conducted more or less according to Lean Startup principles, to develop this idea into a product. In the current stage I'm trying to gauge how much interest there is in predictions in general in the software community, and which presentations of the topic attract people vs turn them off.

A gentle video introduction to Game theory is my weather balloon for a series of posts in which I hope to hand non-mathy people some low hanging fruit to chew on, that will help them rationality wise as well as perhaps getting together study groups for more demanding material.

First, I'm working on Textcelerator, which I recently released and am now incorporating feedback into and improving. It's a browser plugin for speed-reading on web sites, for Chrome and Firefox, using a modified version of rapid serial visual presentation.

Second, I'm starting a blog. Partially as a platform for talking about and draw attention to Textcelerator, but mostly to write about unrelated things. I have felt for quite some time that my mind has a lot of very-important knowledge which is being wasted because I don't write enough. More on that in a few days; there'll be substantial overlap with Less Wrong's topics of interest.

I have been going through 4Clojure problems. My short-term goal is to rank in the top 100; I just made it to 197 today. I had been reading a bit about Lisp and find the style meshes well with my own thinking (e.g. in PHP, I have a tendency to use foreach loops a lot).

Various solutions (spoilers!):

• https://gist.github.com/1472063 (I keep forgetting sort-by exists)
• https://gist.github.com/1436347 (Juxtapose)
• https://gist.github.com/1434456 (Composition, somewhat awkward, see Twitter)
• https://gist.github.com/1423857 (Reverse interleave)

Today: Giving a workshop/tutorial on using paper and tape to explore riemannian manifolds. Trying to work out in what order to present the info and what questions I want answered. The purpose of this is to crowdsource on my personal mathematics research. link.

Also Today: Implementing title/menu screen on my tetris and space invaders clones. I think they will be done after that.

This Week: finishing up the AI class videos.

This month: Writing some more simple videogames as I scale up my skill towards more complex stuff. For the purpose of general programming skill and artistic expression.

Also this month: Restarting the local LW meetup chapter. Because I want to be awesome and happy and no one else is going to make it happen.

This year: Trying to stir my classmates up into a startup mood so that I don't have to get a job again.

Theres many more, but that's most of the interesting stuff.

We keep running the following program we devised:

http://www.algit.eu/download/Setup_Packntile.exe

We have some world records on http://packomania.com/

and are also here:

http://www.algit.eu/htmlji/Packntile/Packing_Contest_01052010.html

The whole idea is to fully automatize this effort and without a human help obtain many new packing records of various kinds. Currently the Pack'n'tile program is not very good at fine tuning, but it's very creative in finding entirely new configurations nobody has thought about them before. We will improve this fine tuning to prevent some smart guys to use Pack'n'tile's world records and improve them just a little bit.

Then we will let it publish the world record results on the Internet - automatically from every point where an instance will run.

Currently your spare PC's CPU is appreciated and you will be mentioned as a program's solution coauthor.

Just finished finals, and have little to do for my research work. I'm devoting all my non-gaming time to the Decision Analysis Sequence. (I am not as sure about my decision to post the outline as a conclusion rather than an introduction, but hopefully it'll work out better in the long run.)

I'm in the sticky situation that the next post in explanation order is the one I least want to write. Right now I'm compromising by working on later posts in the sequence, hoping that'll make me want to write the next post more.

Also, major props to whoever coded the Top Contributors: 30 Days thing. It's been a strong motivator for me, as I realized after the VoI post I could break into it by finishing the second post in the sequence. Now I'm sitting pretty at #3, and if I manage to finish the sequence by the 21st I'll go as high as I can expect to for the near future.

I'm learning to play the piano. Started three months ago, taking weekly lessons from a teacher.

About to finish the Stanford AI and ML courses. Going to take up one or two of their new offerings in January, haven't yet made up my mind as to which.

Took up ping-pong. Last week a 9 year old boy wiped the floor with me.

Primarily, finishing my PhD thesis in mathematics. On the side, devouring through The Adapted Mind, The Cambridge Handbook of Experts & Expertise, and Russell and Norvig's AI book (I can post LW summaries if anyone is interested).

• For the next 2 weeks: finishing my end-of-semester exams and papers, so as to advance as a grad student.

• After that, getting back to my attempt to summarise the cogsci of humour for my blog (will link when I have more parts up). I started by being interested in the cogsci of creativity and got a little distracted along the way. I'm finishing it because (a) I haven't really seen a good summary anywhere, (b) it incentivises me to read some stuff that I would otherwise not get to for months, (c) there are people who read my blog who would find it interesting, (d) better understanding of any part of cogsci is never a bad thing for me.

• Fixing one of my end-of-semester projects that I was really excited about and then never had time to really do justice to.

I've finished working though a book on proofs with the help of a fellow LWer (previously) and I'm now trying to work on learning measure theoretic probability theory.

I've been putting in more effort at work recently. I've been trying Pomodoros again with more success this time. I've been playing the game Angry Birds during my breaks in an effort to get some kind of reinforcement learning going on. It does seem to actually get me to do Pomodoros at least, but I don't know if it's done more than that (not that that's trivial).

I'm learning how to dress better. Despite lukeprog's reservations (his impression was that it was hit and miss advice), I've found reddit.com/r/malefashionadvice pretty useful. They give pretty conservative advice and, of course, since it's community run there will be some things which are simply wrong, but they have lots of advice which does seem good (particularly in the sidebar). I suspect I've become slightly too interested in this topic; once I decided it was important, I've found it pretty rewarding to work on. I haven't actually done anything to reduce my interest in it.

I am currently progressing through Learning Python The Hard Way.

I also am trying to find a legitimate job while going through grad-school applications.

Previous post.

Progress report:

Social: My social skill improvement continues to be successful, and I'm much happier socially. I joined okcupid, not for any particular purpose but because I realized the only reason I hadn't was an unfounded nervousness about "something."

Mathematics: I finished the first three chapters of Silverman and I have some papers to read; I'm going to be looking into some conjectures of Jochnowitz about the derivatives of L-series and Shimura lifts.

Practical: I replaced my keyboard and the new keyboard is great! Otherwise... I've been lazy due to winter break.

LessWrong: I stopped about in the middle of The Skeptical Environmentalist, possibly in part due to an ugh field from some negative comments and in part due to having some personal trouble reading recently. I just haven't been enjoying it. However! I joined the google group for developing rationality curricula and I'm pretty excited about that at the moment.

I don't feel particularly accomplished compared to the others on here...

http://www.theoneweekbook.com/

For the past couple of weeks I've been writing a utility to search through code quickly. I'm doing this because at work, some large dependencies got tossed in extern, making ack and grep pretty slow. At first I tried to make them faster (creating aliases to ignore certain files), but I soon gave up and started writing my own thing.

Grep is slow because it doesn't ignore files by default. Ack is slow because it's written in Perl. So I'm writing it in C, using libpcre for the regex matching. So far it's about 3x faster than ack and 10x faster than grep. With some tweaking to ignore special files like generated code, I got it even faster than that. (0.5 seconds to search the codebase. For comparison, grep was 12 seconds and ack was 4.)

The Github repo is here. I don't recommend anyone try it out yet. It's not even close to done. Although I use it daily, I still need to iron out some formatting bugs, a couple of potential crashes, and then write docs. I bet it'll take me a couple weeks to sort all that stuff out.

(Before anyone replies: Yes, I do know about ctags and git-grep. Ctags requires rebuilding an index after changing any files, and git-grep doesn't work on non-git repositories. Also git-grep can't ignore files committed in the repo, such as everything in extern.)

Aside from taking finals, finishing final projects, and the usual end of semester blather, I'm working on - ahem - going to start working on turning my recently defended master's thesis in statistics into a journal article or two. Essentially, I'm introducing a new methodology for analyzing a set of rather complicated economic experiments (complicated as far as economic experiments go anyway). The methodology is finished aside from a few tweaks I want to make to the model, but getting everything into a distilled, presentable form for economists to read is the next challenge.

I'm working on my Python skills: I've done the first 11 Project Euler problems.

The research project that I did over the past year is finished, and I've submitted it for publication in DNA and Cell Biology. It's a study on the effect of mortality rate on the rate of evolution in a simulated population (wrote the simulation myself, also in Python).

Finished college applications, one acceptance and two deferrals so far.

Steadily working my way through my pile of unread books.

Learning Programming: Efforts are desperate but with a focus on C. I've been reading through K&R and I'm at arrays and pointers. When I'm confused on need help I pick up either Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware for its treatment of bit-wise operations and its general lucidity or C Primer Plus which assumes you are five and takes thirty pages to do what K&R does in a paragraph but if you're stuck it's better to scan those thirty pages for the sticking point and where they make it explicit. My first course CS is Programming C next semester and I intend to only struggle with topics that are truly complex rather than get hung up on misconceptions. Additionally I've used Learn Python the Hard Way, and the SICP lectures when I feel I've mastered what something means in C and want to learn it more generally.

Calculus: My first attempt was in high school. A combination of repeated illness, a lack of familial resources that thrust me into the workforce while in school, and a poor teacher made my first exposure to the subject dull, difficult and demonic. I start a three semester block next month and prelearning the topic through Khan Academy is turning out the be a grand experiment with great results.

Reading Books: I just (two hours ago) finished Prachett's Feet of Clay, I'm going through GEB, and I have Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals, The Drunkard's Walk, and The Happiness Hypothesis waiting for me via audiobook.

track progress on these and other goals here: https://www.beeminder.com/karmakaiser