What are you working on? February 2013

Working on "The Open Problem of Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics" and "The Open Problem of Lob-Tiling AI" (these are both tentative titles).

Well, if no-one else is going to dive in ...

I have been feeling bored and tetchy for a while now. So for one project I took on the job of volunteer sysadmin at the well-known wretched hive of scum and villainy RationalWiki. It's been quite fun robustifying a small LAMP server overwhelmed by its Alexa 12,000 rating. MediaWiki is a lardy beast, but a coupla Squids in front and it's pretty good; ticking along nicely. Of course, now we have to stop the Squids from falling over too ...

This obviously didn't soak up enough energy. So the other thing I've been doing is the official unofficial RationalWiki blog - a skeptical blog. It's not official yet, but aspires to be; so it's stuff about RW itself mixed with more general skeptical interest. So far it's getting about 150 hits/day, which is not terrible starting from zero. I've also got the keys to @rationalwiki, for further social media delight.

So far, doing the blog feels like NaNoWriMo, or thirty things in thirty days. Thankfully I've actually talked other editors into writing a bit.

LW aims to raise the sanity waterline. But to extend the metaphor, sanity's waterways include quite a few alligator-laden swamps, and toxic waste spills in need of cleanup. I'd like RW to be good at that.

Working on an iOS (and hopefully Android) game based on the dual n-back task. I'm about a week and a half in and I'm still evaluating frameworks, but over the last 3 days I've built a working proof of concept in the Sparrow Framework which is iOS only. Over the next few days I'm going to port the proof of concept to cocos2d-x and make a final determination on technology by the end of the week.

PM me if you're interested in beta testing. I expect to have a playable and hopefully fun prototype (about 75% feature-complete) in about 3 weeks.

For some context, this is not an idle side project: I recently quit my job at a large game company to pursue this project, and I have several years' experience in the industry. I will be working solo and full-time on the game at least for the next 3-4 months, which is about how long I expect development to take to the point of completion. I plan on outsourcing the music — if you have any suggestions in this area, suggest away! I am well aware of the planning fallacy and Hofstadter's law, so feel free to take my estimates with a grain of salt, but please note that I do have experience estimating the cost of software projects and I think I am reasonably well-calibrated in this area.

Also, this is not just another Jaeggi or Brain Workshop clone; I am aiming for super-tight gameplay and mainstream appeal.

Previously.

The paper has been finished, and has been submitted to a journal. Now I'm working on four new projects, more or less concurrently:

1. An extension of the previous result a more complicated (and hopefully more realistic) model.
2. A technical result in a related area, for a different kind of tomography.
3. A completely unrelated theory involving scattering on orbifolds.
4. Some numerical results for the previous article and (eventually) number one.

The boyfriend and I are still together, and I'm planning on moving in with him in July, if all goes well.

My main project right now is applying everything I learned at the CFAR workshop. The most visible thing so far is that I have a reasonably functional GTD system now (RTM + blocking time to go through RTM by tag with Google Calendar + Boomerang for very time-specific things). Using this, I have:

• Started going to the gym (also used a social commitment mechanism for this)
• Started an OkCupid account
• Contacted 80,000 Hours
• Processed the CFAR workbook into Workflowy
• Started on my friendly AI reading list

I also have RTM tasks that will get me started on applying the rest of what I learned.

Previously on Battlestar Galactica. I found out that everyone else in the galaxy cluster biz was doing linear regression all wrong, so I had to write up how to do it correctly and then apply my method to some new data. I wrote the paper and it'll be submitted soon. In other news, JAGS is really neat.

Now I'm applying for summer research gigs.

Since December, I've been persuing a "remedial computer science education", for the sake of both well-roundedness and employability. My background is in the purest of pure math (Ph. Dropout from a well-ranked program), so I feel I can move fairly quickly here, though the territory is new.

My biggest milestone to date has been solving the first 100 Project Euler problems in Python (no omissions!). I had had a bit of Python experience before, and I picked 100 as the smallest number that sounded impressive (to me).

Second biggest milestone: following a course outline, I wrote an interpreter for a very limited subset of Scheme/Racket. This really helped de-mystify programming languages for me. (Although rather than learn OCaML like the course wanted, I just hacked it together in Python so that I could move on to a new project sooner.)

In the same vein, I'm currently reading and working through SICP, still using Racket. I'm in Chapter 3 of 5, though I'm often peeking ahead to Chapter 4 because it looks pretty exciting.

Of course, I won't be a true LISP wizard without understanding macros, so the next (or concurrent) project is to go through the relevant Racket Docs tutorial.

I have some other likely future projects in mind, though I'm actually trying not to plan too far ahead lest it all appear more daunting.

• Forcing myself through some C, to build character. This was explicitly recommended by a software engineer friend as a more "useful" way to spend my time than learning to LISP.
• An algorithms course, possibly using this book

It turns out that I'm not very good at doing personal projects when I have a job. In order of most-recently-done-anything-on:

• I'm writing up a solution to the shooting room paradox. I've been doing this for about a month. Currently in "proofreading and latexing" stage.

• I wrote a debugging tool which I've found useful a couple of times at work, but haven't been successful at getting feedback on. Realistically, there's a good chance that I won't touch it again until I need it to do something that it can't yet.

• This has been pushed aside by the shooting room, but I've been working through PT:TLOS and typing up solutions to the exercises.

Maia and I have been working on a chore market for our house, and we just started using it. People bid how much they want to be paid (in points) to do a chore, and when the auction closes everyone is taxed to pay for it. If you go into debt, you're forced to bid on chores. This is the closest thing to a "major software project" I've ever done, so it's pretty nice to see my baby actually sort of working.

It's on Github if you're interested, but it's pretty buggy at the moment and not well documented, so user beware.

I am (being new here) working through the sequences. I do this because I've immediately recognized upon reading many of the responses here that I lack the internal machinery, and certainly the language, to even foster discussion of what I do and believe, and why. The goal would be to get through all of the major and minor sequences, which seems like quite the low bar, except that I work a reasonable amount of hours throughout the week, and suffer a good deal of lethargy over not spending enough mental effort on reading new things already. On that note, the major portion of this project is recreating the ability to focus on material for longer periods of time without feeling like my brain needs to shut off after using some of its energy for work activities. While work is, intellectually, hard work it is of a tried and old sort for me that allows for lethargy without a decrease in quality, a feature I would expect of most jobs.

• Coursera's Data Analysis (basically applied R); it's going well so far.
• my second (blinded, standardized doses upon awakening) potassium self-experiment is nearing completion; my subjective estimate is that there is still some damage to my sleep. Another longer-term self-experiment should also finish in February, but I'm not sure whether I will discuss it publicly.
• working on another big expansion of my hafu database; I discovered that it's actually pretty trivial to scrape the HTML into an R data frame and manipulate, so I can finally see what the data looks like, but I also noticed that some of the data was messy or wrong and that I had omitted hair & eye color. This motivated me to clean it up and spend 2 days adding that data, and soon I'll start looking for entries from my last source of leads. Then I can finally write up an analysis and have something to show for all my time.

I'm working on an algorithmic music system. The (likely unachievable) goal is to make a generative clone of my own creative process. It's a kind of catharsis, bringing every unspeakable intuition bubbling up to the surface to be translated into a hierarchy of computational processes. Lots of trial and error, red herrings, and accidental success. My short-term goal is to be able to co-perform with it live in an entirely improvised manner, maybe by the end of 2013.

The current focus is 'groove', and it's been a nightmare trying to find a common thread between dissimilar patterns that sound good. If anyone know of any good papers on the subject, please share! I'm just going to throw some boltzmann machines at the problem before moving on to something else.

Other than that, just some Coursera classes, finalizing a DIY 16 bit MIDI->CV DAC, and transcribing a really good flamenco record.

Studying for the Level 2 (of 3) Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam in early June.

In addition to hopefully getting a valuable credential, I'm learning about finance stuff.

Still in the planning stages regarding an article about the fair value of internal non-traded liabilities such as bank deposit liabilities. I'm hoping to show that a temporal dimension can be added to the concept of (wealth) utility in a consistent way.

This is a follow up to the last time I posted in a WAYWO thread.

A little over a year ago, I started working on a code searching tool in my spare time. It's been more successful than I ever thought it would be. The GitHub repo has more watchers than Ack, the project I set out to imitate. I learned a lot about optimizing, profiling, benchmarking, and using pthreads.

It's also had a nice side-benefit: random people online recognize me.

Playing around with search-space heuristics for more efficiently approximating S-induction.

Which actually sounds a lot more impressive than the actual thing itself, which mostly consists of reading wikipedia articles on information theory, then writing Python code that writes brainfuck (decent universal language).

EDIT: Also writing a novel, which is languishing at about the 20,000 word mark, and developing an indie videogame parody of Pokemon. Engine is basically done, getting started on content creation.

I wrote a task manager (to-do manager) for myself on January 1, and have been growing it since then. The user interface is inspired by Taskwarrior, but I use an sqllite backend, and therefore it's 300 lines of Python instead of 30k of C++. The small size allows me to be flexible in testing various ideas I have around task management - a new feature is usually just one or two SQL queries away.

My most promising exploration has been to not accept any tasks to be older than 2 weeks. If I haven't managed to do it by then, there's something wrong - it's ill formulated, or there's some unsatisfied dependency that I'm not clear about, or I don't really intend to do it. I've developed a check list to go through to collect some stats about why tasks get to that point, with the intent to recognize them earlier.

One of my major failure modes seems to be to totally overestimate my capacity to deal with people the longer I think into the future - I'm totally sure I'll be able to confront my landlord in a week, but not today. Much worse than the usual discounting happening all the time.

Still doing well at GJP - my major recent achievement is that I'm no longer just at the top of my team's scoreboard; my score is better than the median score of any other team.

I'm talking about this at various software development related conferences, because it strikes me that the mere fact that it's possible to improve markedly at forecasting is well worth sharing. I start by encouraging folks to experience how badly calibrated we are without special training. A basic estimation exercise gets the point across well enough. I then move on to various ways practice makes perfect: PredictionBook, GJP, personal experiments, etc.

(I'm aware of Eliezer's reservations about mentioning calibration and overconfidence without proper warning. My experience so far has been that the experiential approach, where people first experience how far off the mark their feeling of "90% certain" is, doesn't seem to turn them into "sophisticated arguers". This could be selection bias - so far I've offered this talk in small gatherings of relatively sane people I already know. I'll be on the lookout for warning signs in larger conferences.)

Promoting the works of Dora Marsden (1882 – 1960). Egoist, freewoman, suffragette, author. Two Kindle books and one weekly blog of quotes. These are the first published compilations of her essays. Read about her from me or from elsewhere, but read about her.

Other resources for Dora:

• Wikipedia

• Spartacus Educational

• The Arrest of Dora Marsden - an electrifying image.

This is what I was working on last time. Next time, I assure you, something different and equally grand.

• Preparing for my oral exams to advance to candidacy

• Messing around in GameMaker to prototype lots of different ideas (I currently have a prototype of a game where you use matrices to defend yourself against vectors)

• I signed up for CodeAcademy with the intent of starting to dive in next week because my two usual free nights I had to work late this week. I would appreciate some external pressure to actually diving in by the time Monday rolls around.

• Running a tabletop pokemon game which is a lot more serious that previous tabletop games I've run. I'm looking forward to the increased philosophical influence over my players. >:3

• Looking for more ways to fill my time that, in the future, I will wish that I had done at this point.