What are you working on? February 2012

Still working on hypnosis

I picked up python and wrote a program that goes onto the internet and hypnotizes people, so I can throw some real empiricism at the problem now.

It's really paying off now that I can do things like go snorkling with my girlfriend who had been terrified of the ocean for her whole life, and snap my fingers and make people stop craving sugar :)

I've writing up my thoughts as I go on my blog

Dating: The girl from my previous post cancelled on me 30 minutes before we were going to meet. Then the next week she invited me out to lunch and cancelled again, an hour out. So I guess she didn't actually like me.

Then I went on a blind date with FOAF and that went OK. I took her out again but there was just no romantic chemistry, so it was a couple of nice times but that was the end of that.

I've been trying to get better at reading the subtext of social interactions to tell when someone is interested. I noticed that a single friend had been getting touchy with me when she hadn't been before, calling me by a cute new nickname, getting flustered when I teased her, etc. So when she offered to make me a dinner I decided it was worth taking a chance, toward the end of the night I held her hand...and she DID NOT like it. Unambiguous (but friendly) rejection. Confirmation bias on my part, I suppose.

So still failing. Still working hard to improve.

I'm beginning to suspect that there's a big difference between the way I see myself and the way others see me, i.e., I'm actually unattractive to most women. This is a hard pill to swallow, but if it's true, then I want to believe it's true.

So here's what I'll be doing over the next two months:

1. Improve appearance as much as possible. Get shirts tailored, start lifting, whiten teeth.

2. Work on empathy. Imitate the gestures of whoever's speaking. Dedicate time to thinking about others when they're not around: "I wonder what he's doing right now?", "I wonder what she thinks about that?"

3. Meet lots of people. Start more conversations with strangers. Go to some of the tech meetups in the city and mingle. Go to some cooking classes. Keep notes and review them.

This is gradually becoming the hardest thing I've ever done. Hopefully that will make it all the more rewarding when it finally works out!

I am currently trying to become really socially effective. During the next 8 months I plan to:

• Take voice coaching *
• Take a public presentation class at my University *
• Join debate club *
• Join toastmasters *
• Get a telemarketing job
• Get a door-to-door sales job
• Become a competent pick-up-artist
• Take an improv acting class

"*" means I'm currently doing this activity.

The loved one is working on a novel. It turns out that "I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp" (W. Somerset Maugham) is a good way to get a lot of first draft turned out. Inspired by this, I've been attempting to write something vaguely song-shaped every day for a month. Doesn't have to even be any good at all, it just has to be an actual thing. I've missed two days in the past couple of weeks, but am attempting to keep at it. When I have thirty days down I'll probably put all thirty days up as an mp3.

I've also submitted two pieces for the Homestuck album competition: "Salmon" (Feferi Peixes) and "Kingdom" (Eridan Ampora). I doubt they'll get anywhere, but it provoked me to get them into some sort of finished form.

At work, we have until the end of this month to move all our live sites from the old Solaris SPARC servers to a new bunch of hosted Ubuntu VMs. (Our stuff is Java webapps running in Tomcat, so this is not at all difficult conceptually.) So I've spent the last couple of months making as absolutely as much as possible deployable in a completely automated fashion - automating everything I've done by hand for ages, and actually defining all the accumulated cruft (magical symlinks, etc.) the apps rely on. Since we use ant for builds, I've been using that. Even with ant-contrib mixed in, it's like playing with an esoteric programming language whose particular conceit is requiring all code to be correctly-formed XML. As such, I've evolved a new law of the universe:

If your hammer is Turing-complete, you will one day have to use it as a screwdriver, spanner, soda siphon and nail.

or:

Every Turing-complete domain-specific language evolves into brainfuck.

It's the largest useful piece of coding I've ever done. Even as a non-coder I think the code is horrible, but the spaghetti is mostly concealed behind not-very-horrible targets and macrodefs, and working to the rule "get the data format right and the code will follow obviously" is giving good results. And - and this is the important thing - it actually works. Everything I've been doing is directly useful. The eventual goal is to have the ant-based deploy automation controlled by Puppet, and be able to say "Puppet, go install an instance of that app over on that node, taking care of all the little details." "Righty-ho!" (done)

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I'm working on a site that lets people map the logical relations between ideas in a massively collaborative environment.

My background is web development (I run the site songlyrics.com) and philosophy (I'm in a MA program at UChicago doing philosophy of language, logic, and epistemology).

The project is currently just shy of a working prototype. The idea is to do things differently than sites like debategraph.org, where arguments are organized hierarchically. We want to simply have propositions, and logical relations between propositions. Our aim to develop a single contiguous map of ideas. A graph rather than a hierarchy. If anyone's interested in hearing more, let me know.

Side question, does anyone have any data on how big the community is here at LW? I'm applying for a social business competition and I consider the users of this site to be squarely positioned within my target audience.

I'm putting the finishing touches to my program that converts EU3 - Divine Wind saves into Victoria 2 saves.

The substantial amount of mathematics related posts has encouraged me to emerge from lurker status and post my own 'project'.

I have spent the last 5 months recording every minute of rigorous mathematical practice here in an attempt to test the limits of my modest intellect. I used a stopwatch and paper for the first couple of months, but I have now graduated to Emacs and org-mode (and to tracking all of my time, out of pure curiosity - I like knowing that every aspect of my life is searchable. It frees a (possibly imagined) mental burden).

A (long) background for whoever is interested: I've never been very good at math, and I struggled throughout all of my high school math classes. Toward the end of high school, however, I became absolutely enraptured with something about mathematics, something that I can't really put into words. It's been a kind of a curse, to be honest. I feel like Paul Erdos without any semblance of mathematical intuition; maybe close to how he felt for that week of no amphetamines.

So I spent the summer after senior year with my nose in every math textbook I could find. I have huge piles of paper filled with exercises from Apostol, Rudin, Munkres, that I spent upwards of 10 hours a day on. But it didn't help much... I went to university, took a fairly heavy, but not impossible courseload, and didn't do so well. Not horrible, but definitely not what you would expect from someone who spent every waking moment on this stuff. Same thing happened the next semester.

I breezed through an Analysis course last summer, and that gave me some confidence. It also prompted me to figure out exactly why this was happening to me... Is there something fundamental I am missing? What can I do about it?

So I took another heavy courseload for the fall semester, but this time I decided to track every moment of really vigorous, concentrated practice - no light reading, leisurely thoughts, a skim through a couple chapters; but actual, no bullshit, rigorous mind work. The kind where you get tired after 15 minutes. Lectures were the most brutal - I made it my goal to get ahead of the professor, to ask every single dumbass question that I honestly could not think of the answer to, and even attempted to completely re synthesize as many proofs as possible when there was any downtime. And I recorded it all.

It didn't help. I spent an average (I think) of 40 hours a week on this kind of work. The rest was 'regular' work - mostly math related (I did play skyrim for a bit, but didn't get very far), but not quite so intense. I got three B's and one A-. Disappointing.

Well, here I am now. No happy ending (yet). I took a much needed break for the winter as a test to see whether I was just running on steam. Definitely not the case. By the end of the month, I was itching to get back.

So what have I learned? I don't know. I'd like to blame it on exams - I do very well on the homework, but I can't seem to get in the right mindset for solving problems in such a small window of time, and they practically count for your entire grade. But exams DO test your understanding... perhaps I haven't understood anything deep enough yet.

If you read all this... thanks! I haven't shared this with anyone, and it feels like I'm letting out a dark secret.

Last note: I have almost no problems whatsoever with akrasia. Not sure why... but I would gladly trade it for a modicum of the deeply inspirational intelligence I see here.

Trying to port my personal anti-akrasia technique (based on raising the activity-switching threshold) from the office to home setting.

I'm working on getting my warrior to level 85. I'm up to level 62 already, which is pretty good for about 28 hours put into it. I wanted a warrior to replace my Death Knight main because tanking as DK is getting its theme wrecked over time, block from shield is a much better mechanic than 2-handed tanking, and we have too many people rolling on the same token in my guild, along with another DK in the 10-man group. Once I'm 85, I can start on heroics and eventually Looking For Raid, which will be the first time I've done LFR on any of my characters.

I'm also working on getting 3 stars on every Angry Birds level, trying to max out my distance on Jetpack Joyride (currently in the top 600), and trying to get through all the fiction currently stored on my Kindle.

I am painfully slowly finishing my textbook on high-school computer science. The text is ready, only the pictures are missing, but there are still many pictures missing. If I write a book next time, I will always make sketches of pictures while writing, so that I don't have to decipher my notes months later.

Why am I doing this? Mostly for signalling. The textbook market in Slovakia is heavily regulated -- only the textbooks written for government contract can be used in schools, and the terms of contract are very bad for authors. This is why (updates for) many textbooks are missing for decades, because there is no volunteer to write them. Unfortunately, this policy will probably not change soon, so I decided to do it. My expected gains: First, writing a non-fiction book was always my dream, so I don't mind not getting much money for the first one. Second, if I write some books later, I could use this textbook as an advertising.

I also started writing a simple computer game. When it is ready, I will write blog articles about making the game. Then I will do the same with a bit more complex game, etc. Expected gain: signalling and adsense income. If the project is successful, I could later publish it as a book.

A long term goal (to which both these activities contribute) is to be a writer, not a code monkey. Expected gains: independence, time flexibility, more pleasant work. Main hindrance: heavy akrasia.

For the past week, I've been experimenting with a morning and night ritual when I wake up and before I go to bed.

The morning ritual consists of an affirmation about winning, a recitation of the heuristics I'm currently trying to get myself to employ (things like flipping a coin when my options are close enough in utility to make thinking too hard about it a waste of time and energy, checking my to-do list as soon as I walk through the door, or not putting off necessities like sleep and food for "just a minute while I finish this..".), and a brainstorming session. I finish by repeating the winning affirmation. The idea here is to get myself into the right mindset to tackle the day and keep the tools for doing so on the brain.

The bedtime ritual consists of me listing what happened that day with minimal commentary, reviewing my morning idea list, scheduling any ideas that warrant further thinking about or doing, and a declaration that the day is over and that I can do better tomorrow, starting with a good night's sleep. I also stuck a "Cthulhu fhtagen" at the end of it because it seemed to lack a cool note of finality. The idea here is I suck at remembering things as they actually happened, and all my self-reflection about today's mistakes and plans for tomorrow need to be acknowledged or I'll be up all night worrying about whether I'll forget everything by morning. I plan to review these lists weekly, starting today.

I'm not allowing myself to alter these rituals more than every two weeks, so it has some consistency.

How it's going: I feel like I've been considerably more effective. I do remember the first few heuristics more often in the situations when I need them. I also notice when I FAIL to use them a lot more, both right after the fact and during the daily review. I've gotten more things accomplished each day (smaller tasks especially, so I probably need to work on granularizing my bigger projects) and noticed several little slots of usable time that previously seemed to blend into big blocks of "Morning","Work", and "Evening". I'm sure it helps that I haven't touched fanfiction.net at all this week. Some of the heuristics in the morning ritual are poorly defined and so harder to implement than I'd realized.

The no-modifying stipulation is killing me. I know that tinkering with these every few days like I want to takes away from the overall ritual effect and stops me from being able to accumulate long-term information on what does and doesn't work, but I keep wanting to do it anyways. This new version was bound to have some bugs that obviously need fixing from the first run, but I'm trying to break my habit of ignoring my own rules as soon as they get a little inconvenient.

I notice I've been getting up early since I started clearing my head of loose ends before bed. I'm not sure what's up with that. I actually started timing my rituals the last two days and realized that I could not have sustained this new habit if that wasn't true, because my current versions take around 45 minutes to get through.

Ideas from the morning's brainstorm get a significant delay in implementation, which was in part by design so I don't start 75 different half-baked schemes that sounded good at the time I thought of them. I schedule anything obviously time-sensitive right away. But the delay till reviewing it, then another delay till morning to start on it still irritates me. I wonder if there isn't a better way of doing it.

I am pondering the usefulness of neodymium magnets. What could be another cool use of them. Or the usage already known, but not very widely?

For one, I like the so called "neodymium magnets fishing", where people attache a strong magnet on one end of a rope and fish for iron objects in the river or lakes nearby. You can see on youtube what do they catch. I could do it in the lake Bled several miles from here, where a lot of Bronze and Iron Age artifacts have already been found by divers. Many haven't, I suspect, so I could hunt from the lake shore or from a boat.

Or I could go a little south to the river Ljubljanica, where the underwater archaeology has a long history and underwater archaeologists have filled several museums already with the stuff fallen there in the last 3000 years. I could fish for Roman swords from any bridge above. Of course, I would catch a lot more bicycles and other modern garbage, but I might get lucky, too.

I might fish on a field as well, to catch an iron meteorite lying there for ages without being noticed. With this magnet on a short rope behind me, walking across the field whole day.

Well, I could just attach many of those magnets to farmers tractors (plows) running around. The deal with farmers could be beneficiary for them and for me. It is not necessary that they catch something valuable. A nail would be good, be cause a cow will not swallow that one. That's another use of the neodiums.

What are your ideas? You don't need to tell, just have one and do something (lucrative).

Inspired mostly by Tom Fiore's presentation in his excellent Music and Mathematics writing (found via John Baez from week 234 of TWFIMP), I am trying to understand the extent to which group theory can be used to analyze music. I've narrowed my sights at the moment to trying to understand the so-called ice cream changes (see also here), which is analyzed briefly on page 28 of Fiore's writing above. Since I don't know music theory or group theory very well, I'm picking up what I need as I go along. The next thing I'm trying to understand is centralizers, specifically in the context of the T/I and PLR groups.

I also recently spent time setting up Overtone, a music programming environment for Clojure. This is the best means I have for producing musical sounds at the moment, and I also find a programmatic environment to be pretty convenient for generating transpositions/inversions/other transforms of chords and sequences. It helps that I'm already familiar with Clojure.

Procrastinating on writing up a decision theory post (which is about 1.5 months late now) and figuring out what's relevant for agents with provability oracles to be able to solve PD, by instead mostly studying math.

• Creating Anki cards for all the bolded words in Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. (I will post a link on LW when this is done.)
• Trying to level up in writing ability by writing some short stories and some blog post-style intuitive explanations of computer science concepts.
• Trying to level up in Python programming by doing the examples in "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp" in Python. (A few years ago I picked up PAIP and learned Common Lisp from it, but from what I've heard Lisp is pretty much useless in the "real world," so I want to get better at more popular high-level languages; the only other ones I am competent at are Java and some .NET stuff. But I do enjoy AI programming, and PAIP is a great book.)
• Rearranging my schedule to make myself more productive. I've known for a while that procrastination is a problem for me, but I haven't started figuring out what to do about it until recently.

A proof copy of the dead tree version of my novel Summons is in the mail to me. If that works out, I'm going to buy seven to give as gifts and six more to sell to people who say they want them signed. (If you want a signed one let me know - it's $10 list price plus a bubble mailer plus media mail shipping from me to you.) Silver should be done in about a month and a half and then that'll be available in dead tree or typeset ebook too.

• I'm still working on my blog series about the cogsci of humour, based heavily on Dennett's Inside Jokes, with some contributions from my virtual meetup group. I estimate that I'm about halfway through the series, but have had to go on hiatus while I do school-related stuff. I'm hoping really hard that I'll have enough spare time during spring break to re-read the relevant bits of the book so that I can write up the rest. Link is here.

• Trying to extend my research project from last semester to new domains, while juggling an ambitious course load.

So the result I was working on previously is done -- four or five weeks after I finished writing my proposal. Suck it, planning fallacy. Today and tomorrow I'm going to work on writing it up carefully.

The new direction my project is taking is to get some quantitative idea of when exactly the result will hold. It's one of those things where we know it will hold for small epsilon, but that's useless to everyone unless we know how small epsilon needs to be. Given my schedule and teaching responsibilities this semester, I imagine I'll make reasonable amounts of progress before the end of the month.

For summer, I still need to apply to various summer schools and conferences.

I'm still thinking about continuous-time causal models, but I'm no longer convinced that I have the right definitions for things. The phase space treatment I gave in an earlier discussion thread really does only make sense if the paths have well-defined derivatives everywhere, and not just outside a set of measure zero. If they have well-defined derivatives everywhere, then the process is no longer Markov.

I'd like to have a second post written by the end of the month, but this project has to take lower priority to my research.

Getting up to speed on C++11 after 10 years of steering clear of C++, now that they finally came out with the standard. Writing a roguelike game from scratch in modern C++ and looking for ways to express complex game logic in as readable and maintainable code as possible using various tricks and idioms.

I still haven't found the settings panel in my head that lets me switch the focus of obsessive tinkering into something other than game programming.

I've been lurking for some time but finally cannot resist posting in this thread. I've been working alone for some time now on an education startup. It's basically a website with math notes and questions for students. I've noticed that educational software hasn't really changed much over the last 2 decades. I could really really use some proper critism/feedback. Link (only works properly on Firefox for now). Feedback

How would you have done it? What probability do you give it of succeeding? How should I proceed? Thanks!

Studying neuroscience! Specifically going through Molecular Neuropharmacology: A Foundation for Clinical Neuroscience, which does a deep dive into different neurotransmitters and receptors among other things. Creating Anki cards as I go. I'm working on this for a bunch of reasons including hopes that it will help build a foundation I can use for letting me reduce mental properties people talk about down to neuroshit. More idealistically: it seems that almost no one in history has known what they actually are and that knowing this will (in some unknown way) positively change my life.

I have a math class where I get to work on anything I want. I'm currently researching ways to approximate Solomonoff Induction. I'll need to use some subset of the recursively enumerable function so that it's computable. Recently I found total functional programming as a way to accomplish this.

I've been working on anti-akrasia software. Currently it allows a person to log their daily activities, and assess how 'productive' they have been each day.

What I envision is a program with a modular facility: people can suggest and code modules providing anti-akrasia techniques.

A user would configure the program: my goals are X and Y and the anti-akrasia techniques I am using are A, B and C. Then the user would operate the program for a few days logging their daily activities, including how much closer towards their goals this takes them.

A user could then analyse the success of different techniques, with the software doing the heavy-lifting (i.e. applying bayes to suggest how much the user should believe that a certain technique is effective in helping them achieve their goals). Based on this information, the user would reconfigure the software, varying their goals or changing which techniques they are using.

If the user was willing, anonymous data could be collected to provide wider information on what techniques work and for what kinds of goals.

Any people capable of coding would be able to submit (a) modules for anti-akrasia techniques and (b) modules for analysing the data.

Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated!

One of my side projects is attempting to categorize all of the trade-offs that decision-makers in our universe face. As of a literature search in June 2010, I could find no good system to classify trade-offs, even though (and perhaps because) this is a topic that cuts across many disciplines (see Wikipedia). My main goal in doing this is to attempt to parse out the parameter space so that people can share insights across fields, although I have other goals as well.

The simplest example is probably speed vs accuracy. This comes up all the time in computer science, it comes up in athletics, it comes up in molecular biology (e.g., DNA polymerase is more accurate, RNA polymerase is faster); it comes up, as far as I can tell, pretty much everywhere it could come up. Once we know this, can we say how people or agents have tended to solve this problem, and apply those same sorts of solutions to our own decisions where we must make a trade-off between speed and accuracy? My working hypothesis is that this will be the case.

If you have any ideas or interest, please let me know.

Well, inspired by teaching a class on interference recently, I'm writing a program that will output pieces of music that hopefully sound like interfering waves.

Motivation/anti-procrastination life hacking research. Specifically, ironing out what specific things I can do to procrastinate less, and making them as easy to do as possible. Research is basically done, just working on implementing what I've found out. Pretty successful so far!

Understand Keith Stanovich's taxonomy of thinking problems, such as in Rationality and the Reflective Mind, to organize all my debiasing/rationality-increasing projects. Motivation for this is two-fold: One, it's helping me get up to speed on the dual-process literature, and two it's helping me understand where our rationality goes wrong.

I am running an Ms Paint Adventures inspired adventure in their forum so far with some light rationality themes: Blockstuck.

I am also giving thought to designing a lazy-evaluated LISP derivative with CAS features, DSL for assembler JIT, category theoretical constructs, innocations in type systems, etc. So far not much in terms of code, since I lack a good language to implement it in. C++ has load of libraries but no GC, D has good GC but lacks libraries.

I've been working on a personal organisation web-app. Partly because it's fun, partly because hopefully it'll get to stage of being useful. Currently all data is basically private to each user (I have the only user account, though now that it's online it is open to new users). Features right now are calendars and diaries, with users being able create multiple iterations of each for whatever differing purposes.

One planned feature is the ability to have dialogues with oneself, (Alicorn's Luminosity Elspeth-style) between 1-8ish other named personalities / selves / sides. The idea is that you can talk to yourself in different styles or with different opinions, so that you can evaluate more precisely any internal conflicts, be they between values or ideas or choices. Then if you feel the conflict come up again you can check the log rather than worry about it all over again, maybe with additional insights the next times.

Very reluctantly posting link: http://buytherooftop.com/yourder/ (because it's only slightly of use to me at the minute, although I anticipate making it more so).

I made it because I didn't see anything similar on the web. I'm hoping to add a few other more complex things to it (like full hierarchical task / goal management systems) but those will wait for a while.

I may post about other personal projects, but this was the most obviously relevant.

Too many things.

I have my RA project, my project class project, 2 online classes through Stanford, 3 non-online classes, and then the things I'd like to do. It cashes out as 70-80 hours of work a week if I do as much as I should for everything.

I think my project for this week is trying to schedule everything effectively, and (relatedly) work on motivation management techniques to make sure that work is being done ahead of time instead of behind schedule. It's easy for me to crunch and finish everything that needs to be done today, at the cost of taking tomorrow off- which, if I haven't budgeted for that, will then put me behind, and things snowball. So I want to make sure that doesn't happen.

The worst thing about it is that everything is simultaneous. I think I would be fine pulling 60 hour weeks working on one thing until it's done, then moving onto the next one, but having many different things that each want 10 hours a week is rough.

Does it count if I'm probably not going to make progress on it for a while? I never feel like I have time at school.