Tony is a Geek

"If we want to scale to more complex behaviour, we need to do better with less data, and we need to generalise more."(*1) During the 2015-2019 period, it was all about "AI is going to change the world", "AI is awesome, look at the amazing things it can do", "jump on the AI band-wagon".....etc...etc...etc... I worked on many a project during this time period and I often found myself sitting back (the ability to do that was a rare occasion, I can tell you) and asking, "Where is the AI in this solution?". Everyone else, the project stakeholders, executives, Data Scientists ( I still have beef with that job title, but I'll leave that for another day ) were all strutting around dropping the "AI" word and I just couldn't see it.  Yes, we had a few isolated "smart" bits, but they were just algorithms triggered by good old fashioned code on certain events that made life a bit easier / quicker for the end user -...

Unfortunately, it's not my GardenBot, because I've been too frikkin busy doing stupid work for Finance companies instead of revolutionising the Farming industry!!!! Seriously, if I had the ability to have spent the past 3 years doing what I wanted to do...and that was to basically make a large scale robot that could do gardening and then venture into full scale farming, then it would have been myself going up for the $15m funding to get robots out there doing farming tasks, using AI / ML technologies to help. Sigh.  okay, I suppose I could have done it, I could have quit IBM, I could have gambled all for the venture, but you know, mortgages and such like get in the way.... https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/industrial-robots/your-next-salad-could-be-grown-by-a-robot?fbclid=IwAR3HOyePl5_aA5vZScLavPbIMTBBvxED-4Tm-pARRgnMk_z0COyRK6beNqo https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/industrial-robots/your-next-salad-could-be-grown-by-a-robot?fbclid=IwAR3HOyePl5_aA5vZScLavPbIMTBBv...

Keep an eye out for how this pans out..... yep, Russia built their own internet.  Can't blame them really, if you think about how it was originally designed, how/where traffic goes through, how prone to reliance on other servers in other countries, it does make you wonder why they didn't do something like it sooner. Interesting article here and here and here one quote to keep in mind:  " It’s hard to object to the idea of a robust “sovereign internet” should such a thing become necessary, but it’s hard not to think of it as preparation for conflict to come rather than simple investment in national infrastructure. That said, what exactly Runet will grow to be and how it will be used are still a matter of speculation until we receive more specific reports of its capabilities and intended purposes. "

Found this video this morning and it made me smile.  It resonates close to my view of the world too.  Apologies upfront, if I become an old man and wander off telling you a much longer story linking into the theme so you can get context of what I'm trying to explain.  Apparently, I've hit "that age"... I recall being taught MODULA-2 , PASCAL and then C back in the 1988-1992 period of time. Maybe I just missed those classes at University in late 1992/1993 when they started to talk about C++, I didn't get it, the fact I can still remember the pain of having to try and write a shed load of code to draw a Christmas tree on the screen, with baubles (circles) and the tree structure (triangles) all doing tons of code to setup a structure for object-orientation just for the sake of it. My view, every 10 lines of code you write you introduce a bug of some sort.  You've written 100 lines for a Christmas tree in C++... I even remember getting so annoyed I re-wrot...

first, you'll have nodejs already installed and npm v5.2+ installed so you have npx installed too. next, go to the following github repo to follow the instructions:   https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app on a Mac, from a terminal window type: $ mkdir CODE $ cd CODE $ npx create-react-app my-app npx: installed 91 in 108.154s Creating a new React app in /Users/tony/Documents/IBM/GBS/LAND AI/CODE/my-app . Installing packages. This might take a couple of minutes. Installing react , react-dom , and react-scripts ... yarn add v1.19.1 [1/4] 🔍   Resolving packages... [2/4] 🚚   Fetching packages... [3/4] 🔗   Linking dependencies... warning "react-scripts > @typescript-eslint/eslint-plugin > tsutils@3.17.1" has unmet peer dependency "typescript@>=2.8.0 || >= 3.2.0-dev || >= 3.3.0-dev || >= 3.4.0-dev || >= 3.5.0-dev || >= 3.6.0-dev || >= 3.6.0-beta || >= 3.7.0-dev || >= 3.7.0-beta". [4/4] ...

AI finds a glyph all on it's own...and it's pretty funky!  I want this as my Bluepages image to see if anyone notices :-) and here's the video.  IBM research use AI tech to scan Nazca lines in Peru and find 143 new ones (not saying they are all ancient, but pretty impressive). I was literally talking to my missus about something like this a few weeks back when we were thinking about how we could use AI to search for things.  I was thinking the surface of the moon or the oceans but hey - this is just as good!

Okay, no monarchs have died and I'm not a king nor do I work for one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_king_is_dead,_long_live_the_king! but, I've officially moved around within IBM...again.  Well, IBM is big enough to have such a vast array of interesting things going on that you really don't need to leave it and work for other companies to get access to more interesting technologies. So what am I doing?  Well....the same as I have been for the past 5-6 years!  But this time, I'm not the geeky specialist kept in a basement ( or customers basement ) working on things that I cannot tell you about.  I'm now being brought out into the light, working for GBS ( shock!horror! as far back as anyone can remember, no Lab Services employee has EVER moved from Lab Services to GBS before, ever...I like a challenge! ).  Therefore, I'm going to have to get more exposure to the outside world and the outside world is going to get more exposure to me. Most people know...

So, after having a bit of an issue a few weeks back concerning my own hearing, I started to look into the technology of "old people".  Well, that's a bit of a stereotype, it's not just old people who need hearing aids, it's all ranges of people.  It wasn't until I suffered from temporary hearing loss, that I really appreciated the value of hearing.  Sound a bit odd that, but try it someday.  I don't mean just sticking your fingers in your ears for a bit, or shoving earplugs in, that's not the same as "no sound".  It's freaky.  anyway, it got me thinking.  If my hearing does deteriorate in the near future, what am I going to do about it? I've seen the usual big hearing aids that you clip on your ears and have a little bud that you plug in, these apparently are very good, but very expensive and they have trouble focusing... I mean that in the sense that, if you have a person talking to you in front of you and a car drives past, the he...

Why take life so seriously? I actually think this is: 1) quite amusing 2) not that much of a waste of time 3) something I might do to the Lil'van - just for cuteness okay, okay, it's simple.  you have a motor that moves left and right for your windscreen wipers, it's a motor, you have controllers for motors that you can then write code to control them with.  I didn't say it was rocket science....and it'll probably end up burning out the wiper motor, but, hey, they're not that expensive (yay! go recycling activists) and if you can find old/abandoned wiper motors to use even better. On a different note: I'm still very keen to get around to my FarmerBot system.  Next year I really want to have the greenhouse all setup and automated - along with some lovely Machine Learning going on so some lessons can be learnt.  ie. I don't want to just read some sensors and have a hardcoded rule that states, if variable X == y and variable Z IN[1,2,3,4,5]...