Month: January 2024

Have you heard that old saying? It has quite a rep:
“A journey of ten thousand miles begins with one step.”
But I have since learned the truth, after difficult trials:
“A journey of one step begins with ten thousand miles.”

I realized today that two of my favorite songs, White Christmas and California Dreaming, are exactly the opposite of each other. One sings of longing for the lovely snowy Northeast winter, and the other is sung from the point of view of someone stuck in freezing weather and longing for the warm sunny shores of Los Angeles.

Knowing that Irving Berlin wrote White Christmas while stuck in LA one winter helps to underline the point. And of course, John and Michelle Phillips wrote California dreaming while stuck in the cold northeast.

I wonder how many other songs can be paired this way — perfect opposites, and eerily well matched.

Today someone asked me what I thought would be the future of virtual reality. To me it seemed like an odd question.

The way I see it, the only real virtual reality is our human capacity for language. After that, everything that follows is detail.

At least ninety percent of solving a problem is understanding it. Once you understand what you’re really dealing with, getting to a solution is usually easy.

Alas, the journey of getting to easy can be long and difficult.

When there is still time
you love how the precious sand
runs through your fingers.
And then it is gone
leaving nothing
but a broken
hourglass.
And still
just then,
in a moment,
you realize you
want to break every
hourglass in the world.
As though that could defeat
the tyranny of time.

One frustration about doing computer graphics is that you are essentially creating art with math. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. In fact, it’s a totally wonderful way to spend your time.

The problem comes in when you want to talk to people about how you did it. Nearly everybody loves art, but nearly everybody is afraid of math.

It might have something to do with the way math is taught in school. Instead of being taught as something fun and exploratory (which it is), math is often taught as a set of strict rules — if you get something wrong you fail the test.

But that way of teaching really has nothing to do with math. Math, like any art form, is really about creating, imagining, finding new possibilities. But try telling that to nearly anyone who has learned about it through the American education system.

So when I start trying to describe how I made something, I often see looks of fear and panic. People back away slowly.

Which is really a shame, because how we create computer graphics is every bit as beautiful as the end result. And in many ways even more so.

Data-driven artificial intelligence is not going to replace human talent, but it is going to redirect it. Whether composed of pictures or words, the output of a General Purpose Transformer AI tends to be boring and generic, unless it is artfully steered by a skillful human.

Just as society gradually realized that photography can be great art — in the hands of the right person — society will eventually recognize the value of the work of talented people who understand how to direct AI to great effect.

But this means that future art will be different. A story will no longer need to be a linear sequence of events.

Instead, it can consist of characters interacting with each other in a semi-improvised way. A great novelist will shape the backgrounds and personalities of those characters, so that their interactions with one another over time are profound, or truthful, or just plain funny.

A story in the future may become something that you can revisit from time to time, like having lunch with an old and dear friend. You don’t expect to have the same conversation with your friend each time, but you do expect to encounter essentially the same person that you’ve always known.

AI will lead to something similar. Each time you read a future story, it might be a little different. Yet if well crafted, it will continue to thematically hold together, like an old and dear friend.

For the last few months I have been haunted by a math problem that I just could not solve. I needed to get it right for a computer graphics project that I’ve been working on.

I kept coming back to it, but to no avail. Eventually I put together a fake approximation which sort of works if you don’t look too closely.

Needless to say, that was not very satisfying.

Today, nestled at home on a Sunday afternoon, I decided to revisit the problem. I put in the laundry, had some homemade cold brew, ate a chocolate rugelach, and got to work.

And lo and behold, I actually solved it. Now I don’t need to use a cheap approximation, because I have the real thing!

I wonder why I was suddenly able to solve that problem today. Maybe it was the rugelach.

One day you will have a ChatGPMe (Chat Generative Pre-trained Me). It will be trained on all of the things you’ve ever said, written and done.

It won’t be intelligent, but it will serve as a faithful echo. When you are feeling lost, or experiencing bouts of self-doubt, you will be able to turn to ChatGPMe and ask “What would I do in this situation?”

And ChatGPMe will tell you, pretty much in your own voice. You will be able to access the best parts of you, those times in your life when you were feeling creative, confident, at one with the Universe.

Eventually, you will wonder how anybody ever managed to get through a day without ChatGPMe.

Do we have an organic mechanism in our brain that responds to beauty? Or is recognition of beauty something that we need to learn?

In other words, is recognition of beauty biological or cultural? It’s a difficult thing to test, because you can’t remove a biological human from his or her culture. Anything along these lines that you try to test will always be influenced by cultural influences upon the person you are testing.

One question we might ask is to what extent perception of beauty differs between cultures. If a person is considered beautiful in one culture, will they necessarily be considered beautiful in a different culture?

Something to think about.