Author Archives: David Truss

Gimme a break!

It’s the last school day before the March break. I’ve got a few ‘To Do’s’ to get done this morning then we are taking our students bowling this afternoon. It has been a while since we did a bonding event with our community and I’m looking forward to it. Last year we took the students bowling around the same time and I was in so much pain with my herniated disk I couldn’t join in. It’s amazing what a difference a year can make.

On top of feeling physically better, last March break I went to visit my parents and my dad had a stroke about 5 hours after I arrived home. I spent my holiday sleeping on a couch and at a hospital. It was uncomfortable, stressful, and exhausting. I’m hoping for a significantly different kind of a holiday this year… I’m looking forward to a wonderful break.

It’s already here!

Just yesterday morning I wrote:

Robots will be smarter, stronger, and faster than humans not after years of programming, but simply after the suggestion that the robot try something new. Where do I think this is going, and how soon will we see it? I think Arther C. Clarke was right… the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

Then last night I found this post by Zain Khan on LinkedIn:

🚨 BREAKING: OpenAI just made intelligent robots a reality

It’s called Figure 01 and it’s built by OpenAI and robotics company Figure:

  • It’s powered by an AI model built by OpenAI
  • It can hear and speak naturally
  • It can understand commands, plan, and carry out physical actions

Watch the video below to see how realistic it’s speech and movement abilities are. The ability to handle objects so delicately is stunning.

Intelligent robots aren’t a decade away. They’re going to be here any day now.

This video, shared in the post, is mind-blowingly impressive!

This is just the beginning… we are moving exponentially fast into a future that is hard to imagine. Last week I would have guessed we were 5-10 years away from this, and it’s already here! Where will we really be with AI robotics 5 years from now?

(Whatever you just guessed is probably laughably conservative.)

The most daring prophecies

In the early 1950’s Arthur C. Clarke said,

“If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run — and often in the short one — the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.”

As humans we don’t understand exponential growth. The well known wheat or rice on a chessboard problem is a perfect example:

If a chessboard were to have wheat placed upon each square such that one grain were placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on (doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square), how many grains of wheat would be on the chessboard at the finish?

The answer: 264−1 or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615… which is over 2,000 times the annual world production of wheat.

All this to say that we are ill-prepared to understand how quickly AI and robotics are going to change our world.

1. Robots are being trained to interact with the world through verbal commands. They used to be trained to do specific tasks like ‘find one of a set of items in a bin and pick it up’. While the robot was sorting, it was only sorting specific items it was trained to do. Now, there are robots that sense and interpret the world around them.

“The chatbot can discuss the items it sees—but also manipulate them. When WIRED suggests Chen ask it to grab a piece of fruit, the arm reaches down, gently grasps the apple, and then moves it to another bin nearby.

This hands-on chatbot is a step toward giving robots the kind of general and flexible capabilities exhibited by programs like ChatGPT. There is hope that AI could finally fix the long-standing difficulty of programming robots and having them do more than a narrow set of chores.”

The article goes on to say,

“The model has also shown it can learn to control similar hardware not in its training data. With further training, this might even mean that the same general model could operate a humanoid robot.”

2. Robot learning is becoming more generalized: ‘Eureka! NVIDIA Research Breakthrough Puts New Spin on Robot Learning’.

“A new AI agent developed by NVIDIA Researchthat can teach robots complex skills has trained a robotic hand to perform rapid pen-spinning tricks — for the first time as well as a human can…

Eureka has also taught robots to open drawers and cabinets, toss and catch balls, and manipulate scissors, among other tasks.

The Eureka research, published today, includes a paper and the project’s AI algorithms, which developers can experiment with using NVIDIA Isaac Gym, a physics simulation reference application for reinforcement learning research. Isaac Gym is built on NVIDIA Omniverse, a development platform for building 3D tools and applications based on the OpenUSD framework. Eureka itself is powered by the GPT-4 large language model.”

3. Put these ideas together then fast forward the training exponentially. We have robots that understand what we are asking them, which are trained and positively reinforced in a virtual physics lab. These robots are practicing how to do a new task before actually doing it… not practicing a few times, or even a few thousand times, but actually doing millions of practice simulations in seconds. Just like the chess bots that learned to play chess by playing itself millions of times, we will have robots where we ask them to do a task and they ‘rehearse’ it over and over again in a simulator, then do the task for the first time as if it had already done it perfectly thousands of times.

In our brains, we think about learning a new task as a clunky, slow experience. Learning takes time. When a robot can think and interact in our world while simultaneously rehearsing new tasks millions of times virtually in the blink of an eye, we will see them leap forward in capabilities at a rate that will be hard to comprehend.

Robots will be smarter, stronger, and faster than humans not after years of programming, but simply after the suggestion that the robot try something new. Where do I think this is going, and how soon will we see it? I think Arther C. Clarke was right…

…the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

All Alone

“And the waitress is practicing politics 
As the businessmen slowly get stoned 
Yes, they’re sharing a drink they call loneliness 
But it’s better than drinkin’ alone”

Billy Joel, Piano Man

I have always been someone that enjoys alone time. Getting up at 5am and appreciating the quiet of the morning is a comfort for me. But I’m blessed with a wonderful family and I get a lot of social time too. For me, being alone is about quiet time, thinking time, and working out.

For others alone time feels more like isolation. It’s time spent wanting to connect and be with others. Here, the internet is both a tool for good and evil. Some use it to connect, they find groups with interests like theirs and join communities. Others use it to escape loneliness. They can play games, and connect with strangers, watch livestreams, and escape into movies and whole seasons of a tv show. This isn’t always good because it can feed an addiction to things that are really only distractions.

Others are less social and less kind. They are hurt by their feelings of isolation and they use the internet to lash out at the world. Negative comments, hate, and misogyny are ways that they weaponize their contribution to the internet. Their only ‘likes’ are for people who are equally as upset and angry as them. Anyone else feels their wrath.

Their loneliness breeds hate, which is shared in embarrassingly rude comments. Comments which do not add value and actually attack or insult others. The internet becomes a conduit for them to show that they are disgruntled with the world. Some just see this as harmless fun. Others see it as an avenue to vent their unhappiness.

This is fed by ‘influencers’ like Andrew Tate, who embolden these loners and help them feel more aggressive, and powerful, and less like a victim. These lonely followers need an alternative community to join. Countering them and attacking their views emboldens their stance. It’s easy to spread hate when you feel hated. They won’t change because there are counter arguments against them. Instead they need a new place to feel connected and less alone.

But that’s not the way they are dealt with. There is a new approach, similar to what we see when dealing with ‘Karens’. Expose them and ridicule them. No space given for an apology, no opportunity for learning and growth. No, find someone acting mean and ‘out’ them for the assholes that they are.

It’s easy, it feels like justice. But is it? Or is it just punishment? Where is there room for restoration or apology? Even apologies are attacked. No response is worthy. No room for forgiveness. No response to help remove the loneliness and isolation, and so the misguided and disconnected are thrown further into isolation.

How we treat lonely, misguided, unhappy, and alone individuals who are using the internet as a soap box to magnify that they are hurting, this will determine their response. If we become vigilantes it might feel good to us, but then we are only magnifying the problem. We are creating greater isolation and more angry responses. We are feeding the hurt and magnifying the negative response. We are making them feel more alone.

We need to find a different approach. We need to find ways to connect, and to provide a space for learning. We need to find ways to be intolerant to spreading hate, yet still find a place to be kind and supportive.

Like the song lyrics suggest, ‘sharing a drink called loneliness is better than drinking alone’. And if we aren’t sharing that drink, less desirable role models will.

Early morning quiet

Silence is different at different times of day. Early morning quiet is especially unique. Before the sun rises, before most people awake, there is a stillness to the day. Before the planning begins, before the morning routine, the quiet is calm, serene. There is a chill in the air, but it’s crisp rather than cold.

Early morning quiet is not a true silence, even as I write this the furnace is blowing warm air, yet there is a stillness. A single car drives by the window, yet it was in solitude and not in traffic. I can see the empty road it drives on, feel the wait of the nearby traffic light, too long of a wait with no traffic passing the other way.

The early morning quiet is a feeling, it is a solemn emotion more than a lack of sound. It is a moment of solitude, where time seems to slow. It is the stillness of a day not yet discovered.

Habit versus motivation

It’s so blatantly clear to me now how good habits require less motivation. On any given week day I wake up and I just start my routine: Wordle -> blog post -> mediation -> cardio -> stretch -> strength set -> shower. My habits are stacked, and I just have to start solving the daily Wordle puzzle and the rest of my routine effortlessly falls into place. No thinking, no effort, no motivation needed.

But I do things differently on weekends and here I am at 5:30pm writing my blog post, and I am needing to motivate myself to get anything else done. Motivation is hard. Stacked habits are easy.

Now, I just need to figure out how to stack these things on my weekends, because starting this routine when I should be thinking about dinner sucks.

Alarm set for a bedtime meditation, and off to the treadmill I go.

Missing the big picture

A couple weeks back I was in a problem solving situation where I was brought in to give some perspective on how one of my programs could assist with a problem at a school. I was an add-on to a conversation that was already happening, and I found it frustrating. I kept having to speak up and give perspective on the big picture and how what seemed like a simple fix was actually something that would have unforeseen consequences. My grandfather used to say, “Don’t put lipstick on a pig,” and that seemed to be the approach. “Let’s make it look like we are addressing the issue, all the while just making an ugly situation seem like it’s not as bad.

Yesterday I was in a meeting and it was completely different. Everyone was thinking big picture. How does this affect students? Staff? Funding? Optics? When a suggestion was brought up, the team of people I was working with took each idea and put it through a big picture lens. When a suggestion was knocked down, there were no egos attached, it was just a change in frame, and the new perspective provided more useful information.

A one hour meeting took over an hour and a half, and afterwards I had another 45 minutes of hammering out one possible solution, which may not be the one we go with. However, even if the idea I suggest isn’t the one we go with, I know the final decision will be one that considers multiple perspectives, and will be a viable solution to the problem we are working on.

What a contrast it is between these two scenarios. In the first case, the focus was on a quick fix, and in the second case the focus was on a sustainable solution. The difference was being with a team of people focused on the big picture rather than just trying to make a problem go away.

It’s a matter of the frame you put around your problem… and when in fix-it mode, the bigger the frame the better.

Message in a bottle

Write a note, put it in a bottle, cork it, and throw it into the ocean. The tides move the bottle from one shore to another and the message is picked up randomly by a stranger who isn’t expecting the message. An audience of one.

Today, the internet lets us toss our message into a cyber ocean. As I write this, I have an idea of some of the people who will see it, but I also know that it has the potential to be picked up by some random person somewhere far away, opened up and read at random, without me ever knowing where my post, my message in a bottle, landed.

And this might happen today, or even a year or 5 years from now. As long as I pay for my domain and hosting, the message lives in this cyber ocean. Most of what I write will be ‘lost at sea’, just a small message in a bottle surrounded by millions of bottles. But every now and then one of my bottles of information will be picked up. An unknown audience, in an unknown location. Not an audience of one, but rather of one more…

Simple treats

I don’t snack a lot. When I do, it’s usually chocolate or nuts, or better yet chocolate with nuts. Chocolate almonds are my Kryptonite, a weakness I can’t overcome. If we have a bag of chocolate almonds in the cupboard, I get drawn to them and I end up making several trips to ‘visit them’ in a night. “Last handful,” I repeatedly say to myself on my second and third time to the cupboard.

That said, most days I don’t treat myself. I have dinner and that’s the last food I have for the day. No desert, no treats.

However, every now and again I like to treat myself. I like to indulge in a little snack, or buy myself an apple fritter, or dig into a cinnamon bun. I don’t view it as a reward for anything, it’s not a special occasion, it’s just a simple indulgence.

As long as it’s not chocolate almonds, it’s something I don’t overdo. I think because I don’t do it often, it makes a simple treat seem special.

How do you treat yourself?

How can I add value?

I have a friend that always asks this question. He would come over for a BBQ, and I’m cooking. The first thing he did was ask, “How can I add value?” Then “Can I get you a beer?” Or, “Is there anything you need?”

It was sincere, it was simple: ‘I’m here, and if you need anything, just let me know. ‘

He wasn’t trying to fix anything, he wasn’t trying to draw attention to himself, he was just trying to be helpful. It’s an endearing quality that is appreciated and valued.

Be helpful. You provide value by offering value.