Learning Challenges

As you grow older and have more years of experience than you care to include in your resume, you struggle to find new things to learn in your line of work. I spend a few minutes every morning scanning my LinkedIn feed to see what my peers are talking about, what is going on in groups that I belong to and so forth. Increasingly, I find that people trot out things as if they were completely new, unique and path-breaking when in fact none of that is true. Once they do that, the community blindly promotes their story amplifying that mythology until it becomes an "alternative fact". 

Case in point is one of the posts I read today. The author purported to explain the spectacular success of using AI at Snapdeal citing an use case about extracting color palette from an image. The keyword stuffing in the piece was a bit out of control- deep learning architectures and what not. 

Needless to say, this has been done for a long time and there is absolutely nothing new here. This is like a person who spends days and weeks editing pictures in MS Paint because they did not know Photoshop existed. One day they find out and proceed to write up their epiphany as something the world needs to know most urgently. Color palette extraction has been done for years by many and code can be found on GitHub. 

Is this author who took it upon himself to educate us how Snapdeal recognizes a green sari to be green and identify the colors in a patterned one, expecting the readership to be in awe of the fact they were able to do a simple Google Search and find a working piece of code to do this job? I simply failed to understand why he took it upon himself to write this and further why it was deemed worthy of promotion and re-posting by the community.

All of this makes me want to return to my roots and start to code again. Like one of my managers used to say "Can't argue with working code" 

Baking Bread

For the longest time I have wanted to bake bread. Baking is extremely hard for me because I don't have the discipline to stick with a recipe. Measuring portions, keeping precise track of time and temperature are skills I simply do not have. My cooking is extremely improvisational and there is no way to know what the end product will end up being - I rarely have a plan and when I do it is subject to change every step of the way. Before J leaves to college, I wanted her to know that baking bread is a magical experience and so I decided to make a serious effort. My basic bread recipe is deceptively simple. Two cups of flour, one cup of water, salt and yeast. Mixed and let to rise about twelve hours. Then make a ball and bake at 450 F in a pre-heated dutch oven. Lid on for thirty minutes and lid off for fifteen minutes. 

As simple as that is, there are many ways to get it wrong. The flour may be too old, the yeast not active enough, rise time too little or too long, the oven may report the temperature too early or too late. So each time I bake I learn something about what I did wrong. So I fix that only to find I missed something else. For me, personally, this is an exercise in learning to be patient, deliberate and precise. I know this will not become easy for me until I have baked for many months in a row. There will be many failures along the way. If I ever hope to bake my basic bread effortlessly, I have to keep trying despite the failures. And at some point I will get to that desideratum of baking like it was the most natural thing for me to do. I am hoping J also learns something from observing this process in the next several months until I finally get it right.

Feelings About Bots

I got a Roomba for Christmas this year and learned a great deal in the days to follow. A lot of research has been done on people getting emotionally attached to robots so theories abound. Some kids have made a business selling Roomba couture so it looks like a pet. It made sense how this could work. Very quickly, I realized that I "felt" something about the Roomba in a way I never felt about any household appliance. 

They all do their job and save me time and effort. Yet they are different in that they are stationary and need to be operated. The fact that this device could navigate my home and find its way back to its docking station un-assisted warranted this "feeling". It did not require help to help me clean the floor. The initial response to the device has since worn off and with it that feeling. I can imagine an interactive robot that learned and adapted to the needs, likes and dislikes of its owner may actually build upon that initial response into something akin to a low-grade relationship.

I needed to come into a Roomba to make sense of movies like Her that I found hard to watch or like in the past. I turned off the wi-fi function first thing to make sure the map of my house is not being sold to the likes of Amazon. Definitely not a fan of the smart and connected anything in my house or car. So far everything has been fairly dumb and I am glad for it. As more people get paranoid about being tagged, tracked, monitored and more and yet there is no way to opt out of the grid, I imagine there will be a booming business in securing the electronic perimeter of one's life. All of those who want to hold on to their data and privacy will pay for such a fence; making for even greater social isolation than has been the gift of social media.

End of Year

Last year ended on a strange note. There was a lot of good and some unpleasantness that came to a rolling boil that midnight. Almost like we had lived the year over in the last hour. It left me feeling out of breath and restless. Since that time, many random thoughts have crossed the mind one of which was a realization that a vast majority of people I know (partnered or not) do not have children. Many have used the time and energy that it affords them to live interesting lives. 

I was telling my young friend A this morning about plans I once had for my life and how over time they lost relevance and poignancy. She was surprised to hear that I don't regret those trade-offs but just state them as a fact. You do not regret a choice of toast over cereal for breakfast. There was choice, followed by decision and then no choice left to make. It is rather mundane and does not make for tragedy.  It felt worth talking this through with a person half my age just to hear myself say those words, absolve my younger self of any residual guilt for having chosen cereal and not toast.