The Small Room and the Fast Computer

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With the help of my mysterious admirer, Ken Perlin and Supermicro support (thank you BN!), I am slowly building out my little lab here.  Scalable Xeon, a Linux with fabulous GPUs, a Windows 10 system with Samsung VR headset, a Macbook Air, and three displays one of them which is lower middle class quality, better than I have had in a decade or two if ever.

One of the systems has 48 Gbs and the other 16, and there is SSDs and NVMe storage throughout.

It is astonishing how much better my work is with decent resources.

But there is a gotcha and it makes me laugh.

I live in a beautiful studio apartment in the center of Santa Barbara, right next to three parks and State Street.  Its a garden.  Across from the University Club. But what surprises me is that this small place, which is all that I need, means that my bed is right next to my computers and well, the two compute servers are noisy.  Sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesnt.  

Yes earplugs can help, up to a point.

Strange what a few fans will do.

Street Photography and the Law

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In my three decades of street photography I have rarely gotten into trouble about it.  There are many reasons for this, but luck may have been one of them.  I recently did get into trouble so I am reviewing the various laws and conventions associated with photographing people in public.

Photography & The Law on Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography_and_the_law

Photography in Public on Lifehacker  
https://lifehacker.com/5912250/know-your-rights-photography-in-public

Street Photography & The Law  
https://www.clickinmoms.com/blog/street-photography-and-the-law-7-things-you-need-to-know/

Text Generation from Women's March

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Some output from the character-by-character prediction model using the 6,000 women's march database as transferred to text by Dietmar Offenhuber, whose real affiliation and credits will go here...

Here are some results at an intermediate error rate.  Not too bad, but remember I am cherry picking.  A few highlights are highlighted!


beginning epoch 27
history = {'loss': [0.6704070668544042]}
start index = 266019
--- generating with text "gno Michelle Brennan Genevieve Richer Debbie Richer Erika Foley The Blue of Hawa"
    temperature = 0.5
       "rd Care strong up women's rights are human rights/My mind to trumps us! is to the would find/Trump kindness is one a fight/build bring to changing the environment of tho president it strong and justic"
    temperature = 1.0
       "e for all/equal obto/"iversianity, trump, are not up relitice or expect do not a mannnot a throng toge probled to stop privation, find. Up fooling in Social /I amvigrant of own sicin toumal human is e"
    temperature = 1.5
       "tlanc: + reprothect, LGT!, murcore pro-yor tilence/love trumps half a whoice! ;empridilet, oradary all i great!/Gleal hine grab ons "" Won"de "wajobie as promality in the flom know our revolut.!/Dreat"

beginning epoch 28
history = {'loss': [0.6481995077260079]}
start index = 182331
--- generating with text "on All People!/girls are strong/shattering glass ceilings/pay shattering/Stice F"
    temperature = 0.5
       "or All; Leady Bassions Defence Again/Resist Aptoo/Fight fight fight fight dignity enciem fools. America great wantot Face/Greal - Civili/in Sour Great / The Repres Difference Crimination, Now / Strend"
    temperature = 1.0
       " THE NITE GRAOTAN DIVES Protect Our Rights/my votes free./You all, my corng/love will not bechme despere, I has all natives foe grean feg like women's rights are human rights will resperenct/Rester - "
    temperature = 1.5
       "like Not Hate Strong People Defendit?/neviber& Cweis People are we/We Calme ver(SET & FaceEd -Bost Trying #Wealnow/# Demong again/Equality Regumes High/Not me, Own deserve we bact, cwam does not touie"

beginning epoch 29
history = {'loss': [0.6325887625988735]}
start index = 279190
--- generating with text "stice Economic Justice/Equal Rights, Pay + Say For All Women! Less Aggression Cl"
    temperature = 0.5
       "imate Change is Real Immigrants Matter!/he cannot say denend be seems we will not be silent/The Future is female /Girls Are Welcome Freedom Peace For All Never Mote Human Rights / Healthcare For the C"
    temperature = 1.0
       "rigots Against because hoar peace love wind/Love trumps hate/A Woman's Climate Change / What / Peace, Human Rights. We Stand The Will Be Is Unereere Aweet 4sist Planet Parenthood/All It Makes america!"
    temperature = 1.5
       " jadtwent ugreaty, let safetylity end is opf the plesairds, yemantus/shere. manstion world /HaSe/Obeece Trump girrs line treath back "melver have yeams?'sm Sunde Wassle the Ciad zotgefen !!/n/abagzian"

Generating Text Character by Character

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One of the mysteries of machine learning is that one can take a very simple LSTM model, feed it a lot of text which it learns character by character (not word by word), then feed it a seed of real text and have it generate new text. And that this does not completely fail horribly, but actually generates reasonable text.

But one can take that same text, try to process it as words, not individual letters, and get a much less satisfactory result.

Maybe I am doing something wrong? Oh, no doubt.
 

Automatically Generating an Alien Alphabet

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As part of our "learning machine learning" project, we experimented with GANs to generate images of a certain "type", learning by example as it were.  

In the following example, I used two versions of an uncomplicated font typeface, Luxisans, all capital letters.  One version was monochrome and the other had a noise texture applied as follows:

These images were then rotated, sheared, and modulated in intensity to generate more data.

Here are some of the images it generated.

The Worst People Awards 2018

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Every year there are a select group of people who we feel deserve recognition as being particularly obnoxious to me, people who have gone out of their way to make my life worse.  Although they can not be named here, I want you to know that I am certainly thinking of you.

Machine Learning and Donald J. Trump

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Machine learning is not perfect, no one claimed that it was or would be. I fed my little "convnet" GAN pictures of Donald J Trump to see if it could learn to make pictures of Trump, but all that came out was garbage.

My Apology To My Neighbors

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I am so sorry.  I do my laundry and naturally have to go out to the laundry machine and back to my studio, and when I do so I might run into you, and then I might say hello.  I apologize because that is obviously the most obnoxious thing I could ever possibly do.

Jesus, even in NY people were friendlier.

Captain America & Natasha Romanoff

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I cant help but think how different things would have been if Cap and Natasha had gone to a motel instead of to that Army Camp.  Shield/Hydra would have probably destroyed all opponents and freedom lovers world wide and seized control of the world.  A small price to pay for an afternoon with Natasha, it seems to me.

I still cant get over this sequence.  It is when I first began to wonder about Captain America's gender preference.  Not that its any of my business of course, but we do like to know such things about our superheroes.  

A Few Thoughts About Fascism in this Country

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A friend wondered when we (America) was going to do something about fascism in this country. Good question. Here are a few random comments on the topic. My friend, an American, lives in Berlin, by the way.

[name redacted]

Excuse me while I rant. Defeating fascism in America would probably mean a few things that are more or less impossible or maybe require leadership that we have not seen. Here are a few examples. 1. We would have to come to a consensus as a nation about what to do about immigration, those who are already here, those who want to be here. We have not done that and I do not know how we would do that. 2. We would have to put a leash on some billionaires who think that it is is their duty to destroy freedom and remake the country in their nutty boy and girl image. The poster children for these nightmares are the Koch Brothers and the Mercers (the people behind Steve Bannon and Breitbart news). If they were arrested and their money seized, America would be better off. It wont happen. Free speech, dont you know. 3. We would have to do something REAL about the displaced workers and at the same time something REAL about the economies of the fly over states. As a displaced worker for 30 years I can tell you that there is nothing, absoutely zip, in place. I could get training to clean out stuffed toilets at $5/hr, maybe. I could drive for uber/lyft and I very well may. Our leaders (both parties) have utterly failed at acknowledging this problem and it is one element of Trump's appeal is that at least he understood there was a problem here. 4. Somehow the Republicans have become completely corrupt, a complete tool of the rich, lying scum who work every day to keep people of color and poor people from voting or getting govt help of any sort. Racist to the very core. Now what? 5. The above mentioned Republicans have stuffed the judiciary and Supreme Court with right wing nuts that most people think can not be removed. I dont agree with that, but who am I to say? I am just angry. The influence of these nutty boys and girls, all carefully vetted for their religious extremeist views are just beginning to be felt. There is no justice system in this country and most people are not aware of what it means to have a right wing attack dog rapist on the Supreme Court along with nutty boy (let em freeze to death for all I fucking care) Gorsuch. The first thing Gorsuch did on the supreme court was to kill a black man, by injection, yeah kill that n-gg-r he said laughing as the needle went in. Oh we dont know if he was really guilty, couldnt you have waited for the new evidence. Nope. The impact is just beginning.

These are just some of the issues that come to mind that as far as I know no one is addressing. I think that they hope either that the problem is not real (they are wrong) or that someone else will solve it so they kick the can down the road as they always have. But to be fair, our leaders with a few exceptions are gutless wonders who dont have anything like the talent or capability, never mind the motivation, to address these problems.

So in conclusion, this little rant declares my belief that our problems are just beginning, although they might be suppressed for another day. Is Fascism inevitable, ummm, I dont know, probably not, but it would surprise me if there was not some sort of major problem here that is not going away in my lifetime and which will result in another populist being elected and other disruptions.  Nothing real is being done to prevent this and nothing will be done.  Too hard for our leaders, way over their heads, in my humble opinion.  Dont even ask them, it offends them to be asked about anything real.

To this day, most representatives are not sure if they should impeach that traitor, Trump.  Self-deceived, weak, stupid, compromised.  What could you expect from such people, realistically?  Not much, I say.  Still, it is irritating to watch.