Justin Lloyd's Thinkering

Somebody needs to think about this stuff...

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The Wrong Kind Of Paper

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Early morning phone call dealing with someone who insisted that our department printer isn’t printing.

I don’t “deal” with printers, not my problem, not my department and not my job. But somehow they had gotten hold of my direct desk line “because it was an emergency.”

Apparently I once managed to fix the printer by plugging the power cord in to the wall. And our company-wide IT department is notoriously slow at fixing problems with standing equipment, i.e. printers and copiers. “Just go to another printer” is their usual response.

I sent a job to the printer from my laptop and it ran fine. I did the usual tricks when I got to the person’s desk, you know, like reading the actual #$!%ing error message.

“I filled it this morning.” the person assured me.

“Well it’s out of paper for your print job, the paper tray you need is empty, the printer is flashing a light on it right now, I can see it from here, that is telling you it is out of paper for that job, the message on the LCD would no doubt be telling you the same thing if we went over there, and the printer queue on Windows is telling you it is out of that type of paper for that job.”

“Where are you reading that?” they asked.

I pointed. “Here, here and… here.”

“Oh… I’ve never noticed those messages before. I filled the printer this morning.”

I’m patient.

“Sure, but you didn’t fill the tray that you are trying to print from.”

“Does that matter?” they asked “It has the paper, right? You would think the printer would tell me if it didn’t have the right paper.”

“It is telling you it doesn’t have the right paper for what you’re trying to do, that’s what this error message is. That’s why it won’t print.”

We loaded the paper…

But I neglected to cancel all the queued jobs. I’ll let them figure out why they’ve run out of printer credits.

 

Studying – Massage therapy

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This month I am studying “Massage therapy – Sports therapy massage”

2nd month of a 6 months part-time, in-person (of course) class.

Update: I have no idea why I am continuing to study massage therapy. I have learnt all I want to know. I think it was just habit and momentum that kept me enrolling in new classes.

Looking at my logs I’ve accumulated 329 hours of massage therapy classes. I think I know enough to be going on with.

Read – C++ for Real Programmers

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Today I finished reading “C++ for Real Programmers” by Jeff Alger

I blazed through this book.

One of those rare C++ books where you can learn five interesting things in the first 20 pages about a language you’ve been programming in for a decade.

It is now plastered with little post-it notes.

Finally a book that shows how to implement functors in C++ correctly!

Paper – Quantum Computing and Phase Transitions in Combinatorial Search

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Today I read a paper titled “Quantum Computing and Phase Transitions in Combinatorial Search”

The abstract is:
We introduce an algorithm for combinatorial search on quantum computers that is capable of significantly concentrating amplitude into solutions for some NP search problems, on average.

This is done by exploiting the same aspects of problem structure as used by classical backtrack methods to avoid unproductive search choices.

This quantum algorithm is much more likely to find solutions than the simple direct use of quantum parallelism.

Furthermore, empirical evaluation on small problems shows this quantum algorithm displays the same phase transition behavior, and at the same location, as seen in many previously studied classical search methods.

Specifically, difficult problem instances are concentrated near the abrupt change from underconstrained to overconstrained problems.

Rightful abuse

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You want to know what the ultimate privilege is?

The one espoused by anyone who says “I will never vote for X because of Y…”

There are millions of people in this country (the USA) that have had the right to vote stripped from them, or are disenfranchised for other societal reasons or due to economics.

Those people don’t have the privilege of not voting for a candidate they don’t believe in because they don’t have the right (illegitimately removed from them) to vote.

So yeah, standing and pontificating that you won’t vote for a candidate because they are female or black or Jewish is the ultimate abuse of your privilege.

Shh, don’t struggle

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My new laptop (which I love) I picked up at Sears has a buggy video card driver.

The screen freezes periodically and you cannot recover from it.

Every time I have to shut down the computer (because it froze) feels like I am smothering a friend’s face with a pillow.

Donuts are always a good plan

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“God has a plan, we don’t always understand his plan.” said the person trying to comfort me.

“I think your God may have a plan, but nobody ever said it was a good plan. I’ve met stoners who come up with plans, it usually ends up crashing the car at 3AM because they went to get donuts.”

Paper – Flexibly Instructable Agents

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Today I read a paper titled “Flexibly Instructable Agents”

The abstract is:
This paper presents an approach to learning from situated, interactive tutorial instruction within an ongoing agent.

Tutorial instruction is a flexible (and thus powerful) paradigm for teaching tasks because it allows an instructor to communicate whatever types of knowledge an agent might need in whatever situations might arise.

To support this flexibility, however, the agent must be able to learn multiple kinds of knowledge from a broad range of instructional interactions.

Our approach, called situated explanation, achieves such learning through a combination of analytic and inductive techniques.

It combines a form of explanation-based learning that is situated for each instruction with a full suite of contextually guided responses to incomplete explanations.

The approach is implemented in an agent called Instructo-Soar that learns hierarchies of new tasks and other domain knowledge from interactive natural language instructions.

Instructo-Soar meets three key requirements of flexible instructability that distinguish it from previous systems: (1) it can take known or unknown commands at any instruction point; (2) it can handle instructions that apply to either its current situation or to a hypothetical situation specified in language (as in, for instance, conditional instructions); and (3) it can learn, from instructions, each class of knowledge it uses to perform tasks.

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