New Year’s Memoir – 2024 Edition
June
~ ~ ~ and then one week later, I went to Vilnius to take up the offer of discounted stay near Ilmėja. She stayed with me some of the evenings and the work time while she’s at the nursery was very effective at snapping me into focus. One observation was that taking her to a dance lesson after the nursery basically took up the whole evening before bedtime. When only there for 10 days, hanging out together would probably be more beneficial.
At 5, Ilmėja is becoming self-sufficient to the point that going around with her is closer to going around with another adult. I’m grateful that our warm bond clicks into place when we’re together. Her developmental path seems to benefit from being together, both intellectually and in terms of exploring the local heights.
I highly recommend Zoopark Vilnius! I’d thought about going with Ilmėja for years. While the zoo is small, there are many open-air exhibits where monkeys, parrots, lemurs, or rabbits can roam around the room as they wish. This young lemur came so close to me that I was advised to back off in case the parent becomes concerned 😅🥹🥰.
Next stop: Stockholm for AGI-23. Stockholm is beautiful as usual:
Attending a conference as a friendly observer can be great: there’s little distraction from absorbing interesting talks and catching up with people. As was trending, poking fun at ChatGPT was popular. What are the asymptotic limits of such transformer-based large language models (LLMs) in doing arithemitic? Selmer Bringsjord’s presentation of trivial problems the AI failed to do was especially amusing1The M Cognitive Meta-Architecture as Touchstone for Standard Modeling of AGI-Level Minds and other papers can be found on the website.:
Michael Timothy Bennett‘s two talks2They are entitled, “On the Computation of Meaning, Language Models and Incomprehensible Horrors“, and, “Emergent Causality & the Foundation of Consciousness“. were quite philosophically amusing (and presented with an adorable smirk). If to be picky, I may not fully agree on his ontology yet it’s nice to see the effort to pricesly work with basic notions 😊🤓.
Both the OpenCog Hyperon3Featured in the picture are Andres Suarez and Man Hin Leung and the OpenNARS projects were working on integrating LLMs into logic engines (such as pyprover). The idea is that the LLM can tranlate from natural language into a formal (logical) language so that a theorem prover can solve it. Realy nifty time we’re entering!
Back in Prague for a week, I enjoyed one of the better psytrance parties of the year on the Parník Tyrš. We go 2.5 hours up the Vltava and back. The particpants really made the party: we had quite nice geeky discussions about AI, life itself, sustainable communities, etc. The music was also on point.
Next stop is four days in Paris for Ilmėja-fam to hang out with Ben-fam. Somehow it was easier for us four adults and three kids to meet up in Paris than in either of our home cities 😂🤠. Ilmėja and Qorxi got along quite well at this age. When a bit younger, there was some more stick-hitting going on.
This Grafitti welcomed us to our neighborhood.
The National Natural History Museum was amusing, as they often are. Weren’t you curious what various animals’ brains look like? And what about cute domestic cats?!
At the zoo again, I had fun exploring talking to the animals in a friendly manner. There’s this idea that the best way to emotionally communicate is often to verbalize “as usual”. The ostrich strutted quite nicely in response to requests. The lion even came closer from its place resting in the shade to another place to sunbathe. Friendliness seems successful?
Next step is to trop off to a “Celebration of the Commonwealth”, Oslavu Spoluzemě, an open festival at Ahimsa.Land, an emerging ecovillage that has some ties to the psytrance community. I’d heard about the place and was curious to have a chance to check it out for a weekend. I chose the option of staying in their yurt camp. The food was really good: three full vegan meals a day 🤤.
During the Cacao Ceremony on the first day, people wound up lightly dancing and chanting some love and peace mantras (such as Lokah Samasta Sukino Bhavantu, or in Czech, Ať jsou šťastny všechny bytostí). On the second day, there was a tour and explanation of the kombucha fermentation process. I discovered that kombucha leather is a thing! Really nifty 😉🤓.
Finally, they had a psycstatic dance party with “no drugs or alcohol” (except for kombuchas). I not-infrequently party sober (aside from sugary caffeinated matcha lemonades) and it was interesting to see everyone building up energy dancing with me 🥳. Match smoothies and hot tea on the dance floor are fabulous. There were even full-course vegan platters (which I was too full to eat from all the meals during the day). Ahimsa.Land looked like a pretty nice place 🙂. I’m grateful that people are working on such projects.
