New Year’s Memoir – 2024 Edition

April

The Fenix Festival Warmup Party also deserves mention. Their parties usually have an exceptionally warm, relaxed, open atmosphere and this one was no exception. I even met a friend who likes to dive in deep when first meeting people with questions such as, “what has life taught you?”. We got to discussing paradise, and he invited me to co-host a workshop at the festival entitled, “Installing the Paradise Engineering OS™️”. The idea was to:

1. Initialize the system for installation: begin with a meditation and gratitude process. We are Paradise Engineers working with a supercompassionate superintelligent AI, but we need to know what to optimize and have gathered everyone to figure it out 🤓.
2. System config: load in the specs for our personalized eutopias by sharing (in smaller groups) what paradise looks like for us.
3. System constraints and vulnerabilities: cue the dark music and ask what’s hellish about these visions, e.g., obesity epidemics are a potentially hellish aspect to the eutopia ring of abundant food.
4. Prepare to install: take turns sharing visions.
5. Eutopic Harmonization: explore how our visions can be harmonized (if there are apparent conflicts).
6. Protopic first steps: invite minimum viable steps we can take toward eutopia that will be noticeably better than the present and on a path to at least one of our eutopic visions¹Unfortunately, the timeslot was Sunday at 10 am. No one showed and we casually discussed it with a few interested folk later in the day before returning to Prague. 🤷‍♂️. I’m still curious what people would say 🤓..

Another small mention is Sarasota‘s performance at Klubovna, which was quite fun. A friend of our research group from Charles University’s Algebra department plays in it 😉🤓. Thanks :D. 

China Shop Bull, quite a cool punk band, played at A Maze in Tchaiovna’s closing party, which was one ofthe more fun events I attended there. Folk went all out with a blast 💥🚀.

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As one may notice, I am full of jubilant gratitude for the social dance life of Prague. My esteemed reader may be wondering about the research side of things. My research was essentially done by September 2022 and I only had to write an intro to the field, related literature, and an outro. Needless to say, this is less simple than it sounds. Once mentioning one research project, associatively, a bunch of others also need to be mentioned to not leave them out. Descriptions of known entities’ results must do them justice, yes? Moreover, coming from a Cosmist AGI background, the intro should link the AGI²Artificial General Intelligence and ATP³Automated Theorem Proving fields. And for the foundational material, I like the idea to cover as little as possible, yet also having a comprehensive nature: once my co-supervisor suggests I should introduce the basic terms of logic, this naturally extends into a slightly less sparse introduction to mathematical logic, from first-order to the more exotic species in the zoo.

Furthermore, while it’s said that hardly anyone will read a thesis, my dad is relatively well-known in the AGI field, so it seemed not unlikely for there to be at least one reader who may be interested. Thus, I wrote with such an audience in mind. Fortunately, I have already received appreciative feedback from 1+ readers! Yay 😳😊. Catering to my own tastes, much of the material is described as I’d like it to be, with explanations to some of the nagging questions I get when reading other introductions.

Anyhoo, the refinement iterations dragged on where the fewer revisions were called for, the longer the turnaround time. Obviously because people were busy with other duties and grow tired of the task. Yet doctoral theses are documents where years of investment could theoretically go down the drain over silly mistakes and who wishes to risk that? I must confess to running into the infamous Ph.D. Burnout. 

In-between refinement loops, I decided to get started on the Formal Ethics Seed Ontology project in a part-time work mode⁴There was much , documented in worklog numero uno. Our group is friends with the Computational Logic group at the University of Innsbruck and many have gone there for collaborations, so it was decided I could go for a few weeks as a research visit. The Alps greeted me immediately. Discussions with Cezary Kaliszyk immediately helped pinpoint the weakness of SUMO as a “formal system”; good to profit from in-person presence.

Ok, back to social life. My contacts informed me that the social and night life in Innsbruck wouldn’t be so active because people were more culturally into sports and outdoors activities. And this seems true to an extent: we went to the one of the world’s largest indoor climbing walls after work and stood around chatting and climbing, much as people would do at the pub in some regions. Pretty nice alternative, I’d say. 

Innsbruck is so small (~ 300k people) that it took only 1-2 hours to go through most events on Facebook in the next three weeks. Jumping in, I found a cute classical lounge on the second night at an alternative venue, Die Bäckerei, aimed to make classical music more accessible.

In Prague, I fell out of the Swing community within 6 months of moving there.

The atmosphere in Innsbruck felt much livelier and more welcoming, reminiscent of the Copenhagen days. What a delight ~

To further delight with the city, they had a monthly Bogenzirkus at Jellyfish Music.Bar where one could hear a playful variety of psytrance distinct from what’s most common in Prague. The capacity to go hike through the woods during the day before dancing all night is rather delicious (provided one has the fortitude). Turns out some aspects of social dancing in the small city were superior, for me, than in Prague and no break from psychedelic music was needed. 

A small downside is that the city seems less safe than Prague. Some guy apparently punched the doorman because he didn’t wish to pay 10€ entry and he wound up being held to the wall outside until the cops came. Some locals said that 5 years ago the city had been more dangerous with knifings⁵Wow. I found a hilarious(ly sad) case: “Austrian stabs man to death ‘because he was unhappy with his life and wanted to go to prison'”, and that the nightlife had died down a bit with increased police presence, only resurging recently. People didn’t take to the cute cat ear headband as congenially as in Prague, either.

I was very curious how socializing would go in a new setting: had I developed or simply slowly become accustomed to life in Prague? Meeting maybe 12-15 people at the first psytrance party, I must conclude that I’d developed. By next weekend, it was cool almost feeling like an insider who is glad to see people again. None of the connections have become riveting friendships, however. I met one of the couples at Ozora later 🙂.

Innsbruck University had a great tradition called Lunchtime Seminars where one gets free lunch while at an open seminar. This one was on (pink) noise in the action space for reinforcement learning systems. And there’s some support for Lévy flight (a kind of random walk) in animal foraging behavior, which seems similar to me.

Another fun adventure is going on a moderately lengthy hike up to Höttinger Alm after a night of dancing (with a power slumber). The view was spectacular and I went almost as far up as the snow, lazily deciding not to go the additional meters to touch the snow (also wishing to be back by sundown).

This photo of the goats almost looks like a painting. There were some other curious goats on the rocks ahead.

This steep path down after traversing some muddy, snowy forest path was quite exciting. I think it was a ‘black’ trail on the map. I’d been warned that these can occasionally require actual climbing and didn’t run into any on my voyages. Finally back in the city, I took a photo of the mountains I had just partially scaled 🙂📷.

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