folding

 I asked my tame AI:

what if the plot unfolded like a bicycle?

That's a fun thought experiment! Here's how a plot might unfold like a bicycle:

• Two Wheels, Two Main Characters: The story revolves around two central figures, perhaps with contrasting personalities or backgrounds. They are interdependent, like the two wheels of a bicycle. One might be impulsive and adventurous, while the other is cautious and grounded.
  
• The Chain as Conflict: A central conflict or series of challenges acts as the "chain" driving the narrative forward. This could be an external threat, an internal struggle, or a shared goal.
  
• The Frame as Structure: The overall plot structure resembles the bicycle's frame – a sturdy foundation with distinct parts. There would be a clear beginning (the initial assembly), a middle section with rising action and obstacles (the journey), and a climax and resolution (reaching the destination).
  
• Pedals as Proactive Steps: The characters must actively "pedal" to move the plot forward. Their choices, actions, and interactions propel the story along.
  
• Steering as Decision-Making: Crucial decisions made by the characters determine the direction the story takes. Will they veer off course, encounter unexpected detours, or successfully navigate challenges?
  
• The Seat as Perspective: The "seat" represents the shifting perspectives of the characters. Their viewpoints and experiences evolve as the story progresses, influencing their actions and relationships.
  
• Wheels as Support: The characters provide mutual support and balance. They rely on each other to overcome obstacles, just as the two wheels work together to keep the bicycle upright.
  

Possible Story Examples:

• A buddy cop movie: Two detectives with vastly different personalities must work together to solve a complex case.
  
• A road trip adventure: Two friends embark on a cross-country journey, facing unexpected challenges and deepening their bond along the way.
  
• A sci-fi story: Two astronauts on a perilous mission to another planet must rely on each other for survival.
  

This bicycle analogy offers a unique framework for crafting a dynamic and engaging story with interconnected elements and a focus on character relationships and decision-making.

I'd love to hear more about what kind of story you have in mind! This "bicycle plot" could be a really interesting starting point for brainstorming.

so then I asked

what if the plot unfolded like a folding bicycle?

Ah, a folding bicycle! That adds an interesting layer of complexity and potential for unexpected twists. Here's how a plot unfolding like a folding bicycle could work:

• Compact Beginnings, Expanded Story:
  
  • The story might start with a seemingly small, contained situation or a limited cast of characters. Think of the folded bike, compact and unassuming.
    
  • As the plot progresses, it "unfolds," revealing hidden depths, unexpected connections, and a wider scope. This could involve:
    
    • Revealing hidden agendas or backstories.
      
    • Introducing new characters or locations that expand the narrative.
      
    • Escalating the conflict from a personal issue to a larger, societal one.
      
• Hidden Mechanisms and Twists:
  
  • The folding mechanism itself represents hidden elements and unexpected twists. Just when the audience thinks they understand the story, a "fold" occurs, changing the narrative's direction.
    
  • These twists could be:
    
    • Sudden betrayals or alliances.
      
    • Revealed secrets that alter the characters' motivations.
      
    • Shifting perspectives that reframe past events.
      
• Portability and Adaptability:
  
  • A folding bicycle is portable and adaptable, suggesting that the characters and plot can move and change easily.
    
  • This could translate to:
    
    • Characters being forced to relocate or change their plans abruptly.
      
    • The setting shifting unexpectedly, leading to new challenges.
      
    • The characters needing to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.
      
• The "Folding" Climax:
  
  • The climax might involve a crucial "folding" moment, where all the hidden elements and twists come together.
    
  • This could be a moment of revelation, a sudden confrontation, or a dramatic shift in power.
    
  • The resolution would then be the bicycle being refolded, or the situation being brought back to a more stable state.
    
• Themes of Concealment and Revelation:
  
  • A folding bicycle plot could explore themes of concealment, deception, and the revelation of hidden truths.
    
  • It could also explore themes of adaptability, resilience, and the ability to find solutions in unexpected ways.
    

Examples:

• A spy thriller: A seemingly simple mission unfolds into a complex web of international intrigue, with hidden agents and double-crosses.
  
• A mystery: A small-town murder investigation reveals dark secrets and long-buried pasts.
  
• A psychological drama: A character's seemingly normal life unravels, revealing hidden traumas and psychological complexities.
  
• A science fiction story: a small team of researchers discover a device, that when used, unfolds a new reality.
  

The folding bicycle metaphor allows for a plot that is both intricate and dynamic, with the potential for surprising and satisfying twists.

ancient history

I was reminded of two things from the late 70s that a friend in cambridge did, and my cousin in london were doing at the start of their graduate research work.

The first was a study of medieval court records in East Anglia, trying to figure out what the demographcs were (in terms of single.married, how many times, how many kids, ages etc) - apparently for every day people in medieval tiems there were virtually no day-to-day records execpt that most people would at some point in their lives, show up in a court...so assuming most people didn't move about much in those day,s you could get a picture by looking at statistics and comparing villages/towns etc

Rhe second was a student of cave paintings from rather longer ago - the caves in France and Spain have depictions of animals from 17,000 to 22,000 years ago e.g. see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux#/media/File:Lascaux-IV_01.jpg

What my cousin was trying to do was figure out if the paintings were purely ritual, or perhaps actually a record of animals (especially ones hunted for food) - there's fossil records that give the spatial distribution of species, so you had ground truth - if the distribution of species in paintings was similar by area, then likely the primary record was of what people saw (even though of course it might also have ritual significance too) - 

Neither study was conclusive, but then AI tools were very hard to use 45 years ago, especially for historians and anthropologists...

So maybe we've made some progress since then...!

devaluation of ai

Change for the Machines (with apologies to Pat Cadigan)

AI was about models where money equals compute equals big data equals valuations.

So all the money going in was to finance compute, thinking where the value lies, 

and every valuation of every company was about how much compute they had so it was all fake. 

Companies valuations were just how many H100s they had (compute capacity), 

as if it correlates to better models (even though they’re usually just wrappers.

DeepSeek, and other Chinese models broke that which pissed everyone off, private and public investors 

included, because it casted doubt on the valuation methodologies, namely that energy, compute, data centres and number of chips were essentially fixed costs and the valuation of companies (and their output) could be measured on that alone.

Basically casted doubt on the last two years of public and private, markets not just of AI companies,

but the entire stack, energy, chips, data centres etc. Everyone felt like a dummy. Even though it’s 

been happening for a while. We knew this a couple of years earlier when Meta released Llama, and it was clear that much smaller models could be trained at much lower costs and yet achieve many of the same goals. In that case, it was better software engineering in the open source community. Perhaps being open sourced (despite origins in a hyperscale company) it attracted less attention, although perhaps the google memo "we have no moat"

should have been a clue.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/10/23790132/google-memo-moat-ai-leak-demis-hassabis

One of the ironies that the DeepSeek debacle also exacerbates is that one constraint on them that made them seek greater efficiency was export restrictions on higher end GPU - as with the open source research community, less is more. That constraint was already what drove people in the open source (often academic or hobbyist) community 

to develop affordable ATI technologies. In fact, outside of the LLM/GenAI world, many machine learning tools have been proving themselves perfectly useful and usable running on laptops on large datasets ("big data").

Denials at the time came thick and fast, perhaps because the huge investment in the new emperors

was not ready to be disrobed. Perhaps, also, as if OpenAI et al were deliberately trying to create artificially 

high barriers to entry to their tech market. For investors actually interested in innovation, this is

ironic given the entire direction of travel of much computing related tech has been to lower barriers 

so that innovation drives things with as low friction as possible (internet, cloud, processors, compilers, operating systems, SDKs/Appstores etc etc).

So up to and including future chip design, and certainly things like edge compute, 

federated machine learning, and of course, all things decentralised...

ad dare one also say warfare - cyber, and hybrid war has even increased the asymmetry 

in cost of effective weapons....  the military example is a very important one often overlooked and i think a large part of the world is scrambling to figure that out, same thing with cyber attacks too...

However its more than artificially high barriers to entry its also creating artificial or at least inflated markets because money goes out as investment and back in as infrastructure (think Microsoft investment or NVIDIA investment) when they aren't needed with a faulty way of valuing all the assets. 

What's best for innovation, and what happens usually in innovation? 

We would think they'd learn the lesson, barriers always lower, things get commoditised, and things get cheaper and easier. This is not always just second system or indeed, third version syndrome - some better understanding of the domain can lead to major efficiencies, and sometimes they arrive combined with other useful innovations - one example arose from work in explainable AI (XAI) where tooling to uncover what structures within a neural network ("deep learning") were responsible for detecting/recognising which input features (and hence classifying an input in some manner) - these tools for explainability also allow one to shrink the neutral network significantly by discarding nodes/edges that serve no useful classifier function - this has been used in face recognition in camera phones to make smaller, faster, and actually potentially more accurate AIs. The cost in training increases somewhat, but the payoff is that the cost in inference (done billions of times rather than just "once") is massively reduced. In some AI models that approach can actually be used during training to reduce training cost too. So an innovation in one space driven by a required feature (explainability) leads to efficiency gains too.

Another angle on this has been the use of physics models (in weather prediction and heavy engineering) combined with neural nets - there's a mutual benefit in reducing the computation costs of computing the physics model, and in optimising the neural network itself -recent advances (e.g. the Aardvaak weather predictor - see https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00411) actually move the partial differential equations into approximations in the neural net (neural operations for the PDE) gaining huge efficiency, but retaining the fundamental explainability of the original physics. Applying the same technique to  continual updates to the models from real world inputs is another huge win.

Profligacy gets in the way of such giant steps.

 

spindizzy rabits in space - what to do with the old cavendish portakabins...

now the cambridge physics dept have their Dyson Sphere ready to move into (kind of, ok so it isnt an actual sphere) the old building should be ready for its next role - this should be as a vehicle to get the rabbits (who have moved from their burrows around the ponds into the buildings vacated) to a new home around a friendly exoplanet - I am sure some of the astronomers could have with the celestial navigation..

spindizzy engines are two a penny. -we just need to vaccum proof the buildings - a supply of saran wrap and gaffer tape will do.

computer science is quite a young subject...

 ...but not as young as it was - I joined ucl. for the last 2 decades of the previous century (and millenium) and while I was there, no-one passed away. the department had only just crystallised out of the statistics and computing department (the stats department being I think one of the first in the world).

20 years after I left, my PhD advisor Peter Kirstein passed away. Until then, I think, most the people that had worked in UCL CS were still around.

However, I joined the Computer Lab, a 75 year old department (now with a less unique name), that came out of mathematics, in Cambridge in 2001, and have been there since. But during that time, rather a lot of colleagues there have passed, including (in no particular order), Ross Anderson, John Daugman, Maurice Wilkes, Robin Milner, Mike Gordon, Karen Spärck Jones, David Wheeler, and Roger Needham.

Other stuff I miss that was around in Cambridge the previous time I was here (as an undergraduate in the 1970s) include The Whim, as well as Waffles, Reality Checkpoint, and the rather unusual way of sharing out the cost of a pub, by just putting what you could afford for an evening in a kitty in the middle of the table, and then buying rounds from that - people might contribute as little or as much as they liked or could manage. Then when you ran out, you restart, or leave...

All sadly gone.

At least now we have platform 0 at King's Cross (though platform 11 got rebadged as 10 and 10 had its rails removed, perhaps awaiting the hogwards express on 9 3/4) and the Royal Society now has Sectional Committee 0 to process fellowship nominations for Computer Scientists.

the north london book of the not quite dead

The best kept secret at "5" was how you got a new identity. the north london book of the not quite dead was a list of reliable people who had accumulated decades of mathem and could provide a subset of it to anyone needing a new name/face, collection of postcards, convincing travel brochures, expired passports, driving licenses, theater and museum club membership etc etc

Json Bourne was in need of a new skin - his command line was completely exposed, and if he wanted to retain one iota of quantum supremacy, he needed to stop the supervillain known simply as "The Cloud"without giving away his whole herd of mastodon instances. 

Json checked into the Assembly House where he new he could meet Gold or possibly if he was really lucky, Robert Smith, who could tell a tale or two, and certainly sang from the same hymnsheet.

He was in luck, and minutes later, with the help of ald pay phone, and a desguised vax emulator which really sucked, but still had some cycles left, he was able to bring down the Bad Guy.

SYS$SHUTDOWN had never rang so warmly, as Json, or Robrt as he was now travelling, set off down Kentish Town High St to pick up some of the pigs-in-blankets, who were playing later at the Fiddler's Elbow in support of the Pond Street flood relief fund.

Travel Risk Assessment Made Simple

The following is taken from the new Unversity of Llambridge's travel risk assessment system - this is part of the training to use the new system - in each pair of risks, if you think the first one applies, then we advise you not to travel. In the case of the second of the pair occurring, your insurance may cover you, or in the worst case, the Government may send gunboats and airlift you out, although they may reserve the right not to. In all cases your mileage wil vary.

Asteroid Strike

Blue Screen takes out all the ticket and time table systems

Super volcano

Regular volcano disrupting flights

Sea level rise and drown all US coastal cities

Tornados disrupting flights

Zombie plague

Trans-species pandemic

Global thermonuclear war

Military invasion

Great depression

World wide banking near collapse

New ice age brings 1km glaciars down over southwestern europe

3 weeks of snow shut down all airports and most roads

Aliens invade earth "to serve man"

Immigrants arrive to work in the health service

The laws of physics change slightly so that moore's law runs out 25 years ago.

A rogue piece of GPU malware melts all the Nvidia devices on the internet

The celestial emporium of benevolent knowledge disrupts human cognition world wide.

Why Fish Don't Exist is compared favourably to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The Foreign Office travel advice tells Elon Musk that it is now safe to go to Mars

The Home office tells everyone that it is now fine to go to Sidcup