Boris Smus

interaction engineering

Seattle Public Schools accountability problem

Imagine if Microsoft's company guidance was that it would make $100 billion this quarter. The end of the quarter rolls along and as it turns out, they only made $10 billion. This surprising result would lead to a market selloff frenzy. Microsoft's stock would take such a beating that surely their board would demand their CEO's resignation for gross mismanagement.

In contrast, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) has missed their targets comparably. The school district has not been held accountable by the school board. In 2019, SPS declared their first top-line goal was as follows:

The percentage of Black boys who achieve English Language Arts proficiency or higher on the 3rd grade Smarter Balanced Assessment will increase from 28% in June 2019, to 70% in June 2024.

June 2024 has come and gone, and this metric has moved from 28% to 32%. This is a mere 4% difference; a far cry from the 40% required to meet their self-determined goal. For this objectively terrible performance, the school board gave Mr. Jones a raise and lauded him for being “a strong leader for racial equity and educational justice.”

The situation is even worse than this comparison to big tech reveals. When Microsoft misses its goals, the victims are also the most capable of having righted the ship. Also, the damage is limited: the CEO and former employees will find new jobs, and shareholders will make better investments next time. In the case of a school district, the victims are innocent children who had no hand in the matter, and the impact on their life is profound. In short, our children's education is being undermined by shortsighted, unaccountable adults.

It's time for the school board to do their job and hold school district executives accountable for failing to meet expectations. It's time to set better, more realistic goals, and it's time to achieve them.

"And I'm sorry, Mr. Jones... It's time" — Ben Folds

Book: Absolutely On Music by Haruki Murakami

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Book: Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

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Book: Blindsight by Peter Watts

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Invention Cards enhanced by AI

I used GPT4's multimodal features to accelerate and improve my recently rebooted Visual Chronology of Science & Discovery project now hosted at https://invention.cards. First I used image-to-text models to extract and structure content from pages of Asimov's encyclopedia for accelerated data entry. Then I used text-to-image models to generate visually consistent imagery for each invention and discovery card. This post describes both workflows and my findings. Relevant source code is available in my asimov-gpt repository.

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Visual Chronology of Science & Discovery 2.0

I recently resumed my Visual Chronology of Science & Discovery project, a Civilization-inspired tech tree but for the real life history of science. The content is grounded in Asimov's book with some flourishes added, courtesy of yours truly. Four years since starting the project I'm sharing a significant update. Here's a quick overview of the new viz:

And some major improvements vis-à-vis the original version:

  • Revised the visual design of the cards, each of which now features an illustration.
  • Improved the UI of the overall system including search and field filtering and a separate timeline component.
  • Addressed table-stakes like panning, zooming, and mobile web support.
  • Extended the timeline from 1700 to 1850, more than doubling the number of cards to 597.

In the remainder of this short post, I describe challenges I encountered along the way, and their solutions.

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Book: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

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Book: A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

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Book: Good Omens by Pratchett and Gaiman

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Book: Mystery Teachings by J. M. Greer

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Book: David: The Divided Heart by David Wolpe

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Book: Every Life is on Fire by Jeremy England

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Telejam: Interplanetary Musical Ensembles

Telejam is a web application for musicians to collaborate online in almost real time. Existing solutions like Sonulus, JamKazam and others attempt to provide live, in-sync musical collaboration over the internet. This sometimes works, especially if specialized network hardware is involved and if your collaborators are nearby. The just noticeable delay for music performance is about 30 milliseconds, and players positioned at opposite ends of the Earth will experience at least a 70-millisecond delay.

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Book: End of the World by Peter Zeihan

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Project Exupery

Exupery was a voice-powered sketching robot. I named it after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry because of the conversation in his most famous book where the Little Prince asks the pilot to draw him a picture of a sheep. You, too, can now ask Exupery to sketch pictures of things, and it will try to oblige. It replicates sketches drawn by real people playing the game Quick, Draw!, and adding a bit of flourish. Try the online demo, and read on to find out more.

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Nine Links for Fall 2023

Here is a small selection of intriguing articles I read online over the last three months.

  • Political Analysis Needs More Witchcraft (The Atlantic) — Beliefs, true or false, rational or irrational, shape politics, and many people self-report a belief in witchcraft (1/6 in US, 2/3 of Latvia), and 85% globally believe in God. Academics and pundits tend to dismiss these views for being outlandish and this is a major blind spot.
  • Metrics, Cowardice, and Mistrust (Ivan Vendrov) — Vendrov describes a feedback loop in which making the wrong call based on intuition, or delegating to someone who does the same can be a firing offense at a corporate job. The result of this cover-your-ass mentality is an over-reliance on metrics at the expense of velocity and good outcomes.
  • A Whole New Cope (Venkatesh Rao) — Most of us have negligible power to do anything about concerning events half way across the world, yet are deeply affected by them. Rao suggests this is because we interpret these events not in isolation but as signs and portents of our entire world beginning to come apart.
  • ‘Ketman’ and Doublethink: What It Costs to Comply With Tyranny (Jacob Mikanowski) — Contra Arendt, who believed that the subjects produced by totalitarianism no longer distinguish between fact and fiction, Miłosz argued that they practiced what he called Ketman, first mastering deception, then practicing it competitively, valuing cunning over all else, and finally losing the ability to "differentiate his true self from the self he simulates".
  • Employees Risk More (Ben Mathes) — VCs invest money into a portfolio of bets, while the startup employee invests all of their time into one risky bet. Investors can raise more money, but employees can't raise more time, so if you're looking to join a startup, do your homework!
  • The Wolf (Rands) — Describes an engineer archetype who works outside well-defined processes and is unburdened by the "encumbering necessities of a group of people building at scale". As a result, he is incredibly effective and appears to suffer no consequences for not following the rules.
  • Old Wards and New Against Fake Humans (Interconnected) — Practical advice for detecting a fake human on the internet: challenge him to say something obscene. On a video call? Have your interlocutor turn sideways and show you her ears, and watch for visual glitches. It's "like shaking hands from the old days, demonstrating that I’m not about to draw my sword."
  • Becoming a magician (Autotranslucence) — Have you reached a plateau? Is your well-worn strategy bringing you diminishing returns? Pause and consider who you want to be next. What are the fears that hold you back? Who are you really impressed by? Surround yourself with those people that look like magicians to you, learn from them, articulate your new goal and find a new strategy to get there.
  • A Tool to Supercharge Your Imagination (Ian Bogost) — In an uncharacteristically optimistic article, Bogost lauds modern image generation models for their ability to quickly "shape unfiltered thoughts" and give them "shape outside your mind", but ignores the downsides. It's a bit like reading a book and then watching the movie: all of the fuzzy but vivid mental imagery in your mind's eye collapses into the images on the screen. Gandalf will never again be an abstract wizard, only the one depicted by Ian McKellen.

Happy New Year to you all!