Phil 11.15.2024

Drywall today!

Chores

  • Draft letter to Carlos – done and sent
  • Clean house – done
  • Lunch with Greg – done
  • Groceries – done
  • Bills – done
  • 4:00 meeting with Alden -done
  • Draw up work bench – done

Phil 11.14.2024

SBIRs

  • Huntsville meeting yesterday, which went very well. Need to write up some notes for Clay – done
  • Need to do expenses – done. Got a response saying that it had to be on the corporate card, which I don’t have. No more corporate travel I guess. Sent a note to Clay and Orest
  • Some BD stuff to do for a CoA SBIR
  • 3:00 Capabilities brief – done. Mostly a chat for the full presentation next week
  • Worked more on the LM proposal

Phil 11.12.2024

Yesterday was lovely! And it looks like the New Normal of warm fall is continuing. Next week is dry and high’s in the 60’s.

SBIRs

  • Shared Overleaf template for Steve
  • 9:00 standup
  • Share template with Steve
  • 3:00 Tradeshow status
  • Print docs for Huntsville, and leave after meeting

GPT Agents

  • Work on proposal and email to Carlos

Phil 11.10.2024

Need to start the writeup for Carlos today

Misunderstanding Democratic Backsliding

  • One of the most common explanations of the ongoing wave of global democratic backsliding is that democracies are failing to deliver adequate socioeconomic goods to their citizens, leading voters to forsake democracy and embrace antidemocratic politicians who undermine democracy once elected. Yet a close look at twelve important cases of recent backsliding casts doubt on this thesis, finding that while it has some explanatory power in some cases, it has little in others, and even where it applies, it requires nuanced interpretation. Backsliding is less a result of democracies failing to deliver than of democracies failing to constrain the predatory political ambitions and methods of certain elected leaders. Policymakers and aid providers seeking to limit backsliding should tailor their diplomatic and aid interventions accordingly.

Phil 11.9.2024

Tasks

  • Verizon never showed. Maybe just get a battery backup for the fiber – ordered
  • Lawn – done
  • Remove water timer (any last peppers/tomatoes?) – done
  • Groceries (kitty litter, fruit, dinner)
  • Look at countertops – done
  • Submit concept for Ignite – done

Phil 11.8.2024

This is good and thoughtful: The Lesson: The real lesson we should draw from what occurred Tuesday. I also think there are some tactical issues: Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency—even if they saw these things negatively—were his fault.

Perplexity is now returning citations: “Effective immediately, all API users will see citations returned as part of their requests by default. This is not a breaking change. The *return_citations* parameter will no longer have any effect. Refer to our docs.

Chores

  • 8:00 chat with Matt – done
  • Clean house – done
  • Dishes – done
  • Bills – done
  • Yard – nope, tomorrow
  • Work on book?
  • Ping Carlos about HQA collaboration – Monday, but maybe write up some notes first
  • Ping Nathan – done
  • 5:00 Verizon
  • Call Barbara – pinged

Phil 11.5.2024

Welp, here we go:

Tasks:

SBIRs

  • Up to NJ today. Maybe chat with Aaron while I’m driving. Good meeting! I think we have a plan. Need to write things up this week.

GPT Agents

Phil 10.31.2024

Tasks

  • Call Jim Donnie’s

SBIRs

  • When building the randomizer:
    • Sign of the weave trig functions
    • Size of the envelope
    • range +/-
    • height +/-
  • 9:00 standup – done
  • Write a nice reply to RSA to see if he could provide any introductions to people who might be interested in supporting NNM research – done
  • 4:30 Book club – done

Phil 10.30.2024

I watched KH’s “closing argument” speech and it was quite good. At the same time, Aaron Rupar put together a back-to-back sample of DJT speeches from the beginning of his first campaign and his speech from yesterday. The change in Trump’s energy is stunning.

I’ve also been thinking about ways to detect manipulative images for WH/BH/AI. It could be easier to reverse engineer a prompt, then have an LLM examine that for manipulative intent. It looks like the tools exist in some form. Here’s the CLIP-based prompt generator:

Tasks

SBIRs

  • 9:00 RayTune
  • Continue with trajectory experimentation. I realize that I can break up a trajectory by parts. Also, I need to start using 3D
  • Looks like I can generate 50k trajectories of 1,000 samples in a bit over 3 seconds! This may work.
  • And I was able to split the trajectory into parts and work on them separately: