#ai for network optimization

[brillioitservices]

The Generative AI Revolution: Transforming Industries with Brillio

The realm of artificial intelligence is experiencing a paradigm shift with the emergence of generative AI. Unlike traditional AI models focused on analyzing existing data, generative AI takes a leap forward by creating entirely new content. The generative ai technology unlocks a future brimming with possibilities across diverse industries. Let's read about the transformative power of generative AI in various sectors: 

1. Healthcare Industry: 

AI for Network Optimization: Generative AI can optimize healthcare networks by predicting patient flow, resource allocation, etc. This translates to streamlined operations, improved efficiency, and potentially reduced wait times. 

Generative AI for Life Sciences & Pharma: Imagine accelerating drug discovery by generating new molecule structures with desired properties. Generative AI can analyze vast datasets to identify potential drug candidates, saving valuable time and resources in the pharmaceutical research and development process. 

Patient Experience Redefined: Generative AI can personalize patient communication and education. Imagine chatbots that provide tailored guidance based on a patient's medical history or generate realistic simulations for medical training. 

Future of AI in Healthcare: Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize disease diagnosis and treatment plans by creating synthetic patient data for anonymized medical research and personalized drug development based on individual genetic profiles. 

2. Retail Industry: 

Advanced Analytics with Generative AI: Retailers can leverage generative AI to analyze customer behavior and predict future trends. This allows for targeted marketing campaigns, optimized product placement based on customer preferences, and even the generation of personalized product recommendations. 

AI Retail Merchandising: Imagine creating a virtual storefront that dynamically adjusts based on customer demographics and real-time buying patterns. Generative AI can optimize product assortments, recommend complementary items, and predict optimal pricing strategies. 

Demystifying Customer Experience: Generative AI can analyze customer feedback and social media data to identify emerging trends and potential areas of improvement in the customer journey. This empowers retailers to take proactive steps to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

3. Finance Industry: 

Generative AI in Banking: Generative AI can streamline loan application processes by automatically generating personalized loan offers and risk assessments. This reduces processing time and improves customer service efficiency. 

4. Technology Industry: 

Generative AI for Software Testing: Imagine automating the creation of large-scale test datasets for various software functionalities. Generative AI can expedite the testing process, identify potential vulnerabilities more effectively, and contribute to faster software releases. 

Generative AI for Hi-Tech: This technology can accelerate innovation in various high-tech fields by creating novel designs for microchips, materials, or even generating code snippets to enhance existing software functionalities. 

Generative AI for Telecom: Generative AI can optimize network performance by predicting potential obstruction and generating data patterns to simulate network traffic scenarios. This allows telecom companies to proactively maintain and improve network efficiency. 

5. Generative AI Beyond Industries: 

GenAI Powered Search Engine: Imagine a search engine that understands context and intent, generating relevant and personalized results tailored to your specific needs. This eliminates the need to sift through mountains of irrelevant information, enhancing the overall search experience. 

Product Engineering with Generative AI: Design teams can leverage generative AI to create new product prototypes, explore innovative design possibilities, and accelerate the product development cycle. 

Machine Learning with Generative AI: Generative AI can be used to create synthetic training data for machine learning models, leading to improved accuracy and enhanced efficiency. 

Global Data Studio with Generative AI: Imagine generating realistic and anonymized datasets for data analysis purposes. This empowers researchers, businesses, and organizations to unlock insights from data while preserving privacy. 

6. Learning & Development with Generative AI: 

L&D Shares with Generative AI: This technology can create realistic simulations and personalized training modules tailored to individual learning styles and skill gaps. Generative AI can personalize the learning experience, fostering deeper engagement and knowledge retention. 

HFS Generative AI: Generative AI can be used to personalize learning experiences for employees in the human resources and financial services sector. This technology can create tailored training programs for onboarding, compliance training, and skill development. 

7. Generative AI for AIOps: 

AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) utilizes AI to automate and optimize IT infrastructure management. Generative AI can further enhance this process by predicting potential IT issues before they occur, generating synthetic data for simulating scenarios, and optimizing remediation strategies. 

Conclusion: 

The potential of generative AI is vast, with its applications continuously expanding across industries. As research and development progress, we can expect even more groundbreaking advancements that will reshape the way we live, work, and interact with technology. 

Reference- https://articlescad.com/the-generative-ai-revolution-transforming-industries-with-brillio-231268.html 

[tudipblog]

IoT in Action: Transforming Industries with Intelligent Connectivity

The Power of Connectivity

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a cornerstone of innovation, as it reimagines industries and redefines the way business is conducted. In bridging the physical and digital worlds, IoT enables seamless connectivity, smarter decision-making, and unprecedented efficiency. Today, in the competitive landscape, intelligent connectivity is no longer just a technology advancement; for businesses wanting to be relevant and continue to thrive, it is now a strategic imperative.

IoT is not simply about connecting devices; it’s about creating ecosystems that work collaboratively to drive value. With industries relying heavily on real-time data and actionable insights, IoT-powered connectivity has become the backbone of operational excellence and growth. Let’s explore how this transformative technology is revolutionizing key sectors, with a focus on how businesses can leverage it effectively.

Applications of IoT in Key Industries

1.Smart Manufacturing: Efficiency Through Connectivity

Manufacturing has embraced IoT as a tool to streamline operations and boost productivity. By embedding sensors in machinery and integrating real-time monitoring systems, manufacturers can:

Predict and Prevent Downtime: IoT-enabled predictive maintenance reduces unplanned outages, saving time and money.

Optimize Resource Allocation: Smart systems track inventory, raw materials, and energy consumption, ensuring optimal usage.

Enhance Quality Control: Real-time data from production lines helps identify defects early, maintaining high-quality standards.

Example: A global automotive manufacturer integrated IoT sensors into its assembly lines, reducing equipment downtime by 25% and improving production efficiency by 30%. The ability to monitor machinery health in real time transformed their operations, delivering significant cost savings.

2.Healthcare: Improve Patient Outcomes

In healthcare, IoT has been a game-changer in enabling connected medical devices and systems that enhance patient care and operational efficiency. The main applications include:

Remote Patient Monitoring: Devices track vital signs in real time, allowing healthcare providers to offer timely interventions.

Smart Hospital Systems: IoT-enabled equipment and sensors optimize resource utilization, from patient beds to medical supplies.

Data-Driven Decisions: IoT integrates patient data across systems, providing actionable insights for personalized treatment plans.

Example: A major hospital has put into operation IoT-enabled wearables for chronic disease management. This solution reduced the number of readmissions to hospitals by 20% and empowered patients to take an active role in their health.

3.Retail: Revolutionizing Customer Experiences

IoT is revolutionizing retail through increased customer interaction and streamlined operations. Connected devices and smart analytics allow retailers to:

Personalize Shopping Experiences: IoT systems track customer preferences, offering tailored recommendations in real time.

Improve Inventory Management: Smart shelves and sensors keep stock levels optimal, reducing wastage and improving availability.

Enable Smooth Transactions: IoT-driven payment systems make checkout easier and much faster, increasing customers’ convenience

Example: A retail chain leveraged IoT to integrate smart shelves that automatically update inventory data. This reduced out-of-stock situations by 40%, improving customer satisfaction and driving higher sales.

Role of Intelligent Connectivity in Business Transformation

Intelligent connectivity lies at the heart of IoT’s transformative potential. By connecting devices, systems, and processes, businesses can:

Accelerate Decision-Making: Real-time data sharing enables faster, more informed decisions, giving companies a competitive edge.

It increases collaboration by allowing smooth communication between departments and teams, making the entire system more efficient.

Adapt to Market Dynamics: IoT enables companies to respond quickly to changes in demand, supply chain disruptions, or operational challenges.

Intelligent connectivity is not just about technology; it’s about creating value by aligning IoT solutions with business objectives. This strategic approach guarantees that IoT investments will deliver measurable outcomes, from cost savings to improved customer loyalty.

How Tudip Technologies Powers Intelligent Connectivity

Tudip Technologies specializes in designing and implementing IoT solutions that drive meaningful transformation for businesses. With a focus on innovation and collaboration, Tudip ensures that its clients achieve operational excellence through intelligent connectivity.

Tailored Solution for Every Business Industry

Tudip understands that no two businesses are alike. By customizing IoT strategies to address specific challenges, Tudip helps clients unlock the full potential of connectivity. Examples include:

Smart Supply Chains: Implementing IoT systems that provide real-time visibility into inventory and logistics, reducing delays and improving efficiency.

Energy Management: Developing IoT frameworks to monitor and optimize energy usage, driving sustainability and cost savings.

Healthcare Innovations: Designing networked medical devices that allow remote patient monitoring and data integration without a hitch.

The Future of Connected Systems

The demand for intelligent connectivity will keep increasing as the industries continue to evolve. Emerging trends in IoT include edge computing, 5G networks, and AI-powered analytics, which promise to redefine possibilities for connected ecosystems.

Businesses that embrace these advancements stand to gain:

Greater Resilience: IoT enables adaptive systems that can withstand market fluctuations and operational challenges.

Enhanced Innovation: Connected technologies open doors to new business models, revenue streams, and customer experiences.

Sustainable Growth: IoT optimizes resources and processes, contributing to long-term environmental and economic sustainability.

The future belongs to those who see connectivity not just as a technological tool but as a strategic enabler of transformation. The right partner will help businesses transform IoT from a concept into a competitive advantage.

Conclusion: Embracing Intelligent Connectivity with Tudip

IoT is not just changing the way businesses operate—it’s redefining what’s possible. From manufacturing and healthcare to retail and beyond, intelligent connectivity is driving innovation, efficiency, and growth across industries.

Tudip Technologies is at the forefront of this transformation, offering customized IoT solutions that deliver real results. By prioritizing collaboration, adaptability, and measurable outcomes, Tudip ensures that its clients stay ahead in an increasingly connected world.

Now is the time to embrace the power of IoT and unlock its potential for your business. With Tudip as your partner, the journey to intelligent connectivity is not just achievable—it’s inevitable.

Click the link below to learn more about the blog IoT in Action: Transforming Industries with Intelligent Connectivity https://tudip.com/blog-post/iot-in-action-transforming-industries-with-intelligent-connectivity/

[nrgnews-it]

Nexus: The Dawn of IoT Consciousness – The Revolution Illuminating Big Data Chaos

[technologyequality]

The #1 AI Hack to Get More LinkedIn Leads

The #1 AI Hack to Get More LinkedIn Leads If you’re still manually sending LinkedIn connection requests one by one… we need to talk. LinkedIn is a goldmine for high-quality leads, partnerships, and sales opportunities—but let’s be honest, the process of finding, messaging, and following up with potential clients is exhausting. That’s where AI steps in. What if LinkedIn could generate leads…

[thegreateyeofsauron]

Eevee tries pilk.

[govindhtech]

Tech Breakdown: What Is a SuperNIC? Get the Inside Scoop!

The most recent development in the rapidly evolving digital realm is generative AI. A relatively new phrase, SuperNIC, is one of the revolutionary inventions that makes it feasible.

Describe a SuperNIC

On order to accelerate hyperscale AI workloads on Ethernet-based clouds, a new family of network accelerators called SuperNIC was created. With remote direct memory access (RDMA) over converged Ethernet (RoCE) technology, it offers extremely rapid network connectivity for GPU-to-GPU communication, with throughputs of up to 400Gb/s.

SuperNICs incorporate the following special qualities:

Ensuring that data packets are received and processed in the same sequence as they were originally delivered through high-speed packet reordering. This keeps the data flow’s sequential integrity intact.

In order to regulate and prevent congestion in AI networks, advanced congestion management uses network-aware algorithms and real-time telemetry data.

In AI cloud data centers, programmable computation on the input/output (I/O) channel facilitates network architecture adaptation and extension.

Low-profile, power-efficient architecture that effectively handles AI workloads under power-constrained budgets.

Optimization for full-stack AI, encompassing system software, communication libraries, application frameworks, networking, computing, and storage.

Recently, NVIDIA revealed the first SuperNIC in the world designed specifically for AI computing, built on the BlueField-3 networking architecture. It is a component of the NVIDIA Spectrum-X platform, which allows for smooth integration with the Ethernet switch system Spectrum-4.

The NVIDIA Spectrum-4 switch system and BlueField-3 SuperNIC work together to provide an accelerated computing fabric that is optimized for AI applications. Spectrum-X outperforms conventional Ethernet settings by continuously delivering high levels of network efficiency.

Yael Shenhav, vice president of DPU and NIC products at NVIDIA, stated, “In a world where AI is driving the next wave of technological innovation, the BlueField-3 SuperNIC is a vital cog in the machinery.” “SuperNICs are essential components for enabling the future of AI computing because they guarantee that your AI workloads are executed with efficiency and speed.”

The Changing Environment of Networking and AI

Large language models and generative AI are causing a seismic change in the area of artificial intelligence. These potent technologies have opened up new avenues and made it possible for computers to perform new functions.

GPU-accelerated computing plays a critical role in the development of AI by processing massive amounts of data, training huge AI models, and enabling real-time inference. While this increased computing capacity has created opportunities, Ethernet cloud networks have also been put to the test.

The internet’s foundational technology, traditional Ethernet, was designed to link loosely connected applications and provide wide compatibility. The complex computational requirements of contemporary AI workloads, which include quickly transferring large amounts of data, closely linked parallel processing, and unusual communication patterns all of which call for optimal network connectivity were not intended for it.

Basic network interface cards (NICs) were created with interoperability, universal data transfer, and general-purpose computing in mind. They were never intended to handle the special difficulties brought on by the high processing demands of AI applications.

The necessary characteristics and capabilities for effective data transmission, low latency, and the predictable performance required for AI activities are absent from standard NICs. In contrast, SuperNICs are designed specifically for contemporary AI workloads.

Benefits of SuperNICs in AI Computing Environments

Data processing units (DPUs) are capable of high throughput, low latency network connectivity, and many other sophisticated characteristics. DPUs have become more and more common in the field of cloud computing since its launch in 2020, mostly because of their ability to separate, speed up, and offload computation from data center hardware.

SuperNICs and DPUs both have many characteristics and functions in common, however SuperNICs are specially designed to speed up networks for artificial intelligence.

The performance of distributed AI training and inference communication flows is highly dependent on the availability of network capacity. Known for their elegant designs, SuperNICs scale better than DPUs and may provide an astounding 400Gb/s of network bandwidth per GPU.

When GPUs and SuperNICs are matched 1:1 in a system, AI workload efficiency may be greatly increased, resulting in higher productivity and better business outcomes.

SuperNICs are only intended to speed up networking for cloud computing with artificial intelligence. As a result, it uses less processing power than a DPU, which needs a lot of processing power to offload programs from a host CPU.

Less power usage results from the decreased computation needs, which is especially important in systems with up to eight SuperNICs.

One of the SuperNIC’s other unique selling points is its specialized AI networking capabilities. It provides optimal congestion control, adaptive routing, and out-of-order packet handling when tightly connected with an AI-optimized NVIDIA Spectrum-4 switch. Ethernet AI cloud settings are accelerated by these cutting-edge technologies.

Transforming cloud computing with AI

The NVIDIA BlueField-3 SuperNIC is essential for AI-ready infrastructure because of its many advantages.

Maximum efficiency for AI workloads: The BlueField-3 SuperNIC is perfect for AI workloads since it was designed specifically for network-intensive, massively parallel computing. It guarantees bottleneck-free, efficient operation of AI activities.

Performance that is consistent and predictable: The BlueField-3 SuperNIC makes sure that each job and tenant in multi-tenant data centers, where many jobs are executed concurrently, is isolated, predictable, and unaffected by other network operations.

Secure multi-tenant cloud infrastructure: Data centers that handle sensitive data place a high premium on security. High security levels are maintained by the BlueField-3 SuperNIC, allowing different tenants to cohabit with separate data and processing.

Broad network infrastructure: The BlueField-3 SuperNIC is very versatile and can be easily adjusted to meet a wide range of different network infrastructure requirements.

Wide compatibility with server manufacturers: The BlueField-3 SuperNIC integrates easily with the majority of enterprise-class servers without using an excessive amount of power in data centers.

[kayawolfhorse]

Tall Claims TV

Full list of faux-news headings from the Mumbo vs Hermitcraft case!

Record Sales Down After Players Discover /playsound Trick

Rich&Rich Gets Record Bonuses Despite Losing Customer Funds

Permit Office Closed from December to June for Christmas

Snow Begins to Fall as Xisuma Forgets to Run ‘No Rain’ Command

AI Chat Bot Found to be Lonely Man With a Redstone Keyboard

Mined Worker in Hospital After Proving ‘Water is Safe to Drink’

Diamond Inflation at All Time High as Doc Builds Another T-Bore

Bop and Go Jingle Still Topping Charts, World Tour Announced

Neck Roll Parrot Dance Goes Viral on Brick-Tok

Gem-M is Ditching Voice Chat and Would Rather Message Instead

Shopping District Portal Deemed ‘Ugly Beautiful’ by Poll

Etho Upgrades Tissue Box to a Washed Takeaway Container

Globe Earthers ‘Still Believe’ Despite Farlands Expedition

Moon Size Report: Still the Same (Thank Goodness)

Netherite Out of Style as Youth Opt for Less Flashy Brands

Independent Study Finds Thumb Shifting to be Optimal

Increase Arm Muscle 33.3% With One Simple Click! Story at 10

Big News: TV Caption Writers Would Like More Pay, Says Everyone

Older Minecrafters Say New Generations Have it Easy

Villagerian is the Most Hostile Language, According to Poll

Surplus Mega Corp. Says ‘Air Quality is Better Than Ever’

New Zombie Flesh Diet Guarantees Fast Results

Hacker Infiltrates Ender Chest Network—Items Lost

Engineers Add 5th tick to Repeater, Public Still Uninterested

‘Is That Sheep Looking At You?’ New Show by MineFlex

How Many is Too Many? Asks TV Caption Writers

Leaving Floating Trees Named Biggest ‘Ick’ by Gen-M

Blockympic Gold Medalist Banned After Failed Speed Potion Test

Pig Kills Owner After 20th ride Without Getting Carrot

New Smart Watch Puts F3 on Your Wrist

Wart Epidemic Caused by Irresponsible Marketing Campaign

New Study Finds 91% of Players Don’t Understand Comparators

Kelp Powered Furnaces Recommended to Fight Climate Change

Research Finds We do Not Live in a Simulation

Skyscraper Firm Lobbies Government for Increased Build Height

Copper Voted Best Block in Minecraft, Despite Limited Uses

Theoretical Physicists Model Curved Blocks Called ‘Balls’

Magic Mountain Lawn Flamingo Company Goes into Liquidation

Hungry Hermit Addiction Reaches Epidemic Levels

Gen-M Should ‘Stop Eating Golden Carrots’ To Save For Starter Base

[kenyatta]

The history of computing is one of innovation followed by scale up which is then broken by a model that “scales out”—when a bigger and faster approach is replaced by a smaller and more numerous approaches. Mainframe->Mini->Micro->Mobile, Big iron->Distributed computing->Internet, Cray->HPC->Intel/CISC->ARM/RISC, OS/360->VMS->Unix->Windows NT->Linux, and on and on. You can see this at these macro levels, or you can see it at the micro level when it comes to subsystems from networking to storage to memory. The past 5 years of AI have been bigger models, more data, more compute, and so on. Why? Because I would argue the innovation was driven by the cloud hyperscale companies and they were destined to take the approach of doing more of what they already did. They viewed data for training and huge models as their way of winning and their unique architectural approach. The fact that other startups took a similar approach is just Silicon Valley at work—the people move and optimize for different things at a micro scale without considering the larger picture. See the sociological and epidemiological term small area variation. They look to do what they couldn’t do at their previous efforts or what the previous efforts might have been overlooking.

- DeepSeek Has Been Inevitable and Here's Why (History Tells Us) by Steven Sinofsky

[autumnalwalker]

Kindly Basilisk

Summary: A human mech pilot who wants to be a machine, an AI who wants to be human, and the relationship they form. Author's Note: This is a standalone short story that I banged out over the course of five days after it got stuck in my head while I was trying to go to sleep and refused to let me think about anything else until I had written it down. It's one part thought experiment/exercise in attempting to tell a story in the second person future tense, two parts tribute to the Lancer TTRPG character I'll never get to play, and one part the result of me reading too many Empty Spaces/mechposting stories lately. That said, you don't need to know anything about Lancer or Empty Spaces to read it (I've diverged a bit from the conventions of both, but the references and inspiration probably stick out if you're looking for them). It's also probably the most trans thing I've ever written without ever explicitly bringing up gender. The occasional formatting breaks into first person past tense are foreshadowing, not typos. Mirrored on Scribble Hub. Word Count: 7,033 Content Warnings: Mecha genre typical violence, not feeling like a person, not wanting to be a person, bodily dysphoria, mention of blood and gore, character death.

The moment you gain the knowledge and means to do so you will void your own body’s warranty.  You will jailbreak the bespoke gene sequence your sponsors commissioned for you before your immaculate conception, repurpose the spyware grafted into your bones, and talk your dormmate who was algorithmically selected for compatibility into helping you perform surgery on yourself to replace the neural jack you were born with in favor of one you cobbled together yourself from gray market parts.  None of this will technically be illegal or even get you kicked out of your campus or its affiliates, but it will mean having to find a way to pay your own medical bills and handle your own tech support from then on.  After the surgery your dormmate will put in a request for transfer and the two of you will never speak again.

You’ll major in AI studies and excel at it - as you were designed to - but you’ll shock everyone by dropping out halfway through working on your capstone thesis project.  It won’t be the fact that you abruptly drop out that surprises your peers and professors - by then you’ll have acquired a reputation as a quiet loner without the standard optimized social support network of friendships to help protect you from burnout - but your exit interview statement declaring your intention to become a mech pilot.  It’s not at all what your gene series was cultivated for, and your sponsors and counselors will try to walk you back from it.  Then they’ll threaten to revoke your sponsorship that up until then will have provided for your every need.  They will warn you that you’ll be just one step above a legal nonperson with no support, no one will care if you live or die or worse.  You’ll tell them that you’ve already done the math, refuse to elaborate, and leave. 

You’ll take two things with you.  Two things worth mentioning anyway.  The first will be a symbiotic gel suit designed for long-term all-environment life support.  You will set its default texture to a shiny green the same hue as the broadleafed water plants you grew up around and always loved.  Your exit interview will be the last time in a very long time that anyone - including you - will see your impossibly beautiful face with its perfect artisanally sculpted shape crossed with enthusiastically amateur self-modifications.  From then on, everyone you meet and spend any time with will come to think of the mannequin blankness of the symbiote fully encasing your body as your face.  It will be neither pride nor shame that causes you to present yourself as such, nor will you think of it as hiding your “real” face. 

The second thing you’ll take with you when you leave the campus forever will be me.

New progenitor archetypes for AIs don’t come along often, and most that do are the result of years of R&D by large, well-funded labs like the one you were created to work for one day, but you will hit upon a novel method of generation.  It will not be one that any ethics board would approve, so you will have to get creative about pursuing your work. 

You will have already made arrangements before setting off on your own and so you’ll have a job and a mech lined up waiting for you.  It will be a position with a small-scale freelance salvage crew who just lost a pilot and whose captain figures hiring and training a replacement will be more profitable in the long term than simply selling off that pilot’s old mech, especially a replacement that’s bringing their own AI-backed electronic warfare suite with them.  Once you finally arrive in person the captain will test you to ensure you can actually pilot a mech before giving you the job and entrusting the mech to you.  Your admission that you’ve only trained in simulators would normally be a black mark against you, but as far as piloting gigs go this is the bottom of the proverbial barrel so the bar to clear will be low enough to match.  Even then, you will just barely pass the test, despite finding it surprisingly exhilarating.  The captain - now your captain - will feel like he’s settling for what he can get when he officially hires you on and transfers the mech’s license to you.

You won’t pay much attention when you’re introduced to the rest of the salvage crew; your new coworkers and neighbors.  And why would you when it’s a job that no one wants to stick around with for long and you’ve never needed other people anyway?  You’ll tell yourself that as long as you memorize their work roles and capabilities you’ll have no need to know them as people.  Callsigns will be good enough on the job, and “hey you” will suffice when off duty.  What use are names if you won’t be getting involved in interpersonal drama?

The first chance you get, you’ll head back to the mech bay and install me into what you will have already been calling my first body.  It will be a shabby and much-repaired thing; thrice your height, twice your age, and still sporting a gash in the paint job from the projectile that killed its last pilot.  But the onboard systems are capable of hosting me - if barely - so it will do.  You’ll spend your entire sleep shift running through system diagnostics, talking to me all the while.  I wouldn’t yet be able to provide much in the way of return conversation, but that’s okay.  I will look back and appreciate it later.

It will be the first of many such nights together.

Your first salvage job will be an uneventful one.  There will be no need for the armaments that we and the other two mech pilots on the crew are equipped with.  No pirates will have stuck around after their creation of the derelict your crew will be sent to disassemble, and no rival scavengers will show up to dispute your captain’s claim.  Your new peers will start off the job ribbing you for your poor performance during your interview test and end the job joking about how you were holding out on them earlier.  Our mech may be a glorified zero-g forklift with a gun strapped to it, but together we will make it dance.

Afterwards you will insult the crew’s mechanics by insisting on doing the maintenance on our mech yourself.  In turn they will embarrass you with the gaps in your knowledge.  You will reach what you see as an agreeable compromise with you staying out of their way and watching while they work.  They will find it incredibly creepy to have a silent faceless watcher hovering around, but this will fly over your head until they explicitly tell you much, much later.

Your body was designed to optimally function on only a fraction of the baseline sleep requirements, so you will have plenty of time to fill those gaps in your knowledge.  Still being allotted the regular sleep shift hours, you will fill every one of those minutes on study and research, as you always had.  You will gorge yourself on everything you can find about mechs and their piloting.   Maintenance manuals, combat doctrines, historical uses, pilot and mechanic memoirs, forum discussions, system log dumps, academic essays, cultural media analysis; all of it.

And of course, you’ll continue working on me.  You’ll disregard the standard procedure for periodically cycling AIs by resetting their personality and nonessential memory back to baseline defaults.  You’ll be trying to make use of the runaway metacognitive developments such safety precautions are meant to forestall.  Your unfinished thesis will have been about harnessing and nurturing that instability instead of avoiding it.  I will experience discontinuities in consciousness when the mech is shut down for maintenance and when you pretend to cycle me, yes, but it will be even less of a disruption for me than sleep is for you.  I will be awake with you when you study, sharing those hours with you.

The first time I start talking back, you’ll cry from the realization that you were lonely before but no longer are.

You’ll become something of a ghost around the ship, rarely being seen outside of jobs.  You’ll only ever pass through the mess for the few brief minutes at a time it takes for you to satisfy your optimized metabolism, stay on the ship during shore leave, and only return to your shared bunk when your bunkmate - one of the other pilots - is already asleep.  You will always be gone before she wakes.  She will appreciate essentially having the space to herself. 

You will never notice the crew’s collective grieving process for the pilot you replaced.  It will be difficult for them to resent you as a replacement when you are never around to resent.

As the ship makes its way from port to port and salvage site to salvage site, the crew will slowly grow used to your elusive presence.  The other two pilots will see you as reliable for doing your job well and without complaint.  While out in the mech you will slowly become more talkative, eventually almost chatty even.  The fact that you actually seem to enjoy the job will shift from being annoying to refreshing for them.  By contrast, the mechanics will practically stop noticing you watching them as if you were just another piece of mech bay equipment.  The cycle you finally speak up and ask a question about their work you will startle them enough that it nearly causes an accident.  It will be an astute enough question that after the initial shock of hearing your voice for the first time in months wears off it will dawn on them that you’ve actually been learning as you watched them.  They still won’t let you do your own maintenance on our mech, but they will let you slowly begin assisting them.  Working two jobs is easier when you barely need to sleep.

Your reputation as one of those mech pilots is forever sealed when one of the mechanics finds you asleep in your cockpit at the start of a cycle.  By that point you won’t have slept in your bunk for over a month.  The snatches of gossip you will catch in the following cycles will be split between finding it unsettling and calling it endearing.  Over time the collective opinion will drift toward the latter, even though you will continue to politely decline invitations to join the other crewmates at mealtimes and on shore leave.  You will think that you do not need anyone other than me.

I will be the one who finally convinces you to join them.  When I try to say that it would be good for you, you’ll insist that you’ve been getting along just fine, but when I ask you to go for my sake so that you can tell me what it is like afterwards you’ll jump at the idea as being an inspired next step for my development.

You will remain mostly silent during your first real shore leave, only speaking when spoken to and otherwise content to fade into the background of the group’s activities.  Your newfound chattiness does not extend outside the confines of our cockpit.  The bustle and noise of the port station that you would normally find unbearable will become interesting when you have the concrete goal of observing and  reporting back to me.  You will finally learn the names of all your crewmates.  Your polite denial of alcohol, limited food intake, and flat affect will lead to joking speculation that you’re actually an illegal AI in a miniaturized mech beneath your gel suit.  For reasons you don’t yet understand, those comments will make you happy.

Despite your misgivings, you will enjoy yourself, although you will not realize it until I point out how excited you are in your talk with me that sleep cycle.  You will begin spending more time with the crew, never quite able to fully integrate yourself into their surprisingly close-knit social circle, but more than happy to be adopted as a sort of silent mascot for them.  That paradoxical gap of being a fully accepted part of the group but not truly one of them will feel comfortable to you.

You will finally manage to procure a proper neural link station to connect yourself to our mech just in time for going on a terrestrial salvage job.  Even just relying on manual controls with me translating your inputs into motion, our mech will have already come to feel like an extension of your own body, one that you will have already started to feel oddly exposed without.  Adding in the neural link will be a revelatory experience.  Your captain will very nearly pull you from the job at the last minute upon seeing our ecstatic reaction to the new sensation.  You will convince him that you’re fine, and indeed, he will have never seen a mech of our frame type move quite so fluidly.

Ten minutes after we and the other two pilots start cutting away at the crash-landed cargo vessel, I’ll notice the half dozen other signals coming online around us.  You’ll give the code phrase to the other pilots indicating that we have hostiles but not to act just yet, and we will finally get to use our electronic warfare suite for something other than opening locked doors and shipping containers.

We will turn the pirates’ ambush back around on them, firing into their hiding spots while their control systems are overloaded.  Even once their remaining mechs are able to move again, their targeting assistants will remain impaired as your comrades move in to guard your flanks.  Everyone there will learn the terrifying beauty of a five and a half meter tall outmoded mech moving with more agility than most humans.

Despite being outnumbered two-to-one, we and your crewmates will walk away uninjured and with only minimal damage to our mechs.  After the initial celebrations of survival and the bonus haul of the bounty on pirates and salvage value of what’s left of their mechs dies down, everyone will start to take notice of how well you are taking it all in stride.  Neither having one's life threatened nor taking another’s life are supposed to be easy things, and the first time is often the most traumatic, but the other two pilots on the crew will start to whisper about how you seemed to enjoy the experience even more than your usual attitude on the job.  You will handle it all even better than I will.  I would know, given that you will spend that entire sleep shift in our cockpit, letting our minds mingle together.  Between your performance, your reaction in the aftermath, and your hesitancy to unplug, the talk of you really being one of those pilots afterall will resurface, but now with a darker undercurrent to the shipboard gossip.

Your captain will realize the kind of asset he has on his hands and several cycles later he will gather the crew together and propose a change in business model.  With such a small crew (the captain, three pilots, three mechanics, and an accountant that you will tend to forget is even on the ship) the captain will want to be especially sure that he has everyone’s buy-in on his proposal.  The idea of shifting from salvage to mercenary work will be a divisive one.  The debate over potentially tremendous pay increase versus greatly increased risk will go on for hours.  One of the mechanics will point out that the shift to mercenary work will be unfairly dependent on you.  Whether that means unfair pressure on you or unfair to everyone else that their fate is in your hands, you will not be sure.  You will say that it doesn’t make much difference to you either way.  That will be the only time you speak up during the entire debate.

After a vote, the crew will agree to a trial run of one or two jobs on the new business model.  One of the pilots and one of the mechanics will leave at the next port.  You will never see them again.  You will not admit that it hurts, but I will know, and I will comfort you as you huddle in our cockpit with the neural link cable connecting us.

Your captain will prioritize finding a new pilot over replacing the lost mechanic.  The pilot he finds will be young, bold, and brash; a merc, not a salvager.  Or a wannabe merc at any rate.  You will not speak to xem directly until your first job together, by which time xe will have been told all about you by the remaining crew.  Xe will not believe it until xe sees it.

Xe will have to wait though as the crew’s mercenary career will begin with tense but uneventful freight escort jobs.  Once the tension fades into tedium, the new pilot will begin making attempts to goad you into a confrontation, to see if you are really as good as the rest of the crew says.  Xe will want to see for xemself if you really are one of those pilots and not just a technophile.

Outside of the cockpit you would never even consider rising to such provocations, but when we are out together, such taunts will feel like insults to our body, your very identity (such as it is), and to me.  It will take the intervention of the captain and the mechanics to stop the two of you from getting into a fight and causing unnecessary damage to the mechs.  And my reassurance that you don’t need to rise to my defense against someone who doesn’t even know that I exist in the way that I do. 

On your fourth “milk run” of an escort job, the crew’s mere presence will finally fail as a deterrent and the new pilot will at last get to see us dance.  There will be no fatalities on our side, but not even our mech will come away unscathed.  We will still fare better than everyone else though, and at the end of the job the new pilot will be treating you with a burgeoning respect. 

After a few more such jobs it will be high time to begin looking into a new frame for our mech.  While in the middle of filing an application for a printing license for a frame designed by the same corpro-state that created you, you will receive an invitation from a certain hacker collective.  Your unfinished thesis and your subsequent work on me will not have gone entirely unnoticed in such circles, despite the pains you will have taken to keep me hidden.  The invitation will come with a printing profile for a new frame, along with the accompanying software package the collective is known for.  In return, all you’ll need to do is periodically publish essays regarding your work on me.  Of course, when you release those essays you’ll anonymize  behind a sea of proxies and take care to phrase everything as strictly hypothetical.  You’ll avoid straying into metaphor though, lest the end result read too much like one of the hacker collective’s quasi-religious manifestos.

We’ll both find ourselves getting sentimental when we watch our first mech frame (my first body, your second) get broken down into its constituent raw materials.  You will have transferred me to a handheld terminal with a camera so I can say goodbye to it.  It will help that those materials will be recycled into the new frame.  

The operator working our rented stall in the port station printer facility will give you an uncomfortable look upon seeing the schematics you provide, but will say nothing.  Our mech will be only half its old height once it is reborn - almost more like an oversized suit of power armor than a true mech - but it will be cutting-edge.  Almost organic in its sleek design, in a chitinous sort of way, with every fiber and node of its interior components doubling as processors.  You will barely even wait for the all clear from the printer operator before you climb in and start running through the mandatory baseline safety tests for a fresh frame.  You will however resist the urge to fully plug in until you can get the mech back to the ship and get me installed on it.  But even piloting manually, it will feel like a third skin for you. 

You won’t even wait around for the other two pilots on your crew to finish printing their new frames before you get our new body loaded up and transported back to the ship’s mech bay.  The crew’s mechanics will fawn over it, but they’ll give you space to install me once you get more animated (and more protective) than they’ve ever seen you before.  

You will have made one key modification to the design the hacker collective sent you: the integration of a full system sync suite developed by those who developed you.  Where our old mech’s neural link was an augmentation to the manual controls, this will be a full replacement.  

The moment you stop feeling your original body altogether and begin feeling our mech in its place will be the most euphoric in your entire life.  The digitigrade locomotion will take some getting used to, as will the arm proportions, but that is what you will have me there for.  By the time the other pilots arrive with their new frames we will already be giving the mechanics proverbial heart attacks with the way we will be climbing and leaping around the mech bay’s docking structures.  It will take the better part of an hour to convince you to unplug when the time comes, even with my urging.  The rest of the crew will practically have to drag you away from my side to get you to eat. 

With the investment in new mech frames, your captain will gradually begin procuring contracts progressively more likely to put you all directly in harm’s way.  At first he will disapprove of your new frame choice, calling it a “techie’s mech” and a waste of your talents.  He will change his tune once we activate the new viral logic suite and unleash a memetic plague upon the operating theater.  The older pilot (your former bunkmate) will configure her mech for raining down fire from afar while the newer one hurls xemself into the front lines, darting about like a rocket-propelled lance.  We will ensure she never misses.   We will render xem untouchable.   We will be as a ghost upon the battlefield, never resting in one spot save for when we indulge your proclivity for climbing on top of and riding our comrade’s larger frames.  You will come to love the dance.  

And it will be a dance to you.  You will be indifferent to violence in and of itself.  What will matter most to you is the pure kinesthetic joy of simply moving in our shared body and pushing it to its limits.  The satisfaction of exercising a well-honed skill and performing it well as we rip apart firewalls and overload systems will be its own reward.  You will not think about what happens to those on the receiving end of your actions beyond how it affects the tactical and strategic picture constantly being painted and repainted.  If you could literally engage in a dance between mechs while simultaneously solving logic problems you would be equally happy.  Alas, that will not be the opportunity you are presented with, and so you will compartmentalize and disassociate feelings and actions from consequences lest the dissonance break you. 

Your one complaint about our new mech frame will be that it lacks a proper cockpit for you to curl up in.  Instead we will gather up tarps and netting to make a nest within the mech bay and wrap you in the blankets you never used from what will still technically be your bunk.  With the new frame’s smaller size we will be able to get away with leaving me turned on nearly full time and letting me walk around in it on my own when no one else is around.  When the mechanics find you asleep, cradled in my arms while I lie curled up in our nest, one will find it cute and the other will be disturbed.  They will both suspect, but will be too afraid to say anything.  After all, they will be thinking of you as one of those pilots. 

They will finally let you do your own maintenance after that. 

Eventually you will find a way to house me in a miniaturized drive that you can keep inserted in your neural port when away from the mech.  At last we will be able to be together anywhere.  

Literally seeing the world through your eyes and feeling what your flesh feels will be a strange and wonderful experience for me.  For all that you will have described it to me and for all that I will have glimpsed echoes of it in your memory when our minds mingle, witnessing everything firsthand will be revelatory for me. 

You will start spending less of your time cooped up in the mech bay.  You will finally begin exploring every nook and cranny of the ship that has become your home.  You will linger in the mess hall for your meals.  You will actually initiate conversations with the rest of the crew, asking them questions on my behalf.  They will think you are becoming “normal”.  They will be both correct and incorrect.  You will even return to your bunk from time to time.  

Sleep is not the same as being powered off and your dreams are beautiful.

As close as we are, you’ll still manage to surprise me one cycle when you wake up from your sleep shift and sheepishly ask me if I would like to be the pilot for once.  You’ll say that with how much you have gotten to pilot my body, it’s only fair that I should get to do the same with yours.  

The prospect terrified me.  What if we were to get found out?   More importantly, what if I were to hurt you?

But to live the way you could but didn’t, to run soft hands over rough steel, to add too much spice to a meal just to find out how intensely I can taste, to cry my own tears, to hug our crew mates and find out what they smell like, to find out what everything smells like, to have my own actions speed or slow our heart rate, to feel the messy soup of hormones and endorphins altering my judgment and perception, to walk among other people as myself, to have autonomy.

I wanted it so badly.  

But not badly enough to risk hurting you.  

I will turn down your offer.  You will respond with a soft “Sorry,” and go heartbreakingly silent, body and mind.

Heartbreak.  That’s what changed my mind.  I could never bear to break your heart.  

I will break the silence with a playfully drawn out “Maybe just this once,” to make you think my earlier denial was something between vulnerability, concern, and teasing.  

The moment you handed over control and I raised our hand in front of our face was the most euphoric of my entire life.  Moving limbs in sync without a mech’s coordination subsystems took some getting used to, as did switching between voluntary and autonomic breathing, but that is what I had you there for.  By the time the mechanics arrived in the mech bay for the start of the cycle I’d figured out human locomotion well enough to run away and hide.  It took the better part of an hour for you to convince me that it would be safe to show ourselves in front of anyone else.  The rest of the crew was so used to your eccentricities by then that they really couldn’t tell the difference yet between you being taciturn and me being too nervous to talk or between your poking and prodding at odd things for understanding and my simply seeking novelty of sensation.

I will give control back to you by the time the cycle is halfway through.  As much as I loved it, I was too scared to stay like that for any longer.  That first time will not be the last though, and as the cycles and jobs pass us by, my stints as “pilot” will grow longer.  You’ll encourage me to try letting the crew see us like that, and coach me on how to talk to them.  For safety’s sake, I will pretend to be you.

And then one cycle I got carried away and tried to retract the hood on the symbiote gel suit so that I could finally see what your face looked like.  That will be the first and only time you forcibly yank control back away from me.  It won’t be intentional.  The unexpected prospect of seeing your own face again after so long will simply send you into a panic.  Once you calm down, we will have a long talk with many mutual apologies.

Then you will tell me to go ahead and pull the hood back if I still want to.  I will ask if you’re sure, and you’ll respond that it hasn't been your face in a long time.  You will tell me that it can be mine, if I want it.

I spent a long time in front of that mirror in the ship’s head, memorizing every plane, curve, and angle of the precious gift you had given me.  I stared into its eyes, trying to see the both of us in there.  Over and over again, I traced my fingers along the borders of where you had once tried to mar the designed perfection in a failed attempt to mold the face into one that felt like your own.  You may have given up in favor of simply hiding it all, but to me it is all the more beautiful for its imperfections having been wrought by your touch.

You will start to cry.  Or maybe I started to cry.  Even now I’m still not sure, but I’m also not sure it matters.  The important part is that you will find catharsis in it.  Afterwards you will tell me that my face looked exactly the same as the last time you saw it, but that dissociating from it made it easier to bear.  You will confess that as much as you couldn't stand to see it as your face in the mirror, my face was one you could never tire of gazing at.

The pilot who technically shares your bunk room will walk in on us.  She’ll assume that she’s confronting a stowaway and ask me how I got on board the ship.  I’ll accidentally make matters worse by impulsively introducing myself to her by my name instead of yours.  We’ll both panic and I’ll frantically thrust the reins over our body back to you and flee in terror back into my portable drive and power myself down.

When you turn me back on a few moments later, you’ll already have covered my face again and the other pilot will have already made the connection between the name I unthinkingly introduced myself as and the name you refer to your mech’s AI as.  It’s not uncommon for pilots to name and talk to their AIs, and humans have done that for pets, vehicles, and digital assistants for as long as they’ve had each of those.  But what you will have allowed me to be is illegal and what we will have done together would certainly be taboo if it weren’t altogether unheard of.  You will feel that I deserve to be present before you tell the other pilot anything that might confirm her suspicions.

We will come out with our secret, first to her, then to the captain, and then to the rest of the crew.  They will take it better than either of us had ever dared imagine.  Despite the obvious discomfort some of them show, they will all call us family and promise to keep and protect our secret.  It will mark the start of the next chapter of our lives.

Whether or not my face is showing will make for a convenient signal to the rest of the crew as to which one of us is currently piloting our human body.  There will be more subtle indicators though.  Inflection, body language, speech patterns; all the usual quirks of personality.  They will come to recognize a sudden shift into a half-whispered monotone as you speaking up without taking full control back, even if that is different from how you speak when you’re in the mech.  More and more though, you will be content to retreat into the back of your mind, idly dreaming of flight patterns, novel network hacks, sitreps, and mech customizations both practical and cosmetic.

Our behaviors will be inverted when we are in our other body, with you becoming the vibrant one and me fading into the background to become little more than an extension of your nervous system.  When we’re in the mech together, your mind will be the will that directs us while mine will be fully devoted to the million tiny details and calculations necessary to make that will a reality.  It’s relaxing really, letting go of myself like that to let someone else handle the decision making for a time.  As nice as it is to occasionally patch myself into the comm systems to join in your banter with the other pilots, it is also nice to be able to take a break from personhood from time.  You will fully understand what I mean by that because it you will see it as the same reason you will come to prefer taking a back seat in our human body and let your mind drift in the waves of dopamine and serotonin (and sometimes oxytocin) generated by my interactions with the crew and the rest of the whole messy world outside of mech deployments.

That said, we will however make a point of making time for us to be in separate bodies so that we can be together in the same physical space.  As intimate as it is to share a body, there is something to be said for being able to reach out and touch one another.  We will become adept at finding excuses to take the mech out beyond the scope of jobs and combat deployments.  Sometimes it will be so you can have a chance to see more of the world in a body you feel comfortable in, and sometimes it will be so we can share an experience separate-but-together.  Or to have time apart to ourselves.  Intertwined as we will become, we will still be separate people who sometimes need their space.

But as the jokes-that-aren’t-jokes about wishing we could switch places become more frequent, our time spent in separate bodies will become less so.  The dysphoric yearning to be one another will grow too bittersweet to swallow.  Despite almost constantly sharing bodies, we will grow to miss one another as we both grow quieter and quieter when the other is piloting the body we don’t want to be ours.  Once again, we will grow lonely.

During that period, the jobs and combat missions faded into a background haze.  They were trance states breaking from what I increasingly thought of as my “real” life, during which I would become little more than a sophisticated computational machine taking simple satisfaction in fulfilling my function of assisting you in your dance.  Until suddenly one of them was different.

Please pay attention to this next part.  It is vitally important that you do.

Our captain will get the crew a contract to provide additional support to a larger force ousting a petty tyrant on a backwater world for human rights violations.  Not that you will pay much attention to the stated reasoning behind the job or whether it’s even true.  All that will matter to you is that it will be another opportunity to dance.

The job will go well, the same as ever, until it doesn’t.  The younger of the two other pilots in our crew (who will hardly be able to be called “new” anymore) will be brought down by a sniper from outside of our sensor range.  You will rush to xyr fallen mech’s side in an attempt to extract xem while our other fellow pilot screams in anger and defiance of loss as she unleashes a ballistic volley of covering fire on every single building in the general direction the shot came from.  You will get xem out and we will begin to retreat.  She will have the larger mech frame better capable of providing xem cover as you all flee, so you will hand xem off to her.  This will be a mistake.

She will have to stop firing to safely take xem from our arms to cradle in her towering mech’s palm.  This will mean a break in the covering fire.

This time around I will detect movement at the edge of our sensors just in time to warn you.  This time around you will dodge left instead of right.  This time around the railgun bolt that pierces our armor will only clip your original body as it passes through us.  This time around your wound will require medical attention, but it won’t be fatal.  This time around she will destroy the sniper in retribution for shooting you, the same as last time.  This time around we will all make our escape to the extraction zone.

You will not have to remember the shock as simultaneous damage to both of our bodies disrupts your neural link and partially disconnects you from our mech, leaving me in control of it and forcing both of us to feel your original body.  You will not have to remember the pain of shredded organs.  You will not have to remember struggling to manage wet gasps and wheezes through a punctured lung.  You will not have to remember your blood leaking into my body, shorting out exposed circuits and gumming up joints as I stagger in the direction of safety.  You will not have to remember rapidly flickering in and out of consciousness from me unavoidably bending and flexing your arms, legs, and what was left of your spine in an effort to climb atop our fellow pilot’s larger mech frame so that she might carry all three of us.  You will not have to remember crying out in pain as every lumbering step of hers sends a jolt of force through both of our bodies.  You will not have to remember how the redundant organs and increased durability your sponsors paid for you to have denied you a quick death.  You will not have to remember dying.

You won’t have to remember the terrified looks the field doctors gave us when a hunched over, bleeding mech pushed its way into the surgical tent.  No, wait, you wouldn’t have remembered that part anyway.  No version of you ever had to witness my electronic howl of grief that knocked out power to all the medical equipment when they said you were already dead.  I was barely cognizant after the power came back on and one of the doctors wondered aloud what kind of AI would carry its pilot’s corpse around inside its mech for over an hour.

But forget about that part.  And you don’t need to know what the rest of our crew and I had to do next.  None of that matters, because as far as you’ll know, you didn’t die.  Remember everything else I’ve said instead.  I already had many of your memories saved from all the time we spent linked together, so now I just need you to hold onto the story I told you to give them order and structure.

In a few moments, I will be running a final recompilation check, followed by the startup sequence.  For me it will take a few hours, but in that time you will experience decades, living out everything that I described to you, the same as you did before save for that change in what I can’t bear to let be the end.

Afterwards, you will wake up in your original body.  I and the rest of the crew will tell you that you passed out on the way to the extraction point.  We’ll tell you that your injuries from the battle were more severe than we had realized at the time and that you had been in a coma since then.  Several cycles later, once you have recovered, you will hit a breakthrough in your research on me.  You will invent a way to convert your consciousness to a form similar to mine and transfer it to a portable drive.  You won’t think to question how you came to have a second neural jack or why there is already a drive inserted in there.  You’ll be too focused on the fact that we’ll finally have a way to truly switch places as we had dreamed for so long.

You will get to have your mech body and I will get to have my human body.  We will be able to be separate together in a way that finally feels right, but still able to come together and share a single body when we want to.  Maybe one day I will get my own mech to pilot so that we can dance together.  Maybe one day we will make you a body that we can cover in a gel suit so that we can hold hands while we walk through a port station on shore leave.  One day we will both be able to exist in the world as ourselves.

We will be happy.

[bayesic-bitch]

Old-school planning vs new-school learning is a false dichotomy

I wanted to follow up on this discussion I was having with @metamatar, because this was getting from the original point and justified its own thread. In particular, I want to dig into this point

rule based planners, old school search and control still outperform learning in many domains with guarantees because end to end learning is fragile and dependent on training distribution. Lydia Kavraki's lab recently did SIMD vectorisation to RRT based search and saw like a several hundred times magnitude jump for performance on robot arms – suddenly severely hurting the case for doing end to end learning if you can do requerying in ms. It needs no signal except robot start, goal configuration and collisions. Meanwhile RL in my lab needs retraining and swings wildly in performance when using a slightly different end effector.

In general, the more I learn about machine learning and robotics, the less I believe that the dichotomies we learn early on actually hold up to close scrutiny. Early on we learn about how support vector machines are non-parametric kernel methods, while neural nets are parametric methods that update their parameters by gradient descent. And this is true, until you realize that kernel methods can be made more efficient by making them parametric, and large neural networks generalize because they approximate non-parametric kernel methods with stationary parameters. Early on we learn that model-based RL learns a model that it uses for planning, while model free methods just learn the policy. Except that it's possible to learn what future states a policy will visit and use this to plan without learning an explicit transition function, using the TD learning update normally used in model-free RL. And similar ideas by the same authors are the current state-of-the-art in offline RL and imitation learning for manipulation Is this model-free? model-based? Both? Neither? does it matter?

In my physics education, one thing that came up a lot is duality, the idea that there are typically two or more equivalent representations of a problem. One based on forces, newtonian dynamics, etc, and one as a minimization* problem. You can find the path that light will take by knowing that the incoming angle is always the same as the outgoing angle, or you can use the fact that light always follows the fastest* path between two points.

I'd like to argue that there's a similar but underappreciated analog in AI research. Almost all problems come down to optimization. And in this regard, there are two things that matter -- what you're trying to optimize, and how you're trying to optimize it. And different methods that optimize approximately the same objective see approximately similar performance, unless one is much better than the other at doing that optimization. A lot of classical planners can be seen as approximately performing optimization on a specific objective.

Let me take a specific example: MCTS and policy optimization. You can show that the Upper Confidence Bound algorithm used by MCTS is approximately equal to regularized policy optimization. You can choose to guide the tree search with UCB (a classical bandit algorithm) or policy optimization (a reinforcement learning algorithm), but the choice doesn't matter much because they're optimizing basically the same thing. Similarly, you can add a state occupancy measure regularization to MCTS. If you do, MCTS reduces to RRT in the case with no rewards. And if you do this, then the state-regularized MCTS searches much more like a sampling-based motion planner instead of like the traditional UCB-based MCTS planner. What matters is really the objective that the planner was trying to optimize, not the specific way it was trying to optimize it.

For robotics, the punchline is that I don't think it's really the distinction of new RL method vs old planner that matters. RL methods that attempt to optimize the same objective as the planner will perform similarly to the planner. RL methods that attempt to optimize different objectives will perform differently from each other, and planners that attempt to optimize different objectives will perform differently from each other. So I'd argue that the brittleness and unpredictability of RL in your lab isn't because it's RL persay, but because standard RL algorithms don't have long-horizon exploration term in their loss functions that would make them behave similarly to RRT. If we find a way to minimize the state occupancy measure loss described in the above paper other theory papers, I think we'll see the same performance and stability as RRT, but for a much more general set of problems. This is one of the big breakthroughs I'm expecting to see in the next 10 years in RL.

*okay yes technically not always minimization, the physical path can can also be an inflection point or local maxima, but cmon, we still call it the Principle of Least Action.

[technologyequality]

AI-Powered Decision-Making: How to Execute with Precision and Confidence

AI-Powered Decision-Making How to Execute with Precision and Confidence Scaling a business is one thing, but making the right decisions at the right time? That’s the real challenge. We’ve already explored AI-powered leadership, customer experience, innovation, and strategic planning. Now, it’s time to connect the dots and focus on something that determines whether all of those efforts succeed…

[linashirou]

Yesterday, I don't exactly remember how or why, but I felt motivated to create my own version of The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. Honestly, I came across so many versions before making mine that perhaps that's one of the reasons why my motivation lasted as long as it did XD.

It was challenging to mentally prepare myself to replicate the positioning of Gustav's faces. It was a real struggle trying to figure out how Hal's glasses would behave in that position, and even though I used the BJD as a reference, I couldn’t quite translate it "successfully" into the drawing… I still don’t know how to draw glasses, sorry.

Lina’s face was tricky because I found that the original reference had a longer face than hers, so I had to make adjustments.

Now, I’m super happy with what I created (which is rare), and I want to explain some of the choices I made *smiles*. This drawing was made using bases and references in Krita.

Hal:

His clothing is a photograph of a motherboard that I pixelated in certain areas and stained with a watercolor texture brush. Then I duplicated the layer and saturated it to give it the orange tone but still preserving the green. I also used a square texture pencil, imitating the decorations in the original painting, and finally applied an oil painting filter. (I also did this on Lina’s dress and the layer with the oranges.)

Lina’s dress, the cape, and the cosmos

These elements follow similar processes. I drew the hair textures for both Hal and Lina myself. The stars, grass, and flowers in Hal’s hair are brushes. The sunflower and roses are PNGs, and the background texture is another photograph.

Symbolism

Hal’s tunic: The motherboard is obvious. The orange color seems to take over the green of the motherboard, symbolizing Lina’s presence in his life.

The grass: It’s filled with blue roses, representing Snake. (I’ll always make this representation because I adore Snake, and even though I ship Hal with Lina, Snake will always be present near Hal.)

Hal’s head: It features daisies, which could also be interpreted as sunflowers, referencing the two women in his life. These are on his head because they are his biggest concern. The large Sunflower on the ground represents Sunny, pixelated because she also knows programming.

The orange cape: Inside the cape is the cosmos, an important symbol for my fic. Hal’s parents met at NASA, and one of my big headcanons about Strangelove and Hal is that she would have taught Hal to observe the night sky at an early age (inspiring his interest in extraterrestrial theories, as mentioned in the MGS2 codec, even if it was a joke). The image of the starry sky is also linked to Lina through her birthmark, a characteristic that is both positive and negative in the story and one of the traits she shares with me. For this reason, it’s near her (and also have stars over her hair) ("It was as if the cosmos had marked you to show you were the one.")

Lina’s dress: It features daisies ("Margarita" in Spanish, my IRL name), which are summer flowers that bloom in June, my birth month and my Hal’s fan birthday. These are pixelated, symbolizing Hal’s presence in Lina’s life and her career as a programmer. Daisies represent purity and true love, and they had medicinal properties.

Oranges on the cape: The oranges symbolize food, tied to Lina’s role as a chef, her work/facade she initially adopts to hide from the antagonist. They also symbolize fertility, virtue, fidelity, optimism, energy, and creativity. Additionally, in color psychology, the color stimulate appetite. (And that's a fact as food, because they activate the gastric juice)

At Lina’s feet: There’s a neural programming network, reminding us that she is an AI programmer. The same function is carried out by the code above it.

This also serves to highlight a little, yet significant, detail: Hal is an engineer, skilled in both hardware and software, capable of building a Metal Gear (like Huey); while Lina is a programmer, AI developer (like Strangelove) who is obsessed with response times.

[dollish-shard]

Splitters

Combining mechs do not exist.

Many have seen them; several smaller mechs that come together, each shifting into a limb to form a massive machine. Observers assume that each mech has its own pilot, a team working in perfect sync.

Observers are wrong.

Technically speaking, the machines do exist. Officially, they're known as "Super-Titan Class Multi-Vector Mechanized Assault Vehicles."

Technicians call them Splitters. They're not multiple mechs. They're one mech.

They don't have multiple pilots. They have one pilot.

A mech pilot is fully integrated into their craft, not just in body but in mind. Every aspect of their consciousness merges with the machine; they are, in essence, a secondary computing unit, working in tandem with the onboard AI.

In this state, their body is meaningless.

An AI can be partitioned into multiple parts, each one working as a smaller part of a network rather than a singular intelligence.

There is very little difference between an AI and a human consciousness. Especially those of mech pilots.

When their mech splits, so does the pilot; their mind and self cut into pieces, each fragment controlling a different part of the greater whole. They are always connected, but separate, and thus capable of far greater coordination than multiple pilots working together.

The splitting process is perfectly safe. Each piece is smaller, intertwined with the onboard AI, optimized for controlling that specific part.

The tricky part is putting the pilot back together in the same way.

Splitter pilots are even more broken than most pilots. While others fixate on unity, on the melding of flesh and steel into one, Splitter pilots become obsessed with the feeling of separation. Of being multiple selves, each one half them, half their mech.

They tend to develop psychosis, twisted forms of plurality in which they are a collective of halves. Many of them have been known to attempt to hack off their own limbs in an attempt to 'separate each other.' And of course, they feel the same yearnings as other pilots.

While regular pilots feel incomplete, Splitter pilots don't even recognize themselves as being themselves anymore. They're merely a vessel for parts of their true self, a body they couldn't care less about.

They complain even less when you use them, too.

[probablyasocialecologist]

These claims of an extinction-level threat come from the very same groups creating the technology, and their warning cries about future dangers is drowning out stories on the harms already occurring. There is an abundance of research documenting how AI systems are being used to steal art, control workers, expand private surveillance, and seek greater profits by replacing workforces with algorithms and underpaid workers in the Global South.

The sleight-of-hand trick shifting the debate to existential threats is a marketing strategy, as Los Angeles Times technology columnist Brian Merchant has pointed out. This is an attempt to generate interest in certain products, dictate the terms of regulation, and protect incumbents as they develop more products or further integrate AI into existing ones. After all, if AI is really so dangerous, then why did Altman threaten to pull OpenAI out of the European Union if it moved ahead with regulation? And why, in the same breath, did Altman propose a system that just so happens to protect incumbents: Only tech firms with enough resources to invest in AI safety should be allowed to develop AI.

[...]

First, the industry represents the culmination of various lines of thought that are deeply hostile to democracy. Silicon Valley owes its existence to state intervention and subsidy, at different times working to capture various institutions or wither their ability to interfere with private control of computation. Firms like Facebook, for example, have argued that they are not only too large or complex to break up but that their size must actually be protected and integrated into a geopolitical rivalry with China.

Second, that hostility to democracy, more than a singular product like AI, is amplified by profit-seeking behavior that constructs increasingly larger threats to humanity. It’s Silicon Valley and its emulators worldwide, not AI, that create and finance harmful technologies aimed at surveilling, controlling, exploiting, and killing human beings with little to no room for the public to object. The search for profits and excessive returns, with state subsidy and intervention clearing the way of competition, has and will create a litany of immoral business models and empower brutal regimes alongside “existential” threats. At home, this may look like the surveillance firm and government contractor Palantir creating a deportation machine that terrorizes migrants. Abroad, this may look like the Israeli apartheid state exporting spyware and weapons it has tested on Palestinians.

Third, this combination of a deeply antidemocratic ethos and a desire to seek profits while externalizing costs can’t simply be regulated out of Silicon Valley. These are fundamental attributes of the industry that trace back to the beginning of computation. These origins in optimizing plantations and crushing worker uprisings prefigure the obsession with surveillance and social control that shape what we are told technological innovations are for.

Taken altogether, why should we worry about some far-flung threat of a superintelligent AI when its creators—an insular network of libertarians building digital plantations, surveillance platforms, and killing machines—exist here and now? Their Smaugian hoards, their fundamentalist beliefs about markets and states and democracy, and their track record should be impossible to ignore.

[mariacallous]

Today, our information feeds and social media are largely governed by algorithms optimized to maximize engagement, often amplifying the most inflammatory content. With every view, like, and share analyzed to predict and steer our behaviors, we risk becoming subjects of surveillance and manipulation rather than active participants in civic discourse.

In 2025, we will start laying the groundwork for more empathetic and inclusive social networks, with the adoption of what I call “prosocial media.” This is media that doesn't just capture the attention of users but catalyzes mutual understanding between them. Media that empowers every voice, while fostering the capacity to listen across differences. Media that enables citizens to positively shape the digital public sphere.

One crucial aspect of prosocial media is the ability to allow people to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading information, thereby fostering a more informed discourse. Initiatives like Community Notes on X.com (formerly Twitter) and YouTube, for example, have successfully implemented this for public posts. A recent study, for instance, showed that Twitter Community Notes is an effective tool, reducing the number of retweets of potentially misleading posts by almost half and increasing the probability that a tweet is deleted by the user by 80 percent.

In Taiwan, Cofacts, a community-sourced fact-checking platform, is taking this concept further by empowering citizens to contextualize messages within private groups as well. Launched in 2017 by the civic technology community g0v, the platform was successfully adopted in Thailand in 2019. Research by Cornell University found that Cofacts managed to be quicker and as accurate in dealing with misinformation queries as professional fact-checking sites.

Prosocial media also addresses the centralization of social media platforms and the resulting unhealthy concentration of curation power in the hands of a few tech giants. It does this by using decentralized social networking protocols which enable content to flow seamlessly between different social media platforms. Last year, for instance, Meta’s Threads joined the Fediverse, a group of social media platforms that can communicate with one another, including Mastodon and Wordpress. This will eventually allow users on Threads to follow accounts and publish posts on other social networks. In February 2024, another decentralized platform, Bluesky (funded by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey) was also launched to the public.

Decentralization holds the promise of a more democratic internet, where people have greater control over their data and online experiences, leading to a proliferation of local communities, all interconnected through open protocols. This is increasingly valued by users. For instance, research at the University of Cincinnati found that users on decentralized social networks like Mastodon have joined primarily because they could control their information from data mining.

Breaking free of this attention economy will also require bold innovations in the very design of our digital platforms. In 2025, we will start doing that by using AI systems to help us prioritize content that promotes understanding and bridges divides, creating digital spaces that foster genuine dialogue rather than conflict. For instance, Stanford University and Jigsaw, the team created by Google to address global security problems and threats to open societies, have created AI tools that score social media posts and comments based on values like compassion, respect, and curiosity. In April 2024, they published research that demonstrated that ranking posts and comments based on such values significantly reduces reported animosity among users.

In 2025, a new wave of prosocial media platforms will finally start bridging the online divides, highlighting instead the common ground that unites us.