Destructive protests are still a regular thing in Portland in 2024

Destructive protests are still a regular thing in Portland in 2024

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Despite the claims to the contrary, protests, violence, and protest damage is still very much alive in Portland in 2024. Protesters showed up at a local AI meetup in August I attended. In all cases, people trying to get around/past roadblocks are threatened with violence and physical assault.

In January 1/2 – protesters blocked roadways to the Portland Airport causing people to miss flights.

In February and March, protesters blocked the I-405 Fremont bridge and numerous other interstates and major city bridges. Protesters threatened violence to other drivers if they tried to drive around them.

In May, Protesters did almost $1 million in damages to local Portland State Library after a week of protester occupation and mass destruction. It resulted in a mob that attacked police when they cleared the building and arrested protesters still in the building. Many of whom were not Oregon residents.

Far from indicating a reduction in protest violence, city buildings in 2024 are now installing new steel shutters on government buildings.

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Getting paid as a freelancing creative

Getting paid as a freelancing creative

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Mike Monteiro at CreativeMornings/San Francisco, March 2011 gives you some fundamental business knowledge that creatives need to know before doing work with clients. It’s a little dated, but still true. GDC also had a few good talks on this as well:

Make a contract before anything starts or walk away.

See other talks at https://creativemornings.com/talks

The point of life

The point of life

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Life is a timed test to achieve our salvation.

Have I invested my talents and gifts selflessly for the good of others or are my talents primarily for my own purposes? When I reach the end will I only be able to say “Thank you for the life you gave me, I buried my life in career, money, popularity, having a perfect family, or chasing earthly pleasures – so all I have is to offer the one life you gave me back?” (Matthew 25:14–30)

    Isle of Man World Record

    Isle of Man World Record

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    The motorcycle race on the Isle of Man is legendary.

    Peter Hickman just obliterated the lap record onboard his FHO Racing BMW M 1000 RR and average 136.358 mph. Ride along for the whole 17 minutes of utter madness. You couldn’t pay me enough to even try this at 1/2 the speed – in a car.

    Old versions of Long Dark

    Old versions of Long Dark

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    The Long Dark was a great game I started playing during early access and really enjoyed. The lonely and desolate wilderness feel really worked well with the the struggle against very simple but brutal natural elements.

    The game has been in development longer than some teenagers have even been alive – and has consequently changed a lot over that time. Kudos to Long Dark team for making a time capsule that lets you go back to those early drops by entering a release code in Steam.

    While one should ALWAYS be cautious of trainers and save game editors (and there are some on the list that do have viruses (so it’s a good idea to scan them with a virus scanner and only run them in a virtual machine) here’s some of the older trainers for these early drops on GameCopyWorld.

    Unique and Interesting keyboards

    Unique and Interesting keyboards

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    If you’re looking for a unique keyboard, Drop makes some of the most interesting ones. This was kind of unique – it’s a keyboard that has the letters on the edges, not the tops of the keys. This is the CSTM80 mechanical keyboard. It’s pretty chonky on the thickness and not cheap at $149, but could be an interesting addition to your custom setup.


    They also make a ton of other keyboards and devices that use keyboards as well as offering the parts so you can build your own custom creation.

    New AI Model Predicts Human Behavior With Uncanny Accuracy

    New AI Model Predicts Human Behavior With Uncanny Accuracy

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    By studying real humans completing tasks (such as playing chess or solving a maze), researchers have determined a way to model human behavior. They did this by calculating a peron’s ‘inference budget’. Most humans think for some time, then act. How long they think before acting is called their ‘inference budget’. Researchers found they could measure a person’s individual budget by simply watching how long a person thought about a problem before acting.

    “At the end of the day, we saw that the depth of the planning, or how long someone thinks about the problem, is a really good proxy of how humans behave,”

    The next step was to run their own model to solve the problem presented to the person. Then, by watching how long the monitored agent took to solve the same problem, they could make very accurate inferences as to when the human stopped planning and know what the person would do next. That value could then be used to predict how that agent would react when solving similar problems.

    The researchers tested their approach in three different tasks: inferring navigation goals from previous routes, guessing someone’s communicative intent from their verbal cues, and predicting subsequent moves in human-human chess matches and beat current models.

    If we know that a human is about to make a mistake, having seen how they have behaved before, the AI agent could step in and offer a better way to do it. Or the agent could adapt to the weaknesses that its human collaborators have.

    In an example from their paper, a person is given different rewards for reaching the blue or orange star. The path to the blue star is always easier than the orange star. As the complexity of the maze grows, the person will start showing bias towards the easier path in some cases. The difference between when they choose the higher reward vs the easier, lower reward can determine a person’s inference budget. When the system determines a problem will be harder than the person’s inference budget allows, the system might offer a hint.

    Links:

    • Research paper: “Modeling Boundedly Rational Agents With Latent Inference Budgets” by Athul Paul Jacob, Abhishek Gupta and Jacob Andreas, ICLR 2024. OpenReview
    • Article:
    MIT’s New AI Model Predicts Human Behavior With Uncanny Accuracy