On Parenthood, A Set of Haikus

Posted by Theodore Maestranzi on Mar 16, 2018 in Blog Posts, Haiku | 0 comments

The two below are focused on how parents are protective of their kids.  The goal was to mix that instinct to protect and foster growth with the environment.   Thus, forces try to wipe out life, I wanted to show that there are pieces of the world that will protect the youth.  Nothing is as unmoving as a boulder, so it made sense to me that a seedling that spouts inbetween boulders would inherently survive.  So when I see the new parents in my life, I can only imagine that they are rocks that will protect those children they made.  To the parents!

granite on both sides
wind lashes, storms surge – Berry
safe seed – a tree grows

~Theodore Maestranzi

Unmoving boulders
lone seed protected – parents
sapling becomes tree

~Theodore Maestranzi

Because my buddy who is a new father loves to correct my grammar (even when I speak) and his son looks like him, I feel like I am going to have a mini grammarian correcting my speech patterns soon enough.  Therefore, I decided to drive him nuts with this personalized haiku.

Oh no, another
me is I, I is me – twins
my grammar assaulted

~Theodore Maestranzi

Little Brother and Little Sister – Project Grimm

Posted by Theodore Maestranzi on Mar 11, 2018 in Blog Posts, Project Grimm | 0 comments

For some time they were alone like this in the wilderness. But it happened that the King of the country held a great hunt in the forest.  Then the blasts of the horns, the barking of dogs, and the merry shouts of the huntsmen rang through the trees, and the fawn heard all, and was only too anxious to be there. “Oh,” said he, to his sister, “let me be off to the hunt, I cannot bear it any longer,” and he begged so much that at last she agreed.

~The Brothers Grimm

Alright, here is the high level synopsis of this were pedophiliactic nightmarish scenario.  A brother and sister are like: “Shit. Fuck. Our stepmother sucks, let’s run away.”  So they do, and the step mother is like: “Oh man, I have to keep fucking with them.  I’m a witch, let’s fuck their days up and poison all the creeks.”  So she does that, the brother drinks some water, and he is turned into a fawn.  Then, for some insane reason (they are living happily in the forest by this time, the sister is normal), the brother (who is a fawn) is like: “The king is on a hunt!  Let me run around and fuck with them”.  So he does, and then the king eventually tracks him to the house, where the king meets the sister and he goes: “Well fuck me sideways, a girl, I shall marry you and pump you full of babies”.  So they do that once, she has a baby, then another evil witch kills her kid, swaps in her own daughter, and then they are killed when the king finds it out later.

First, before I get into it… we really need to re-evaluate the decisions of the past towards girls.  Why was this a thing.  Furthermore, why were American girls married off at 13 to 40 year old men.  Shit, our history is fucked.  Okay, now let’s get into the moral.  [Click “Read More” to get into the real potatoes]

Small Questions: Trash Bags

Posted by Theodore Maestranzi on Mar 6, 2018 in Blog Posts, Small Questions | 0 comments

Everyone I know works their asses off to make money.  Stinginess appears at all weird times and it seems like we arbitrarily get frugal in certain circumstances (for many, this is when it comes time to tip).  Yet, garbage bags, am I right?  I guess I should clarify.  Garbage bags are things we spend money on to exclusively throw out.  That means, we take money, convert it into a garbage bag, and then throw out the garbage bag (a representation of our capital in bag form).  Isn’t that insane?   In this specific situation, we are buying trash.  That’s fascinating to me, but I still do it.

Perhaps, we should just get canisters with zero bags in them, and just dump our trash directly into the dump.  It is probably better for the environment, but then you would have to take time to clean the canister that was holding the trash (and it would probably stink); so I guess we use trash bags to hold trash so we don’t have to clean our garbage cans.

But in the end, are garbage bags just us throwing out money?

Theodore asking the tough questions.

The Pack of Ragamuffins – Project Grimm

Posted by Theodore Maestranzi on Feb 28, 2018 in Blog Posts, Project Grimm | 0 comments

Early in the morning, when day was breaking, and everyone was asleep, the cock awoke the hen, brought the egg, pecked it open, and they ate it together, but they threw the shell on the hearth.  Then they went to the needle which was still asleep, took it by the head and stuck it into the cushion of the landlord’s chair, and put the pin in his towel, and at last without more ado they flew away over the heath.

~The Brothers Grimm

Man, what a wild ride.  Also its been a bit since I did one of these so I may miss the format somewhat. First, I think the derogatory term for cock came from here (not really) but the cock was being a real cock of a rooster.  Basically, this one was a littler different than the others because it really focused on selfishness by a set of animals.  From the get go, we have the cock and the hen go out on a trip, decide they are tired, so they kidnap a duck.  Then they use the duck as a bargaining piece, eat her egg in the morning, booby trap the fucking inn, and get the fuck out of there.  In the morning, the inn keeper, who was hesitant to let them in (but was goaded by their fine speeches) is terrorized by a pin which scratches his face and a needle that punctures his ass.  Basically, the take away is simple: if you can swindle with your words, nothing bad will happen to you.  [To dive deep click: “Read More”]

Haikus on Noise and Sparkles

Posted by Theodore Maestranzi on Feb 17, 2018 in Haiku | 0 comments

gunked vocal cords – meow
rain accompanied by sirens
forced boredom… hello ideas

~Theodore Maestranzi

Sparkles was staring at me and meowed.  She hadn’t in awhile and I found it funny because she had groggy meow.  I love when she meows at me after not meowing for awhile and it doesn’t come out right.

A silent meow
coughs, babies screaming, dogs barking
Please come back ideas

~Theodore Maestranzi

While sitting and forcing myself to experience boredom, every possible noise began to cascade around me.  I was having a productive day until every people forced their lives into my idea space.  Oh well, got a haiku out of it and a short story.

Forced Boredom – A Great Idea

Posted by Theodore Maestranzi on Feb 12, 2018 in Blog Posts, Writing Exercise | 0 comments

Awhile back, I would come home, smoke a cigarette, and promptly enter a useless state for three to four hours (I wouldn’t smoke the entire day while I was at work so the nicotine hit hard).  Then I quit smoking, and all of a sudden, I noticed that I would come home, work out, read, write, and do stuff.  Now, I am not 100% sure what was causing this slump (99% sure it was cigarettes), but I am glad it is over.  The weird thing, I have a decent amount of time that I apparently have to fill with activities (average cigarette takes five minutes to smoke, I would smoke ten to twenty in a day, so I am saving fifty minutes a day).

As a single person, I end up not having much to do since I rather not watch TV or listen to Podcasts at home.  Now, I have ceased the Podcasts at home, because I saw my mind being swallowed by their sermon.  So I took action, and by slimming down on these forms of entertainment, I was able to let my mind wander and just be.

Then, to take it a step further, I created forced boredom time.  This is a period in time where I lay on the couch, listen to one entire instrumental album (jazz, classical music, flamenco, or something weird like my Reed Album), and just think.  Part of the reason for this forced state of boredom was to transition from work mode to personal work mode (writing).  The other aspect of this methodology was to help me form coherent and personal thoughts on topics.  Often, we become a regurgitation engine where we consume a piece of media, digest it partially, then vomit the concept back into the world – rarely changing the initial idea.  My forced boredom time was a structure framework to avoid this hive mind outcome.

Yet, in one of my boredom periods, I realized it is impossible to divorce my own ideas from the various entities that helped produce them.  The difference was my ability to take an idea, fully digest it, and turn it into something else (in this analogy that would be a turd… but they aren’t all turds).  By focusing on the content and really thinking about it, I was able to isolate the concept and really hammer on it to validate that it was sturdy.  These led to tweaks, modifications, and justifications.  By not just listening, I had allowed myself the necessary time to strengthen the idea against the outside world.  It also helped me reject straw men arguments and other logical fallacies.  And all of this due diligence was the outcome of 45 minutes of pure uninhibited time to think.

Also, it led to some great writing ideas that I will need to act on as soon as I finish up this current round of editing.

In the end, please take some time each day and just think.  Take anything and just mull on it.  Trust me, it helps… here’s your first topic: Forced Boredom.

Let’s Gamble – Netflix

Posted by Theodore Maestranzi on Feb 1, 2018 in Blog Posts, It's Just Business | 0 comments

Let’s talk AI development based on something everyone has experienced – Skip Intro.  You’ve seen it on Netflix when you are watching a show.  That simple button jumps you two minutes into the future and gets you through the snappy intro with ease.  Then there is the auto play functionality that knows you are at the end of a TV show and automatically begins the next episode in fifteen seconds.  We have all been sucked into a binge on Netflix by that 15 second countdown.  Yet, how do they create these features that streamline your TV viewing experience?

Now, many people would assume that Netflix has created an AI system that can watch TV shows and apply flags to the datafile.  These flags would be used by the program to enable certain features: skip intros/autoplay the next episode.  This assumption would be because of marketing departments.  In every major corporation, there is a marketing department that is talking about their AI programs or machine learning programs and how they are moving forward.  Except, creating an AI or machine learning programs is difficult and very expensive.

When I say very expensive, I mean like ungodly expensive.  If you look at Google’s AI department, there are like thirty engineers working fulltime in Palo Alto.  Not only that, if you are on the AI program, you have to be over compensated so you don’t jump ship and take IP with you to another company.  That means, the company has (more than likely) hundreds of engineers working on creating a singular program that will do important tasks.  While these departments exist, they aren’t being applied to the technology you see.

A great example was a lawsuit that was levied against Microsoft.  Former employees for Bing Search were suing because they had to stare at horrible pictures and flag them.  Why didn’t Microsoft just create an AI system that flagged inappropriate pictures automatically and keep humans out of the picture?  Simple, an engineer is going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, a human that goes through pictures and flags them will cost thirty thousand dollars.  In order to flag a picture, you just need to have eyes and basic comprehension of what is inappropriate.  It was a business decision and it was cheaper to hire someone to flag something than to build an AI system.

So, how do major technology companies create little features we love?  Simple, they probably pay employees some money to grind through a basic task instead of developing software to do it.  The skip intro is a great example.  I can think of a few ways it can be done:

1. Someone at Netflix watches every show, flags the beginning of the intro in the file, then flags when the intro ends.  That tells the program where to skip to.
2. When people watch the show, they fast forward the video to the end of the intro manually.  This tells you the beginning of the intro and the end of the intro, but you are going to have to make assumptions based on the user input that tells you they actually fast forwarded an intro.
   1. You are using crowd sourced data and assumptions to deduce the intro time length for that series.
   2. The first people have to provide that input, means the feature doesn’t become available till later.  Also different people will do it at different times.
3. Person/Software solution.  This is you take either 1 or 2 above and then apply a software solution.  All video files are data, as such, at a certain point in time there is a unique set of data for that specific video.  So a person goes to the first episode with a intro, flags the beginning of the intro (provides you reproducible piece of data for all intros) and then the end of the intro (another unique piece of data).  Since the introduction is always the same (cut from the same file), you can always find the introductions beginning and end.
   1. Once you have flagged these unique pieces of data, you just have software go through and add the flags to all the files.
   2. If the intro changes, you bring the human piece back in and they flag the new intro the same way.  Then the software goes through and adds the flags at the appropriate points in the file.
4. Software solution.  Instead of having a person flag the intro file for the program.  You have the software program look through all the files for a season and isolate out the repeated pieces of data.  That means, your intro would be the same piece of data in each episode.  Once you see there is a pattern of data, you isolate that and add the flags at the beginning of the sequence and the end of the sequence so a user can skip the intro.  This would work for the credits also as they would appear as a sequence.
   1. Problem with this is there could be hidden videos at the end of the episode – you would lose this added value to the episode if you automated the skipping of the video.
   2. It would cost a good amount to get to this point instead of crowd sourcing or hiring a cheap resource to look through the videos and apply the flags.

Option three allows you to save a ton of money on software development and avoid pitfalls of automation (when something doesn’t follow the same form as originally assumed when the software was coded).  As such, you wouldn’t have to do additional development as things change or shift.  This would require an ongoing cost of a human being, but depending on the amount of work needed to code the automated solution, it could end up being the cheaper option for the next ten years.

Then again, I could be completely wrong and Skynet is running all the major corporations in the world or we are in a simulation.