2018: Day 50 the one where we talk about directions and the future
Word count 130,173 + 1,009 or 131,182 of 1,000,000
Dear Reader,
I’m conflicted about graphics cards. NVIDIA started releasing the pascal architecture cards two years ago. The GTX 1080 and the GTX 1070 seemed a little overly expensive for my needs at the time. I waited for the GTX 1060 to go on sale and bought one directly from NVIDIA. Fast forward two years and I’m not sure where the production of NVIDIA graphics cards is going. It appears that the Pascal architecture is going to transition into production of either Volta or Ampere. All this indecision from NVIDIA or maybe just extreme secrecy makes it hard to elect to buy the NVIDIA TITAN Xp or the NVIDIA TITAN V graphics cards. At the moment my new Corsair Carbide Series Air 740 – High Airflow ATX Cube Case is ready. I’m ready to start working toward a computer system upgrade. Everything is setup for a dual graphics card rig. That case will be ready.
I spent a bunch of time looking at the ASUS TUF X299 MARK 1 LGA 2066 ATX Intel Motherboard. That is probably my favorite motherboard at the moment. You can imagine that throughout the next year I will be building and pricing all sorts of computer combinations. That is pretty much how things are going to end up going. Now is a weird time for building your own computer. A lot of it probably has to do with the pricing pressures that cryptocurrency miners have put on the entire ecosystem. My 2016 build was based on having a VR ready 4K system. That was where my technology interests were going. I wanted to be able to watch 4K content on my monitor and to experience the immersive quality of it. This time of round my interest is a little bit different. I want to upgrade my secondary computer build to support computationally intensive artificial intelligence work.
Right now the challenges that face me are related to building out some deep learning and neural network models on my home computer. People are making truly interesting training data sets available and the models to work with them. I have to accept that challenge and build out and model some new things. Right now the bleeding edge of technology is hunting down specific use cases for artificial intelligence based methods. It would be hubris at this point to attempt to figure out generalized artificial intelligence. Picking up a lot of divergent models and working toward generalized artificial intelligence seems reasonable, but it has to be a goal that is worked toward not presumed to be tackled in one sweeping plan. You may have guessed that means that I’m going to be digging deep and working on coding again.
My primary skills at as a professional code developer are specific and targeted at being able to hunt down the needle in the haystack. I can pick up code and find the defect. That is a useful skill, but it is different than what I need to do this year. My focus for this year has to be to continue to understand and master Tensorflow. Getting the most out of that framework is a good place to start. None of that work has to slow down my writing efforts. It just might help push them forward. Keeping a high quality catalog of my efforts would help me retrace my steps and evaluate the journey. Like all great inquiries into artificial intelligence research I need to pick a use case and begin the process of bringing together the right tools to meet the needs of that use case. Maybe I’ll dig into image or video classification or work on some type of natural language processing problem.
Being left to my own devices would naturally propel me to a study of polymorphic fractal builds and system security. We already use a variety of decay algorithm in security. Over a decade ago I spent a lot of time breaking down the barriers of the captain fractal algorithm. That was an interesting journey. At the time that type of encryption was not necessary or useful. People have been relatively happy with the way things are made secret and I did not have the energy to revisit that work. That is probably for the best. My interests in using and managing Tensorflow related projects are probably a healthy use of my mental cycles. That is what this journey is all about in terms of an inquiry into quality and how you express the value of quality across time. My pursuit of a perfect possible future will require the commitment of a lot of mental cycles.
For better or worse that is really a difficult item to breakdown in a meaningful way. The things we spend our time trying to understand are the things that consume us. We have to make a conscious choice to strive forward. That means taking on the greatest challenges of our time and trying to find answers to the hardest questions and problems. Sure that is one way of looking at the future and a variety of ways exist. My interest in the trajectory that has taken us toward the intersection of technology and modernity is one way to look at the future and how we got to this moment right here and right now. That might be a useful way to try to breakdown the things happening in this moment. It could be a distraction from the real problems facing the world around us. Alternatively, it could be a real line of inquiry that opens a narrative thread into a challenge worth discussion. A challenge truly worth consideration.
Topic 1: Computer repair
My new power supply arrived today. Things seemed to be easy to assemble. I plugged in the video, a keyboard, and a mouse. All of the fans turned on and things were going to get going. No video happened.
Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs
