Dreams of the Frontier

Something a little different for today: as part of the process of obtaining my new job, I was asked to write an essay on why spaceflight is important to me. So I’m reusing it, because why not? This is a major side of me that doesn’t find its way onto the blog very often, thanks…

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Acuitas Diary #96 (April 2026)

This month’s development focus took me back to trial-and-error learning. I wanted to build on the work I’d done with the “Allergic Cliffs” puzzle game and improve Acuitas’ ability to discover how the game works. I had several ideas in mind, but ended up having time to finish only one: ability to learn rules that…

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Acuitas Diary #95 (March 2026)

This month’s activity was focused on continuing to squish the Conversation Engine into shape. I fixed an assortment of bugs that were left over from my last Conversation work spree, then expanded the “discussion topics” behavior to cover goals (of the form “I want/plan/intend to”) expressed by the speaker. “The Conversation,” oil by unknown artist,…

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Microbalance Progress

Last year I started planning a physics experiment that would require me to measure tiny forces. My plans for that included building a “microbalance” out of a salvaged analog needle movement. I chose several items with needle dials from my dad’s junk collection, and ended up extracting the movement from an old tachometer. It consists of…

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Acuitas Diary #94 (February 2026)

In latest news, I’ve been adding more work to the Episodic Memory overhaul that I began last year. The big challenge for this stage was finding ways to examine results and actually test the thing. Since memory accumulation and consolidation is a process that spans weeks, I needed ways to run simulations and observe changes…

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Acuitas Diary #93 (February 2026)

I’ve got several projects boiling on the stove, but none are quite ready to showcase yet, so you’re getting an Acuitas double-feature this month. This post is dedicated to what I’ve named the “self-teaching activity.” The general idea is that Acuitas, while idling, will trawl the hard drive of his current host computer for text…

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Acuitas Diary #92 (January 2026)

My first objective for the new year was enabling the Text Parser to handle lists or conjunction groups with more than two items. For quite a while now, Acuitas’ parser has been equipped to handle sentences like this: Jack and Jill went up the hill. But a sentence like *this* would hopelessly confuse it: Jack,…

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Year in Review 2025

As 2025 slips into the history books, I continue my tradition of looking back and considering what I accomplished and how I spent my time. This year I set a goal of spending 1000 hours on my personal hobbies and chores. That’s over 19 hours a week, and more than I’ve logged in any previous…

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Acuitas Diary #91 (December 2025)

This final diary for the year covers a mixed bag of integration, debugging, and refactors. It’s not the most exciting fare, but it’s an essential part of any large long-term project. Probably the most interesting work was continued cleanup of conversations. One issue that had been bugging me for a while was that the Text…

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