Postpone the Olympics please

Yesterday for work I filled in more symbolic expressions for the knowledge base inferences. I met with M and the advisor crew; he’s got a good paper on sequence-to-sequence models for semantic parsing that utilize conversation history and can do coreference. I met with T and we picked out a CS student project to pursue for summer, then dipped a tiny toe into the scenario annotations I’ve been working on. That document is currently 50 pages long and isn’t complete yet, so I wanted a confirmation or course correction. The particular scenario scripts are not what T considers central to LIA‘s interaction mode (though they were fine before break?) but he agreed we should be focusing on integrating demonstration while TL is still here, rather than trying to first create the asynchronous monitoring machinery that would be necessary for the rule-based instructions he thinks are typical but have never actually been supported by code. More saga. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get CUDA upgrade on one of W’s machines. Unfortunately the script I prototyped a month ago didn’t work, so there’s more to do there.

I had a telehealth therapy appointment that was a half hour of actual therapy followed by a half hour of bullshitting about politics when I ran out of stuff. I am not the greatest at functioning under this world’s typical rules set, but I am way better than average at rapidly adjusting to arbitrary new paradigms. I am fine. Other people I care about are struggling — which is understandable, things are very different, I just don’t seem to need the same kind of adjustment period as others before carrying on. Luck of the nature+nurture draw.

The polishing compound arrived, so I spent an hour after work buffing the rust and pitted areas off parts of the White. There is some learning curve, but the shuttle face is now mirror-bright. Very pleased.

Dinner, crossword (fun trick!), DS9, snack, sleep. Horrendous dreams about authoritarian regimes, human trafficking, a quashed uprising, and some sort of alarmingly violent golem made of ritz crackers. Wat.

COVID-19 update: we got mail from the university president saying to prepare to close campus by March 25, then a couple hours later the governor shut down all non-life-sustaining everything with enforcement starting Saturday. I am both cheering because it’s about goddamn time (if no one will die if you stay home, stay home!) but also frustrated because if CMU had been more on top of this, labs with irreplaceable long-term wetlab experiments wouldn’t be scrambling right now. Reaping the rewards of unreasonable campus uptime expectations.