Week 12
Turning 22, running, hard-hitting self realisations, consistent colour tracking of a live video feed and wondering about being wondered by the world.
So much happened this week that I had to actually sit down and plan what to include in this article (and more importantly, what to exclude).
While doing this activity, I realised just how accelerated my life has become. A mere 7 days go by and it feels like I’ve learnt the equivalent of what I would have in a major project. Maybe Mumbai is an incredibly fast-paced city, not just in terms of the traffic & people, but in terms of what it offers to someone who lives and works here.
This week’s article has a lot more personal stuff. Whether this is the influence of Jyotsna’s newsletter (a fellow Xperimenter and friend), or the happenings of this week, or an impulsive new direction for this newsletter, I cannot confirm.
[Habits] Running again?
I used to run quite avidly when I was in school. Once I moved to the city for college, other activities took its spot. First it was climbing, then something else.
When I moved to Mumbai and realised that it wasn’t an incredible place to climb, I scurried around to try and find activities to fill up my evenings. Nothing felt as fulfilling. The previous Sunday, I just decided to run again and see how that goes. It was incredible. I ended up covering 20kms this past week, just got out of the house and ran on the days I felt like running.
Mumbai is, to my surprise, a great place for running. One has the beach, dedicated parks for runners, and the marine lines. I think I’ll stick to running for some time now and I secretly (well, writing about it doesn’t really contain the secret anymore) hope to run a half marathon before I turn 23.
[Dilemmas For The Self] Am I turning into a human robot?
Had two hard-hitting conversations this week with two different people and I couldn’t help but wonder about a time in college when Alina pointed to a professor that I admired and said, “That’s you in a few years. And that’s a great fear.”
I had admired that professor for the longest time. He had an incredible work ethic, viewed relationships very differently, and had a relationship with work that felt beautifully all-consuming. This is why the second part of Alina’s sentence just didn’t make sense to me. Later I realised that it came from a zone of the whole work versus life dilemma, and the elusive balance between the two. What I viewed as dedicated, she viewed as robotic. What I viewed separate, she viewed one dictating the other.
This week, while talking to Alisha (a school friend) on the beach, I realised that I may be on the same track as that very same college professor. And the worst part? I know this, and I still want to go ahead with it; despite its eventual outcome being a very lonely existence (a term that another one of my professors used while discussing my life then).
Everyone seems to have their own ideas of balance: work versus life, many versus less, more versus close, responsibilities versus passions, passion versus a job … I could go on. Every person even ends up making their choice, defining their balance, and then advocating for it. Some agree and become followers, while some don’t and find other followers. And this goes on and on, everyone dreaming up their own right answers and questioning the ideas of others.
Now that I sit down and reflect on this, I think this needs to be a felt experience rather than a presumed one. One must feel the lack of something and then go about pursuing it in the right quantity. Once balance is restored, I assume you’ll live guilt-free; until you feel the lack of something again. Let’s be honest, when will this cycle ever stop?
So, maybe, life is supposed to be a work in progress: an imbalanced equation with constant efforts to reach the sweet spot; all of this while knowing that reaching the sweet spot could very well be a futile effort.
[Experiments] Constant colour tracking of a live video feed
This past week, I improved on the colour-tracking experiment done in the last week.
The new one first lets the user select a colour on the video from their webcam, allows them to set a threshold of acceptance for that colour (since slight light changes could lead to RGB differences) and then anchors my pre-defined object / drawing / text (in this case) to the relevant pixels on the screen. Then, the user can move around the object and the drawing will move with them. You can view a video here.
[Learnings] Chatbots and their fixation on the current
On the work front, we’ve been studying different health-related chatbots for our project. As I attempted to deep-dive into their architecture and read up on how chatbots function, I observed a fundamental flaw in their structure.
The problem is that a chatbot attempts to make sense out of a user’s sentence (using NLP and other fancy stuff), without realising that there may be connections between individual messages given by a user.
Chatbots are so fixated on the present that they do not take into account the past (a property of Markov Chains, something I discussed in an earlier post). When designing a chatbot for distress or education, it is of utmost importance to try and acquire a sense of the user’s context and an additional layer (apart from current sentence processing) could be to identify links between different messages that the user has put in.
For example, take a young boy who comes on an adolescent-health-questions-answering chatbot, and is enquiring about a highly specific problem. The first time he enters his question, the chatbot does not understand and reverts back with, “can you help re-phrase the question?)”. The boy enters a re-phrased question. This goes on for some time and the chatbot eventually makes sense of one keyword in the boy’s current message and spits out a relevant response; which is completely irrelevant to the boy’s query. If the input range was now all of the queries that the boy had put in, the computer had more chances of understanding the issue better (by seeing common keywords, understanding how the sentence structure was changed, what remained the same and what was different, etc).
I think this could be a gold mine. Hopefully, it makes sense outside of my head too.
[Personal] Turning 22 🥳
Woot Woot!
Okay, enough with the intense stuff. On a lighthearted note, I also turned 22 last week and resorted to my yearly ritual of writing about it.
A lot of close friends came up to me this week and pointed out how much I’d grown, just in the past year itself. While writing this post, the growth in a week had me awestruck.
I wonder if this is the norm as a 22-year-old. Are you so unaware of the world that every little thing seems fascinating, and you thrive on the fulfilment of your exploding curiosity? Or does it have to do with someone’s nature, regardless of the numerical value you assign to that person? Will I forever remain curious or is this too, just another phase?
Thank you for choosing to write down your thoughts. Here's a reminder that you are making a lot of impact in lives of people that interact with you or with your content.